The line between blogging and Tweeting just blurred a bit today.
Today, document assembly company Exari wrote the blog post The insidious nature of the billable hour. It discusses why the billable hour is a barrier to building document assembly tools. Central to its point is a Twitter conversation among Mary Abraham, Jeff Brandt, Doug Cornelius, and me [links are to Twitter]. This spurs some observations.
1. A Tweet I wrote is first. I can’t remember why I wrote it nor do I remember the entire dialogue at Twitter. So much for knowledge management of Twitter content. Skeptics might think there is nothing worth preserving but this suggests otherwise. So I ask my knowledge management friends… any hope of ‘doing KM to Twitter’? Personally, I periodically copy my Tweets to a spreadsheet, which is a manual and clunky process. And it saves only mine, not exchanges like Exari captured.
2. Seeing what Exari has done here, I wonder whether there are other Twitter conversations I’ve had that are blog-worthy.
3. In August I posted Divining Meaning and Intent in the Modern Era, commenting on Dan Regard’s comment that “re-assembling fragments of what once was” will create meaning as well as EDD challenges. I would have been very hard-pressed to re-assemble the dialog that Exari presents. If asked about it, I probably would have had, at best, a dim recollection. So I view the Exari post as a great illustration of “re-assembling fragments”.
4. And finally, I can see the lawyers starting to swarm on the copyright issues. I’ve not spoken to Mary, Jeff, or Doug but I suspect they, like me, are perfectly happy to have their content re-purposed with attribution and links (as Exari does). Is such reproduction fair use? Will reproducing a Twitter thread that never really existed as thread lead to legal issues? I certainly hope not but Tweets have already given rise to libel actions.