Too bad that some of the amateurs on the Web don’t have similar class.  Shortly after the bad call, somebody vandalized Joyce’s Wikipedia page to declare he was dead.  That’s just sick.  Yesterday, I saw that Joyce’s name was a trending Twitter topic, but the results were polluted with Twitter spam.

Such online foolishness illustrates what Andrew Keen derided as the “Cult of the Amateur” in his book by the same name.  Keen says:

We — those of us who want to know more about the world, those of us who are the consumers of mainstream culture — are being seduced by the empty promise of the “democratized” media.  For the real consequence of the Web 2.0 revolution is less culture, less reliable news, and a chaos of useless information.  One chilling reality in this brave new digital epoch is the blurring, obfuscation, and even disappearance of truth.

In some ways, the foolishness of Wiki vandals and Twitter spammers provides support for Keen’s observations.  But Keen’s critiques of amateurs are also somewhat overblown.  Keen’s preference for traditional “experts” over Web 2.0 “amateurs” ignores that the distinctions between the two are not always clear.  Indeed, in federal court, the qualification of a witness as an “expert” permitted to provide opinion testimony on “scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge” is often sharply argued.  Plus, traditional experts are also subject to error, as amply illustrated by Joyce’s bad call.

But Joyce has class, something that doesn’t require, or always come with, expertise.  You either have it or you don’t.

Also, even without a perfect game, Galarraga’s game combined with Joyce’s bad call are the stuff of legend.  As Paul Clemens noted in the New York Times, the replays of the bad call may become “baseball’s Zapruder film.”  Such immediate-legend status is even better illustrated by this exchange between Kevin Costner (Roy) and Rene Russo (Molly) in the classic sports film Tin Cup.  Immediately prior, golfer Roy loses the U.S. Open by massively blowing par by stubbornly refusing to take a lay-up shot on the 18th hole for an easy win.  Instead, he tries (repeatedly) to hit the ball over a long water hazard.  Roy loses the tournament, but wins the hearts of the fans, and of Molly:

Molly: That was incredible! That was the shot of the tournament!

Roy: I just gave away the U.S. Open.

Molly: It doesn’t matter.

Roy: One time in my life I know the safe play to hit and I still…Shit, I still can’t make myself do it.

Molly: It doesn’t matter.

Roy: My whole career, my whole life on the line…I just made a 12 on the last hole of the Open!

Molly: You sure did. It was the greatest 12 of all time. No one’s going to remember the Open 10 years from now, who won…but they’ll remember your 12! My, God, Roy, it was…Well, it’s immortal! I am so proud of you!

Sometimes it’s the ones that get away that are the most memorable.

Twitter as a news source. I like to Twitter, but mostly to aggregate links of personal interest.  But Twitter is increasingly emerging as a powerful source of breaking news.  I turned to it during the Gaza invasion as well as after the safe crash-landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549.  (The most fascinating pic was taken by Floridian Janis Krums and posted through Twitter.)  Though Twitter isn’t necessarily authoritative or reliable, it’s a great way of getting the pulse of what concerns people right now.

You’re in Steelers Twitter Country. One last twittery thought.  Being from the Steel City, no shock that I’m a big Steelers fan.  Go Steelers in Super Bowl XLIII! But I gotta say: last night’s AFC Championship game was a brutal and exhausting four-hour marathon.  As Peter King put it,”If I’ve ever been to a game with more intense hitting, I don’t remember it. This was primeval.”  Like the players on the field, I was seriously worried for Raven Willis McGahee, who was carted from the field after a hard hit from Ryan Clark.  Although it was a physical game, this is not what you ever want to see and I hope he’s ok.  Many others shared that thought, and last night, McGahee was one of the trending searches on Twitter.  I was happy to see many well-wishes for McGahee from Steelers as well as Ravens fans.

Shortly afterward, he received an e-mail message from Comcast, thanking him for the feedback and adding that it was working on a new interactive guide that might “illuminate the issues that you are currently experiencing.”

[He] found it all a bit creepy.  “The rest of his e-mail may as well have read, ‘Big Brother is watching you,’ ” he said.

A woman’s Twitter complaint about Comcast led to a quick but unexpected response:

“It’s one thing to spit vitriol about a company when they can’t hear you,” she said in an interview.  It’s another, she said, when the company replies.  “I immediately backed down and softened my tone when I knew I was talking to a real person.”

I can see why some people might be creeped out by Comcast’s outreach efforts, but they shouldn’t be.   People keep assuming that the relative anonymity of the web will keep their postings effectively invisible.  That’s naive.  There’s nothing anonymous about the Internet when postings are quickly found by those who want to see what you’re doing (such as prosecutors, as Kaimipono Wenger blogged about recently), or by companies who want to know what you’re saying about them.  The sooner people realize that “relative” web anonymity is not really anonymity at all, the more savvy they’ll hopefully become about their online postings.

Plus, done tactfully and personally, direct outreach by companies might be a good thing.  Direct emails?  Sure.  Public comments on blogs or Facebook walls?  Not so good.  It might embarrass already-angry customers and put them on the defensive.  Worse, it might trigger flame wars involving others.  But a direct email is far less confrontational, and far more likely to lead to satisfied, albeit occasionally creeped-out customers.

That’s a fantastic idea, and one that solves the problem of what to do with interesting reads that are worth pointing out, but for which I don’t want to write a full blog post.

I’ve created a microblog for this site here.  A mini-feed can be found in the sidebar, and I’ve also created a dedicated page on this site with an expanded list of recent tweets here.