Who is this asshole?
In William Goldman’s excellent book Adventures in the Screen Trade
During this sizing-up time, the executive is trying to answer one question: “Who is this asshole?” He knows you’re not Mario Puzo because Puzo wouldn’t be there talking about taking twenty-five thou for an iffy project like this.
The “Who is this asshole?” question is the biggest challenge today for the real-time web. We now have thousands of pieces of content (tweets, status updates, links, etc.) coming at us every day. Do we have time to really consider their source? Even The New York Times and MSNBC haven’t quite mastered analyzing sources.
One of the biggest challenges with following other people’s Twitter lists is that you don’t know why each source was added to the list. For example, CNN put together a nice list of people and organizations worth listening to on the oil spill, but if you look at the list timeline you’ll see tweets like these:
Who are these people? Are jessWBRZ and Surfrider reliable sources? I trust that they’re reliable because CNN says so, but I still don’t know about sources’ agenda and expertise without doing a lot of clicking around. By the time I’m done clicking around it’s not so real-time anymore.
In the past couple of years the web’s made amazing strides in getting lot of people to create content, but it’s left us all in the shoes of that studio exec: wondering who all these assholes are.
