The problem with Twitter is fitting your message into just 140 characters. It's something that Dave Winer's talked about before and he's now come up with a method of determing how long tweets should be allowed to be
The reason I'm raising this is because of my last post, where I picked up on a tweet from Steve Yelvington.
When you read his blog post about "death to the death of journalism meme" you get a much more considered view of things: papers are losing money; several are in real danger; but some are still doing ok and will survive into the future, albeit by changing their business model as they go. Video did not kill the radio star.
I can't disagree with this really. I think papers will be around for a good while to come; some folk still have black and white tellies - it takes time for the new technology to become ubiquitous.
But the world's changing so quickly now that I don't think it will be long until the use value of newspapers becomes so devalued in comparison to other forms of news media, that they find themselves no longer used as vehicles for journalism. Niche newspapers like The Economist and weekly locals might carry on longer than others, but national and regional dailies?
Anyway, if you compare Steve's Tweet and his blog post, it shows how Twitter will have to evolve if it's going to carry on being useful. Shouting links at each other isn't enough - we need to be able to contextualise them. Some folk - like Steve - do that in their blogs, but Twitter is the only blogging tool for hundreds of thousands of people; it's lowered the bar for entry into the blogosphere but it now needs to give these new bloggers the opportunity to become more expansive and thoughtful.
And on a different point, I've started work on building a not-for-profit news network using Drupal. I asked for suggestions for names on Facebook and Twitter but didn't get much of a response. So I'm calling it Your Scotland. Once I've got it built I'll open it up to people for comments and suggestions.