A discussion that began on a journalist's personal blog has sparked a wider debate on ethics in the age of social media as the lines between journalists' professional work and their personal activities blur.

It began when Adam Tinworth, the head of blogging development for Reed Business International, criticised the National Union of Journalists on his blog for still not "getting" social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and for responding defensively to calls to include social media in their training.

1-800-Flowers is just one of hundreds of retailers using social media. Read about this retailer and all the others.

Adam Kmiec enumerates what he looks for in a Tweet, and why he decides to follow certain people.

Mindcasting is where it’s at.

The distinction is courtesy of Jay Rosen (left), a journalism professor and new media analyst at New York University. For him, Twitter is a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of his colleagues and fellow netizens.

“Mindcasting came about when I was trying to achieve a very high signal-to noise-ratio,” he explained. This meant using his Twitter account to send out tweets pointing to the best media news and analysis he could find, 15 or 20 times a day. “I could work on the concept of a Twitter feed as an editorial product of my own.”

As Rosen noted, that product is itself a distillation of the huge stream of input he gets from the nearly 550 journalists, analysts and news outlets he follows on Twitter. “I’ve hand-built my own tipster network,” he said. “It’s editing the Web for me in real time.”

Now zoom out and think of Rosen, his hundreds of sources and his 11,000 followers, each as a kind of individual information amplifier, consuming and passing along the most interesting stuff that comes their way. So when the Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, announced it was re-engineering itself, with the newspaper as just one container for its news, Rosen saw the news tweeted by Scott Karp, a Web journalism entrepreneur he follows — and shared the story with his own audience.

It’s people-powered media in action. And yet a Time magazine columnist wondered this week, “Could a service that seemed to be designed specifically to provide its users with incessant interruptions, empty of almost any meaning or importance, really succeed?”

Nah, seriously? If Twitter was nothing but a way for the masses to meaninglessly interrupt each other, it wouldn’t have attracted the deafening media buzz in the first place, let alone millions of users, or a hyper-caffeinated developer community that cranks out new tools every day that allow users to search, sift and harness the geyser of content that Twitter has become.

The not quite 3-year-old San Francisco-based company says its user base has grown by 900% in the last year alone. Last month the company accepted an additional $35 million in venture capital, too, a hint that investors see potential where skeptics don’t.

Continued

Lynn Gaertner Johnson (left) said, "Early one recent morning I got a phone call from someone whose name, let's say, was Adam. Adam called because he and a co-worker were having a disagreement about whether paragraphs should be indented in e-mail."

David Spark says, "When I was working as a stand-up comic, I was always warned about the rules of performing. In general, the advice was good (e.g. “Don’t be dirty.” “Talk about yourself.” “Play to the crowd.”), adhering to it made one look and sound like everybody else.

It didn’t take long to quickly learn that for every guideline and rule of successful stand-up comedy, somebody has broken that rule and made a fortune off of it (e.g. Sam Kinison, Andy Kaufman)."

Read this fascinating story about Kaiser Permanente's corporate blog.

Does Twitter have a place in the office? Or it is just an amusing time-waster?

We’ve all heard the ominous warnings that our online habits are sucking the productivity out of our worklives, and that social-networking tools like Twitter are the equivalent of electronic black holes.

But you’ll find plenty of people arguing the opposite: that a microblogging option like Twitter can lead to improved communication (heck, it might even replace e-mail!) and better productivity. And that it actually makes business sense to use Twitter.

A new study (Lecture Podcast Listeners Outperform Class Attendees) found that students who listen to lectures on podcasts test better than those who listen in class.

Podcasting is a powerful educational medium, second only to books, in my opinion. But unlike reading books, you can listen to podcasts while doing the dishes.

About This Talk

The founding mother of the blog revolution, Movable Type's Mena Trott, talks about the early days of blogging, when she realized that giving regular people the power to share our lives online is the key to building a friendlier, more connected world.

About Mena Trott

Mena Trott and her husband Ben founded Six Apart in a spare bedroom after the blogging software they developed grew beyond a hobby. With products Movable Type, TypePad, LiveJournal and Vox, the company has helped lead the "social media" revolution. Full bio and more links.