Month: July 2008

Biz has a great post up on the Twitter blog about people using Twitter during yesterdays earthquake in LA.

This chart is really powerful to me.

As Biz describes in the post, Twitter is being used as a news-wire. The combination of Twitter plus Twitter Search is amazing for tracking real time news or alerts from different keywords. And you don’t have to be a Twitter user to use Twitter search.

I also loved one of the comments in the post by someone named Ed.

“Twitter is so much more than a news wire. It’s faster, unspun, and most significantly, we don’t participate on AP. We don’t share and retweet each other on channel 4.

We dynamically aggregate awareness with Twitter, and want to”

I like that notion a lot. Social real time news.

(disclosure: we are investors in Twitter and I’m on their board)

I’ve been thinking a lot about blog comments lately.

Here’s a recent thing to consider that happens all the time on Tumblr.

My post about the Steve Jobs health issue from last night doesn’t have any comments yet (update: there are now several comments but the point still stands).

Yet it has been reblogged 5 times with some great commentary.

Do I wish that all the “conversations” about my post happens on this site? I do love comments. I learn a lot and appreciate the feedback.

But I love and am extremely grateful when people reblog my posts to their tumblelog. To me it’s pretty special because it means that they think so highly of the content that they are willing to put in on their personal blogs.

Here’s a few examples of the folks that reblogged that particular Steve Jobs post.

Mike Hudack

Jay Parkhill

Now we need a way to easily show to non-Tumblr users what these reblogs look like. Right now only Tumblr users can see the reblog links automatically in their Tumblr Dashboard.

Comments and reblogs have their own place in my heart. They offer two difference experiences and I value them both.

Lauren is 39 today.

I’ve got a few surprises planned for today.

The NYT and others can’t get enough of the Steve Jobs story.

Is he sick? Is he well?

I don’t believe he needs to disclose his health status publicly. It’s none of our business. Shareholders & Apple’s board need to decide if he’s doing the best job for the company or not. And at this time, no one that could do it better. End of story.

I saw this on Slashdot earlier:

“The New York Times is saying that Steve Jobs doesn’t have cancer, but that he needs to disclose all the information about his medical condition so investors can decide. Gizmodo’s strong rebuttal says that everyone has the right to keep medical records confidential. They argue that, if prominent US presidents legally kept their grave illnesses secret — even while the security of the country was at stake — a simple CEO should be able to do the same: ‘Steve Jobs has the right to keep his medical records private for as long as he wants. Like FDR. Like JFK. Like any single person in this country and the world. It’s our right, as humans, to do so.’”

Steve Jobs’ personal medical condition is private. It is for you and for me too. And that’s how it should be.