Ironically, I first signed up for Twitter some years back because I had heard a tale about a journalist who was arrested in Egypt. The story was that he managed to use Twitter to alert his editor and others outside the country. They then helped him get released. Was that story true, back then? It sure is credible now.

The process has attracted some powerful voices. Scanning Twitter feeds in the last couple of weeks, I’ve discovered Twitter had emerged from an early stage I’ll call: “I’m cleaning the catbox right now,” to the major tool for democracy I hoped it might become.

The prompt for Twitter’s 140-character post now reads: “What’s happening?” And a lot is. I’ve read dispatches from Mother Jones Magazine, tweeting updates from the streets of Cairo, and later, from Wisconsin. I’ve found a a link to a YouTube video of Margaret Atwood’s keynote at the Tools of Change conference in New York, speaking about the future of publishing – a hot topic as Borders bookstores enter bankruptcy. I’ve found a link to a photo of Steve Jobs and other high tech titans at dinner with President Obama. I’ve studied up on book design on a linked page showing last year’s most favored font faces and even found a tweeter covering Wikileaks releases.

In short, Twitter is providing, in almost real time, the service editors and publishers – those who decided what was news or publishable – used to be fond of calling curation. But the curation’s in more hands now: It’s in the hands of the tweeters as they describe open cities and the shifting stakes ordinary people hold in the planet’s future. (And by ordinary people, I mean artists, writers, civil servants, laborers, bazaar vendors, bloggers and those who aren’t rich, people who read cereal boxes, news junkies and lovers of books).

Curation’s also in the hands of familiar magazines like Publisher’s Weekly, Salon, Granta, the New York Review of Books; think tanks like the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, and the writers’ organization, PEN. These have ventured to establish feeds among the flock of less traditional tweeters.

The curation’s in my hands, too, as I make cautious decisions about what to skip and whom to follow.

Twitter’s potential to unify a global or a local village was always there. In 2010, our local fire departments began tweeting announcements about which roads were closed – a real service in a storm-prone rural area, where trees smash down in the winter wind. This week, I spotted an icon for tweets covering emergencies in the San Francisco Bay Area and another for San Francisco local news. I saw a picture of the Bay Bridge repairs which will be rerouting traffic and a newsfeed piping up from Berkeley. I saw a photo of a protesting teacher singing outside Wisconsin’s state capital.

This is not your grandma’s 2008 Twitter. Or even your offspring’s. A technical novelty with a lot of promise has hatched into an vibrant, inclusive infrastructure.

In her brilliant keynote speech to the Tools of Change Conference, novelist Margaret Atwood explained the changing economic relationship between authors and publishers. Using her own hand-drawn image of a bulging publishing pie, she traced the writer’s shifting share from the days of illuminated manuscripts onwards.

This metaphor suggests to me an equally ancient pie image – the one from the nursery rhyme. In this, our Twitter era, the pie before the king has been pried open; the crust has split away. The birds are emerging, fluttering. They are spreading their wings. They are singing out. And what a sight it is!
© Shelley Buck, 2011. Used with permission. Shelley Buck is the author of Floating Point: Endlessly Rocking off Silicon Valley, a memoir of living on a boat at the heart of the technical R & D world. You can find her on Twitter.

As with many other instances during the George W. Bush administration in which legitimate duties of government (such as statesmanship) became conflated with and ultimately displaced by punishment, pure and simple, we are all of us coming to realize that Bush-era techniques employed in efforts to extract information from unwilling and even uninformed “informants” went way too far. Not only international conventions but also our own laws and morals were savagely violated by actions taken with a veneer of government approval.

As ever more reeking information continues to seep from the closed drawers of the military and spy agencies, it is clear that the heritage of America’s own dirty war will not go away on its own.

The problem now seems to be what to do about it. Should we go on talk shows and claim that torture wasn’t really torture? Should we-Nuremberg-style-prosecute and punish those who carried out illegal policies endorsed by our then-government? Should we convene a truth and reconciliation commission, so that those who carried out the torture can ‘fess up and hug their surviving former victims? Should we talk the issue onto its deathbed, bury it in paper, smother the legal and moral outrages in subtleties, and move on to health care, global warming and other pressing matters? Or should we see-to paraphrase the late folksinger, Phil Ochs– the pictures of the pain?

What to do? In this case, although I consider myself a progressive, I really would like to see Washington run more like a small business. I ask: “What would Main Street do?”

If I identified an embezzler in my business, I would likely institute controls to identify financial misdeeds earlier and more readily. I might choose not to prosecute the culprit due to concern about publicity. But would I keep the embezzler around to do next season’s taxes?

If I were a small town editor who discovered one of my writers was plagiarizing, I would probably increase my future scrutiny of news stories prior to publishing them. But would I continue to accept articles from the freelancer who burned me?

If I were a carpenter who discovered that a vender sold me wood for a house that was so weakened by wormholes that the house I was building could not stand, I might devise new methods for stress testing my materials before beginning construction. But would I buy again from that vender?

If I, a hapless householder, hire a plumber who recklessly breaks a pipe and lets a stream of sewage spew into my front yard, will I call the guy up again when the garbage disposal stops grinding?

I am not a carpenter or accountant. I do my own cleaning. My business does not earn enough to have employees, let alone ones who embezzle, and my garbage disposal is not broken, but you get the idea.

If I were a new president who discovered his employees had engaged in torture, I would likely devise new methods and policies to keep torture out of government. But would I continue to keep people who authorized it or did it on the payroll?

C’mon. Really? Would you? Would anybody? –buckdata

Twitter is software which allows a registered member to send out very brief messages to others, either from twitter.com’s website or from a cell phone. Recipients can get the messages either on the web or on their cell phones or other mobile devices.  Members can “follow” others’ messages or allow others to follow their own. One can thus send messages like, “I’m doing the dishes,” or “I’m saving the economy” to friends, family, colleagues, and nearly total strangers who have signed up to receive them.

The service is free, except for the instant messaging charges the cell phone carriers may impose.

It’s a neat idea and its time may have come in a way many media watchers not have foreseen. Here’s why: With mounting middle class layoffs, lots more people will have the leisure to try out new technologies, particularly low cost and free ones. Using their new and copious spare time, they will learn how to – as the users of this new communication system put it – “tweet.”

This week, a buckdata.com writer received a solicitation to follow her to date rather scanty Twitter postings. Checking out the profile of the would-be follower, she discovered a discreet link which connected to the sender’s resume.

It is not likely to be the last such.

Readers, brace yourselves for the sight of the new-new media being used the old-fashioned way. The great Twitter job hunt is on!

This may be good news for many voters concerned about the environment who have paused quietly on the sidelines throughout the current campaign with the polite demurer, “My candidate isn’t running.”

In the report by Devlin Barrett, Obama is quoted as stating that he will make a commitment that Gore–who won a Nobel Prize last year for his environmental efforts– “will be at the table and play a central part in us figuring out how we solve this problem.” Senator Obama reportedly did not mention a specific job post for the former Vice President, but reportedly characterized climate change is “something we have to deal with now…” Hey, it’s about time!

Has Vice President Gore agreed to this? What job might he accept? Does this mean an endorsement is forthcoming?