Just as Silicon Valley was starting to come to terms with the sudden departure of Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs, another technology giant dropped a bombshell: Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he is stepping down to become executive chairman of the company. Schmidt says he will focus primarily on government relations, while Larry Page is going to take back the CEO role he held until Schmidt arrived to take the job in 2001. Although Schmidt will still be around to advise on various matters, the executive shuffle makes it clear that Larry Page is now in sole control of the web giant. But does he have what Google needs? That’s not obvious.

After the news broke Thursday afternoon, Schmidt posted a message on Twitter that linked to his blog post about the changes, also writing “day-to-day adult supervision no longer needed!” That comment was a reference to the fact that Schmidt — a former senior executive with Sun Microsystems — was seen by many as the “adult supervision” the two young billionaires needed in 2001, when they were planning the stock offering that eventually came in 2004. The memories of the tech implosion of the late 1990s were so fresh still that many clearly felt Page and Brin needed to be stopped before they blew all Google’s money, and since Schmidt looked the part of a senior executive, the company’s backers felt he would go over better with investors.

Over the past 10 years, Schmidt has repeatedly stressed — as he did in his announcement and on the earnings call — that although he was the chief executive, he and the two founders have functioned more or less as a triumvirate, advising each other and debating various courses of action. Schmidt has suggested this is because of the mutual respect each had for the other, but his role was undoubtedly also influenced by the fact that Page and Brin share ultimate voting control of the company, thanks to their majority ownership of Google’s multiple-voting shares.

Now, Page has taken the reins as CEO, and Schmidt made it clear in his blog post about the news that this was done “to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making.” After the split, each member of the triumvirate seems to be taking on the role for which he is arguably the best qualified: Schmidt, who is the most senior (and tends to wear a suit), becomes the public face of the company when it comes to government: meeting with senators who are investigating the company’s privacy infractions, for example, or appearing before congressional committees, the FTC, and so on. Page becomes the day-to-day leader, and Brin gets to spend time on the projects he enjoys (which may or may not include self-driving cars).

How Schmidt performs in the governmental role remains to be seen. He might have to tone down his penchant for inappropriate jokes about how people “can just move” if they don’t want their houses to be photographed by the Google StreetView car, or his comments about how “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” That’s probably not going to go over well in Washington.

The reality is, Google is facing challenges on a number of fronts. Yes, it turned in another stellar performance in the most recent quarter, with revenues climbing by 26 percent to $8.4 billion. The search-related advertising business is still doing extremely well, and that cash cow has allowed the company to do many other things, including promoting the Android operating system and running a number of popular (but money-losing) services such as Gmail and YouTube. But the tech giant has been unable to get much traction on the social-web front, and that has led to criticism that it’s losing the battle — or is at least in danger of losing the battle — for both users and advertisers to Facebook, whose share of the online-ad pie is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Critics are also getting more vocal about the rapid deterioration of Google’s search results, its core business, thanks in part to the contributions of “content farms” such as Demand Media, with many saying Google hasn’t done enough about the problem because it gains ad revenue from those publishers. Then there are the governmental hurdles Schmidt is expected to help the company leap: a potential antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice into Google’s proposed acquisition of travel-information provider ITA, along with pressure from Congress on the company’s approach to privacy, and continued difficulties with foreign governments like Italy and China.

Larry Page is taking the helm at what could be a turning point for Google. Its core business is under fire; it’s losing ground to Facebook in an important new market; and it’s still relying on search-related ads — a market getting long in the tooth — for 90 percent of its income. It has been unable to build any substantial new businesses, despite a number of attempts, including its recently rebuffed $6-billion acquisition offer for Groupon. As angel investor Chris Dixon put it, some Google watchers are probably asking: Is Page’s return like Steve Jobs coming back to Apple in 1997, or is it more like Jerry Yang’s return to Yahoo in 2007?

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Techmeme, the technology-news aggregator that is like CNN for many geeks and tech fans, has given its seal of approval to the idea that Twitter is a real-time news network — founder Gabe Rivera announced today that tweets will now be highlighted as headlines on the site, if they meet his newsworthiness criteria, and even Twitter messages that refer to a breaking news story can make it onto Techmeme if they are noteworthy in some way, or posted by influential users. But will this new feature provide the site with more news to choose from sooner, or will it overwhelm the service with noise?

I admit that my first response to the news (which I saw on Twitter, naturally) was that it didn’t really seem to make a lot of sense. It seemed a little like printing text messages on the front page of the newspaper, in some ways. Much like Twitter, text messages are for chatting and banter, while the front page of a paper is where the important headlines and story excerpts are supposed to go. And Techmeme is very much like the front page of a newspaper, except it’s a newspaper that is devoted solely to technology, and it is updated minute by minute, and sometimes even second by second. Wouldn’t mixing an informal chat-oriented medium like Twitter mess up the headline aspect of the site?

In looking at the current example of the feature, which is Rivera’s own tweet followed by a lot of @ replies, it does seem quite noisy. There are dozens and dozens of comments of 140-character or less attached to the original, and none of them really add a lot to the conversation (including mine, I confess). Or rather, some of them might add something, but it’s really hard to tell which ones, or to sort through them all looking for meaning. On Techmeme’s sister site Mediagazer, where tweets are mixed in with blog headlines, it’s hard to tell what is a tweet and what is a link to a blog post, which presumably would have more to add than just a single offhand comment.

That said, however, Rivera makes a good case in his blog post that tweets can in many cases be news, or make news — such as an announcement from a company that is launching something, or a rumor posted by a celebrity. Another example the Techmeme founder uses is the tweet from former Twitter engineer Alex Payne that seemed to signal unpleasant changes coming for third-party Twitter developers, and was eventually followed by exactly that. In that case, however, it’s arguable that the tweet only became news because TechCrunch wrote about it and put it in context. Would the tweet itself have made Techmeme without the context that blog post provided? I don’t think so.

In any case, it’s interesting that Rivera sees tweets as potentially newsworthy enough to make it part of his news-filtering service — something venture capitalist and blogger (and Twitter investor) Fred Wilson was suggesting might happen as far back as 2008, before many people had even recognized that Twitter was a worthwhile service, let alone a real-time information network. And presumably, the Techmeme founder will apply the same combination of algorithm-driven selection and human filtering that he has to the headlines to keep tweets from overwhelming the site. And Twitter now has another thing to point to that confirms it is a real news network.

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It’s not just iPad apps and paywalls that are confounding traditional media — there’s plenty of evidence that many don’t really get Facebook or Twitter much either, despite the fact that both have been around for years now, and there are plenty of examples of how to use them well. One of those examples is National Public Radio, which has over 1.4 million Facebook fans and recently talked about how it uses the social network to build its community of listeners as well as to do reporting.

NPR’s digital strategist, Andy Carvin, told an Online News Association event that the organization doesn’t look at its Facebook page as a place where it can push the news, but more as a place where listeners (and potential listeners) can talk with each other about things that interest them. The pieces that the broadcaster posts aren’t usually breaking news or even the top story; instead, Carvin says they are items that get picked based on the question: “Will our friends want to talk about this?” And they don’t just talk — the Facebook page also drives 4.5 million pageviews a month to the NPR website. And as the Nieman Journalism Lab notes, according to survey of its listeners that the broadcaster did last year:

Facebook fans are also some of NPR’s most devoted listeners, with 70 percent of them tuning into their local NPR station — and averaging 2 hours of NPR consumption a day. Fifty-five percent also visit NPR’s website on a regular basis.

Of course, NPR doesn’t have to rely on advertising, so you could argue that how it approaches Facebook is different from the way other traditional ad-supported media might, or should. But I don’t think that’s the case. What NPR is doing is building a community around its content — and not just by posting links that people can comment on or click “like” on, but by asking people to help shape stories as well. In other words, using social media as a tool for real interaction, not just for broadcasting a message (pun intended). And the result is more engaged readers/listeners, and more traffic to the broadcaster’s website — which matters just as much to NPR as a traditional media outlet, because the broadcaster relies on public donations and awareness.

It’s also worth noting that the public broadcaster doesn’t keep too tight a rein on its community, which some media outlets try to do. “We feel like it’s as much theirs as it is ours,” Carvin said at the ONA event. “If they want to swear like sailors, [they can]. We don’t block comments just because there’s swearing, or even if they’re being snarky.” NPR staffers delete offensive comments or hate speech, but criticism is fine. And here’s the best part: their Facebook fans often take care of the moderation themselves, by reporting obvious fake accounts or offensive comments. That’s one sign of a strong community (NPR also makes great use of its Tumblr blog and of YouTube).

One issue for media companies is that approaching things the way that NPR has means giving up the community aspect to Facebook, or at least some of it. Many readers will click through to NPR’s site, but others will not — they will click “like” or comment, but that’s all. For a media entity, this is going to feel like giving away the store. There are other issues as well: the social network is still a fairly walled garden in many ways, and it can change its terms of use quickly and with little warning. That could put a media company in a difficult spot, since Facebook is ultimately the one that controls what happens to that community and the interaction that takes place there.

That said, however, the reality is that media in the web era is a distributed thing, and that includes the community aspect. Conversations about your content are going to occur on Facebook because 600 million people use it, and they are going to occur on Twitter because 200 million people or so use that. If you want to build a relationship with your users — which is about the only thing you have left, since scarcity of information and control over the distribution channel is no longer working — then you have to be there too. And not just shoving ads or content at them, but talking to them.

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By now, thanks to incidents like the earthquake in Haiti, the recent revolution in Tunisia and the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, most people are coming to grips with the fact that Twitter is effectively a real-time news network — like a version of CNN that is powered by hundreds of thousands of users around the world. But what happens when that news network is spreading mis-information? That happened during the Giffords shooting, when the congresswoman was initially reported to be dead, and there are other more recent cases as well: on Wednesday, for example, reports of a shooting in Oxford Circus in London, England swept through the Twitter-sphere but turned out to be a mistake.

The British incident appears to have been caused by two coincidental events: according to several reports, one was an email about a police training exercise involving a shooting in Oxford Circus, which somehow got into the wrong hands and was posted as though it was the real thing. Meanwhile, another Twitter user posted an unrelated message about a TV commercial “shooting” in the area, and the combination of those two things helped to fan the flames of hysteria for a number of hours about buildings being locked down and police sharpshooters being brought in, etc. — which can be seen in the chronicle of tweets collected by one Twitter observer at the site Exquisite Tweets.

In the case of Rep. Giffords, in the minutes following the initial reports of the shooting, a number of outlets reported that the congresswoman had been killed, and these reports made their way onto Twitter — in some cases because the reporters for those news outlets posted them, and in other cases because users heard or saw the reports and then tweeted about them. For hours after the shooting these erroneous reports continued to circulate, even after the reporters and media outlets themselves had posted corrections. Andy Carvin of National Public Radio, for example, spent a considerable amount of time correcting people about the report that he posted, but it continued to be re-tweeted.

This led to a discussion by a number of journalists in the days that followed (including me, in a Twitter chat for web journalists) about how to handle an incorrect tweet. Should it be deleted, to prevent the error from being circulated any further? A number of reporters and bloggers said that it should — but others, such as Salon founder Scott Rosenberg and Carvin (who described his thoughts in this comment at Lost Remote), argued that the error should be allowed to remain, but that whoever posted it should do their best to update Twitter with the correct information. Craig Silverman of Regret The Error, who wrote a post cataloguing the erroneous reports, has also described a way in which Twitter could implement a correction function, by tying any correction to the original tweet.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that Twitter is by definition a stream of content. It never stops flowing, and during breaking news events it flows so quickly it’s almost impossible to filter it all, or be sure of what is correct and what isn’t. And because it is an asynchronous experience — meaning people step away from it and then come back repeatedly — there is no way to guarantee that everyone is going to see an update or a correction, or to stop them from re-tweeting incorrect information.

It’s possible that Twitter might be able to either embed corrections or tie errors and updates together using its so-called Annotations feature, which the company was working on last year and had originally hoped to launch in the fall. But work on that project was apparently put on hold while the company launched a revamped website version of the service and sorted out some other matters. It’s not clear whether Annotations will be revived, but the idea behind it was that information about a tweet — or “meta data” such as location or a number of other variables — could be attached to it as it travelled through the network, something that might work for corrections as well (as noted in a comment below, the Poynter Institute is also working with programmer Adrian Holovaty, founder of EveryBlock, to try and develop a correction mechanism outside of Twitter).

Twitter problem isn’t a new one. Traditional media have struggled with the issue as well, with newspapers often running corrections days or weeks after a mistake was made, with no real indication of what the actual error was. In a sense, Twitter is like a real-time, distributed version of a news-wire service such as Reuters or Associated Press; when those services post something that is wrong, they simply send out an update to their customers, and hope that no one has published it in the paper or online yet.

Twitter’s great strength is that it allows anyone to publish, and re-publish, information instantly, and distribute that information to thousands of people within minutes. But when a mistake gets distributed, there’s no single source that can send out a correction. That’s the double-edged sword such a network represents. Perhaps — since we all make up this real-time news network — it’s incumbent on all of us to do the correcting, even if it’s just by re-tweeting corrections and updates as eagerly as we re-tweeted the original.

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New York City has launched an ambitious internal “crowdsourcing” project, aimed at getting ideas from city employees to help the giant metropolis function more efficiently. The program, called Simplicity, is being powered by Spigit, which makes a Software-as-a-Service platform that companies and governments can use to crowdsource ideas. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the plan during his annual “State of The City” address on Wednesday afternoon, and the company said that it will initially be rolled out to 15,000 city workers before being extended to the city’s entire workforce of more than 300,000.

Spigit provides a software platform that allows a company or government to set up an idea-submission site relatively quickly, and incorporates reward-based incentives, idea voting and trading, as well as providing analytics that can help anyone using the software to track submissions and those who provide them. A number of companies, including AT&T and Southwest Airlines, have used its software to get ideas from their employees. Other companies such as Dell — which was one of the first to launch a crowdsourcing effort called IdeaStorm in 2007 — and Starbucks, which launched a similar effort not long afterwards, have used the Salesforce.com platform to get ideas from both inside and outside the company, while Jive Software and BrightIdea also offer similar platforms.

Spigit said that the Simplicity platform has been in beta testing with a small group of NYC employees, and some of the ideas that have been suggested include:

• A central research and development unit that can help NYC agencies find more information about new programs and initiatives.
• A web-based portal that would allow city agencies to bid on items that have been “relinquished” or made redundant by other city agencies.
• A “just in time” inventory-management system that would prevent the over-stocking of supplies.
• A way to identify internal experts who could train other employees at their desks in computer hardware and software, rather than sending employees for training.
• A web-based help desk for employees, so that they could contact someone in another department about a particular topic within their expertise.

Whether the Spigit-powered program will actually help New York become more efficient remains to be seen. It could become just another dumping ground for ideas that never see the light of day — something collaboration experts call the “suggestion box problem.” But at least the city government is trying to use social tools to improve the way it functions, which is an encouraging sign.

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Updated: Groupon may have gotten the lion’s share of the attention in the group-buying market lately, thanks in large part to its chutzpah in turning down a $6-billion acquisition offer from Google and reports of a planned IPO that would value the company at more than $15 billion, but competitor LivingSocial is making some news of its own: the company today launched a promotion with Amazon that shows the kind of marketing power the group-buying company now has at its disposal, as a result of the recent $175-million investment it got from the online retailing powerhouse.

The deal offers buyers who subscribe to LivingSocial a $20 Amazon gift card for just $10, and according to a number of reports the cards have been flying off the virtual shelves, as word of the deal spreads through Twitter and other social networks. With an estimated 300,000 cards sold within a few hours of the deal being launched, the offer was already worth about $3 million. If the pace of buying continues, the deal — which is available for 24 hours — could generate as much or more gross revenue as a deal that Groupon did with The Gap last year, which brought in about $11 million. Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Ventures, one of LivingSocial’s financial backers, said that the deal was “the first step of operational integration” as a result of the Amazon investment.

Update: By the end of the day on Wednesday, LivingSocial said it had sold more than one million of the Amazon gift cards, which would put the company’s total revenue at over $10 million. The company said the cards had been selling at the rate of 2,000 every minute or 85 per second.

It’s not clear how much of the revenue from the Amazon deal LivingSocial gets to keep. Most group-buying deals offered by LivingSocial or Groupon — or one of a number of other similar companies — see the buying platform that sends the deal out to its subscriber base keep anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of the revenue, depending on the arrangement with the retailer. Although the fine print notes that “Amazon is not a sponsor of this promotion,” the retailer could easily have offered the gift cards free of charge and let LivingSocial keep the bulk of the revenue as a way of promoting its new investment — especially since gift cards themselves will have future value for Amazon once buyers redeem them.

If nothing else, the Amazon offer is a sign that the combination of LivingSocial and the world’s largest online retailer could be a powerful competitor for Groupon. In addition to Amazon and Lightspeed, the Washington, D.C.-based company is backed by Grotech Ventures (the investment company of and former AOL founder Steve Case) as well as US Venture Partners. LivingSocial recently bought a controlling stake in a Spanish group-buying company called LetsBonus.

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Four out of five Internet users participate in some kind of group in the “real” world, compared with just 56 percent of those who don’t use the Internet regularly, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. Those figures rise to 82 percent for users of social networks, and to 85 percent for users of Twitter — in other words, being social online makes it more likely you will be social offline as well.

Ever since the Internet first started to go mainstream, there has been an image of the archetypal Internet user: someone hunched over a computer in the dark, spending hours online instead of interacting with people in the real world. Although such creatures undoubtedly exist, this has always been an unfair portrayal of most people who spend time online, and the Pew data confirms that. Lee Rainie of the Pew Center said in a statement:

Use of the Internet in general, and social media in particular, has become the lubricant for chatter and outreach for all kinds of groups ranging from spiritual communities to professional societies to ad hoc fan clubs.

The Internet-related results are part of a larger Pew report on the real-world social activity of Americans — how many people belong to social groups in their communities, what kinds of groups they tend to join, how membership breaks down based on age and income, etc. But as part of the study, the group also asked those who belong to groups about their use of the Internet and of social media and social networks.

The report also found that a majority of Americans — both Internet users and non-Internet users — believe the Internet has increased the ability of groups to communicate with members and to draw attention to an issue. The report also found that those who are members of groups and associations say the Internet has had a major impact on their ability to communicate with and stay connected to other members of those groups, and to stay informed about the group’s activities:

• 68 percent of all Americans (both Internet users and non-users) said the Internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to communicate with members.
• 62 percent of all Americans said the Internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to draw attention to an issue.
• 59 percent of all Americans said the Internet has had a major impact on the ability of groups to organize activities.
• 53 percent of online users who are active in groups say the Internet has had a major impact on their ability to keep up with news and information about their groups
• 46 percent of Internet users who are active in groups say the Internet has help them be active in more groups than would otherwise be the case.

According to the Pew report, those who are Internet users tend to be far more active in their groups than non-Internet users, with 69 percent attending meetings (compared with 54 percent of non-Internet users) and 64 percent volunteering their time for a group, compared with just 47 percent of non-Internet users. The study also found that close to half of those who are active in groups say those groups have a page on a social network such as Facebook, while 42 percent say their group uses text messaging, and 30 percent of those who belong to a group say their group has its own blog. The number of groups that communicate with members via Twitter is just 16 percent.

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Cheezburger — the blog network that brought you I Can Has Cheezburger, the Fail blog, Engrish Funny and many other similar humor-oriented sites — today announced that it has closed a $30-million round of funding from a group of venture capital firms including Foundry Group and SoftBank Capital. The company said it plans to use the funds to build up its staff and grow the network in new directions. Brad Feld of Foundry Group will also be joining the Cheezburger board of directors.

The financing is a hefty validation for the company, which CEO Ben Huh has built into a major media entity after acquiring the original I Can Has Cheezburger website three years ago from the two bloggers who started it. (The site has even branched out into video.) The company, which has grown to more than 40 employees, has not taken any outside investment since that initial round of angel financing. In addition to Foundry Group and Japan’s SoftBank, the latest funding round includes Madrona Venture Group and Avalon Ventures, and representatives from both companies will also be joining the board.

Cheezburger said it currently has 16.5 million unique visitors per month and over 375 million pageviews, and that it plans to become “the largest humor network in the world.” Among the other companies chasing that niche is the Cracked.com network, which is owned by “content farm” Demand Media — a company that has filed to go public in an initial stock offering later this month that could value Demand at over $1.5 billion. In many ways, the Cheezburger network has taken the same “user-generated content” approach to humor that Demand has to other topics, since most of its content comes from others.

Cheezburger’s chief revenue officer talked to the New York Times last year about what has made the network so successful (it has been profitable since the beginning), and he noted that only about one percent of the content that comes into the various hubs the company operates — there are more than 50 of them in all — gets used on the websites. The rest winds up being used for merchandise related to the sites, such as T-shirts, laptop stickers and so on. The company also publishes books and wall calendars that aggregate the LOLcats and other images that appear on its sites.

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Steve Jobs announced on Monday that he is taking another leave of absence from the company — of unspecified length — to deal with his health. Although he will remain CEO, Apple’s chief operating officer Tim Cook will be running things in Jobs’ absence. While the company is on firm financial footing, and is expected to beat most analysts’ estimates with its quarterly earnings tomorrow, the news is almost certain to rattle investors, and could put continued pressure on the stock as the markets try to figure out what Apple might be like without its charismatic leader.

The company appears to have deliberately chosen to release the news on Martin Luther King Day, in order to give investors some time to think about it, since U.S. stock markets are closed. But Apple shares dropped dramatically on foreign markets, falling as much as 7 percent in Germany at one point after the news was first reported. Apple likely also chose to make its release just before it comes out with its financial results, since that should focus investors’ minds on the performance of products like the iPad and the iPhone 4 instead of on the CEO’s health. Most analysts have said they are expecting another blockbuster quarter from the company.

Despite what is expected to be good news on the financial front, the Jobs announcement is almost certain to re-ignite criticism that Apple has not been as forthcoming as it should be about his medical status. Jobs was widely expected to appear at a recent press conference announcing Verizon’s launch of the iPhone, but Tim Cook appeared instead. Others noticed that during the Apple developers conference in September, Jobs handed off a lot of the presentation to Cook and others — although he has been doing that more over the past year, in what is likely an attempt to shift the spotlight away from himself and show that Apple has other executives who can carry the torch if necessary. (The company continues to argue with shareholders over its succession planning.)

Apple came under fire in 2008 over repeated reports that Jobs was more seriously ill than the company had acknowledged — based in part on his gaunt appearance at several events — but there was no official news until Apple announced in January of 2009 that he was taking a medical leave. Shortly thereafter, Jobs was required to have a liver transplant. Some argued that his personal health was no one’s business, but SEC rules require companies to inform shareholders and the public markets about material facts, and Jobs having complications as a result of potentially fatal illness was seen by many as a material fact. One of Apple’s own directors later said that the company should have gone public with the news, and that he regretted not resigning over Apple’s decision to keep quiet.

The focus on Jobs and his health stems from the fact that Apple is one of the few major corporations whose fortunes are tied so closely to its founder and CEO. Most other companies with a $300-billion market value and revenues in the $25-billion range may have prominent chief executives, but few of them are seen as having so much control over the products their companies produce — and even fewer are as charismatic and widely admired as Jobs. Some have estimated that the stock trades between 10 and 25 percent higher than it otherwise would, based solely on Jobs being the CEO. During the latter part of 2008, after rumors of Jobs’ health began to accelerate, the stock lost more than 50 percent of its value, although several analysts have told Reuters that they don’t believe the latest absence will affect the stock that much.

On the weekend, a Smart Money columnist wrote a piece entitled “Are Apple’s Best Years Over?” In it, James Stewart argued that while the company has been hugely successful with the iPad and the iPhone and its MacBook laptops, “I’m not sure what worlds there are left for Apple to conquer,” and said the stock could come under pressure because it has climbed more than 80 percent in the past year, and is up by over 400 percent from its low in 2009. Rightly or wrongly, the news of Jobs departure is going to cause many investors to echo Stewart’s question.

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As it did during the recent shootings in Arizona, the Twitter network provided a ringside seat for another major news event on Friday — the overthrow of a corrupt government in the African nation of Tunisia, after weeks of protests over repression and economic upheaval. And even as the country’s ruler was being hustled onto a plane, the debate began over whether Twitter had played even more of a role in the revolution than just reporting on it as it happened: was this the first real Twitter revolution? The correct answer is probably yes and no. Did it help protesters, and thus the end goal of overthrowing the government? Undoubtedly. Was it solely responsible for that happening? Hardly.

Among those arguing the question — on Twitter, of course — were foreign affairs commentator Evgeny Morozov, who writes for Foreign Policy magazine, along with Jillian York of Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, Ethan Zuckerman — who founded Global Voices Online while he was a fellow at the Berkman Center (and has written his own post about Twitter’s role in Tunisia) — as well as media theorist Clay Shirky and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci from the University of Maryland. After some debate on the issue, Shirky (responding to Morozov) said that “no one claims social media makes people angry enough to act [but] it helps angry people coordinate their actions.” The Foreign Policy writer, meanwhile, responded by arguing in a blog post that Twitter did not play a strong role in the events in Tunisia on Friday:

Would this revolution have happened if there were no Facebook and Twitter? I think this is a key question to ask. If the answer is “yes,” then the contribution that the Internet has made was minor; there is no way around it.

Jillian York also cautioned against attributing too much of what happened to social media, saying: “Don’t get all techno-utopian. Twitter’s great for spreading news, but this revolution happened offline” (she later amended her comment, however, saying that she definitely believed social media played a role in the day’s events). Tufekci, meanwhile, wondered why there had to be such a dividing line between offline vs. online activity, asking: “I don’t get this was it online or offline dichotomy. The online world is part of the world. It has a role.” She added that trying to answer the question of whether it was a Twitter revolution was “like asking was the French Revolution a printing press revolution?”

There’s no question that Twitter definitely helped to spread the information about what was happening in Tunisia, as demonstrated by the tweets and videos and other media collected by Andy Carvin at National Public Radio while the events unfolded. And at least one Tunisian revolutionary, who runs a website called Free Tunisia, told a Huffington Post blogger that social media such as Twitter — along with cellphones, text messaging and various websites — was crucial to the flow of information and helped protesters gather and plan their demonstrations. Said Bechir Blagui:

They called it the jasmine revolt, Sidi Bouzid revolt, Tunisian revolt… but there is only one name that does justice to what is happening in the homeland: Social media revolution.

The role of social media in activism is something that has been debated a lot over the past year or so, in part because of a piece Malcolm Gladwell wrote poo-poohing the idea that tools like Twitter and Facebook could ever have much to do with real activism. Shirky responded to this argument — at least somewhat — in a piece he wrote on the topic for Foreign Affairs magazine recently, arguing that social media and other modern communication networks may not directly lead to revolution, but they sure help.

The reality is that Twitter is an information-distribution network, not that different from the telephone or email or text messaging, except that it is real-time and massively distributed — in the sense that a message posted by a Tunisian blogger can be re-published thousands of times and transmitted halfway around the world in the blink of an eye. That is a very powerful thing, in part because the more rapidly the news is distributed, the more it can create a sense of momentum, helping a revolution to “go viral,” as marketing types like to say. Tufekci noted that Twitter can “strengthen communities prior to unrest by allowing a parallel public(ish) sphere that is harder to censor.”

So was what happened in Tunisia a Twitter revolution? Not any more than what happened in Poland in 1989 was a telephone revolution. But the reality of modern media is that Twitter and Facebook and other social-media tools can be incredibly useful for spreading the news about revolutions — because it gives everyone a voice, as founder Ev Williams has pointed out — and that can help them expand and ultimately achieve some kind of effect. Whether that means the world will see more revolutions, or simply revolutions that happen more quickly or are better reported, remains to be seen.

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If you spend any time on Twitter, you’ve probably seen a hashtag — it’s a keyword with a number sign in front of it, which is used to refer to an ongoing conversation of some kind. Hashtags can occasionally take off and become trends that dominate the Twitter-sphere for periods of time, and that’s exactly what happened recently with the “#lessambitiousmovies” tag. But how do these trends evolve, and how long do they last? The Twitter media blog did a forensic analysis of the latest example, but the really interesting thing is just how random — and short-lived — these Twitter storms can be. It’s much more of an art (or barely-controlled chaos) than it is a science.

As Liz Gannes noted in a piece last year, the first tweet with a hashtag in it came from Chris Messina — then a consultant and now the open-web advocate at Google. They soon came to be used for any ongoing conversation about a topic, and really took off during the San Diego fires of 2007. As Liz pointed out, most conferences now make coming up with a hashtag part of their repertoire, so that they can track discussion, and there are recurring tags such as the “follow Friday” or #ff tag.

Twitter’s analysis showed that the sarcastic movie discussion (which included entries like “A Funny Dream on Elm Street” and “Texas Chainsaw Repairman”) started with a tweet from Toronto-based graphic designer Rob McCallum, who posted “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Room” with the hashtag #lessambitiousfilms on January 4 (he told me he likes to try ideas out on Twitter). A graph of tweets per minute shows that the volume of tweets with that tag climbed at a fairly rapid pace, but then at some point during the wee hours of January 5th a new variation took off: #lessambitiousmovies suddenly shot to prominence, and quickly had orders of magnitude larger numbers of tweets per minute than the original tag.

Robin Sloan of Twitter’s media team notes that the new tag likely took off because it got retweeted by several prominent users of the service, including Lizz Winstead, co-creator of the popular comedy talk show The Daily Show and Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic. But one of the things that’s interesting about the graph is that the two hashtags co-existed for so long — and some people, including Winstead, actually posted tweets with both. Why did it change? Who knows. The real lesson is that Twitter community decides what a hashtag is going to be, not the person who created it, and to some extent it is unpredictable.

The other thing that seems obvious from the graph is that even the most popular hashtag has a short life-span, as Michael Sippey also notes in a blog post about the Twitter graph. Sloan describes how once the hashtag had begun to rapidly decline — something that took only a few hours from its peak of 17 titles per second according to BackType — even a boost from a superstar Twitter user like singer Katy Perry couldn’t do much to keep it alive, even though she has over 5 million followers (among other things, this raises the question of how active the millions of followers on celebrity accounts actually are).

One of the reasons for the short life-span could be that the tag just became so dominant that after awhile it was simply annoying — another thing media companies should be wary of (I logged off Twitter because my entire stream was #lessambitiousmovies). If you’re interested in more on what makes a good hashtag, Sloan had another recent post with some useful tips, including using other media to push the tag. And if you want to see trending hashtags, WhatTheTrend is a good place to do so.

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By now, it’s become obvious that the web is disrupting the media business in some fundamental ways — and not just the distribution of content, but the monetization of it as well. Publishers and content producers of all kinds are desperately trying paywalls, metered access, iPad apps and pretty much anything else they can think of, while users are turning increasingly to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook for their news, as well as aggregation apps like Flipboard. Bradford Cross, co-founder of a new startup called Woven, thinks most of those solutions attack only part of the problem. He wants to solve the entire thing — the content-discovery side and the monetization side.

That’s a pretty big assignment, as Cross freely admits. In fact, it’s a little like saying you want to cure cancer and make hospitals fun places to stay at the same time. Plenty of others have tried and failed to come up with either a personalized digital newspaper — the so-called “Daily Me” — and/or to solve the media industry’s monetization problems. There are also some fairly large players going after various aspects of what Woven has in mind, including a little company called Google with Google News, as well as AOL and Yahoo with their content plays, and also content “farms” such as Demand Media, which is planning a $1-billion-plus IPO soon.

“These are some really big problems,” says Cross, “but if we can solve them, we could have something really huge on our hands.”

Cross doesn’t have a background in media — his specialty is data analysis and machine learning. Until recently, he was the head of research at Flightcaster, a Y Combinator-funded startup that specialized in predicting flight delays by sifting through airplane flight records, weather data and a variety of other information. The company was just acquired by NextJump, and Cross said he decided that rather than go to work for someone else, he would try to create a better kind of web-based media company — one that could really learn what a user thought was relevant, using social graphs from Twitter and Facebook, but could also suggest things to users that they might not already be interested in.

“It’s not just about personalization,” he says. “It’s more than that. It’s about how media is consumed now. In the old days, you could just go to the New York Times and get all your news, or whatever. But that’s not the case any more, and it will likely never be the case again. The news is all distributed now, to a thousand different places.” But that makes it hard for users, he says, because they have to go and check dozens or even hundreds of different sites to get the news they are interested in reading. What Woven wants to create is a smart aggregator that can learn while you read it.

Although data analysis is what he does, Cross said he is also passionately interested in the world and politics and other topics, but felt that simply reading his RSS feeds and Twitter wasn’t exposing him to those topics the way newspapers used to. Woven “started as kind of a side project for myself, because I was sick of using RSS,” he said, “but I wanted to find stuff that I wasn’t getting on Twitter or from my friends on Facebook.” Cross even wrote a program that took his RSS feeds and piped them into Twitter, and he would send it messages about the content he liked and didn’t like. But that was missing the serendipity that a newspaper provides, he says.

“At one point I thought that would be enough — that everyone would have their own little intelligent agent that would recommend things for them, and they would train it and so on,” says Cross. But then he started talking to people in the media industry and realized that this wouldn’t help solve the other problems the industry was wrestling with, namely how to monetize their content online. So how does Cross plan to solve that? He admits that he hasn’t nailed all the pieces of that part down yet, but he thinks a Groupon-style local offering would make the perfect combination for the kind of service he has in mind, with revenue going to media outlets and to Woven as the smart aggregator — the digital newspaper replacement.

What makes Cross think that he and Woven can solve some of these problems when others haven’t? “We care about this stuff a lot,” he says. And while it is no substitute for money or talent, caring really does matter, especially when you’re tackling a project like saving the media industry — as NewsTilt found out last year. The startup tried to create a platform for journalists that would help them distribute and monetize their content (something Woven is also interested in doing for individual journalists as well as traditional publishers) but the company later shut down, in part because founder Paul Biggar admitted that he wasn’t really passionate about the topic.

Cross says he knows he has taken on a huge assignment, and he is under no illusions about being the only one going after it. “I expect Facebook will do it and probably be awesome at it, and I expect Twitter will do it and be awesome at it — there isn’t going to be only one company that does all this.” The Woven founder says he actually had talks with Twitter about working on content recommendation and discovery, but decided to try and solve the problem on his own instead. And what about Google News? “They’ve tried to do some of this,” he says, “but it isn’t really their focus, and so they’re not really good at it, and they haven’t really put any resources into it.”

Woven will be launching soon as an invitation-only beta so the company can fine-tune the semantic filtering algorithms and other systems it uses to learn from users.

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Wikipedia, which turns 10 years old this weekend, has taken a lot of heat over the years. There has been repeated criticism of the site’s accuracy, of the so-called “cabal” of editors who decide which changes are accepted and which are not, and of founder Jimmy Wales and various aspects of his personal life and how he manages the non-profit service. But as a Pew Research report released today confirms, Wikipedia has become a crucial aspect of our online lives, and in many ways it has shown us — for better or worse — what all information online is in the process of becoming: social, distributed, interactive and (at times) chaotic.

According to Pew’s research, 53 percent of American Internet users said they regularly look for information on Wikipedia, up from 36 percent of the same group the first time the research center asked the question in February of 2007. Usage by those under the age of 30 is even higher — more than 60 percent of that age group uses the site regularly, compared with just 33 percent of users 65 and older. Based on Pew’s other research, using Wikipedia is more popular than sending instant messages (which less than half of Internet users do), and is only a little less popular than using social networking services, which 61 percent of users do regularly.

The term “wiki” — just like the word “blog,” or the name “Google” for that matter — is one of those words that sounds so ridiculous it was hard to imagine anyone using it with a straight face when Wikipedia first emerged in the early 2000s. But despite a weird name and a confusing interface (which the site has been trying to improve to make it easier to edit things), Wikipedia took off and has become a powerhouse of “crowdsourcing,” before most people had even heard that word. In fact, the idea of a wiki has become so powerful that document-leaking organization WikiLeaks adopted the term even though (as many critics like to point out) it doesn’t really function as a wiki at all.

Most people will never edit a Wikipedia page — like most social media or interactive services, it follows the 90-9-1 rule, which states that 90 percent of users will simply consume the content, 9 percent or so will contribute regularly, and only about 1 percent will ever become dedicated contributors. But even with those kinds of numbers, the site has still seen more than 4 billion individual edits in its lifetime, and has more than 127,000 active users. Those include people like Simon Pulsifer, once known as “the king of Wikipedia” because he edited over 100,000 articles. Why? Because that was his idea of fun, as he explained to me at a web conference.

Yes, there will always be people who decide to edit the Natalie Portman page so that it says she is going to marry them, or create fictional pages about people they dislike. But the surprising thing isn’t that this happens — it’s how rarely it happens, and how quickly those errors are found and corrected.

With Twitter, we are starting to see how a Wikipedia-like approach to information scales even further. As events like the Giffords shooting take hold of the national consciousness, Twitter becomes a real-time news service that anyone can contribute to, and it gradually builds a picture of what has happened and what it means. Along the way, there are errors and all kinds of other noise — but over time, it produces a very real and human view of the news. Is it going to replace newspapers and television and other media? No, just as Wikipedia hasn’t replaced encyclopedias (although it has made them less relevant).

That is the way information works now, and for all their flaws, Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales were among the first to recognize that.

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Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of the Icelandic parliament and an early supporter of WikiLeaks, said that despite having had a falling out with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange over his role in the organization, she is willing to “stand up and stick my neck out for him” and defend the document-leaking entity against attacks by the U.S. government and others, because doing so is her duty. “We must all stand behind WikiLeaks and defend freedom of information and freedom of speech,” Jónsdóttir said in a presentation at the University of Toronto on Tuesday night, in which she also called on media outlets to support the organization. Jónsdóttir also said “even if they chop the head off WikiLeaks, a thousand more heads will come out.”

The Icelandic MP didn’t talk a lot about the WikiLeaks leader, except to say that “WikiLeaks is bigger than Julian Assange.” But she did talk about how she met him at a conference in 2009, while she and her party were developing proposed legislation in Iceland called the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, and Assange was looking for a “transparency haven” that could help the organization. The IMMI legislation is aimed at helping to protect freedom of information and whistleblowers like WikiLeaks who leak documents — something Iceland as a whole is also interested in, because many believe that more whistleblowing could have helped the country avoid its financial meltdown in 2008.

Jónsdóttir and Assange started working together, and in the spring of last year he showed her a copy of the infamous U.S. military video of American bombers firing on a civilian vehicle during an attack in Iraq. The Icelandic MP described how she watched the video in a crowded cafe and began to cry — and at that point decided to help WikiLeaks get publicity for the video, which she said she was afraid would get lost amid all the other leaked documents on the organization’s website. Jónsdóttir spent her Easter holiday editing the video, including pulling out still photographs to send to various media outlets. WikiLeaks even sent people to Iraq to the village where the attack took place, to confirm whether there were children in the van.

WikiLeaks' leader Julian Assange

That video was the beginning of an explosion of interest in WikiLeaks, which culminated with the leaking of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables late last year, and the current attempt by the U.S. government to mount a case against Assange under the Espionage Act. As part of that effort, the Department of Justice has gotten a court order that compels Twitter to release certain information — including messages, IP addresses and other details — about the personal accounts of Jónsdóttir, Assange, Dutch hacker Rop Gonggrijp and American programmer Jacob Appelbaum. Jónsdóttir has said that she will resist this order, and has hired the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help with her defense.

In her talk, Jónsdóttir also freely admitted that she was completely unprepared for entering government. A member of a loosely-affiliated group of human rights protesters known simply as The Movement, she only volunteered to run for office because there weren’t enough female candidates, she said — and “to my great shock, I actually won, and I was in parliament two weeks later.” But the MP, who is an author and a poet, said that she believed her ignorance of the ways of government was a benefit rather than a disadvantage, because it meant that she could look at everything with fresh eyes and try things that others might not, including pushing forward the idea of the IMMI legislation.

Jónsdóttir said the idea behind the initiative — which was unanimously supported by the Icelandic parliament in a vote last summer — is to create the most advanced freedom-of-information and whistleblower-protection legislation in the world. The group looked at laws protecting freedom of speech and freedom of information in dozens of major countries and cherry-picked what they thought were the best ones. “The Internet is becoming industrialized and corporatized,” she said. “We need to make sure we don’t lose our freedom of speech and freedom of information.” Here’s a video interview that Jónsdóttir did with the public television station TVO while she was in Toronto:

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Today is the one-year anniversary of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed an estimated 230,000 people and has left millions of others homeless. As in some other recent catastrophes, social media such as Twitter, text messaging, interactive online maps and other tools such as crowdsourcing were used by both victims and rescue workers to co-ordinate relief efforts. But did they help? The Knight Foundation has released a comprehensive study of the use of technology during the aftermath of the quake, and found that while there is still a lot of work to be done, such tools can make rescue efforts and aid far easier and faster.

Haiti quickly became what the report describes as “a living laboratory for new applications such as SMS, interactive online maps and radio-cell phone hybrids.” But while many of the tools were extremely useful in transmitting crucial information, this information often wasn’t used as well as it could have been, for a variety of reasons. The report notes:

As new media activists have pointed out, “Technology is easy, community is hard.” Many of the obstacles to the relief efforts concerned difficulties in dialogue between communities: between international organizations and local Haitian groups, between volunteers and professional humanitarian organizations and between civilians and military.

and

While the democratic approach to information management fuels crowdsourcing, this characteristic can also serve as a limitation in crisis settings. Information may be gathered and assembled in an open, democratic fashion. But often the practical response effort is driven by large organizations that deal with information in a radically different way. Military and international humanitarian organizations manage information within more closed systems.

One of the most powerful new-media and online tools used in the relief efforts, the Knight report says, was Ushahidi — a service that was developed in Kenya in 2007, and can be used to aggregate and process information that comes in from a variety of sources such as SMS, Twitter and radio, and then plot the information on a map. The service “developed an RSS feed for the U.S. Coast Guard to help them retrieve emergency information [and] a team of four to eight Coast Guard responders retrieved the information and disseminated it to forces on the ground.” A group of students at Georgia Tech’s School of Computer Science converted the Ushahidi data to Google Earth file formats.

Crowdsourcing also played a large role in the aftermath of the disaster, the report says. Two weeks after the earthquake, the labor-on-demand company CrowdFlower took over management of the workflow of volunteers to “translate, classify and geocode the messages” coming in via the short-code 4636. Later, an outsourcing company called Samasource took over the bulk of the translation and coding work in co-operation with a local Haiti-based group. And accurate maps of the country and the location of survivors and victims were also crowdsourced using the OpenStreetMap standard.

One of the biggest problems of crisis response in developing countries lies in finding locations that do not appear on any maps. In some cases, the maps have never been made; in others, rural populations have crowded into urban areas so quickly that maps soon become outdated. These problems were addressed in Haiti by another notable development in information technology: the OpenStreetMap (OSM) Haiti mapping initiative.

Although social media and other tools were important, the report makes a point of cautioning that the Haiti relief effort shouldn’t be seen as a “new-media success story,” because some of the new approaches used did not work very well, due to a lack of co-ordination — and in many cases a lack of understanding of how to use the tools. For example, U.S. Air Force Col. Lee Harvis, the chief medical officer who landed in Port-au-Prince 36 hours after the earthquake, said he had no knowledge of Ushahidi, and neither did any of the other military doctors operating in the country.

The Knight Foundation report (which was co-produced with Internews) also noted that despite all the new media tools, the single most important tool in Haiti was one that has also been crucial in almost every other major disaster in the past 50 years: namely, traditional radio broadcasting. However, the report’s authors noted that social media and other tools helped spread the information farther than radio would otherwise have been able, and that this was an important aspect of the relief efforts.

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As I read about the layoffs at Myspace — the company today confirmed that it is shedding close to half of the company, or about 500 employees, including virtually the entire international operation — I couldn’t help thinking of the legendary 1986 science-fiction film Highlander, which starred Sean Connery and Christopher Lambert as warriors fighting to become the world’s sole remaining immortal. The tag-line for the movie was “There can be only one,” and that certainly seems to be the case when it comes to social networks. The cuts suggest Myspace will be the next to give up its life so Facebook can reign supreme.

News Corp. has tried hard to make something of the company it acquired for close to $600 million in 2005. It has changed chief executives repeatedly — to the point where it has almost become comical – and it has refocused several times, with the latest incarnation targeting the entertainment market. The latest redesign pitched the network as the place where people can follow their favorite musicians and other celebrities, then not long afterward, the network added the ability to integrate user accounts with Facebook — a final sign of how completely it has surrendered to its former foe.

The layoffs also appear to be a sign that no one is rushing forward to take the company off the hands of its corporate parent. News Corp. has made it clear that it is looking to unload the operation, but so far there have been no reports of interest. While some content portals such as Yahoo might be more attracted to the social network once it cuts its costs by 50 percent, the best News Corp. can probably hope for is a Bebo-style deal, like the one that saw AOL shed its own failed social network for a fraction of what it paid (Criterion later sold it to a group of investors who have apparently brought in Bebo founder Michael Birch to try to resurrect it somehow).

Myspace’s latest CEO, Mike Jones, did his best to put a positive spin on the downsizing, saying the company has seen 3 million new user profiles created in the past few months, and that traffic — particularly mobile traffic — has increased. But the reality is, the social network has been in decline for years now, and there are no signs that it can recover any of that lost ground. In the history of modern technology companies, there are very few that can claim they laid off half of their staff and still went on to become successful. The best-case scenario for News Corp. is that it either manages to sell the company to someone, or runs it on a shoestring for a while, then quietly shuts it down.

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