When Will Quora Be Quorate?

Almost without meaning to, I conducted a small experiment today.

Over on Twitter, Brenda Wallace asked me a very good question:

do you know a good umbrella term for things like ACTA, TPPA, 3strikes, guilt on accusation etc. ?

Since I couldn't think of one, I naturally turned back to Twitter to ask people what they thought. And since I've recently joined the all-too trendy Quora, it occurred to me that this was just the kind of thing it was designed to answer: what is effectively a "new" question whose answer is not available elsewhere, but which the collective efforts of qualified people might successfully address.

Literally within minutes, I had dozens of witty suggestions from people on Twitter, which you can see by scrolling this list of tweets; here's just a small selection:

copygreed

IP enclosure

legislative o'erweening

LRM (legislative rights management)

Corsair Laws

neo-mercantilism

(Any favourites there, or alternative suggestions?)

Meanwhile, over on Quora, I had precisely...nothing. Six hours later, I've still had precisely zero replies. Now, maybe I'm not important enough to attract answers, or perhaps I'm just doin' it wrong; but either way, this one data point tends to confirm me in my natural bias in favour of the wit of Twitter.

Of course, it might just be that Quora simply isn't big enough yet to have sufficient users/traffic to answers such questions. In which case, the issue becomes: at what point will Quora become quorate for these kinds of questions?

I shall probably be trying a few more experiments in the coming months in the hope of finding out, and I'd be interested to hear about the comparative experience of others in this respect.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Who is La Rochefoucauld of Twitter?

Mozilla's Tristan Nitot has come up with a rather fine aphorism:

Twitter, c'est la version XXI°S des salons mondains, mais limitée à 140 caractères, et à l'échelle du globe.

So come on people, start polishing those tweets: somewhere out there is La Rochefoucauld of Twitter....

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Is it Possible for the Chinese *Truly* to Twitter?

Here's something that has always struck me about Twittering in Chinese:

a Chinese tweet can have three times the volume of an English tweet, thanks to the high information intensity of the Chinese language. 140 Chinese characters can make up all the full elements of a news piece with the "5 Ws" (Who, What, Where, When and HoW).

So that's as if those writing in alphabetic languages had 420 characters instead of Twitter's usual 140 - a very different kettle of fish.

So, is that still a genuine tweet, given that it's no longer so constrained by its format? Is it better or worse to have more space for your thoughts? Which would you prefer: traditional micro-blogging, or Chinese-style *miniblogging*?

Of Blogs and Microblogging

The eagle-eyed among you (everyone, surely), will have noticed the sudden excrudescence of a widget to the right. Since this represents the rude irruption of that upstart Twitter among the peaceful glades of Blogger, I feel some explanation is in order.

I've only been using Twitter for about a month, but I've found a what seems to me a fairly natural use for it alongside Open... and my Open Enterprise blog: posting stuff that doesn't really merit a full-on blog post, but is worthy of a quick mention.

So the idea of including a few tweets on this blog is to offer a few quick links or ideas that might be of interest to readers of this blog, without them needing to subscribe to Twitter or even leave this page.

It's meant to add, not take away, and nothing else will be changing in terms of what I blog about (except that I probably won't be posting anything really short, since that is likely to end up on Twitter.)

I intend running this page in its present form for a while to see how people like it. Please feel free to let me know whether you love or loathe it. I may also tweak some of its parameters - number of tweets etc. - so thoughts on that, too, would be welcome.