My geeky 8-year-old son wants to take apart my old laptop. But the thing still works, so I could also donate it. What’s the right call?

If philosopher John Stuart Mill were alive today—and able to escape his grave in southern France—he’d advise you to employ the “greatest happiness principle.” Make the choice that will bring maximum enjoyment to the maximum number of people. If you turn the laptop into an engineering project for your son, you’ll thrill him for a few hours and teach him a bit about circuitry—lessons he could also learn by disassembling a less valuable gadget. But if you donate it, you could provide months or years of happiness to someone else’s child, and perhaps to the rest of their family as well.

So find a reputable organization that will get the laptop into needy hands. And while you’re at it, see if you can track down a completely dead computer (ask a friend or check craigslist) so your son can dissect its innards. Just promise you’ll closely supervise Junior’s tinkering; while learning about semiconductors, he should also discover the glories of goggles and the magic of battery recycling.

My old college newspaper is posting its archives online—including some truly awful pieces I wrote in the ’90s. Can I ask to have them taken down?

The most basic tenet of journalism is that, save for when factual errors must be corrected, the published record is immutable. Embarrassed interviewees aren’t permitted to retract foolish quotes, and embarrassed scribes can’t disappear their weaker efforts. Such is the unwritten contract we enter into when we dabble in journalism, whether on campus or in Wired. Suck it up.

“Ultimately, what you’re asking to do here is lie, to say, ‘I’m perfect,’” says George Sylvie, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “Every little Catholic fiber in me says you just don’t do that.” Nobody expected digital distribution, my friend, but just because you thought your half-baked op-eds were destined for the memory hole doesn’t mean you get a mulligan. Technically, your pieces have always been available, whether stacked on a library shelf or spooled on microfilm. You just weren’t famous enough for anyone to care.

Anyway, you’re probably worrying too much. People are generally quite forgiving of the intellectual missteps and inappropriate revelations of youth. We were all 20 once. And if someone does confront you about a truly inflammatory bit of prose, point out that a person’s views can evolve dramatically over time. After all, Ronald Reagan started out as a Democrat.

What’s the policy on profanity in tweets? Is it OK to drop f-bombs at will, or should I replace curse words with pound signs and ampersands?

The only profanity enforcer on Twitter is the invisible hand: ticked-off readers voting with the Unfollow button. Is that enough of a disincentive to keep your filthy mouth—er, fingers—in check? That depends on your long-term plans for Twitter domination. Who exactly is your target audience? If your forte is passing along links about parenting or needlepoint, then blue language may rankle your core demographic. But if your chief selling point is acerbic cultural commentary, foulmouthed musings may actually increase your popularity. Look at film director Kevin Smith (@ThatKevinSmith)—more than 1 million followers as of this writing, and his tweets occasionally include explicit references to his wife’s most private parts.

But honestly, if any of your followers are too fragile to endure a single ribald tweet, they probably shouldn’t be anywhere near the Internet in the first place. Have you seen some of the nasty $#@! on there?

Need help navigating life in the 21st century? Email us at mrknowitall@wiredmag.com.

When Michael Jackson died on June 25, millions of people flooded onto Google News to find the latest information about what had happened. The spike in traffic was so massive that Google suspected a malware attack and began blocking anyone searching for “Michael Jackson.”

It’s a funny story, but it illustrates how the Web is changing. People increasingly turn to the Internet for up-to-the-minute information about, well, everything—blog postings about celebrity antics, status updates from friends, and pictures and videos of political events as they unfold, like the protests over the Iranian election. Studies have shown that these types of search requests are on the rise.

Pundits call it the real-time Web. It’s upending the Internet as we’ve known it, and it’s not something that Google can easily dominate.

For more than 10 years, Google has organized the Web by figuring out who has authority. The company measures which sites have the most links pointing to them—crucial votes of confidence—and checks to see whether a site grew to prominence slowly and organically, which tends to be a marker of quality. If a site amasses a zillion links overnight, it’s almost certainly spam.

But the real-time Web behaves in the opposite fashion. It’s all about “trending topics”—zOMG a plane crash!—which by their very nature generate a massive number of links and postings within minutes. And a search engine can’t spend days deciding what is the most crucial site or posting; people want to know immediately.

So a new generation of search engines like Tweetmeme, OneRiot, Topsy, Scoopler, and Collecta are trying to redefine what makes a piece of information important.

Some of these sites offer a Digg-like indexed front page that displays hot topics, while others just include a simple search field. But most of them rely heavily on Twitter. When a burst of tweets citing a particular subject or URL emerges, it’s a “signaling event,” as Rishab Ghosh of Topsy puts it. To make sure they’re not just getting hoodwinked by spammers, these new search engines employ some clever tricks, like crawling tweeted URLs and discarding those that land on sites containing spamlike language. Most disregard Twitter users who behave like spambots—for example, ones that follow thousands of people but have very few followers themselves.

Other ploys abound. OneRiot has a toolbar that lets users flag an interesting post immediately. Collecta actively imports blog posts and tweets so they appear in search results less than a second after they go live, rather than the hours it can take regular search engines to catalog the same info. “We want to be limited only by the speed of light,” Collecta CTO Jack Moffitt jokes.

The result is something curiously different from regular searching. If you hunt for “Michael Jackson” on a traditional engine like Ask.com or Bing, the vast majority of the links remain the same day to day. Authority changes slowly on the “old” Web. But real-time search engines deliver different, updated results almost every time.

The creators of these new engines argue that their goal isn’t to answer questions— à la Google—but to organize experience into a keyhole glimpse of what the world is doing at this very moment. “It’s exactly what your friends are going to be talking about when you get to the bar tonight,” OneRiot executive Tobias Peggs says. “That’s what we’re finding.” Google settles arguments; real-time search starts them.

Edo Segal, a pioneer in real-time search, thinks the field is going to explode as updates become more automatic, with our devices autoreporting where we are, how we’re feeling, and what we’re doing and seeing. Old-school search will never vanish, but real-time news will create a society where we have an omnipresent sense of the moment. “Google organized our memory,” Segal says. “Real-time search organizes our consciousness.”

Email clive@clivethompson.net.

To: A. Sorkin, D. Fincher


cc: Hollywood


Re: Facebook Movie

Gentlemen: My Google Reader informs me that you two are teaming up to write and direct a making-of-Facebook story (working title: The Social Network). While I’m a tad offended I wasn’t notified through more formal channels—I am, after all, a member of Facebook and therefore entitled to give notes—I offer my heartiest congratulations. Aaron, I have no idea how you pulled off that script: Mark Zuckerberg isn’t exactly known for rapid badinage, and Facebook, as concept, resists the bricks-and-mortar convention of hallway “walk-and-talks.” (Wish you’d landed the Doom movie, A-Sorks—nothing but hallways in that one! Very West Wing.) On the other hand, a movie about Ivy League twerps putting their yearbook online, suing each other over boilerplate code, and ultimately dispatching a hapless foe (MySpace) sounds like a good flick for you to helm, Finchy. Lemme guess the twist: Those Nordic twins with the runaway pituitaries still litigating for a share of Facebucks? They’re not real, right? They’re Zuckerberg’s Doublemint version of Tyler Durden—chips off the ol’ id.

But enough backslapping: Let’s talk turkey. This is going to be a terrible movie, right? I mean, it better be. Because Hollywood’s ancien régime is counting on you to make social media look bad. They’re eager to embalm Web 2.0 in celluloid. Otherwise, why bother with some silly silicon catfight? The titanic tech war between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would’ve made a riveting flick 25 years ago. But Hollywood couldn’t muster interest in those propellerheads back then and, decades later, relegated the whole saga into a made-for-TV-movie.

Today, however, the fear of new microstudios (College Humor, Funny or Die) and delivery systems (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is so fierce and so tangible that Tinseltown is reaching for its weapon of last resort: the handshake. Hey, Social Media! Wanna be in pictures? Well, of course it does, the same way triumphal Japanese businessmen enjoyed visiting Graceland in the ’80s—to pose with a glitzy cultural relic. If you want to kill something in the shell, pluck it prematurely and smear it all over the big screen. It’ll go from cutting edge to lite-FM lame faster than you can say “You’ve got mail.”

With that in mind, I’d love to talk future projects. Let’s get crackin’ on Left 4 Twitter. The pitch: It’s a zombie picture! The logline: A social network is thrown into panic when its members’ very souls get sucked away by a simpler, faster, more smartphone-friendly social network. And here’s your summer tent pole: Google Toolbar: Revenge of the Copyright. This one’s pretty tried-and-true: Take an old brand we all feel a little nostalgic for, pour on the special effects, and cast Megan Fox as the cheesecake. When all the Google apps combine to form one massive menacing Toolbar (and unsheath the blazing Tool-sword), a collective OMFG! will shake this nation the likes of which hasn’t been felt since Goatse. And speaking of Goatse: I hope like hell you’re ready to meet Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest outrageous character: GOATSE! He’s … well, you know who he is. We’re going to send him to a church in the South, then just let the cameras run until the cops show up.

See the genius? Hollywood can simultanously appropriate and neutralize new media brands by miring them in old-media corn and cliché. The theoretical target audience for The Social Network—250 million (and counting) Facebookers—think of the site as small-screen Web utility, not big-screen fare; and nobody would confuse Mark Zuckerberg with Citizen Kane. Let’s hope this movie goes straight to video and Hollywood maintains its oligopoly. That’ll show those code monkeys who’s boss. Yeah! High five! Peace out. —Scott

Email scott_brown@wired.com.

Mary Spio has been a server at McDonald’s and an aerospace engineer at Boeing. She holds one of the patents that make it possible to send movies to theaters digitally (no. 7,065,355, relating to “very high data rate satellite transmission”). She also founded a successful singles magazine called One2One Living and currently runs Gen2Media, an Internet-oriented video production and distribution company.

Now Spio is bringing her talents to Xbox Live. About 17 million people subscribe to Microsoft’s online entertainment service, and a new one signs up every five seconds. But they still come mainly for gaming; the media offerings are mostly network fare—not exactly in the strike zone for Xbox users. “They’re not watching American Idol or America’s Got Talent,” Spio says. “They’re playing Rock Band.” What these kids need, she says, is customized content.

So she’s planning a show called The Verge, a cross between—of course—America’s Got Talent and Rock Band. Independent artists will produce their own music and submit it via e360live.com. Viewers and a panel of industry professionals will then pick 20 entrants to be featured on Xbox Live, and subscribers can vote on their favorites. Spio’s production team will shoot footage and gather backstories on the 20 finalists, to be woven into weekly programs leading up to the finale this winter. “This is the Guitar Hero generation,” Spio says. “We want to make shows that match their taste.” Sure, it’s harder than selling Big Macs—but probably easier than building rockets.