In terms of resource allocation, I think it’s appropriate to assign a low priority to Stopped.Watched. items — which we do. It’s a minimal effort to paste the content from correspondents’ various submissions into the WordPress interface for publication. It’s an activity I interleave with myriad others — responding to comments and questions left on the site or sent by email, writing, reporting, processing photos, etc.

My sense is that it does not increase the drag on my productivity to the point where there’s a choice between Stopped.Watched. items versus some amount of center-column articles. That is, I think if the time I invested in Stopped.Watched. through the day were eliminated, it would not result in additional reporting and writing of a longer and more substantial nature. I could be wrong — I haven’t tried to measure it.

The editorial hand that’s wielded for Stopped.Watched. items makes that stream somewhat different from, say, a typical Twitter feed. There’s a smaller “box” that a Stopped.Watched. item needs to fit. It’s one reason that we didn’t just code a Twitter feed to auto-dump into that slot — something many readers have suggested would yield a “better” more spontaneous, instantaneous, and overall richer mix.

Twitter itself is evolving as more sophisticated tools have become available (Tweetdeck, for example), so that the follower-followee relation is now almost moot for many people — they monitor key words or hashtags as opposed to simply monitoring what the people they’re following are Twittering. The integration of other tools with Twitter tools also means that it’s possible to generate more Tweets with startling efficiency, which increases overall noise and redundancy. It’s forced me, for example, to use Tweetdeck — to filter out certain types of Tweets. It’s like an arms race.

So I certainly understand My Two Cents’ sentiments.

Without repeating the descriptions above of some of the benefits of Stopped.Watched. items, I think they have value in excess of the resources it takes to ensure their publication. But given a choice between paying an additional Chronicle staffer to manage the Stopped.Watched. items versus write additional articles on, say, the school system, it’s a pretty easy choice (for schools).

There’s a syntax for sculpting the RSS feed to include the sections you want, which is described in one of the monthly milestones. It’s not exactly user-friendly. We could do a better job on that score: the link that says RSS in the upper left gray box should ideally lead to a page with a bunch of pre-defined feeds so that people didn’t have to assemble their own.

Part of the reason we haven’t yet addressed that in any meaningful way is that we’d like to give our “sections” some additional thought — I don’t think they’re currently very well defined. It’s part of the reason we relegated them to the footer after the first few weeks of publication. We’re hoping a school of information student might take an interest in undertaking an analysis for a class project or an internship basis.

MTC, you admit not getting it, then draw a conclusion anyway, then wish for the end of what you don’t understand. Are you feeling left out? If so, others might provide some tips for how to learn about social media. Otherwise, can you live and let live wrt to this?

My suggestion would be to separate the Stopped.Watched rss feeds from the hard news feeds. That way if I can choose which I want to read.

Thanks for the good discussion on this!

There’s more to life than sound bites and twitter one-liners.

Are you a twit if you don’t want to Twitter?

I’ll be the first to agree that there is still a lot of noise to wade through, but isn’t that always the case when creating social networks and community? I’ve been surprised and impressed with how effective these tools can be, and how much they have increased my in person contacts and experiences.

Absolutely a benefit for me. I’m just waiting to see what happens next.

I actually believe that twitter and facebook are making society less social, not more social. If you can keep track of what people are doing electronically (facebook, tweets, ect) then there is no reason to call or meet with your friends, go to a meeting or even venture out into society anymore.. You already know everything while sitting home in front of your computer. I prefer human contact.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am computer literate and know how to use all these programs and devices. I just don’t “get” the thrill of it all and can’t wait until the fad dies.

Stopped. Watched. provides an archive of everyday life in Ann Arbor, documenting the simple items; it may not be hard news, but it is not without merit.

Also, do not underestimate the complexity that can emerge from repeated simple interactions. The full impact of Twitter like services is not yet fully understood. (See article in NY Times as an example.)