Facebook's 'Home' link is proving to be an enormous FAIL due to the horrendously inconvenient fact that, when clicked, it gives you the 'News Feed' instead of the 'Live Feed'. You don't know the difference? Well, here's the good oil direct from Facebook itself:

News Feed aggregates the most interesting content that your friends are posting, while Live Feed shows you all the actions your friends are making in real-time.

IOW, 'News Feed' is an algorithm-driven subset of the 'Live Feed'. It's what Facebook's mathematicians think is "most interesting" to you. As such, it is perfectly useless.

'News Feed' went out to users at the end of last month. However, I cannot recall experiencing the frustration that I'm subject to now, as a result of continually having to click 'View Live feed' after clicking 'Home'. I'm starting to feel as though I've contracted some sort of behavioural tic.

It's extremely annoying.

Jonathan Holmes said "pwned" (pron 'powned' as in 'Edgar Allan Poe') last night on Media Watch. It was a great moment in the history of convergence, a moment celebrating the point at which the audience comes to participate in the media process.

'Pwned' is a word many will be unfamiliar with. It comes from video gaming, and seems to have begun as a spelling mistake included by a software coder in a game's code. The word that was meant to go in was 'owned' (as in 'totally owned' or possessed, beaten, made subject). So gamers playing would see "pwned" resulting from a completed stage, in the event of victory.

That's my understanding, anyway.

Holmes' final program for 2009 finished with the utterance of this word, which pops up frequently in Twitter hashtag streams, where people dicsuss the program as it screens. I used to participate in the stream, but I find it a bit exhausting and distracting to do two things at once. So I stopped.

I did get the gist. The word "pwned" was also accompanied, frequently, by another hashtag, "pwnednudierun". It seems that the idea is that, if Holmes uses the word on-screen, participants in the hashtag stream promise to go into the street naked and run around the block.

So when Holmes used the word last night, that's exactly what happened. Here's an example: Scott Bridges on Groupthink. More pics at link.

I feel for Tom Tudehope, who has been implicated in a Downfall-spoof video that lampoons a Liberal Party factional battle in language that, frankly, most people would not understand.

It's full of 'in' jokes the meaning of which 99.99 percent of Australians would be oblivious to. Until it was pointed out to them in the Sydney Morning Herald article linked to above.

Tudehope's name emerged in the online world only recently, when Malcolm Turnbull gave it out during the Media140 conference held in Sydney last Thursday and Friday.

As editors handling a piece by Karl Quinn, The Age's entertainment editor, put it, "He who lives by the cutting-edge dies by the cutting edge".

The online world is liable to deliver shocks of this nature, because so much is on view all the time. There's no place here for those who don't stand by their words and actions. Gumption - or fortitude - is a base requirement.

Even for me, running a blog can be a liability. In fact, I've published things here that have come back to bite me. And sometimes it hurts.

This morning, for example, a post I made this year came back to haunt me because I was in the process of getting a piece published when my colloquitor came across it and decided to "hold off". I was shocked because the disagreement chronicled referred to a piece originally pitched to the website that was quite unrelated in subject, and the correspondent was even different.

So I know something of what Tudehope is feeling. The shock this kind of thing produces is physical, not only mental. It causes pain - and it's meant to. But blogging is fun and that's why people do it.

They don't do it to make enemies or to score points. Most bloggers do it because they care deeply about what they write about. It matters that debate be open and fair. It matters that the issues be more important than pride. It matters because - to paraphrase Jay Rosen, who spoke via videolink at the Media140 forum - you "think democratically".

That's why you want to be a journalist.

Maybe that's why Tudehope - who denies involvement in a "trail of emails" - or whoever made the Downfall-spoof, did it. They are passionately invested, personally involved, and committed to something they believe in.

Good luck, Tom, and don't forget to keep tweeting.

The Olympus DSS Player is less contentious than sex education in secondary schools, which is the topic I had initially selected for today's blog post. It's a great tool for journalists who don't have shorthand, especially if you buy the model with the foot-pedal controller.

While I fulsomely agree with improving sex education in secondary schools, and deplore objections from Catholic schools head Dan White, I'm just so sick of the media's aggressive language and conflict-driven methodology for stories on social subjects. So instead of writing, at length, about how sick the whole debate makes me feel, I thought I'd try to say something positive.

After all, new ways to improve your worklife are uncontentious, though hopefully not unpreposessingly bland. The DSS Player has changed my life.

I was going to attend j-school for a few months to learn shorthand but then the move up here to Queesland scotched that. Instead, I found another way to alleviate the massive sensation of irritation I used to feel whenever it came to contemplating a large transcription job.

Getting words into a WP file is 100 times easier, now, with the foot-operated DSS Player.

To remove the recording from the VN-960PC Digital Voice Recorder, I just plug it into a USB port. The Olympus Digital Wave Player opens automatically and the file gets transferred by the driver software into a folder that is created automatically for the purpose of holding the file. The folder is dated. The file on the recorder can now be automatically deleted - you must use a pre-set in the Wave Player interface.

Then you open up the DSS Player software and place the window on the screen near the Wave Player window. You just drag the file across to the DSS Player, which has several folders available for temporary file storage.

The foot pedal playback unit sits on the floor under my desk, and is connected to the back of the computer via a USB port. Once you highlight a file inside the DSS Player window, you just step on the right-hand pedal of the controller and playback starts.

So instead of twiddling with the tiny buttons of the VN-960PC Voice Recorder, I can use both hands to type while playing the recording using my feet on the control pedals.

There's a rewind pedal as well. In addition, the DSS Player interface shows with an indicator where you currently are located in the recording, so it's easy to move back and forwards. And it's easy to go back to a location you want to hear again.

After completing a transcription, I drag the file out of the DSS Player interface into a storage folder along with the other files for the story, so they're all stored together, for future reference. This way, if I ever need to find the file again, it's very easy to do so.

Recently, I transcribed about an hour's-worth of recordings in less than two hours. This facility lets me concentrate on writing immediately, instead of breaking off work and coming back to do the actual writing later. It's a huge efficiency.

An interview with Rupert Murdoch was broadcast on BigPond TV, courtesy - I take it - of Sky News, which is 30 percent owned by News Ltd. I take it that the cross from BigPond TV's normal feed came from Sky because the reporter in the chair made the disclosure before the interview started.

He covered three areas:

• News Ltd's way of handling structural changes in the economic model of news globally
  
• Murdoch's personal opinions of politicians
  
• The future of the Murdoch dynasty

Briefly, the second area of the interview merely served to underscore Murdoch's conservative credentials. Murdoch is an unapologetic conservative and doesn’t like US President Barak Obama, doesn’t like Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

In the third area, there's nothing new and I won't touch on it at all.

Murdoch likes being asked questions about the economy. He answers far more readily. The interviewer is clever in starting the interview with the hard questions about the news business, and ending on the dynasty. The vacillating, complex ellipses and non-sequiturs that characterised the early parts of the interview – when the topic was the money aspect of news – completely disappear when the topic changes to politicians and the economy.

I want to focus on what Murdoch thinks - or says - he's going to do in order to improve the economic performance of his media interests. It seems the main thing he's thinking about at the moment is legislation to protect his interests. I was a little shocked - as a blogger - to learn that he considers 'fair use' to be a "doctrine" rather than a principle of freedom of communication.

"Anything that takes peoples’ time and they enjoy ... everything is competition," Murdoch says. In other words, it's the eyeballs, stupid. He made a reference to the way the media landscape changed in the 1950s, when TV entered the arena of public information.

He also repeated elements of earlier communication, where he laments the fickle news consumer's propensity to simply click on the news they want, rather than spending time inside a news site where they can be exposed to more of the advertising that pays for news.

Murdoch says that a future paywall may not replicate the Wall Street Journal model - where some news is free but others is available only to subscribers - and may be up in front of all content on the website.

But he seems to be genuinely troubled by the Internet model of free communication, and he's decided that he's had enough.

"Is this the biggest change you’ve seen?" "Probably," says Murdoch. "But we’ve had a lot of things. In the 50s we had the arrival of TV." The advent of TV, he says, led to a monopolistic newspaper in each city. Each city could only afford a single newspaper because so much of the advertising revenue moved to TV at the time.

But Murdoch also says that he's not against the Internet.

"I love the news business. Contacting, communicating with people. I don’t mind if it’s on TV, on radio, newspapers, the Internet."

As long as he can make money from it.

"It sounds from that like the hard-copy newspaper will disappear," says the reporter. "Not for twenty years. It’s a generational thing," says Murdoch.

The reporter pointed to the words coming recently from Mark Scott, head of Australia's publicly-funded broadcaster, the ABC: Mainstream media is "An empire in decline."

"I think the ABC – I’m not attacking it," says Murdoch. "The BBC is a scandal. Everybody in the UK is compelled to pay 150 pounds a year. I think public broadcasting should be high quality. That I don’t mind."

This seems to be very similar to what James Murdoch said a couple of months ago in Edinburgh. You attack the BBC by implying that its journalism isn't high-quality. As though only a private company can provide high-quality news.

"We’ll be suing them for copyright," says Murdoch. "They’ll have to spend a lot more money on a lot more reporters. They know the law. They’ll adapt."

The reporter changed tack to cover News Ltd's other major interest, in cinema. "If newspapers are going to disappear, what about the big screen?" "There’s big screens coming into peoples’ homes. In a couple of years, there’ll be 3D."

"There’s a constant war and vilgilancy in the entertainment industry about piracy. Look what happened to the music industry," says Murdoch. He points to the recently-introduced French law for media, which don't pay for content that they broadcast, to be subject to a three-strikes rule.

Background from cNet:

France has adopted a strong antipiracy law, one that may mean those who chronically share unauthorized movies and music online will lose Web access for up to a year.

France's top constitutional court approved a revised plan to penalize those accused multiple times of infringing intellectual property, according to a report published Thursday in The New York Times.

In the spring, the court rejected an earlier version of the law.

Dan Glickman, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, applauded the French court's decision.

"And there’s a lot of movement to have that standard in the US," says Murdoch.

Day two of Media140 with Jay Rosen, a big name in the twitterverse, and a peep I follow and frequently retweet. He’s always got interesting things coming online.

Online viewers number 132.

Atomisation has been overcome. Rosen recalls the 1976 movie ‘Network’ and says that the Internet is just as good for connecting a cause to other people as big media. Causes are connected horizontally to other people, not just up through the media. “The ability of people to connect horizontally ... just changes the situation a lot.”

One of the most important things journalists can do is try and reason with this situation. But the media is also still viable, so both directions apply.

Open systems don’t work like closed systems. Twitter is an open system. Anyone cannot sign up for the Sydney Morning Herald and its news staff. Disappointment will result if we expect open systems to behave like closed systems.

For example, checking and refinement happens after publishing in open systems. People in closed systems see chaos, but it’s just a different way of doing business.

Citizen journalism is when the constituency previously called the audience picks up the tools of publishing and uses them. They enter the press sphere even if they’re not members of the press.

There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure. It’s useless to try to prevent people making media. It’s easy to make ‘content’ and people like doing it. We’re going to have more and more content. Not possible to stop or slow the process.

Behind the revolution in content production will come better ways of filtering the content. There’s Twitter and there’s ways to search Twitter. It isn’t a closed environment. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by the flood of information – the real scarcity now is mindshare – we need to improve the filters. Filtering the best stuff to the front page is one of the most important ways journalists can operate.

Do what you do best and link to the rest. Every page on the Web is equidistant from every other page. Don’t duplicate what others are doing. It’s a principle of economies, also, not just the Web. It’s important for journalism organisations, too. A lot of content on MSM is redundant. Editorial producers need to link more, concentrate on speciality.

John Wannamaker said ‘Half the advertising I spend on advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” This is an inefficient system. Advertisers reach a lot of people who are not ready to buy. The system is limited by its ‘addressasbility’.

Now, we’re starting to focus on the wasted advertising, and eliminate inefficiencies. Price of advertising is dropping, as a result.

The nature of trust online is different from the way trust is built under a mass-media system. It is a more reliable way to generate trust, to tell people where you’re coming from. As opposed to claiming you’ve got no stake, you’ve got no interest. Objectivity is dead.

The view from nowhere is the old philosophy. It’s hard to generate trust by claiming that you have no perspective. It’s easier if you can explain where you’re coming from to people. Transparency is the new objectivity, in social media.

It’s not amateurs vs pros. It’s not old media vs new media. The holy war is a distraction. Hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. Rosen is looking for the people who can develop a pro-am approach. All innovation is going to be in hybrid forms.

Addition through subtraction – people who are not interesting in coming to terms with the new media landscape should just go home.

Media140’s live stream started in silence before sounds kicked in at about 8.50am (NSW time; all times given here will be NSW time). And what did we hear? A sound guy tests the mic over the top of some ambient music.

In the Twitter hashtag we learn about all the peeps converging on the event – by taxi, by bus, on the elevator, down the stairs – and also plaintive tweets from some who are unable to attend.

Wish I was headed to #media140 today. Will have to geek up double hard tomorrow. - @neilwrites

oh no, so many emails this morning and so behind schedule for #media140 hope I don't miss much! - @ suzieis

Arrived at the #media140 centre of the universe at ABC Sydney. The coffee is a lifesaverlp - @ derekbarry

Ok...off we go...my commute to #media140 is short. 14 floors. Speaking at 9.10 http://bit.ly/qI2Fq - @abcmarkscott

‘The autumn leaves drift by my window/The autumn leaves of red and gold/I see your face like summer kisses/Since you went away the days grow long/And soon I’ll hear a ... /But I miss you most my darling/ When they start to fall ...’

Mood music for the frazzled, 9am crowd busy chatting, getting-to-know, and slurping on cappuccinos.

Hashed events are a good way to find like-minded peeps, and follow them. I find there’re always a lot of follow-me-too exchanges during these events.

And at 9.05am the voice starts up at Eugene Goosens Hall, in Ultimo. Fran Kelly, host of the conference, introduces Andy Gregson at 9.10am – he’s a Brit!

A phone call from a friend stopped me listening to Mark Scott, the opening speaker, but I maximised the benefit of my time away by eating a banana. Scott makes lots of noises about commitment to social media, widgets, tax-payers and free access. “Getting the content out to the audience in a form they want, where they want it.”

Online viewer count: 221.

Scott takes questions, including one suggesting putting the Twitter feed at the back of the studio during the ABC’s popular talk program, Q&A.

At 10am Julie Posetti gets up and slams old media – “fiddling while Rome burns”, “bent on controlling”, “sloppy journalism that bordered on propaganda” – and says that anyone can call themselves a journalist. But “credibility will be critical ...”

‘Objectivity’ – SLAM. ‘Trench warfare’ – SLAM. ‘Hamstrung by fear’ – SLAM.

Posetti has been “formally” studying social media and journalism for eight months, and her Twitter summary here (the rising power of social media is a news “cliché”) reflects her work, establishes her credentials.

‘A lot of ignorance and arrogance’ – SLAM. ‘Isn’t Twitter just a platform for narcissism and banality?’ – SLAM.

Twitter is a publication platform, Posetti asserts. Correct.

The biggest detractors among the journalists who have interviewed Posetti in recent months are not on Twitter, she says.

Posetti says Twitter is not a replacement for long-form and investigative journalism. It’s “one of the new essential tools” in the journalist’s “kitbag”. It is a “live contact book”, too. “Journalism is a conversation” and intelligent conversations are happening on Twitter between journalists and sources.

“Journalists are making profitable connections” and are “broadening their horizons”.

All of this is true and needs to be said, but I’m thinking that I want stories. I want the colour and the texture of real activities being undertaken in this new “public space”.

“Accuracy and verification are the antidotes to an overdose on speed.”

‘Trafigura’ – SLAM. ‘Democracy’ – SLAM.

10.40am – 289 online viewers.

Julie Posetti : ‘Objectivity’ – SLAM. Fran Kelly: “Is journalism a profession or a practice?” “What is the fact-checking mechanism?”

More phone calls.

11.55am – 344 online viewers.

Paul Cutler, head of news at SBS gave an interesting talk but, as usual, I had to wait until the name appeared in the twitterstream before I knew who it was speaking. Online video stream #Fail.

FFS Twitter is not journalism, it's a circle jerk to see who gets some gossip of the latest cause célèbre. #media140 - @jonoabroad (Jonathan Ferguson; ‘geek living in Sydney’).

Dr Jason Wilson from Wollongong University speaks. Rhetoric around Twitter resembles what has greeted all new media technologies that have ever appeared. And the “Twitter user base is not as inclusive as we like to think”, so the idea of Twitter ‘democratising’ the media is not a given. Some people are excluded, poor Iranian farmers who support Ahmedinejad, for example.

Camera gets stuck on Jason Wilson, who drinks from his water bottle repeatedly. Poor guy!

Two “very quick questions” come from a New Zealand academic. Hang on, these are not quick questions!

Malcolm Turnbull joins Fran Kelly at 12.30pm (388 viewers). Does he do all his own tweeting? Tommy Tudehope, an assistant, does some of his tweeting, he says. He has 50,000 people on an email list, which he says is one of the biggest ones around. He responds to hundreds of emails each week but doesn’t do a lot of one-to-one correspondence on Twitter.

Essentially, Turnbull uses Twitter as a tool of political communication. He doesn’t tweet personal things. Turnbull has a sense of humour!

Are journalists engaging with Turnbull via Twitter? Hmm, we don’t get a very good answer to this question. Yes, Malcolm, of course all journalists live somewhere and therefore are someone’s constituent.

Politicians are the quarry, journalists are the hunters. Twitter correspondence: “An online press conference.” “Better off pre-advertising it so a lot of people can be aware.” Control the message – this is what he means.

Twitter partly about going over the heads of journalists, Turnbull admits. He says Twitter is only the medium, not the message. “The critical thing, though, is the message.” Yawn.

Anyone can be a broadcaster, he thinks. He quotes Murdoch: “The Internet will destroy more profitable businesses than it creates.” I ask a question (that doesn’t get asked): Anyone can be broadcaster, but not all have leisure (money) to investigate. Costs to be a journalist.

Would love the hear the answer to this one from – if not Turnbull, then some panellist today or tomorrow.

Consistency is vitally important, says Turnbull; you need to publish the same message on all platforms. “The message has to be consistent.” Controlling the message, again.

Turnbull doesn’t follow Kevin Rudd on Twitter. Surprise!

He says ‘discipline” again in the context of politics. Is politics, then, like the armed forces or a sports team? More control of messge.

1.10pm – 371 online viewers.

“I’m in the communication business.” “I’m a bit ambivalent about” Joe Hockey tweeting in Parliament. “I won’t cast judgement on others.” “It’s important for me to be very much focused on what’s happening in the House.” “We’re only limited by our technological imagination.” So many ‘killer apps’ “just died”.

His guiding star for what works on the Internet? OK, he thinks, time to control the message. “People want freedom, they want more choice.” 17,000 people following Turnbull on Twitter. He went over the friend limit in Facebook, so moved to a fan page.

As Fran Kelly says, it’s pretty decent of Turnbull to turn up to a social media gabfest. But nothing really stretched him. It’s not that he looked too ‘at-ease’, just that he managed to easily sidestep the (very) few curly questions coming from the audience.

Lunch – one hour.

What do I remember most about this morning?

Someone – one of the panellists – said something like ‘We can’t have a journalist sitting out in the back room working on a story for three months – and failing.” Translation: we can’t afford to do a lot of investigative journalism, because it’s expensive and doesn’t pay its way.

This implies that newspapers routinely ‘fill’ space with ‘easy’ journalism that ‘does the job’ or is ‘good enough’ but which doesn’t ask tough questions. Are newspapers afraid of making enemies or are they just too concerned – for our good – about the cost of copy. Fewer journalists = overworked as they try to fill the ‘hole’= less time spent researching stories.

Back from lunch – Julian Morrow, ex-Chaser lead, announced prizewinners.

More phone calls.

Caroline Overington: Fairfax is “in a shocking state”. Overington works for Fairfax competitor, News Ltd.

More phone calls.

Chris Warren @mediaalliance: ethical journalism has always been a fundamental struggle. #media140 (@pinglo Thinking social media for Aunty ABC. These ramblings are mine & not those of the ABC.)

Future of journalists as curators, sifters and researchers, rather than creators of content...? #media140 (via @acatinatree) @burntsugar (tweet from @RSColley; IT Trainer. IT student.; Melbourne)

If you were with a Chinese person and this came up, how amused would your companion be? If they laughed, did it sound genuine or artificial? Did the conversation suddenly flag? Or did your interlocutor raise any of the - no doubt - thousands of cases in her culture where Western tropes are cause for hilarity?

To what extent does casual humour that brings attention to cultural characteristics add to or minimise the ongoing problem of racism?


Now, I've been guilty of this type of humour in the past. I even went so far, in the 90s when I lived in Japan, to send a photo showing the sign of a women's hair salon, to The Far Eastern Economic Review. I haven't seen or heard of FEAR for a good ten years. But I remember when Nuri Vittachi - who has been more recently involved in international literary prizes - ran a weekly column that brought our attention to the unwitting bloopers that occur at the cross-roads of the world's two dominant cultural highways.

It's due to the dominance of the Western ethos in the world. A store, like this one, that aspires to possess cachet will probably turn to writing its signage in Roman letters. A Chinese-language sign projects a lower tone. Asians aspire to the success of the West.

The person who sent this to me is a liberal mother-of-two who works in a library in New York. She recently became involved in blogging for a women's literature website, a fact of which she is deservedly proud. She's also enthusiastically web-connected, and I initially met her online when I was setting up an electronic library catalogue in 2006.

So when this arrived in my email inbox, I took it with a grain of salt.

Yet it points to the ease with which we make assumptions based on ethnicity. Recent studies conducted in Australia found that having a Western name is absolutely, positively an advantage when looking for paid employment. Statistics like this make me frown on my correspondent's email message.

We all need to examine why this is so funny before we let out that guffaw or even before we acquiesce to that pleasant sensation which derives from a feeling of superiority. It's a very small world we live in, today, and we need to be careful that what emanates from our private space is suitable for a very mixed company of neighbours.

There are several different kinds of retweet (RT) used in Twitter and the software appliations - such as TweetDeck and HootSuite - that have emerged in the wake of the service's surge this year to broad popularity. I've decided to classify retweets here.

If you were to ask me when RTs first started to appear, I couldn't tell you. The story is there to learn, however, and one day maybe I'll find out and write about it. But I do remember that RTs began to be used by users without any prompting from Twitter. Like a lot of web innovations, it just happened to become a convention.

So what is a RT? It's when another person, who sees and likes a tweet you made, repeats the tweet with or without modification. Because a different set of people follow the other person, the benefit to the person who wrote the initial tweet is that a lot of new eyes will read his or her words. This can lead to new 'follows'.

And getting 'follows' is a main part of what motivates people who use Twitter.

So RTs are a method of dissemination of information. If the initial tweet contains a link to other content, and that content is interesting or unique, you can get a cascade effect, whereby several people RT the tweet.

So, to the matter at hand then.

RT 'simple'

The RT 'simple' is a simple RT without any modification or added comment. It's an easy concept to grasp, so I'll just give an example:

RT @macloo: Seeking tips to teach storytelling - NOT reporting - for journalism. Pls. help w/ links. Pls. RT.

It's not immediately obvious from looking at this example that no modification at all took place. I simply RT'd because the tweet was short enough that no trimming was required. Trimming may be required, since RTing adds the tag of the tweet's initiator, which consumes characters. With a maximum limit of 140 characters, some simple RTs need to be trimmed or edited for brevity.

RT 'qualified'

A 'qualified' RT is one where you've added some text - usually at the head of the RT - to comment on it before tweeting it out to the world. In other words, you've qualified the RT. Again, it's not a difficult concept to grasp, so I'll straight away insert an example:

Could be worked into a great feature story. RT @CharlieBeckett: Is Social Media Enterprise Changing China's Politics? http://bit.ly/JCm2n

In a qualified RT the initial tweet may have been - in fact most probably has been - edited for brevity, to fit the 140-character limit.

In the case shown here, I've simply added a few words with my ideas about the content contained in the link appended to the tweet. But I made sure to conserve part of the original tweet along with the link and, of course, the tag of the originator.

RT 'modified'

RTing is a type of publishing, and so you want to be careful that you do not associate yourself with content you disagree with or otherwise object to. For this reason, the 'modified' RT comprises a complete rewrite.

You need to include the link contained in the original tweet, and you also want to make sure you acknowledge where it comes from, but you just don't like the text that was associated with it. Maybe it was stupid - in your eyes - or maybe it was simply not accurate. You decide what you tweet. Here's an example:

Editorial laments print media's crisis, deplores quality of language in social media http://j.mp/2dVqNA (via @jeffsonderman)

Here the tag of the tweet's originator is still visible, but it's not at the head of the tweet any more, but at the tail. The verb 'via' is used to indicate the nature of the tweet, and the relationship of the person whose tag appears, to the tweet you have made. I use brackets, as shown here, but they are optional. Instead of 'via' you can employ a synonym such as 'from'.

RT 'radical'

This is dangerous territory. A 'radical' RT can come in different forms, but most commonly it is where you appear to make a simple RT but, in actual fact, you have heavily modified the original tweet's content. I'll insert an example as well as the follow-up to show how a radical RT can ruffle feathers.

Incidentally, a radical RT can be inadvertent. If you omit the tag of one person in a series of RTs using the same content, you can attract ire without even doing anything apart from not including a single tag.

What I want to show here, however, is something else entirely. Watch. First, the original RT from a person whose tag I will edit out here.

RT @Lynchy: Aussie TVC director Wayne Maule killed in Thailand-much admired and loved, another tragedy for the industry http://bit.ly/SgBGa

Then there's my radical RT:

Unfortunate phps. Regrettable, sure. But a tragedy? RT @###############: Aussie adman killed in Thai road accident http://bit.ly/SgBGa

It's a mixture of a qualified and a modified RT, with the added element of one of the originators' tags being removed. This mixture of elements caused the most-recent originator to object:

@matt_dasilva You've edited my retweet. It wasnt me that said that. If you RT, make sure you can still show where something originated eh?

Naturally, I apologised. But it goes to show that radical RTs can be problematic as they may be a surprise to the previous person involved in the chain of content publication. People are very aware of how they exist in Twitter, and any RT will certainly be noted by the originator.

I've put this summary of types of RTs together for my own benefit, and to further the process of description and classification that always occurs when a new phenomenon is observed. Twitter is a fascinating phenomenon, and there are more people every day who choose to participate and join the conversation.

I hope you enjoyed reading this post.

Tomorrow is Melbourne Cup day and they're not getting back to me. If they haven't got back to me by tomorrow, mid-morning, it's gonna mean waiting until Wednesday. The 'race that stops a nation', for those of you born outside Australia, is the major event in the horse-racing calendar here.

At workplaces everywhere, staff congregate near TV sets and drink beer, munch snacks, and chat until the winner is announced. Then they go home, because they're too drunk to work any more.

Apart from essential services, that's the scenario I'm facing as the clock on my wall chimes the end of the work-day.

I sent a bunch of emails yesterday - Sunday - for stories I'm working on. Then there's that email sent on Saturday and the guy in Melbourne I spoke to on Friday who promised he'd send me a list of contacts for another story. It all adds up. Journalists are always waiting, it seems, for someone to return their call, reply to their email, or otherwise acknowledge that they exist.

Are we so hateful? Is there an as-yet-undiscovered genetic marker that predisposes individuals living in advanced economies to distrust those who uphold the very democracy they depend on for their happiness and security?

Add this paucity of considerate correspondents to the problems I'm having with Facebook, and you can understand why I'm slightly disgruntled.

I sent yet another missive to Facebook today. I don't know if anything has changed on that front, as I haven't attempted to change my password (again) today. There doesn't seem to be much point to it until some sign emerges from the crusty depths of cyberspace to tell me 'All is now OK'.

Until that happens, I'm going to sit tight and wait. Meanwhile, there are criminals out there who have evil designs on my data. Absent access to Facebook, I spent several hours yesterday and today updating my website. Go and look, but don't laugh. It may look odd, but it's taken me two years to get this far.

I put two loads of washing out to dry this morning. At least I achieved something today.

Day two of my Facebook hack saga opened with further attempts to neutralise the foe. Wishful thinking! So far, the enemy has succeeded in maintaining its forward position and has infiltrated elements behind my lines of defence. But I have co-opted a new ally thanks to advice from my geeky brother, who thinks that Internet Explorer is the cause of many problems online because it is especially vulnerable to attacks.

In Firefox, you can sometimes see provenance information about the site you're looking at. At the head of the URL field, you might see a label that changes colour depending on the reliability of the page being viewed. A green label is the best, it seems. A blue label indicates uncertainty about the page's reliability.

Because of the label, I started to pay close attention to the URLs being displayed in my browser. Matching the type of URL with the content of the Profile page being displayed has enabled me to gauge whether my real Profile page is showing, or a fake Profile page being served by the hackers.

By paying attention to the URLs, rather than just assuming that a plausible Facebook page is displayed, I think I have at least been able to change my password in the authentic Facebook. Having done this, I made sure that I didn't do anything to again give the hackers access to personal details.

For example, after changing the password I received a Facebook message from "John Ryan" to "the members of Network Marketing - How to Build Online", which is definitely something that I have never subscribed to or followed or become a fan of. The message contains a link to a video. I deleted the message without even opening it, because this is clearly a hack attempt.

But there are so many of these. Some are more obvious than others, such as some among the multiple login screens that can appear when you're suddenly logged out (or 'timed out') of Facebook. The suspect login screens have pink labels and too many fields. You can also check the URLs at this point. Even better, just click away from the page. Then go to Google and return to the real Facebook and try logging in at the page that appears in your browser.

Notifying Facebook of the hack - which I did (again) today - can generate some unexpected results, too. And 'unexpected' can mean inauthentic and therefore dangerous.

When I filled out the hack report screen, an email arrived with 'Re: My Account Has Been Hacked' is the subject line. The email contains some unexpected things, one of which is that you should reply to the email confirming some requested information. This sounds suspect.

If you have not done so already, please attempt to reset the password to your account by selecting the "Forgot your password?" link that appears above the Password field. Entering the email address you use to log in to Facebook on the next page will cause a new password to be sent to that address.

If you still cannot access your account or you believe that your account is still compromised, please reply to this email to verify that you are the owner of the hacked account that you referenced in your Facebook support inquiry. Please also confirm that you own the email address from which you are currently writing and that it is not associated with an existing Facebook account. This security step must be completed before Facebook can assist you further.

In the meantime, do not create another account using this or any other email address. Doing so may increase the time needed to resolve the issue.

Finally, please provide a brief description of the issue you are experiencing. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

You can be sure that, after reading this begging message, I did NOT try to reset my password. It may be that the scammers, finding themselves locked out of my account, are working on new ways to again get access.

OK, so I've sent my hack report and decided to avoid Facebook until the genuine administrators in Palo Alto resolve the problem. Just imagine that, at this point, I return to Facebook. Here's the URL I see:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home

Not sure? Me neither. Just to experiment with this a bit more, let's click on the Profile link at the top of the Home page. I get this:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/matthewdasilva?ref=profile

Seem strange to you, too? I thought that my Profile page URL should be:

http://www.facebook.com/matthewdasilva/

You see? You can't trust these pages. I can't say, right now and with my palpitating heart covered by a hand trembling with righteous anger, whether I'll entirely avoid Facebook until the mess is cleaned up. What I can say for sure is that I'll watch very closely where I put my login details, in future.

Handling the bad stuff when your Facebook account gets hacked into can make unsettling demands on you. At least, that's what I think has happened. It started last night when status updates I made began to disappear from my Profile page. Then I got logged out of Facebook. Then it happened again. And again.

Each time you are logged out, it may happen - as it did with me - that your password no longer works. It's hard to describe how disturbing this can be. It's sort of like when you wake up in the night in a hotel wondering where you are and it takes a few moments to remember. Having your password invalidated, and being repeatedly logged out of Facebook when under normal circumstances you use it for days or weeks without needing to log in, has a simlar, dark tone.

To check if it was really a hack, I changed my Twitter password to be the same as my Facebook password. Then I went back to Twitter and logged in. It refused to allow me through.

I telephoned the bank and got them to suspend transactions on my credit card. I had had no need, fortunately, to access my online banking interface. But I got that suspended as well.

It seemed just too perfect that these things should start to happen on a Friday night. There's no weekend-open branch near me, a fact I discovered when I drove over there this morning. I'm not happy with how things sit, but I feel a tad safer knowing that my transaction accounts are well under wraps.

Another thing that takes time is getting help from an expert. I live in a regional centre, so the usual crew of Geeks2U are out of scope. So I did a quick Internet search and discovered a couple of numbers and rang them. One guy refused to come out because I live outside his territory. The other gave me a spiel that seemed to promise a large account in case he did appear at my doorstep.

The first guy was helpful, though, and gave me details of free software that can help in situations like this. But it took a good 90 minutes to install the programs and, in the end, one of them didn't work as expected. You never know when you're a digital moron. Maybe it's OK, maybe not. Hope springs eternal.

Then I took a drastic step and called my brother in the United States to get some more of the good oil. He advised me to back up my data files and format the hard drive. If this turns out to be necessary, I'm in for a good couple of days' work right there.

I think someone is logging my keystrokes. This would account for the way the Facebook password keeps changing. What surprises me, however, is that my Facebook-registered email has not been changed. When I click to get a new login authorisation sent to my inbox, it duly arrives. Maybe the hackers are just stuffing me around, with no intention to presecute their advantage further than is required to frustrate, perplex and anger me.

Who knows. What I do know is that despite changing my password several times, my Facebook Profile page continues to lack a couple of status changes. Until this is cleared up, I won't relax.

Contacting Facebook is another thorn in the side of the unfortunate hackee. Once you arrive at the Help page and click through to the right page for reporting hacks, you must simply wait. It's not as though you can phone a customer service operative - as happens with telephone or Internet problems.

You just wait for the black box to spit out a resolution to the problem that continues to harass you as you try to go about the normal business of life online.

HootSuite tells me they'll be adding the ability to add people to Twitter lists "as soon as possible". The 'Lists' feature is no secret, with many tweeps (people on Twitter) tweeting about how it has been added to their account. I got mine yesterday. Management's request not to tweet about it yet was possibly tongue-in-cheek and, in any case, an improbable ask.

Tweeps are notorious breakers-of-news so getting lists added to their accounts was always going to be something to tweet about. Immediately.

The feature stumped me, at first. I couldn't work out how to edit a list once it was made. It seemed, for a while, that editing would be impossible. Then I read a blog post which told me that you add people to a list from their profile page.

Since I use HootSuite all the time as well as the regular Twitter web page, I can now just move between them when I discover someone who I want to add to a list.

There are two of them, currently. I figured that other people would set up 'journalists' lists, so I added a twist to mine, and set up a 'journalism-academics' list. It's got eight members so far. As new j-school teachers appear in my stream, I'll add them to it.

The other list I started is 'politicians', for obvious reasons.

Maybe a summary of how a list works is in order. If a person is added to a list, all their tweets appear in the stream that belongs to the list. This is accessed at the list page. The member is logged as being 'followed' by the list. So the label on my 'journalism-academics' list says "Following: 8".

People can also follow a list that you create, and there's another label showing how many people are following your list. There's also a 'List' counter on your home page, which shows how many lists you are included in.

Lists are thus a fully-integrated element of Twitter. So where will the first 'list analytics' operation start up? Will it be inside an old-media company such as Reuters, or will there be a new type of company that searches through lists and publishes surveys and articles that examine the list phenomenon?

And are lists just like permanent hashtags?

To get a Google Wave account, all I did was ask. But it's lonely. Using Wave without others is no different to using email alone: there's no point. You're in the same situation as the software tester who hasn't got 'real' data to play with. The app simply doesn't work without collocutors on your side. Software testers will know what I'm talking about, and the rest of you can imagine it as well.

I want invites so that I can really test-run the application in a real scenario.

That doesn't mean that this post will be shorter than usual. There are some things I can say with certainty, even though some of them may be reports of bugs. Which is probably why Wave admins are holding back on issuing invites for the present.

If there's anyone else out there who wants to play, my handle is 'matthewdasilva'.

I have one interlocutor, who I found through Twitter. We have a wave going right now. The best thing that we've decided about Wave, so far, is the neatness it offers in terms of communication. I'm not even talking about collaborative authoring or document creation. I'm just talking about managing information generated as a result of an email conversation.

And Google sold Wave mainly on this benefit, during their product launch last month in Sydney. Each piece of the conversation is laid down in the right-hand window sequentially. Anyone can add an interpolative comment anywhere in the sequence just by clicking into the stream. And sub-comments can be made to sub-comments in a staggered sequence just like in the days of threaded BBs.

I haven't tried to use the 'gadgets' let alone the many 'app-bots' that third-party developers have come up with. For the moment, I'm only interested in how Wave works as a killer app. And the app they're trying to kill is email.

Each time an addition is made to a wave, your browser's tab counter increments by one. So it's not each wave that's changed that counts as an 'add', it's each instance of text added by a person involved in a wave. If five people in each of two waves adds a comment, you get an increment in the tab counter of 10.

In the left-hand window each wave that gets updated displays a counter, indicating the number of new comments it contains. This guides you from the tab to the wave, so you can find the new stuff.

So far, there's no doubt in my mind. Even though I've got only one interlocutor and we're only using a single wave, I believe that Wave will be hard to beat by conventional email. It's just neater, more scalable, less time-consuming and error-prone. In the product launch, they highlighted the fact that, with Wave, you don't forget to include people, as you often do with regular email. But it's more than that.

To see the entire conversation, you simply scroll up and down a list of utterances. Each utterance has attached to it the picture and name of the person who made it, so there's no mistaking who made a comment. In a regular email you can be doing an awful lot of scrolling to follow the conversation. Here, it's a whole lot more compact and accessible. Visual clues help to organise data, and there just seems to be less of it to deal with.

This advantage can save a lot of time, compared with regular email. I see regular email surviving the onslaught of the Wave but it will be used for other things, like first contacts and official correspondence with public utilities, government and the like.

Wave seems ideally suited to environments where a set of people who often work together on a project are found. They will prefer its ease-of-use and convenience. Getting invited to a Wave will be like being included in a Cc nowadays: a sign of acceptance and inclusion. Using Wave will be another type of communication, additional to regular email.

There are bugs, of course, but they will be ironed out. Less attractive, for me, are the search tools. I've yet to work out how they work but, again, this might just be because there's not enough 'real' data to play with.

In brief, I'm still excited. But I'm eagerly awaiting the moment when I can send out a bunch of invites to people who I regularly correspond with. The larger groups of hands-on operatives are the ones who will make or break this product, not tech enthusiasts like lil' ol' moi.