I like Twitter, I think they do good stuff. (I tweet as jreffell.)

I like retweeting, and it’s been fascinating to see Twitter’s community form the loose norms of the practice. It reminds me of the early use of PayPal by eBay sellers who preferred it to Billpoint, or (truly ancient history) some of the common practices of Usenet.

I’ve seen Twitter’s blog post about an upcoming retweet function, Mashable’s preview of what it might look like, and Dan Zarella’s critique of the design (ironically, I saw the last through a retweet). That sent me back to the Microsoft Research draft paper on Twitter practices (PDF), which I recommend highly. The numbers I use below are based on that paper, so keep in mind it is a draft paper and the data will have some limitations.

I basically agree with Dan’s critique, and hope that when Twitter does release the feature it will do so in a way which preserves current practices as much as possible.

Specifically:

1. I think Twitter should preserve the current norm of seeing the identity of someone you’re following first, and the person you’re retweeting (whom you might or might not be following) second. I think it will be pretty jarring to see someone “slip” into your stream due to a retweet. The proposed design is also a little unclear around time — because the retweeted tweet is primary, and it might be from some time ago, suddenly it can look like an out-of-order post is in your stream.
2. The MS Research paper showed 18% of users adding a hashtag to a retweet, and 11% contained additional text (usually commentary). I think these are useful practices and should be maintained if possible — the proposed Twitter design doesn’t allow for the addition of comments  or hashtags as far as I can tell.
3. 11% of retweets contained an encapsulated retweet. There are two chunks of information that can be (they aren’t always) present in encapsulation — the different sources, but also the chain or sequence of sourcing. I think that’s interesting information!

I threw together a quick design based on these points. This was just a quick hack to see what I could come up with. I think my proposal preserves the practices of retweeting which might matter to people, while still taking retweeting from “just” text to be more embedded in the platform. The design assumes you are following me (jreffell) but aren’t following Bruce Sterling (bruces). I retweet a recent post of his.

Some caveats: The folks at Twitter are smart. I’m sure they’ve looked at designs very like this, and have reasons for not going in this direction (or, as they haven’t launched yet, they may still go in this kind of direction.) I haven’t thought about technical constraints or the API at all, and those are very important. I haven’t designed the “retweet button” itself — though I think the design I’ve seen would be fine if it simply included some space for adding commentary / hashtags.

If you were working on this feature at Twitter, how would you do it?

The map looked pretty reasonable, except for implying a left turn from Lincoln onto 19th, which you can’t do. The detailed directions are a little more creative. It turns out that Google Maps has shown an unhealthy love for U-turns before.

I figure the Googlebots have been watching Bullitt a few too many times.

We have this poster, the one on the left, hanging in our kitchen. Apparently we aren't alone in this. I like it, because it reminds me of my family, and because I think

it's the sort of thing it's helpful to see first thing in the morning when the day is smacking you upside the head with its dayness and you haven't had your tea yet.

I'd always thought of it as a poster that was up during The Blitz, but apparently, it was actually held back for use during the expected invasion, which puts a different color on it. (The designer of this poster version also put a

different color on it, of course.) The previous posters in the series read "Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory." and "Freedom Is In Peril." I'd be happy with a set of all three.

BoingBoing brings word of a version for today, whipped up in response to the Grauniad article linked above. I like it too. If the artist gets around to selling nice prints in a matching size, I'd be pretty happy with a set of both. But the new one would have to go somewhere where I'd see it after I've had my tea.

Here's Stephen Colbert, while interviewing Neil Gaiman, singing the Tom Bombadil song:

Quoted in full from his blog:

I know some former eBay folks feel the same way. Think he'd fund a startup?

I'm reading The Lord of the Rings again.

I've read it many, many times. This probably isn't surprising. I first read The Hobbit at a very young age, but The Lord of the Rings wasn't in the kids section, and it was intimidatingly long, even for me. But when I was a little older — I think 10 — we traveled to Scotland, where my mother grew up. On the way, we visited my mother's cousin Nigel, who (reading my semi-formed taste astutely) strongly recommended two works to me: LOTR and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Both got their hooks into me good and hard, both get read over and over again and always will, but while Hitchhikers led fairly directly to my first Real Date With A Girl in high school, LOTR has occupied my mind more fully over the years than any other book.

I didn't have a chance to buy the books until we got to Edinburgh. Both were purchased, as far as I can remember, at the John Menzies on Princes Street, near the Scott Monument. It didn't escape my 10-year old self that the Victorian Gothic spire, stained black from years of coal soot, looked more than a little like Robert Garland's painting of Barad-Dur on the cover of my one-volume Unicorn edition of LOTR.

I read great chunks of it all the way across Scotland.I don't remember much about how I read it then, except that I enjoyed the prologue, skipped the songs and poetry, didn't really notice the appendix, but was entranced by the maps. I think most 10-year-olds are miniature cartographers at heart. I know that the transition from the early chapters, so like The Hobbit, and the epic later chapters, was intense. I know I bogged down in the Frodo/Sam/Gollum chapters of The Two Towers — so much so that I lost our car keys in them, triggering a frantic attempt to find an open locksmith in the small Scottish coastal village of my ancestors. I'm pretty sure Tom Bombadil confused me, but that's true for most everyone.

I've read it again and again over that last 20-odd years. At least once every two years, sometimes once a year. Mostly that old Unicorn edition, due to affection and the ease of flipping back and forth in a single volume. I did read the three-volume set at the library a few times, mostly because of the superior maps. My favorite edition, the 50th Anniversary edition with the Alan Lee plates, I don't even own. (As far as I'm concerned, the holy trinity of LOTR artists are Lee, representing the modern era, Garland in the middle, and the old Barbara Remington covers as the classic era.)

As I've read and read again, the scope has increased. The poems and songs get read. The Silmarillion gets (slowly at first) absorbed. The historical appendices, which contain what are now some of my favorite stories. I picked up an encyclopedia, and the first Book of Lost Tales. At this point I even go over the linguistic history, though the languages themselves aren't yet compelling. There's no real end to this, that's part of the pleasure — Tolkien's creation (and his son's collection and arrangement of it) are vast enough, and the world of Tolkien scholarship is probably larger than any other genre creator, with only the Sherlock Holmes folks coming close. I'll ignore the movies and games, not because they're unimportant to me, but because they represent something totally different.

And then, the internet. LOTR fanatics and the net have always been a comfortable match, for obvious reasons, but the resources available now are amazing. The LOTR wikipedia entries are a match in size and complexity for a small nation, and the more individual Encyclopedia of Arda can supplement where terse wiki-knowledge leaves off.

The real find for me, though, is Kate Nepveu's ongoing re-read at Tor.com. It's a slow, chapter-by-chapter re-read of the whole book. Her essays are lovely — she's the perfect critic, someone who is knowledgeable but not expert (allowing her to be surprised at some turns of the narrative), and affectionate but not worshipfull. She's also been drawing in some of the more important works of criticism into hers, leading to (for example) a discussion of LOTR and Augustine. The very best part of these essays, though, are the comments — the commentors are civil, literate, and an interesting mixture of relatively naive readers and those with vast expertise. I'm a geek, but I'm also a former literature major, and it's fascinating to read other folks who can deal with the text seriously, as a fantasy work and on it's own terms, but also draw back and look at it as a work of literature. They've just about finished with the first half of the first book, so there's plenty of time to join in.

I'm doing the re-reading with my old Unicorn copy, but I suspect this is the last time for it. It's stood up bravely to two decades of abuse, but I think it's hit the limit. It will get retired to the top shelf of a bookcase, and maybe I'll grab one of the Alan Lee editions to take the hit for the next few decades.

I mentioned in Decluttering my digital inboxes that I'd been pruning my feed reader. The ones I removed were either defunct, not as interesting as they used to be, or interesting but wrongly paced (IO9 for instance is a great way to keep up on the trashy side of science-fiction media — if you can cope with 20 posts a day. I can't.)

Poking through the list of blogs I read regularly did let me figure out which I really like, at least by one measure — the ones where I pinned hundreds of articles to read for later in 2008. Usually these have a common mood rather than a narrow subject, and a pretty eclectic range of links.

My (Roughly) Top 5 Blogs

1. Coilhouse "A love letter to alternative culture" — Coilhouse is for people who miss Mondo 2000 and think that goth is not quite dead yet. What's startling about Coilhouse is how easily it could be crappy and how not-crappy they mostly manage to be. The trick seems to be to actually take things seriously and go light on the snark. I approve.
2. Kottke – This is sort of like saying you like The Beatles. But I do like the Beatles! Kottke has had the best links for years.
3. Warren Ellis – Warren Ellis writes comic books and is a filthy, filthy man. Read with caution, and don't look at any link he prefaces with "What is best in life?" unless you're already a hardened BME reader. (And if you don't know what I'm taling about, you really don't want to click on those links).
4. Tor– relatively new effort by a science-fiction publisher to correct online for the slowly-dying offline science-fiction magazine market.
5. Waxy – If Kottke is The Beatles, Waxy is The Rolling Stones.

And to go with that, I sampling of new blogs for 2009 — we'll see which ones I'm still reading in 2010.

New blogs for 2009

1. Grognardia – Talks about roleplaying games (the paper pencil and dice kind) within the context of reviving "classic" RPG gaming, like early versions of D&D. Strangely compelling, assuming you are still or ever have played roleplaying games.
2. Homegrown Evolution – Authors of The Urban Homestead, this blog is (mostly) about how to live more sustainably in an urban environment. There is much discussion of chickens.
3. Brazen Careerist – Blogs about life & business are usually dull and almost always say safe things that sound like things you should say. Penelope Trunk is not dull and not safe.
4. AASCII – Jason Scott runs Textfiles.com (recording the history of BBSs) and has interesting things to say about computer history, social media online, and the preservation thereof.
5. SFist – Local San Francisco news and links. This is much a sign of my discontent with the San Francisco Chronicle as anything else.