Really, what is there to add?

I was this close to calling New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver's office to that @ShellySilver isn't really his Twitter account, when I thought to myself, come on now, really. Let's put on our critical thinking pants...

Credit:RadarOnline

Point proven? Above the Law traces the origins of the John Roberts retirement rumor that spread about the Internet yesterday back to a Georgetown Law professor who floated the fake news as part of a class lesson on how what seem like credible sources might actually turn out to be engaging in somewhat questionable pedagogy! ABT quotes a 1L in the professor's class:

Today’s class was partially on the validity of informants not explaining their sources. [Professor Tague] started off class at around 9 am EST by telling us not to tell anyone, but that we might find it interesting that tomorrow, Roberts would be announcing his retirement for health concerns. He refused to tell anyone how he knew. Then, at around 9:30, he let everyone in on the joke.

The time between the prof's dropping of the Roberts retirement "news" and a posting of the rumor on Radar? ("EXCLUSIVE: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts Considering Stepping Down.") Ten minutes. The time between when the professor let his kids in on the ruse and a Radar retraction? Six minutes. You almost get whiplash. Seems like the good professor might have wanted to institute a no-texting/no-emailing/no-iPhone/no-Blackberry rule before running his little classroom experiment.

Now some tech apologists might take a look at that episode and say "what's the problem?" The rumor was floated, shot down, and corrected within an hour. What's the damage, really? It'd be interesting to hear from Roberts whether he, in his heart of hearts, sees some sort of long-term and lasting ill effects from the gossip. It seems likely that part of the evolution of this wild and crazy news world is that we'll all learn to be more incredulous about things that seem farfetched, even if they are marked "exclusive." We learned that much from the whole Perez Hilton/Fidel Castro mess, didn't we? But really, it's tough to draw much more meaning from this little case study than the fact that (1) 1Ls are guilible and that (2) the good folks at Radar, who consider themselves journalists, should really think twice about considering "my professor told us in class this morning" a hard and fast source.

The silver lining of all this, though, is that #radarheadlines was a pretty funny Twitter meme while it lasted -- which was all of a few hours.

(Apologies for the non-existent blogging earlier today. Some severe laptop troubles -- though she seems to be feeling better now.)

Credit: tris

Okay, so who would win in a fight between NASA, the Virginia State Parks, and Newark Mayor Cory Booker? If it's a Twitter battle, then it has to be Booker, the winner last night of the Shorty Award in the category of government. (If it was a fight-fight, Booker'd probably come to compete, and the parks would have a size advantage, but we'd have to go with NASA because of their rockets and stuff.)

We kid, and a Shorty Award isn't actually the height of public achievements, but the thing about Booker is that he's used Twitter (and his 1,075,937 followers on the platform as of this afternoon) to advance a unique brand of government, or public official. Booker is engaged, human, willing to bring a shovel to someone's driveway after they complain about the snowfall, and he has a habit of quoting spiritual leaders in his tweets. Not to be crass about it, because Booker seems committed to revitalizing Newark, but there are worse ways for someone like Booker to develop a political platform beyond their immediate political circumstances. It's hard to tweet as much as Booker does and keep up a fake persona, and as those of us who live in the great and insane state of New York can attest this week in particular, it potentially of benefit to voters and good politicians alike for us to really know, in advance, what the measure is of those that we chose to elect to office.

A fun thought experiment this Friday afternoon: are there are folks in American history who were tremendous political leaders, but would have made bad Twitterers? Or would we have known their greatness from their tweets? One's thing for sure -- it would have been awesome to hear from @AbeLincoln.

There's a good chance that by now you've seen this post by Ben Smith, as it's burning up the Twitter -- somehow breaking through the clamor of aimless chitchat on the platform. The gist: a study by Wyeth Ruthven for the firm Qorvis Communications looked at the use of Twitter in the recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts (pdf). The finding that leaps out is that 40.55% of all tweets therein constituted "pointless babble."* (The video above is a recent interview with Ruthven on his study.)

"More than 40% Blather!" is a juicy confirmation of what we all might want to think of politicians and their silly Twitter habits. But it's worth considering what pointless babble means here. In the study, Ruthven glosses it as "off message tweets, personal observations not related to the campaign."On Twitter (natch!), he says that he borrowed the "technical term" from a study last August by Pear Analytics. Here's how Pear says they determined which tweets were pointless babble in their research, and which were more meaningful...

Credit: GOOD Magazine

It's sometimes worth stopping and considering for a moment just how weird it is that the White House is, in 2010, a somewhat credible member of the greater blogosphere. Not weird in a judgemental way, but unusual in the way that, contrary to the normal course of history, the lines between 1600 Penn and the rest of the world seem to be blurred by the advent of the always-on digital conversation. On the communications front, at least, we're witnessing a White House that seems to have a certain permeability. They're aware of Internet traditions, and are not afraid to appropriate them where appropriate. This is, in other words and for whatever it's worth, a White House that retweets.

Prompting today's stop-and-consider is that the Obama White House has just made note on its blog that it's going to be participating in a rather bloggy exercise: asking the American people to respond to a question on either Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. They're calling it The White House Asks. "As an extension of the Administration’s commitment to making government more collaborative and participatory," blogs a member of the new media team, they will "highlight some of the most interesting responses on the White House blog."

The first question in The White House Asks series is this:

What does a 21st century education mean to you?

Where'd they get the good idea? Well, from GOOD, it seems. That California-based magazine has been doing pretty much the exact same experiment on their blog. For that, the White House gives "a hat tip to @GOOD for a good idea."

Credit: Ustream.tv

Need a break from watching Eric Cantor and Barack Obama debate how heavy a bill should be? Well, you're in luck. Ashton Kutcher is live streaming from Moscow, sharing his thoughts on the State Department's tech delegation to Russia he's been a part of this week.

Credit: IdealWare

The non-profit IdealWare surveyed more than 400 staffers at various non-profits back in November to find out what social media tools they're using, and whether they're finding those applications are meeting their organizational needs on three fronts: reaching new allies, fundraising, and deepening their relationships with existing supporters:

Respondents considered Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and video- and photo-sharing sites reasonably effective -- at least at outreach and enhancing existing relationships. MySpace was not as well-thought-of, and ranked lowest for each of the three goals. LinkedIn was considered comparatively effective for fundraising, but lagged behind everything but MySpace for the other goals.

How the reports speaks to your organizational objectives depends on what those objectives are, so check out the full 20-page study here. But spoiler alert: non-profiters seem to find Twitter the Swiss Army knife of social media tools.

After this morning, I'm rooting for someone to suggest earmarking funds for airplane maintenance during today's bipartisan health care summit at Blair House between members of Congress of both parties and President Obama. I spent four hours sitting on a runway at JFK airport because some dashboard light either wouldn't go on or wouldn't go off. No take-off meant no in-flight wifi (and thus no blogging). Still, I was able to track the progress of the health care come-together fairly well just by getting online via my iPhone. That's because coverage of the summit's start came in a multitude of channels, from live blogging to live tweeting to online chats and more.

Whatever might come out of today's group therapy session in terms of legislative progress, it's probably fair to say that progress on another front is unavoidable: how those inside, outside, and around government learn to navigate the stream of information made possible by the real-time web. Here's a quick look at how people from all corners are -- in the context of today's bipartisan health reform summit in Washington -- experimenting with disseminating, annotating, and analyzing the stream of information we're able to access about what government looks like today...

Credit: Twitter.com

It's a cutting-edge Twitter tactic that Texas Republican Senator John Cornyn seems to currently be making use of. Seriously, it's kinda difficult to believe that this ever seemed like a sensible idea.