Call it the lazy web, wisdom of crowds, organic computers, or a hive mind, but I’ve seen in the last few weeks alone that asking a question on Twitter yields great results. Here is tonight’s example:

I use Twitter as my hyper-intelligent personal search engine #quote @zaibatsu

link: Twitter / Reg Saddler: I use Twitter as my hyper- …

There is a problem, of course, in relying on Twitter or Facebook or whatever social network du jour is out there and it has nothing do to with getting the wrong answer, it’s whether you get an answer at all. I know that a lot of us will help and answer friends, friends of friends, sometimes even total strangers when we can, but we’re just not around all the time.

Okay, enough of the downer stuff, let’s think about how we can do this better, how we can capture the questions and answers so they aren’t just passing whispers in the wind or drops in a deluge. Not long ago I need suggestions for a good Nintendo DS game. Not only did I get nearly instant responses (probably not that much slower than searching Google and reading the info I found), but I got consistent results that let me make a good decision (as it turned out, it was an awesome decision Mario Kart for DS is really, really cool). However both the question and all the answers are as good as gone. I would take me a tedious amount of searching to find my original question and even more to find all the answers. That doesn’t even pull the information together.

I know Google indexes all of Twitter’s public timeline, but with the scale of information that flows through Twitter at any moment, even a search engine like Google needs some context to help pull things together. If we have @replies for discussion and hash tags for search, I think we need another designator just for this kind of query-response connection. Maybe ?q and ?a to connect the dots? Yes, I know its two characters instead of one. I suppose you could preface or end with ^ instead? The point is, that in order for this information not to be lost, we have to find a way to curate it.

The question with the answer(s) doesn’t become a blog post. The person asking the question thanks everyone for their help and that’s it (most of the time, I know there are exceptions). I also realize that just ending a question with ^ and answers with ^ (or ^^) doesn’t connect specific questions to specific answers, but at least it’s a start.

It’s like when I was a lab geek counting fossil pollen, seeds, and other organic bits in samples. I asked my professors if I needed to count this or that. They always answered that if you don’t gather the data, you can’t analyze later. If we don’t de-mark some tweets as special, then we can’t build engines to analyze them. We can’t match a question to answers from that person’s followers if we don’t have an easy way to pull them out in the first place.

Okay, I’ve had my time on the soapbox. So…

• How should we denote a question
• How should we denote an answer
• Who’s going to find a way to connect them together?

And can we start now…

Journalists seem to always be taking it on the chin. If it isn’t that their craft is dying (which I don’t think is true) or their publications are failing (okay that one is true), now it’s that in order to be agile journalists, keep employed, and be relevant they need to be programers too? Wow, harsh.

As the news industry looks to reconstruct its suffering business model, the journalists of today must reconstruct their skill sets for the growing world of online media. Because of cutbacks at many news organizations, the jobs available are highly competitive. News companies are seeking journalists who are jacks of all trades, yet still masters of one (or more).

2010 will likely be a time of transition as today’s journalists catch up to learn the multimedia, programming, social media, and business skills they’ll need to tell their stories online. These new skills are especially relevant to startups that are looking to hire multi-skilled and social media-savvy journalists. Below we’ve gathered some skills that are quickly becoming basic requirements for the journalist of tomorrow.

[From 8 Must-Have Traits of Tomorrow's Journalist]

Okay, I give, I’m blowing this a just a wee out of proportion, but I think what is more accurate is that journalists just need to adapt to the new tools, outlets, and opportunities that social media and Web 2.0 bring to them. Gillian Shaw of the Sun and Mathew Ingram of the Globe & Mail epitomize the transition that journalists have needed to make in order to stay on top of the game. Fine, both Gillian and Mathew are tech reporters and friends, but still both of them keep up, experiment with new toys and tools, and I don’t think I’ve heard either of them kvetch about the state of their papers. I’m sure they both think about the state of their papers, but I suspect that they both see that a nice, steady transition to providing more and more content online (and in some cases online-only content) for their papers is the place to be.

While I do write a column for the Vancouver Observer, I think of myself as a padawan journalist. I have a lot to learn about how to “do it right”, but I’m catching on I think. Regardless, I think what is a more apt prediction is that journalists, like all knowledge workers, need to continue to hone skills, learn new technologies, and adapt to an ever-changing sea of technology. In the end, yes, the tech ninjas will rule the roost. The people in the newsroom who can have google search results waiting for them at their desks because they did a google search on their smartphone (or netbook) in a story meeting or know enough to set up their own hosting account and unleash a myriad of tools like Fever and Yahoo Pipes onto the Internet to be their own personal info minions, those are the journalists (and knowledge workers) who will rock the news world in the years to come.

Hmm, maybe I should trade some journalism mentoring from Gillian for showing her some advanced info ninja skills…

Tom Foremski writes a compelling post about the potential threat to innovation as Web 2.0 companies toy with opening and closing APIs. I think he has an excellent point. There is a threat, of course we can still try to push innovation, but without revenue, how can a company seriously do such a thing?

But open standards will be years in the making, and in adoption. In the meantime, it looks like we will be heading into a closed web of the like that we haven’t seen since before the Internet.

[From The Partially Open Web (Ajar) - The Very Real Threat To Web 2.0 - SVW]

The issue we’re really grappling with is summed up in this xkcd cartoon:

The Internet was born from government funding. POP was invented at the University of Illinois. HTTP was born at CERN. I could go on, but that would be almost just replicating Wikipedia.These were huge developments and laid the foundation for what we have now, but they were funded. I think our potential constriction of our innovation is tied directly to the fact that we’re not funding these innovations anymore. We passed the innovation torch to industry long ago. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that was a bad thing. Industry took the foundation and made some pretty amazing things. I think what we need to consider, is how we can transferring some core technologies back to the community.

Yes, we certainly have a lot of important tools that are open source and curated by others, but I also fear that those tools also exist on the generosity of companies. And while I have no solutions, I do think this is an important discussion that we need to have.

If Tom’s thinking is correct, and I think it could be, we should encourage the companies who hold some of the cards here to work to keep the doors open. Keep the APIs running. In the meantime I think we also need to find ways to support those same companies in revenue generation.

If we want innovation to flourish, which we do, we at least have to try.

I love technology. Always have. Even as a kid I loved to figure out the gadget du jour. For the past four and a half years I’ve been immersed in what we’ve been calling “Web 2.0” and for the past couple of months I’ve been on hiatus. During this time I noticed that keeping an eye on Twitter, Techmeme and a couple other places, I could stay up to date. I might go a several days without checked my once much vaunted feeds and when I did check feeds, I marked everything older than 48 hours read (thank you FeedDemon!). Again, I didn’t feel like I was missing much.

Walking around BlogWorldExpo this weekend and Gnomedex last month, I didn’t see anything revolutionary or groundbreaking. Nothing that made me step back and go, “whoa”. Yes, don’t get me wrong, there have been some amazing recent innovations for microblogging, video, commenting, lifestreaming, but these are making good ideas better.

I’m thinking, though, that there is, thus far, a tremendous amount of unmet potential in netbooks, the foundation Google Chrome represents for web apps, and what could happen if laconi.ca reaches the status of POP, SMTP and IMAP.

Which brings me to the important question here, who is stepping up to create the “what’s next” thing? I’m going to grant you that I just might have become jaded and a wee bit cynical, but chatting with several folks at BlogWorldExpo, people who’s opinions I value, I got universal nods of agreement. We haven’t see a really amazing something new in a while. Not the shift from 2.0 to 2.5 or 3.0 per se, but something that will have lasting importance.

Yes, touch computing did, as many thought (including me) it would, change how we’re dealing with devices. The iPhone is amazing so is Surface, these are taking interfaces to new levels and we have seen other interesting launches, but something is missing.

And I really wish I knew what that something is.

I wish I could put my finger on it.

Step back with me. No, not in time, up to the “big picture” level of things. We see more and more and better and better ways to share things, do things, buy things, sell things. We’ve seen tremendous innovation in making things faster, more reliable, smoother, integrated.

I love it. I love that I can toss my EeePc in a bag and be able to do things that I needed a larger computer for not that long ago.

Still, something is missing.

I’d love to discuss here, discuss at BarCamp this weekend, what that something might be. Where should we go next.

This would have made a great panel at BlogWorldExpo, and I’m sure that groups of people were talking about this over dinner. I’d love to hear about it.

Let’s hear what your vision of what’s next is, while I mull and formulate my own.

I hung out with Jordan and the Launch Party gang last night to check out some of Vancouver’s newest and most promising startups. Tagga was there, I hope they weren’t up too late since they are flying to Vegas today, and since I already think they are pretty cool, I can gloss cover them.

One startup that caught my eye was ClarityAccounting, basic web-based accounting for small businesses. Okay, maybe not so basic. Sheila got the full pitch, I was taking pics as usual, but she was really impressed. For $10/month she can manage her side work, teaching, jewelry sales, and other gigs all together. PDF invoices, receipts, access for your accountant. It’s all there. Simply, easily. Sure I’ve tried to use QuickBooks, but wow, it is a royal pain. Not even considering the cost there are the updates (not free btw) and just using it.

And so, I think ClarityAccounting is going to have some legs.

There are two ways to succeed in Web 2.0, etc one is to come up with something brand new and amazing the other is to just make something we need better. Coming up with something mind-blowing amazing, and new, is a rare thing. Doesn’t happen often. The “something better” happens more often, isn’t as sexy, but I think something that can succeed.

The problem with the “something better” is that if your competition is so entrenched (say eBay) that a competitor has to overcome a huge amount of user inertia to get people to switch. Like for me and photos. On Flickr I have over 11,000 pics and I’m not an edge case either. Can you imagine me moving everything to a new service? Yeah no. You’d have to have a way to use the Flickr API to move not only the pictures, but the sets, collections, and tags. Oh and tell folks that I’ve moved my pic. Oh, yeah all the posts where I’ve embedded an image from there …. yeah those would break huh?

See? Huge amount of inertia. I am thinking of doing more with SmugMug for my professional portfolio, but make it my primary photo location? Yeah not likely.

ClarityAccounting, if it has a nice QuickBooks import function, can make it painless. Amount of inertia? Low. If your account weeps tears of joy at what it does, even better. For a new user, they can be sending out an invoice in a few minutes and Sheila said it would take a day or two for her to bring it all up to date. Granted she might not have a lot to enter, that’s still pretty good.

Learning curve? Looked like less than nil.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Make a better wheel. Not in a rainbow of new colours, but something new, smoother, easier, faster, better.

Innovation can be as simple as just being better.