Polluting the streams, pruning the networks…

Image: There's a really good illustration for this post behind this door...

* * UPDATED: corrected from draft which was published. Facts/links/opinions unaltered. * *

Alan Patrick’s pure class in my book. His blog is prickly, argumentative and pushy in the very best kinds of ways. I reckon it’s blogs like Broadstuff and DotBen that help me keep questioning things. Without them the idealistic eejit in me decides to dance off into a digital daze chanting lines from Clay Shirky and waiting for the Singularity to arrive in the style of an evangelical rapture and sweep us up to the all-too-virtual promised land.

So, Alan’s post about filtering the Twitterstream gets me thinking. He talks about the Tweets around the Guardian’s Activate conference:

What was interesting to me was the massive degradation in the User Generated Twitterstream. Last year, and early this year, you could tune in to such Twitterstreams and get a fairly decent “user generated media” view of what was going on. The “User Generated” Activate Twitterstream yesterday was….well, “unhelpful” would put it mildly.