Links for October 20th 2009 through October 26th 2009:

• Twitter Serves Up Ideas From Its Users [NYTimes.com] – “”Companies big and small monitor Twitter to find out what their customers like and what they want changed. Twitter does the same. It started two years ago as a bare-bones service, offering little more than the ability to post 140-character messages. Then, it outsourced its idea generation to its users. The company watches how people use the service and which ideas catch on. Then its engineers turn the ideas into new features. In the next several weeks, Twitter users will discover two new features, Lists and Retweets, that had the same user-generated beginnings. “Twitter’s smart enough, or lucky enough, to say, ‘Gee, let’s not try to compete with our users in designing this stuff, let’s outsource design to them,’ ” said Eric von Hippel, head of the innovation and entrepreneurship group at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T.” (Build less, watch more: it’s a good design philosophy! 🙂
• White House Website CMS Switches To Drupal [The Age] – “A programming overhaul of the White House’s website has set the tech world abuzz. The online-savvy administration switched to open-source code for www.whitehouse.gov — meaning the programming language is written in public view, available for public use and able for people to edit. “We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site,” White House new media director Macon Phillips said hours before the new site went live on Saturday. “This is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it.” White House officials described the change as similar to rebuilding the foundation of a building without changing the street-level appearance of the facade. It was expected to make the White House site more secure — and the same could be true for other administration sites in the future.” (Nice way to publicise open source platforms! 🙂
• Viewers turn away from TV in 2009 [ mUmBRELLA] – “Total prime time TV audiences have fallen below 5m in Australia, according to a new analysis of viewing data so far this year. This is despite the arrival of the new Freeview and subscription TV channels to tempt viewers. According to the analysis of figures across the prime 6pm to 10.30pm slot, the average audience has fallen from 5,027,868 in 2008 to 4,969,810 in 2009. This marks a decline of around 60,000 prime time viewers per evening – or a fall of just over 1%. This is despite the Australian population growing by more than 2% during the same period.” (I wonder how this compares to an increase in viewing shared video online … combine the YouTube and TV stats and I suspect overall engagement with broadcast and streamed video would be up.)
• Exclusive: U.S. Spies Buy Stake in Firm That Monitors Blogs, Tweets [Danger Room | Wired.com] – “America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon. In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media. It’s part of a larger movement within the spy services to get better at using ”open source intelligence” — information that’s publicly available, but often hidden in the flood of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports generated every day. Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day…” (The question isn’t are we paranoid; it’s: are we paranoid enough!) [Via BBoing]