The bigger change is that the Obama administration has announced the government is revising its policy on the Internet. Whereas for the first few decades of its life, the government chose to take a strictly hands-off approach, now it will be holding discussions on key areas of Internet policy, such as cybersecurity, Internet governance, and copyright protection.

The outcomes of such discussions will be “flexible” but may result in recommendations for legislation or regulation, [Assistant Commerce Secretary Lawrence Strickling] said in a speech at the Media Institute in Washington this week.

In a sense, it was only a matter of time before the government stepped in. It has a history of regulating communication media, after all. This may also have been prompted, in part, by the recent court decision stating that the FCC was overreaching when it tried to enforce network neutrality.

But looking at Strickling’s original presentation, the whole thing is awfully vague. And it’s worth pointing out that the government has not quite been as lassaiz-faire about the Internet as the article would seem to suggest. The Communications Decency Act, the Child Online Protection Act, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—the government has already been more or less "regulating the Internet,” or trying to, since at least the mid ‘90s.

And it is a bit worrying that this comes at the same time as various European governments are pushing for world-wide “three strikes” Internet access revocation provisions to be recommended as part of the ACTA counterfeit and copyright treaty at the same time as our own government is one of the driving forces behind keeping ACTA away from the public eye.

Under these provisions, a customer need not actually be guilty of copyright violation to lose his Internet access; he just has to be accused of it three times. And he may have little to no recourse when it comes to getting his Internet access back.

Soldiers and Social Networking

The other government change is a happier one. The Department of Defense has announced a new, more permissive policy for social Internet media use by members of the military. Under this policy, soldiers will be permitted to use social networking sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and so on.

It will still be up to local commanders to approve or deny Internet uses for their units, but the policy is aimed at being more permissive than restrictive so any restrictions would have to be temporary, and service branches that have blocked social networking and media sites will be required to unblock them.

Since many soldiers rely on the Internet to keep them in touch with their friends and families back home in a much more timely manner than “snail mail,” it is a good thing that the strictures have been loosened to make that easier.

The Internet is the medium through which e-books are delivered, be it legitimately or illicitly, so any change that affects the Internet could potentially also affect our access to those books—for bad or for good.

Smartwords is a lightweight, easy-to-use standard for retrieving and publishing real-time, contextually-aware information about words.

It took reading through the CNet article a couple of times to figure out that it might better be described as “an integrated dictionary on steroids.”

Existing e-book apps with dictionary support (such as eReader) are largely limited to clicking on a single word to get a definition. Wordnik wants to go further than that. With Smartwords, as CNet puts it:

Wordnik and its partners are aiming to bring deep levels of context to any kind of electronic text—be it in e-books on readers like the iPad, Kindle, or Nook, or on computers or mobile devices—by examining words and the words around them and linking readers to potentially vast amounts of information about them.

And that context is not just limited to the words around the one in question; Wordnik CEO Erin McKean suggests it might even go as far as checking out what other books you keep on your device so it knows to offer information only about words you probably haven’t seen before.

Smartwords will also incorporate elements of social networking, allowing readers to share snippets of text on Facebook, Twitter, and the like. (Though I wonder if I am being too cynical to foresee a bit of difficulty getting many e-book device and app makers to sign onto this, publishers being notoriously paranoid about copy-and-paste ability.)

It might also provide a useful source of demographic information for publishers—letting them know how long it takes readers to finish particular books, or where they stop reading. This might be of some concern to privacy advocates, but McKean says they have an advisory board—including the Internet Archive, well-known for being concerned about privacy itself—that will be keeping an eye on those aspects.

One thing’s for sure: this isn’t some “if I build it, maybe they might come” pipe dream. CNet’s listing of some of the backers of the Smartwords project reads like a veritable who’s-who of digital media: “The New York Times, Forbes, the Huffington Post, O’Reilly Media, Vook, Ibis, Scribd, and the Internet Archive.”

Smartwords has the potential to be quite useful. It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it.

(Incidentally, along the lines of Paul Biba’s capitalization pet peeve about the “nook”, the Smartwords website only capitalizes “smartwords” at the beginning of sentences. I wish companies would cut that out. CNet uses more traditional capitalization.)

Slashdot links to an article in Slate that goes over the history of these fears. Psychologist Vaughan Bell writes:

Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label.

In the 16th century, it was the printing press. In the 18th century, newspapers (and the way they replaced the pulpit as a source of news). In the 19th century, public education was the bugaboo; in the 20th, radio, television, and finally computers. Looking at all the mental health warnings through the ages, it is a wonder we have any sanity left at all.

As Bell wrote, it is interesting how similar these concerns are. They all sounded reasonably scientific for the understanding of their day, just as the short-attention-span articles do now. I guess I can worry a lot less about the time I spend on-line now. My short attention span must be my own problem, not the Internet’s.

Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson chronicles an exchange between New Yorker writer George Packer and New York Times “Bits” blogger Nick Bilton. Packer is concerned that the constant bombardment of information from e-mail, webpages, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, et al are eroding the attention span and leaving people unable to concentrate. He writes:

Twitter is crack for media addicts. It scares me, not because I’m morally superior to it, but because I don’t think I could handle it. I’m afraid I’d end up letting my son go hungry.

Bilton responds, chiding Packer for knocking Twitter without trying it, and writes about all the beneficial uses Twitter has in business, journalism, protests, and other activity.

Packer, however, is not convinced.

The Shortening Attention Span

Through Packer’s posts and the Ars piece, the writers reflect on how hard it is to find the time and attention to read books anymore. So does Nicholas Carr, the writer of a piece in The Atlantic that Ars’s Anderson links:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

Why is this the case? This piece in Slate offers a clue. In our constant information searching and bombardment, Emily Yoffe writes,

We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls.

Almost everybody has heard about this experiment in high school or college psychology class. Remember the rats that would press a lever repeatedly to the exclusion of all else to stimulate the “reward center” of their brain?

Though it might be better called the “seeking center,” this is the same part of the brain that is stimulated by constant bombardment of information. It has to do with the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is produced by this activity (and also by things like cocaine and amphetamines).

“It’s Like Rickrolling, But You’re Trapped All Day”

It’s the same drive that causes people to spend hours on search engines, Wikipedia, or TVTropes, going from one link to another. The same drive that powers shopping, and the reason we get carried away by games offering rewards at irregular intervals—be they slot machines or World of Warcraft. The anticipation, the seeking, is better than the actual finding. And Slate adds:

Actually all our electronic communication devices—e-mail, Facebook feeds, texts, Twitter—are feeding the same drive as our searches. Since we’re restless, easily bored creatures, our gadgets give us in abundance qualities the seeking/wanting system finds particularly exciting. Novelty is one. Panksepp says the dopamine system is activated by finding something unexpected or by the anticipation of something new. If the rewards come unpredictably—as e-mail, texts, updates do—we get even more carried away. No wonder we call it a "CrackBerry."

Like an addict with his fixes, this constant stream of stimulation leads to a need for more of it, more often. Carr writes in the Atlantic piece linked above:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Carr goes on to cover studies that suggest people’s reading habits on-line are changing, and to talk about the effect changing to a typewriter had on Nietzche’s writing style. He writes that the Internet has an effect on other media which sounds almost like a description of the behavior of Star Trek’s Borg:

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

My Own Attention…Wait, What Was I Doing?

From my own personal experience, I am finding something very similar happens. Sometimes I find it hard to “unplug” and direct my attention in only one direction. And sometimes it’s hard to get up the impetus to sit down and write something long-form, because I don’t want to put my attention in any one place for that long.

Even when watching movies or new episodes of my favorite TV shows, I sometimes have to pause and pull up a web browser to check my mail, or pop onto a chatserver to exchange words with friends. When I was watching Avatar for the second time with my parents, during the “boring parts” I would slip out to the aisle where I was blocked from view of the rest of the audience and check my email and Twitter from my cell phone.

I still enjoy reading, and still have the ability to read books in one go—especially if they are sequels to something I have read before, and/or if they’re on my iPhone rather than print—but that could be a factor of how much books and reading shaped my life growing up. For someone without as strong a connection, it’s easy to see how the ability to read long form works could be imperiled.

Can anything be done to make it easier for people to lose themselves in books without constantly worrying about checking their Twitter or e-mail? This is something that the publishing industry should consider very seriously, especially as they raise the price of the form of books best suited to our modern short attention span.

For example:

Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat (F, 40s, seated, blue knit hat, Q train)http://bit.ly/dtBfqf #coverspy

Slice seems to see this as a sort of protest against e-book devices.

"We were lamenting the prevalence of e-readers spotted on our train rides and what a bleak commute it would be if all of the book covers were replaced with blank e-reader covers," [Slice art director Amy Sly] said of the project’s beginnings last October. "For one thing, it’s always been fun to see what everyone’s reading around you–and it’s especially interesting how they’re not always the books that are making headlines at the moment. And also because we each had a story about a time a conversation started with someone we didn’t know because of the books we were holding in our hands."

On the other hand, there are some who would see this anonymity as an advantage. After all, we don’t always want other people to see what we’re reading. For example, British Harry Potter publisher Bloomsbury famously prints an “adult” edition of each Harry Potter book with a nondescript cover so adults do not have to worry about being seen reading an obvious “children’s book” on the train.

And the romance and erotica genres were one of e-bookdom’s first great success stories (and are still some of its hottest sellers) as people realized that they could read whatever they wanted to on their PDAs without the possibility of someone seeing the cover in their hands.

Personally, when I’m deep in reading a book, the last thing I want is to have a conversation with someone else about it anyway.

Here is yet another new entry into the e-book field: Copia, whose big idea is to cross e-books with social networking tools like Twitter and Facebook.

Not only can you share your books with your friends, you can apparently use the pre-existing social networks to do it. Copia will also be supporting other devices with its ePub distribution service.

Copia looks like a very interesting idea. Book sharing in other dedicated readers has always been an afterthought, and fairly limited. But it seems to be the whole reason for being of the Copia. I suspect the sharing will only work for non-DRMed books, though.

Meanwhile, Asus’s entry into the e-book biz is conspicuous by its absence. Asus has been rumored to be working on an Eee-branded e-book reading tablet, but neither this tablet nor the new smartbooks are on display at CES. Asus’s chairman said that deals with content providers are not in place yet, so showing the devices now would be premature.

But e-book readers are only one side of the e-book coin. The other side is the tablet PC, which combines the utility of a computer with the form-factor of a handheld and can run the same e-book reading software as keyboard-equipped devices.

During the Microsoft keynote, Steve Ballmer tried to steal Apple’s thunder by introducing a new Hewlett-Packard tablet computer running Windows 7. However, Techcrunch notes that HP is working on another, very similar tablet that runs Google’s Android. And Dell showed off a 5” Android tablet of its own.

On O’Reilly Radar, Sarah Milstein talks about the similar assumption that Twitter, email, and other instant, small-chunk communication methods are something entirely new and different and changing the way in which we communicate.

Milstein reminds us that in the 19th century, the mail was delivered in Victorian England as many as six times a day. (Found via BoingBoing.)

[Jane] Austen wrote more than 3,000 letters, many to her sister Cassandra. They corresponded constantly, starting new letters to each other the minute they finished the last one and sharing the minutia of their lives.

If e-mail and Twitter had existed back then, the Austens would probably have been using them enthusiastically.

We assume today that instant, frequent communication is something unique to our generation. But past generations had it more frequently than we expected, if not instantly.

Likewise, e-book readers may change some readers’ habits, but the things they are reading will remain the same—including the public-domain titles by Jane Austen that are available at Feedbooks and Manybooks.

Updates: See end of story.

Though Rupert Murdoch’s decision to move newspaper content behind a paywall is the most publicized decision of its kind, it is not the only one. In an Op Ed in British paper The Guardian, journalism professor Tim Luckhurst (left) writes that “Johnston Press, Britain’s most prolific newspaper publisher with 286 titles, will place the online content of six of its local titles behind paywalls.”

“Shoddy, Propagandist Ranting”

Luckhurst, to put it mildly, looks unfavorably on Internet journalism. He thinks that putting news content free on-line was a mistake brought about “by a potent cocktail of commercial fantasy and woolly ideology topped with a sprinkling of youth appeal.”

And of blogs, he writes:

The internet is a valuable tool. It can bring inspiring, diligent and creative reporting into every home. But it will not do so by obliging consumers to accept the shoddy, propagandist ranting some categorise as citizen journalism and less credulous critics recognise as a deplorable reversion to the days when news was always deployed as a political weapon and only occasionally reported.

A writer of my acquaintance, Adam Tinworth, has written a rebuttal. He remarks, “Mr Luckhurst seems blissfully unaware that he has just produced – in that self-same paragraph – a piece of ‘shoddy, propagandist ranting’.” He continues:

To dismiss the whole of the free-to-air reporting, analysis and news-gathering being done on blogs and the myriad forms of social media that exist in that one paragraph is to duck the crucial question of "what do you offer that’s so much more compelling than the work done on free content". Worse than that, it shows a worrying ignorance of the material and work that is being done by the amateur and the entrepreneurial professional in the field of online journalism. Research is meant to be a crucial part of journalism, and it had better be part of any business plan. There’s no research here, just prejudice and, I suspect, fear.

This reminded me of a story I originally meant to cover a few days ago. Ironically, it is about how on-line media can be significantly faster in getting the news out than even the Internet outlets of traditional news sources. (Read on below the jump.)

Tiger Woods: The Internet vs. CNN

In TechCrunch last week, MG Siegler wrote about how Twitter and Google News were faster than CNN to break the story of Tiger Woods’s car crash. Fully 45 minutes before the story appeared on CNN, Siegler was receiving multiply-retweeted Twitter updates saying, “BULLETIN — REPORT: FAMED GOLFER TIGER WOODS SERIOUSLY INJURED AFTER CRASH NEAR FLORIDA HOME.”

Within ten to fifteen minutes, Google News had reports from local sources, and a number of important details.

Cut to about 30 minutes after that. CNN finally got its “breaking” story up. And what did it contain? This:

(CNN) — Golfer Tiger Woods was injured in a car accident near his home, Florida officials say.

Seriously. That’s it.

Which is to say, it took CNN 45 minutes to report what Twitter already knew—without any of the additional details that Google News had found. Compared to Internet journalism, it would seem that the online paper was a paper tiger in the Tiger Woods story.

Twitter as Walter Cronkite

In a follow-up post, Siegler compares the role of Twitter in the Tiger Wood crash to Walter Cronkite in the Kennedy assassination. He rebuts the idea that traditional media takes longer in order to do more fact-checking, and notes that when shocking events happen, people want facts as soon as possible—even if they have not been checked yet.

As an example, Siegler cites Cronkite’s reading out unconfirmed information on the air in the wake of the Kennedy shooting. The public did not care that the information was unconfirmed; they still wanted to know it right away.

That was what the traditional media did then, and during 9/11, and when other great disasters or shocking events take place. It seems that Twitter is starting to fill that role now.

We’re entering a new age of realtime information. Some people don’t like that because they fear inaccurate reports. They’ll cite the Balloon Boy example as how things get out of control on services like Twitter. Well you know where the Balloon Boy reports were way more out of control? On CNN and the other cable news channels. And you know where I first heard sound arguments that there is no way that balloon could hold a full-grown child? Twitter.

This is the climate in which traditional journalists want to begin charging for their news.

The Internet: It’s More Than Newspapers

And this brings me to a follow-up to the Adam Tinworth post that I mentioned earlier, in which Tinworth calls attention to a comment someone left on Tim Luckhurst’s Op Ed.

The model you have of your consumer’s behaviour is wrong, they aren’t using the internet as a way of reading a newspaper, they are using the internet, some of which consists of newspaper content, its a different thing. It was bad enough having to explain this in 1999, I find it a bit surprising it still needs saying in 2009.

If newspapers are going to want to start charging for their on-line content, they had better start providing value for the money. And when consumers can get faster-breaking facts, verified or not, via free Internet resources than they can from traditional news sources, that could end up a tricky proposition.

Update: Another writer of my acquaintance, Eric A. Burns of Websnark, weighs in on the issue, with a post I wish had been written before mine so I could have incorporated it as well.

Burns points out that a significant part of the Internet’s value comes through free linking, which is prevented by paywalls—and this is why Wikipedia is getting used a lot more than the Encyclopedia Britannica these days.

Update 2: Rob Beschizza blogs at BoingBoing about why paywalls won’t save most newspapers.

The critical point here is that advertising is still what makes money for news, even when there’s a cover charge. Paywalls aren’t just sold to readers. They must be sold to advertisers. Paid walls make the eyeballs behind them much more valuable.

Update 3: Devin Coldewey at Crunchgear dissents from Siegler’s comparison of Twitter to Walter Cronkite, for a number of reasons. Most notably, Twitter is better at spreading information than originating it, and it spreads what is popular rather than what is important.

Video footage from last week’s 140 Character Conference is now online, so you can watch the panel where Macmillan’s digital marketing team, Ryan Chapman and Ami Greko, teamed up with publishing ronin Richard Nash to discuss the impact of Twitter on the book industry—with some unexpected conclusions, such as: “Twitter won’t save publishing; publishing will save Twitter.”

Claudio Soares, a Brazilian author and literary blogger, has launched an intriguing multimedia online publishing experiment involving Twitter, CommentPress, videos, music and ultimately, Smashwords.

A couple years back, Soares published his novel, Santos Dumont Numero 8. The story revolves around an aircraft inventor who numbers each of his inventions with "Santos-Dumont number 1" through "Santos-Dumont number 22." Mysteriously, for some superstitious reason, the inventor refuses to use the number 8.

The book follows eight main characters, seven of whom are intent upon unlocking the truth behind the mystery, and one of whom, I assume, is intent on keeping the reason a secret.
Soares has broken the novel into pieces, and is serializing it from the unique perspectives of each of the characters, each of whom has their own Twitter account. In an interesting twist, the characters will interact with their Twitter followers. This has the potential to create an immersive experience, not just for the community of readers that congregates around the book and its characters as the story unfolds, but for the author as well.

At the same time, Soares is serializing the the novel in its entirety from http://www.twiter.com/sd8. Readers can view the twitterstreams of all characters simultaneously at Crowdstatus, an online app that allows you to aggregate the Twitterstreams of multiple people.

There’s a bookish twist to the novel, because it’s also a book about books and readers. The narrator of the story is reading from a book. As Soares explained to me, "The main character, Abayomi, reads and it seems as if the story he reads is really happening." Soares says in writing the book, he found inspiration from by some ideas of the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who once said words to the effect that, "the reading of a book makes us experience parallel worlds, which often, superstitiously, invade our reality."

Does Soares believe his experiment presages the future of reading? Not at all. He recognizes Twitter has numerous flaws in terms of its ability to convey a story. Twitterstreams, for example, are like ongoing conversations, and the participants pop in and out of them as if pedestrians passing in the street, so it’s difficult to follow a narrative. People also tend to read Twitterstreams in reverse chronological order, which is also not terribly conducive to an immersive reading experience. And finally, for those who want to follow a story from start to beginning, Twitter doesn’t make it easy to locate the start of a stream, or follow complex conversations that occur within the stream.

According to Soares, discovering the inherent limitations of these social reading tools is part of his experiment. He plans to document his experiences on his blog, and he’ll publish the complete Twitterized version of the novel on Smashwords after the completion of the experiment.

The book is written in Brazilian Portuguese, though you don’t need to understand the language to appreciate the experiment. For additional details on the experiment, check out this imprecise English translation of the project description, visit his blog at http://www.pontolit.com/br, view an online presentation of the project at http://prezi.com/25890/view/#104, or follow his personal Twitterstream at twitter.com/pontolit

No matter how you look at it, we’ve come a long way since papyrus scrolls, stone tablets and Gutenberg.

Editor’s note:  Mark’s original post can be found here.

How to use Twitter for books marketing—or, to be more precise, relationship building? We passed on some tips earlier, and now Kat Meyer, the star of the TeleRead post, shares additional thoughts. For example, how do you pick people whose posts you want to follow?

Related: Mari Smith’s hashtag tips, to which Kat points. This # stuff is one way to group Tweets related to the topic of your book—or to the book itself. For my novel, the phrase is solomonscandals. Yep, the obvious: the use of the title.

“Ratha, female leader of the Named cat clan, paused on the meadow trail, one forefoot raised.”

When Clare Bell sends that sentence through Cyberspace on March 14, she’ll be launching an experiment: a story told 140 characters at a time using the rapidly growing Twitter social networking platform. Bell writes the Named series, young adult science fiction about a developing civilization of sentient prehistoric cats.

Bell has been making creative use of the Twitter platform, which allows members to send status messages limited to 140 characters in length. She recently posted a prequel to her newest book, Ratha’s Courage, and her feline characters make humorous comments on everything from last year’s Presidential election to human Valentine’s Day mating rituals.

Bell’s experiments with Twitter encouraged her to write a short story specifically for posting on the service. Although she isn’t the first to experiment with Twitter fiction, it’s still mostly unexplored territory, and Bell had to figure out how to create a story that would work within the very short messages allowed by Twitter. She considered telling the story entirely in dialog, with each character having its own Twitter username, but finally decided a straightforward narrative would be easier to follow in such short segments. …

Bell intends to collect and post each day’s tweets on a website, so that readers who join in the middle can catch up. Daily story updates will appear on the “Ratha and the Named” Facebook page.

Kat has pumped out some 5,000 Twitter updates. She subscribes to messages from more than 1,000 fellow users and has attracted more than 1,500 "followers." I also track Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, now up to 54,807 followers, still a fraction of Barack Obama’s 379,716 before the First Keyboarder apparently abandoned Twitter for more conventional media. Unlike Obama, Kat can’t hold White House news conferences.

Thanks to Twitter, however, more people will know about Kat and maybe do business with her. She is author of The Bookish Dilettane Blog, as well as a book sales and marketing professional with past experience at Harcourt, the University of Arizona Press and elsewhere. I’d be shocked if Kat did not write a book at some point. Check out her Tweets—her Twitter entries—to see a pro at work.

A virtual coffeehouse

Whether she goes on to a book or not, Kat knows how to draw a crowd in a book-related context and could well serve as a good example for many other writers and publishers who prefer a low-key approach.

Kat avoids obnoxious personal ballyhoo, using Twitter as a coffeehouse, where she chit-chats and talks up friends. Followers are tempted to to click on her Twitter profile and blog-link there—and perhaps go on to Google her work samples, including, I’d hope, the TeleRead Q&A’s. Twitter lets her choose between sending a message to one friend, a group or all 1,500. In effect it’s a mix between a one-to-one instant message and mailing list without many of the usual list hassles. Twitter users can post and read from the Web or via programs for a number of devices, everything from iPhones and iPod Touches (try the Tweetie app) to desktops (Twhirl and Tweetdeck, for example).

But how to get the world to notice your own e-books or p-books after signing up for Twitter or another social network? Social nets can involve more than just messages back and forth, but in the message area, I’ll pass on a few tips to use when communicating with friends, clients and people potentially in both categories. The current recession makes networking all the more useful. There are even job-related networks such as Linked-In, and Facebook is after the same career-related business even though it began life as a social network for college students and still is largely for personal users.

Book-specific tips

For book-specific advice for Twitter and other social networks, check out Bring Sexy Back to the Book Party in the Digital Age,  Laurel Touby’s excellent presentation from O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference last month. Chris Brogan offered his own share of good tips on blogging and social media, a session now viewable on the Web, where he discussed the new currencies of attention and trust, his terms. With Twitter, the goals are similar.

Laurel herself founded MediaBistro, a media professional site, which, yes, is on Twitter just like her. She sees online "book parties" as especially valuable because "your message is spread  by word of mouth" and the results are measurable. What’s more, the conversion can remain online for years. And you’re building a community. "The audience wants to interact with the author," Laurel said at TOC, "but they also want to interact with like-minded souls, just as they would at a traditional book party. And those relationships people have reflect back in positive ways onto the author, onto the book, onto the publisher who brought them together. It’s a beautiful and virtuous circle."

To find useful people in your book’s area of interest, you can try Twitter’s search engine—also good for topics—or Twellow.com. Go ahead; guess and check out names. The right trendies just may be on Twitter. None other than Daniel Schorr, the 92-year-old NPR news analyst, who at time has succeeded by sticking to his beliefs and not being a trendy, recently started Twittering and is a convert with 4,128 followers.

Some Twitter wisdom from Publishing Trends

Meanwhile my diligent friends at Publishing Trends (subscription information) have compiled a handy list of Twitter-oriented tips, and I suspect that Laurel and Kat would agree with most everything in PT’s detailed Twitter guide. Ahead are highlights, just a sample of what you’ll find in the actual newsletter from March 2009.

1. "Developing your Twitter presence." "The number-one tip from people we talked to: Publishers shouldn’t be afraid to get personal on Twitter, and their tweets shouldn’t sound like marketing." Chris Brogan, the social media expert, told PT: "The best people using Twitter are the ones who talk back to people, not just the people who are talking about their dumb stuff." Look for companies whose Tweets please you, then think about similar tactics and strategies, Chris says. Ron Hogan, who started the Beatrice.com literary blog and now blogs for MediaBistro’s Galley Cat and produces workshops and conferences for writers, says publishers should "let the person running the account put a personal spin on their posts, not just announcing every press clipping or YouTube clip that comes down the pike." Same advice would apply to others. Twitter’s length limit is too short anyway for extended ballyhoo in one place—just 140 characters or perhaps 20 words or so. Use Twitter for chat and informal pointers to other Web pages. The percentage of business conversation depends on whom you’re in touch with. Just don’t overdo it. Blog headlines are okay if people expect ‘em.

2. "Using Twitter to Connect with Your Audience and Gain Recognition." A "Pew social media survey," notes Publishing Trends, "found that Twitter users as a group are much more likely than the general population to use wireless devices like cell phones, laptops, and handhelds for Internet access. They use those devices to get their news. ‘For many Twitter users, learning about and sharing relevant and recent nuggets of information is a primary utility of the service,’ says the report. ‘While Twitter users are just as likely as others to consume media on any given day, they are more likely to consume it on mobile devices and less likely to engage with news via more traditional outlets.’" You might even want to set up search words connected with your topic. For The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel, I created, yes, #solomonscandals. But I really should try tagging other topics.

3. "Oh, Yeah—It leans to increased sales."

"’Publishers should not think about Twitter initially as a way to drive book sales. Instead, it’s a way for them to connect and communicate with readers in a way that is foreign at first,’ says [Wiley Associate Publisher Christopher Webb. 'If we [are part of the community], the opportunities to introduce people to the books we publish will present themselves naturally. But we have to listen for them as part of the ongoing conversation….Having said that, Twitter can drive sales. It has been widely reported that Dell [computers] drove an additional $1 million in revenues in 18 months via its Twitter account.’"

For more Twitter tips from Publishing Trends, see @Chelsea Green has 2,350 Followers. Here’s Why. The first tip: "The main thing we do on Twitter is listen. We learn a great deal about community mood, upcoming trends, interesting news, and influential people. We find and vet possible book topics all day long."

Twitter’s visitor count:  It’s said to be almost six million unique visitors a month. Twitter is only the third-larger social network, but is especially attractive for book promo because  like radio it has an intimate one-to-one feeling, especially if you talk back to your followers—a nice way of letting people know you’re approachable, even if, like Kat, you have 1,500 fans.

How to get my "Tweets" about TeleRead and The Solomon Scandals, my Washington newspaper novel from Twilight Times Books: Just sign up for Twitter and click here.

Related: When everyone’s a friend, is anything private?, in the New York Times. Just where to draw the line?

Another promo tip—riding Amazon’s coat-tails: Now that the Kindle books are available more widely, thanks to the iPhone and iPod Touch, why not encourage people to use their gizmos to read Amazon-posted excerpts from your books? Put up the instructions on your book-related site. Here’s how, with the Kindle and other e-readers in mind, I’m now following up on the Scandals link in the upper-right of the TeleRead home page. Yes, I’d like the Kindle and the iPhone app much more without that horrid proprietary format and DRM, and I hope that Amazon will see the light and discover ePub and either drop DRM or switch to social DRM.