Word Of The Moment: Mindcasting

[via On Twitter, mindcasting is the new lifecasting | Technology | Los Angeles Times by David Sarno]

There’s already a vibrant community of Twitter users who are using the system to share and filter the hyper-glut of online information with ingenious efficiency. Forget what you had for breakfast or how much you hate Mondays. That’s just lifecasting.

Mindcasting is where it’s at.

The distinction is courtesy of Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu), a journalism professor and new media analyst at New York University. For him, Twitter is a new way to conduct a real-time, multi-way dialogue with thousands of his colleagues and fellow netizens.

“Mindcasting came about when I was trying to achieve a very high signal-to noise-ratio,” he explained. This meant using his Twitter account to send out tweets pointing to the best media news and analysis he could find, 15 or 20 times a day. “I could work on the concept of a Twitter feed as an editorial product of my own.”

As Rosen noted, that product is itself a distillation of the huge stream of input he gets from the nearly 550 journalists, analysts and news outlets he follows on Twitter. “I’ve hand-built my own tipster network,” he said. “It’s editing the Web for me in real time.”

Now zoom out and think of Rosen, his hundreds of sources and his 11,000 followers, each as a kind of individual information amplifier, consuming and passing along the most interesting stuff that comes their way. So when the Gazette newspaper in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, announced it was re-engineering itself, with the newspaper as just one container for its news, Rosen saw the news tweeted by Scott Karp, a Web journalism entrepreneur he follows — and shared the story with his own audience.

It’s people-powered media in action. And yet a Time magazine columnist wondered this week, “Could a service that seemed to be designed specifically to provide its users with incessant interruptions, empty of almost any meaning or importance, really succeed?”

Nah, seriously? If Twitter was nothing but a way for the masses to meaninglessly interrupt each other, it wouldn’t have attracted the deafening media buzz in the first place, let alone millions of users, or a hyper-caffeinated developer community that cranks out new tools every day that allow users to search, sift and harness the geyser of content that Twitter has become.

We’ll have to see if the subtle shading of mindcasting really catches hold. I am betting no, although I appreciate the nuance.

I favor streaming as the core verb for all these activities, anyway. Casting is too strongly related to broadcast, which is strange, considering Jay is the guy who coined the term “the people formerly known as the audience” to get away from the info producer/consumer dialectic.