Wag masyadong atat mag-retweet.

We've had a couple of opportunities to see and measure Twitter's potential as a communication tool—during the heavy monsoon rains the other week, for example, when the government used it to aid rescue operations.

As a news source, however, it (and the Internet in general) has a long way to go. Tonight is a case in point. News of Sec. Jesse Robredo's plane crashing into waters off Masbate spread quickly on Twitter. So did false reports that he had been rescued. Traditional media outlets were quick to deny such reports, but on Twitter, even more than in real life, rumors reach the other side of the world before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on.

Twitsperts have been navel-gazing quite a lot online lately, lauding the Internet's capacity to allow news to travel at a blinding rate. But tonight's incident should dissuade the "certified bloggers" of the world from getting together for another circlejerk. Twitter spread the news of the Robredo plane crash quickly, but it also blurred a lot of the details of the story. And it happened in part because people were all too willing to retweet without checking for accuracy, all for the sake of being a social media influencer, a person with online clout, or whatever the hell we call pretentious Internet users nowadays. That's thoroughly counterproductive for a tool we routinely refer to as the future of journalism.

So, haughty Twitter users, before you pat each other on the back for your show of love and concern for Robredo's family and scold other people for tweeting about things not related to the plane crash, please know: you're nowhere near as awesome as you think you are.

On fairness, balance and the worldwide Interwebs

Noemi Dado wrote about a video that recently made the rounds that claims facts about the Cojuangco-Aquino family. It's a treasure trove of biting accusations, dubious data and water-cooler fodder. You can watch it here.

The merit of the video is another matter. All I'll say about it here is that it looks like propaganda to me, so I won't accept what it says at face value.

I hoped that Ms Dado would have, too, especially since she wrote the post for BlogWatch, a reputable online "citizen media" site that, in theory, should be fair and balanced. In fact, she said on Twitter that she wrote the post in the interest of fairness and balance.

However, when you look at her post, you can tell where she's leaning towards. She begins with "Thou shalt not be ignorant," then proceeds to reproduce, in full, the description of the video, which explains the motivation behind it and where it sources its facts. After posting the entirety of the description, she inserts excerpts of comments about it by historian Xiao Chua. Not the entirety of Chua's Facebook note, just the first few paragraphs. In fact, the body of Chua's reaction, which Dado excluded from the post, largely disproves the arguments of the video, but she makes no mention of it. This is followed by a long list of tweeted reactions to the video, the overwhelming majority of which were approving of it.

You'll have to read her post yourself, but I think you'll find that she herself approves of the video. The tweets she posted about the issue reveal her stand, too.

Fielding criticism from bloggers, she said she posted about the video in the name of fairness and balance. Her aim, she said, was to present all sides. But the post itself betrays a lack of will on her part to keep the discussion fair. Furthermore, her tweets, more than anything else, challenged the Cojuangco-Aquinos and their supporters to disprove the video.

Of course, we all have our own personal biases, human as we are. But the lack of balance in Dado's post, which (I will repeat) she wrote in the name of fairness and balance, is a disservice to her readers and to the discourse on the matter. She says she presented both sides, but instead she presented one of them, then inserted excerpts from the other. Inserting Chua's comments was a nice gesture, I guess, but I think it was a cop-out, a token act. It didn't balance her discussion of the issue.

I pointed this out to Dado on Twitter (in much fewer words, obviously), and she said, "Well if you think I was not balanced, maybe you can make a blog post about it and share it here instead of splitting hairs." She suggested I curate my own Twitter reactions, and added, "Sorry na lang if that is all I found. Verify it yourself." I found her response disappointing, especially since I only pointed these out to her because she had written the post in question for want of fairness.

In short, she said she was fair, and I (and many others) begged to differ. The discussion kind of disintegrated from there.

Steve Jobs, 56. Long live Steve.

The demo units at Switch Technohub

I denied Steve Jobs's death when I first heard of it.

"Steve Jobs is dead?" Mama texted me while I was on a jeep to Katipunan to meet Katz for breakfast. "No, just retired," I replied.

"Our television must be lying, then," read her reply.

Incredulous, I opened Twitter on my iPhone 4. The tweets weren't loading, so I opened up Mobile Safari and began googling.

The news outfits had broken their stories on Jobs only half an hour earlier.

* * *

Truth be told, I don't think I've fully absorbed Steve Jobs's death yet. We all knew his health was deteriorating. We knew it when he had to take three medical leaves as CEO. We knew his health was the reason he had to step down from Apple—his love for his company wouldn't allow him to resign for any less. We knew his battle with disease had become permanent, that cancer had become his lifelong foe.

Still, I never imagined I would have to hear the news of his death this early. I'd imagined myself finding out about it a solid two or three decades later, plopped on a couch at home next to my child in front of whatever iDevice would be the fashion of the time. Jobs would have been cozily retired by the time he died, fully satisfied with what he would have had accomplished.

I guess to me, Jobs's death felt like a film screening stopped before the closing credits ended. I think the thought process in my head was something like, "No, it can't be. Steve still has so much to show us."

Not that we haven't seen anything from the man that revolutionized desktop computing, our mobile experience and the way we listen to music. I will fight anyone who says that Steve hasn't made a mark; you couldn't ignore his impact if you had three layers of blindfolds on. Still I think we felt that he had more, much much more left to show us, that the show was far from its end. Steve just needed to take a break.

It didn't help that the day before his death, Tim Cook and the rest of the team he entrusted his life's work to announced the iPhone 4S. Although Steve couldn't go on stage to show the world the device, we know he was hands-on in creating it. For all we know, the early prototypes of the iPhone 5 are sitting in an Apple laboratory somewhere, not quite fully formed yet, but with the fingerprints of Steve Jobs all over them. Steve's vision was so far-reaching, we can't tell for sure where he stopped looking.

I suspect we won't know for sure for a long time to come.

* * *

I could say Steve means the most to me as the man who made me feel personally connected to the chunks of metal that are my gadgets. But really, when I think of Steve I think of a tremendous presenter who knew how to get a message across and engage and spark enthusiasm in his audience.

The tips I picked up just watching Steve's keynotes help me in school, when I have a report or some other kind of visual presentation to do. More than that, however, I learned from Steve to do what you want, do it with genuine enthusiasm and believe in it. The enthusiasm and belief of whoever you're trying to convince will follow naturally.

Jobs did what he wanted to do, and he didn't feel threatened by "the system." He thought different; he spent his limited time on Earth to make a difference. He set out to put a ding in the Universe, and thanks to him, it now looks like a half-eaten apple.

I aspire to live the Jobs way every day of my life.

Apple fanboy notes: iOS 5

If there's one thing to be excited about in iOS 5, it's the overhaul of the notification system, which Apple users have been waiting for ever since we received our first text. Twitter integration is nice; the upgrades to the Camera app, I have right now because I bought Camera+. Reminders? Okay. Newsstand? Sure. But man, that new implementation for notifications—it's like cut and paste all over again.

If there's one thing to hate about iOS 5, it's that it's a long way away from devices. Apple says it'll be available in the fall (September, for my fellow tropics-dwellers).