I am new to Twitter and have yet to get to grips with all the conventions. Its primary use amongst eDiscovery people (no-one there talks of e-disclosure, alas) seems to be to refer others to interesting articles elsewhere. That seems to me to be a worthwhile function by itself, with the other networking benefits (which I am yet to get into) as a bonus. It has obvious marketing potential for the wholly legitimate reason that joining in is part of the collaborative spread of information about the subject which has the potential to benefit everyone  – the referrer, the author of the source referred to, interested bystanders (which may include potential buyers), and the market generally. So far as I can see, only one participant is using its tweets as a bald advertisement, and I hope everyone else will boycott them.

If I could wish for one thing, it is that people would refrain from making multiple references to the same source in close succession. There is a distinction here between what you might call “thoughtful” articles (or less than thoughtful in the case of a recent FT one presently causing a stir) and mere press releases – the former might warrant the endorsement of several tweeters whereas the latter really only needs one reference every few hours. The point emerged in relation to the announcement of EMC’s acquisition of Kazeon. Sure, it is news of some significance, but it is hard to see who benefited from several days’ worth of tweets pointing to the press release. As I remarked elsewhere, the first 30 or so were enough to convey the message, and all the repeats simply drowned out other, and potentially more interesting, references. You need to be pretty dedicated (or have a lot of time on your hands) to pay attention to every one.

Relatively few of the references were to useful commentary on the acquisition. It came to be one of those subjects on which I felt I ought to have something to say, but words failed me. I know of EMC only as the owner of Iomega, and I only know that because I have a smart little Iomega network drive humming behind me. I have met some nice people from Kazeon, but that did not provide inspiration to try and dig a story out of the bones of the press release. I really felt I had nothing to communicate about it and, as Tom Lehrer (making his second appearance in these pages in two days) said, ‘If a person can’t communicate, the least he can do is to shut up’.

I thought I would wait until a story emerged or, even better, somebody else wrote something worth pointing to. In due course, Craig Carpenter of Recommind came up with what everyone else on Twitter seems to be describing as “the final word”. I do not suppose that it is indeed final but its mere description as such seems to have stemmed the flow of bare pointers to the press release.

The article is called Viewing e-discovery as strategic. Its conclusion is that the big players in the storage, archiving and content management space might see EMC’s acquisition of Kazeon as a gauntlet, a challenge thrown down to others to get into e-discovery. It seems a sensible enough prediction, and it might allow everyone else on Twitter to move on.

Home