At last week’s Chirp developers’ conference, Twitter announced plans to release a new feature called Annotations. As I understand it, it will be a way for any Twitter client program to add a metadata payload to each tweet it publishes, with any namespaces it desires. The potential here is poetic, epic, crazy awesome huge. Kim-Mai Cutler’s coverage of it on VentureBeat has been very good, she quotes one unnamed developer as saying it’s “the most disruptive thing Twitter’s done in two years.”

I have been trying to wrap my head around it so I can write about what it means for developers and non-developing end users. This deserves the blogging equivalent of a song, belted out with clear notes and a catchy melody. I’ve got librarians asking me to write about this, on Twitter, and when librarians call – a writer must answer.

I’m reaching out to some of the smartest people I know to get their thoughts about this, and consider yourselves among that group. I would love for you to share any quotable thoughts you have about Annotations in comments here. I will fold your best thoughts into the song I sing while I travel from village to outpost, singing to tell the tale about the epic development Twitter is about to attempt.

OK so really I’ll just blog about it from my bedroom office, but hopefully a lot of people will read it, so please share your thoughts below and make ’em good! Thanks!

I was honored to be invited by the Poynter News University to present a webinar on the way that location based servies are (and will) change the news world. Pretty far out stuff! I hope you’ll join me. I’ll be flying out to Florida to present in person, but it’s all about the online attendance so I hope you’ll spend some time on April 1st joining us for this discussion.

I just had my 2nd conversation this morning before coffee about this fabulous Economist special report on Big Data: Data Data Everywhere. The person I was corresponding with asked me why I was interested in this topic. Here’s my answer. If this is something you’re interested in, I’d love to know what it is about Big Data that captures your interest, too.

What got me excited is just that this is a topic I think is fascinating. I’ll tell you frankly: I think in big data there lies a lot of hidden patterns that represent both opportunities for action and for reflection. At RWW we’re working on trying to find ways to mine data to find news first (we’ve got some interesting methods employed already) and personally, I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I’m hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we’ll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today.

How about you? Are you interested in Big Data? Where does your interest come from?

Related: Check out Ta-Nehisi Coate’s critical analysis of one of the most prominent recent examples of social media data analyzed. I’m still reading it, myself.

Working on a new bio, anybody got any feedback on how this reads?

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the lead writer at ReadWriteWeb, one of the top technology news blogs on the internet and syndicated daily online by the New York Times. Marshall has established himself as one of the web’s leading voices on bleeding edge technology thanks to his ability to find signal buried in real-time noise – primarily through the use of innovative research systems built for crowdsourced data mining and first mover’s advantage. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two dogs, two cats and three chickens.

This is from Urtak and looks a lot like Hunch. I think it’s a pretty compelling user experience. Poll creation is pretty weak, but easy. Let me know what you think and I’ll tell you what I think of it once we’re on the other side.

Checking in at the admin side, I now see that I can’t even find my poll to check results. Oh well, I sure like the idea anyway.

It’s messy, I can’t figure out why it’s cutting off the first few words of my first sentence above.

I’m experimenting with a new system for discovering and getting to know important new people. I’m pretty excited about it. Of course it’s about Twitter because Twitter is paying my mortgage. I wrote a little song about it, goes something like this:

Just kidding, no song. I totally should write a song about it, though. If this system works well over time maybe I will do a little warbling about it after all. Thoughts?