My friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has a thoughtful post up about how he hardly reads books any more, and mostly does his reading on the Web, through blogs and other online media. In the post, he wonders whether this is just for convenience — or whether it’s because the actual way that he thinks has changed into something non-linear, to the point where reading books just isn’t as enjoyable as it used to be.

This is something I’ve thought a fair bit about as well, and I recall talking to Paul Kedrosky about how few books I read any more. Like Scott, I’m a literature major, and have shelves full of books that I have read (and want to read). And I still do read books — but mostly at the beach or the cottage, or other places where there’s no Internet access. Is that something to be ashamed of, or is there more to it than that?

I think the most common criticism of people who do all their reading on the Web is that they are like moths, flitting from flame to flame, never stopping in one place long enough to actually think something through. In this view, the Web is a medium designed for those with short attention spans. The other perspective, however, is the one that Scott is advancing: that the Web enables you to connect thoughts and ideas that you might not otherwise have had, and therefore is actually of more value rather than less.

I think about how reading the newspaper is an inherently unsatisfying experience in a lot of ways now, because when I read something that triggers a thought or idea, or a desire for more information, I can’t just click it and do a Google search. Does that mean I’m not giving the story the attention it deserves? Hardly. I think if anything it makes it easier to use an article as a jumping off point for further thought and discussion. Reading books feels awkward in part because — as Jeff Jarvis described in a Guardian piece he wrote — they’re not connected to anything.

Obviously there’s always time for relaxation and thoughtful reflection, and there’s a time for escapism as well, and books are great for both of those things. But when it comes to consuming information and trying to connect it to other information as a way of generating ideas or coming to conclusions, nothing beats the Web — except maybe a great conversation with friends over dinner and drinks, of course :-)

Like the swallows returning to Capistrano, or the prodigal son returning home to the family farm, my friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has decided to rejoin the Twitter-sphere. He stopped last fall sometime, and wrote a post about why he had decided it was a gigantic waste of time (one that made Anne Zelenka kind of mad). I wrote about Scott’s decision here, and said I understood, but that I personally get a lot out of Twitter.

In his post about why he has decided to rejoin the Twitterverse, Scott says that he has decided he needs to experiment with social media like Twitter — to eat his own dog food, as he puts it, since he is involved with a social media service called Publish 2 — and that he’s experimenting with a different approach this time in which he has reduced the number of people he follows on Twitter to 40, all of whom he “knows” in some sense.

My experience with Twitter — which I’ve written about here, among several other posts — is that it can be very different, depending on the person using it. There are some people I follow who never interact with me, and who I’m not even sure follow me back (meaning they get my Twitter messages). In some cases that’s fine, because they mostly broadcast thoughts or observations, and most of the time I’m OK with that.

Others I would like to correspond with, but they don’t follow me — which I find frustrating (and if you follow me and I don’t follow you back, I apologize for possibly creating the same feelings on your end). I can understand that for many of the people I follow, since they have hundreds and hundreds of people following them. How can they possibly interact with them all? And so what inevitably happens is tiers of relationships.

This reminds me of the “Dunbar number” — a theory that Robin Dunbar came up with, to describe what he thought was the maximum number of people that one could interact with on any kind of personal level. Dunbar figured the average was around 150. Some have claimed that they can boost that number online, and there’s no question that it’s easier to keep up a kind of intermittent attention flow with more people.

But does that produce any real value on either end? I wonder. Twitter seems to be riding that line, and it’s interesting to watch it develop.

It’s interesting to see some of the reactions to Scott Karp’s post on Twitter and why he stopped using it at Publishing 2.0, a post which has now topped the cluster of Techmeme discussion about Twitter). Anne Zelenka, who writes for Web Worker Daily — part of Om Malik’s GigaOmniMedia — has a fairly visceral response, which is to call Scott’s post insulting.

The clear implication, she says, is that Scott finds talking to people like her a massive waste of time. In the classic sense, of course, it is a waste of time. As Scott quite rightly points out, the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter is quite low in many cases — there’s a lot of banter and chat and extraneous information of various kinds, and that can make it difficult to get some good, solid work done. It’s like having the TV on too loud, or people chatting behind you when you’re trying to do something.

I think what Anne’s driving at, though, is that some of this social interaction, some of this “ambient intimacy,” is good for us — even if it does get in the way of our actual work. I would compare it to working at home versus working at my office: at home, I can actually get a lot more accomplished, but I miss the social interaction, the miscellaneous chatting and random conversations with co-workers. Some of it is just socializing, but some of it has value — although it may not be immediately obvious.

I had a feeling that my friend Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0 was up to something, and now I see the fruits of his secret labours — or rather, I’ve read his description of what he’s been up to over at the Publish2 blog. The final pieces of the puzzle likely won’t come into focus until the site launches in beta, which Scott says is coming next month.

Like Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, I’m a little fuzzy on what Publish2 is going to be exactly, or how it’s going to work — but I will say that Scott is a smart guy (with some smart backers such as Robert Young, Howard Weaver and Jeff Jarvis), and I am very interested in seeing what he comes up with.

It seems obvious from Scott’s preamble that Publish2 is based in part on a Digg-style model, in which journalists (and he appears to be defining that term broadly, as he should) submit and then vote for news stories. Publish2 will also apparently incorporate some of the social bookmarking features of sites like del.icio.us, and stored bookmarks may also feed into the service.

How the participants in the site will be chosen is a little unclear. It sounds as though it will begin with a selected number of journalists, and then spread out from there to journalists who are not part of a mainstream entity, and to what Scott refers to as “news bloggers.”

This reminds me of the model that Citizendium.com has been trying to use to fix what it sees as the flaws in Wikipedia, by using some form of “expert” sources. And it seems clear that Scott wants to use journalists as the core of his news aggregation engine in order to address some of the flaws of the Digg model.

Jason Calacanis tried to do something similar when he revamped Netscape.com, by using editors who select and highlight — and in some cases even report on — stories and content. And in Publish2 there also seem to be aspects of what Newsvine.com and Daylife.com (which Jeff Jarvis is also involved in) are doing, as well as Topix.com. Whether Publish2 can make it work better than any of these remains to be seen.

One of the first things I thought when I read Scott’s description was: “This sounds like exactly what newspapers should already be doing.” And part of what he implies in his post is that not enough journalists, and not enough publications, are really making use of social networking tools to improve the news generation or aggregation process. I would definitely agree with that.

Can Publish2 help to change that? I’m looking forward to finding out.

Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 writes about the NowPublic financing and takes issue with the terms “citizen journalism” (which I admit is a terrible term) and “crowdsourcing” (which I actually kind of like). He says that what is going on at NowPublic is just journalism, period — or perhaps “networked journalism,” which Jeff Jarvis suggested as an alternative here.

Update:

My mesh friend Jeff Howe — who coined the term “crowdsourcing” — has a post in response to Scott’s, in which he effectively agrees that it’s really just journalism, extended to new sources.