Tuesday, March 17, 2009

TWIT chat: define ‘offensive’

On the latest This Week in Tech Leo LaPorte said his network will be dropping its exclusive arrangement with Stickam so the shows can be viewed live on other services.

He also mentioned in passing that each service would use its own chat tool, and that’s what got me wondering about something. If the chat is going to be further fragmented anyway, I wonder if Leo would mind if a few grownups gathered in its own chatroom to watch some of the shows.

I’d like to be able to watch the Gillmor Gang while chatting with a more mature group like the old NewsGang. In such a room, we could be as profane as the panelists if we wanted to be. It’s less offensive to me to see the occasional naughty word than it is to swim in a stream of whining “advice” for Steve on getting a decent mic or learning about lighting or shutting up about Twitter or shutting up about the Beatles. We could post links, too. Not all links are self-serving spam. Used by grownups, they probably would provide background on the topic under discussion.

My mother’s intuition tells me the snark comes from very young men—a sort of Digg, YouTube commenting crowd. I’m glad for Leo that he enjoys such a following; that crowd is necessary to achieve a really decent-sized tech audience. Their conversation just isn’t to my taste. Also I’m not so sure it’s his advertisers’ most desirable audience. Maybe he could even get a sponsor for a different sort of room, or make it into a premium service by serving it up with one of the video streams on special page.

Update (April 6): Christian Burns suggested a Friendfeed room would be good for this purpose. Today it happened in Friendfeed, in the beta interface and it didn’t even need a room.