Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz is unquestionably one of the best, and first, CEO bloggers in the world. He’s not only a pioneer, but an intelligent, articulate, engaging writer who sets a difficult standard for others to match. I was writing a column on CEO blogging this afternoon and noticed that Jonathan’s blog has not been updated since May 18 of this year.

As Jonathan writes on the blog, in the May 18 post:

“I recognize it’s been a while since I’ve posted a blog. For reasons why, just click here to read the background. And before you ask, SEC regulations and securities laws limit what I can discuss about the Oracle transaction, so don’t expect any insights on the topic.”

Oracle announced its intention to acquire Sun on April 20. Whenever companies are in this mode, strict SEC regulations govern all communications material to the deal, so silence is sometimes the best policy. It’s interesting that Jonathan was still active nearly a month after the announcement. Sun’s Twitter account linked to the blog was tweeting six-month old blog posts up until October 15.

I look forward to seeing Jonathan, one of the industry’s unique voices, blogging again.

Full Disclosure: I worked for Sun Microsystems for five years and knew Jonathan. I am a huge fan of the company.

Tags: Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, CEO, SEC, blog, blogger

I was reviewing my Twitter follower list this morning and came across a potentially disturbing account tweeting what appears to be someone’s private information.

I reported this account by sending a Direct Message to @spam on Twitter. The service doesn’t seem to have any overt mechanism for reporting Terms of Service violations, though apparently, if enough people block a certain account, Twitter may decide to suspend the account.

I hope this is someone’s idea of a joke. If it’s for real, I hope Twitter shuts it down soon. People may not realize that every tweet is visible across the web the instant it’s published. Even if a tweet is deleted, it might still be visible in Twitter search and elsewhere.

This serves as a reminder of the potential privacy risks of social networking.

Tags: Twitter, TOS, privacy

I went to journalism school, which just might make me a “better” blogger. Here’s why I think so.

First of all, I learned to write in the “inverted pyramid” style, which says “start with a lead that exposes the most important elements of the story first, and then work down the page to aspects of the story that are of decreasing importance.” It’s a simple way to organize my writing.

I also learned how to properly use attribution, something which, when done wrong (by my standards) drives me crazy and is borderline dishonesty and/or theft. When I reference someone else’s blog, or an article, I’m very thorough and conscientious about clearly pointing out where the information came from. A typical attribution I might write would look something like this:

Tom Goldstein, writing in the August 21 San Francisco Chronicle, quotes Scott Rosenberg’s Book Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters:

“blogging could be journalism any time the person writing a blog chose to act like a journalist - recording and reacting to the events of the day, asking questions and seeking answers, checking facts and fixing errors.”

It might be a little pedantic, but heck, with that much information, you could find the source of the article I quoted without the link. And by the way, Rosenberg is on to something. There are plenty of bloggers who don’t act like journalists, but should.

As far as I’m concerned, for a blogger to “act like a journalist” is for the blogger to apply a few basic principles to blogging, like research, fact checking, correcting errors, using some kind of consistent style of presentation, distinguishing fact from opinion, and so on.

What else did I learn in journalism school? Keep paragraphs short for readability. There’s no magic number of words or sentences, but if your paragraphs look too dense, break ‘em up.

Emulate the pros. Some great bloggers to learn from are Dave Winer, and Tom Foremski, the first professional journalist/blogger.

Use a style guide. I don’t always follow it, but I do my best to write to Associated Press (AP) style. A style guide will tell you things like “write out numbers that are less than 10, and use numerals after that.” A little consistency is awesome.

Find your own unique voice. I’ve found mine, but I’m not sure it’s the right one. I can be a little too sarcastic, and (You might have noticed), I get all parenthetic. It’s my way of representing online the way I really talk. I tend to wander and introduce tangents, parallels and diversions, hopefully returning to the original thread. But I digress.

Write about something new, but if you can’t, find a new way to write about something that already exists. I recently wrote a column for Talent Zoo titled “Famous Dead People Weigh In On Social Media.” I quoted McLuhan, Einstein, Edith Wharton and others and used their quotes to make various points about the state of social media. I’m not saying this was an act of genius. And I didn’t write about anything “new,” but I did write about something in a new way.

Read voraciously. I mentioned emulating the pros, which I try to do, but I also read constantly. I have a book in bed and another in the bathroom. I read in the bathtub. If there’s nothing else to read I’ll read the ingredients on a toothpaste tube. I have a reading compulsion, and much of it happens offline.

So there’s a bit of what I learned in journalism school. I hope you find it helpful. I went to a state school, so if I was going to charge for this it wouldn’t be much, so you can have it, gratis.

Tags: blogger, journalist, journalism, inverted pyramid, attribution, Tom Foremski, Dave Winer

You’re at a conference, the wifi is good, and you’re excited about live tweeting the next speaker. But have you ever wondered whether it’s “OK” to copy and publish someone else’s words and ideas? If you were at the movie theater, neither the studio nor the theater operator would permit you to videotape portions of the movie to post on your blog. On the other hand, the art of critical commentary goes back to at least Shakespeare’s time, so it’s definitely established both in common practice and in the law that reproducing information, even copyrighted information, is acceptable under certain circumstances.

Setting aside issues of whether the practice is actually useful, and whether it is distracting to the speaker and to others in attendance, live tweeting and live blogging of conferences, events and webcasts raises legal and ethical issues. Producers of webcasts and live events often charge admission for these, and they may include copyrighted material. Speakers may also have copyrighted their presentations, or may (in my case) quote substantial portions of a copyrighted book or other work. These words and ideas are essentially products that are sold commercially, and the owners have certain rights to them.

On the other hand, the law does permit reproduction of portions of copyrighted material. I have two biases that affect my opinions on this issue, but I think they balance each other. I have a degree in journalism so I appreciate the need for journalists to incorporate information from third parties in their works. As the author of a book, I also understand the need for copyright protections for commercial content.

The best guidance for whether live blogging and live tweeting is acceptable comes from the Fair Use provision of U.S. copyright law, which allows a certain percentage of a copyrighted work to be reproduced for purposes such as a review of a book or theatrical play. Factors that affect whether reproduction of a copyrighted work is fair use are:

1. “The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

The distinction between fair use and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined. There is no specific number of words, lines, or notes that may safely be taken without permission.”

In other words, fair use is in the eyes of the beholder. The government will not rule on what is or isn’t fair use, leaving it the judgment of the individual, and in some cases, the courts to make the ultimate determination.

Despite the federal government’s unwillingness to establish numerical guidelines for fair use, many organizations have set their own limits. The University of California for example, in its Policy on the Reproduction of Copyrighted Materials for Teaching and Research, permits teachers to reproduce for classroom use “either a complete article, story or essay of less than 2,500 words or an excerpt of not more than 2,500 words from any prose work.” The policy was written in 1986, long before blogging and tweeting. Today, 2500 words is quite substantial and I think excessive. The UC policy also reminds teachers that if they exceed fair use limits they “can subject the one making unauthorized copies and the University to severe penalties.” The UC policy pertains to photocopying, not live events, but it does give some ideas of how to apply fair use. (I did not find a UC policy covering other fair use guidelines.)

Last year, the Associated Press announced it would “attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.’s copyright.”

A practical approach is to simply ask yourself, does the speaker want his or her work reproduced and distributed free of charge? Some may, some may not. The right, and the ability, to freely share information is such a cornerstone of Web 2.0, that I think most conference organizers and speakers in the Web 2.0/social media sphere are happy to have their talks live tweeted and live blogged. Either practice is more like reporting than reproduction, and would involve the “copying” of relatively small percentages of the content.

Most speakers make their slides and speaker’s notes available to attendees and these are freely distributed. I do the same, and I don’t care if my talks are reproduced in full, as long as there is attribution. And if someone can benefit from the information, I am happy for them to have it. Who knows — it could lead someone to buy my book or choose to engage my company.

My publisher generally allows me to grant permission to people who request the right to reproduce content from my book as long as the material constitutes less than 10% of the book. It is unlikely that someone live tweeting one of my talks could approach that 140 characters at a time, or even that a blogger could do so.

In one recent case, a blogger and researcher was criticized for live blogging a scientific meeting because the organizers felt he should have “abide(d) by the rules governing professional journalists attending the conference.” These rules include the requirement that journalists inform conference organizers in advance of their intentions.

Another interesting issue journalists are contending with is how Fair Use applies to information published on Twitter. Last month, Julie Posetti wrote a piece on the PBS MediaShift blog, Rules of Engagement for Journalists on Twitter. She believes that anything that appears on Twitter is “fair game”:

“Although social media etiquette may not recognize a journalist’s right to report any material published openly, the reality is that open Twitter accounts are a matter of permanent public record and fair game for journalists. While attribution is vital and it might be polite (but not necessary) to seek the approval of a Twitterer to quote them, I don’t see anything unethical about using tweets in mainstream news coverage.”

She goes on to say, however that she feels private Twitter accounts, those requiring owner approval of subscription requests, are off-the-record and not fair game. I disagree with her take that simply because something is published it is therefore a matter of public record and fair game. This would probably apply to quoting someone in a story, but not to reproducing material that might be copyrighted. Just because a tweet is only 140 characters does not remove it from the domain of copyrighted material. Multiple tweets could be used to convey an article, or a Twitter-based webcast. A journalist could quote a portion under Fair Use, but could not reproduce something in its entirety.

This also points out one of the weak links in the integrity of information in the Web 2.0 world. Bloggers and tweeters are NOT professional journalists. They don’t have training in ethical practices in areas like attribution and when and how to quote a source.

I generally hold that new media does not require new ethics, and I think this is largely the case in live tweeting/live blogging a presentation or webcast. Given that these practices don’t generally involve reproduction of any significant portion of the entire “work,” both common practice and the law seem to permit this.

Do you live tweet conferences and web casts? Do you have any personal guidelines you follow, or are you aware of any guidelines established by your company or organization?

Tags: Fair Use, copyright, Twitter, live tweeting, live blogging, guidelines

Steve Rubel recently announced “So Long Blogging, Hello Lifestreaming,” indicating he was going to “direct all of my online publishing energies to one hub, The Steve Rubel Lifestream, plus several spokes, e.g. the social networks and platforms where I participate (e.g today that’s Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook). You can read more why here.”

The influence and popularity of Twitter is undeniable, but I have always thought of Twitter as a “pointer site.” Most of the best tweets are not really 140 characters in length. They tend instead to point to lengthier articles and blog posts elsewhere.

I’ve recently been spending more time using FriendFeed than Twitter. I also have been using Posterous and think it is awesome, and I strongly recommend it as part of the standard social media tool kit. Posterous lets you post nearly any kind of information, including dozens of file types, directly (and nearly flawlessly) to your blog via email. I used it recently to post an ad hoc podcast on this blog, using the new iPhone Audio Memo app to record and then emailing to my blog.

I won’t go so far as to say it’s a gimmick for Steve to declare he’s done blogging, (who could blame a PR pro from doing something for its PR value), but I do think it’s an attention getter and I am not sure it makes sense. The best value I can offer is through thoughtful, reasoned analysis, and detailed posts on social media tools, applications and ethics. If all you want to do is share thousands of links a week, which is certainly one way to be informed and connected, you can go 100% lifestream, but otherwise, I strongly advocate the good old fashioned blog (who thought blogs would become passé?) as the place for where the best original content is still going to be published.

Tags: Steve Rubel, Lifestreaming, Life Streaming, Posterous, Death of Blogging