Explanation requested. A day of mindcasting at http://twitter.com/jayrose... is, say, 8 to 20 tweets. That's 200 to 500 words, plus links. Many of those links do not repeat; they're new and cool but divergent, and the stream is mostly that: a new post here, a document over there, an idea, a refutation. BUT... some in the 20 a day collect around a standout controversy or key debate or big-to-me event, and those "threads" can be short or long, shallow or deep. They range from a simple daily schema (3-4 Tweets over one and a half days like Mark Moford's column today) to an ongoing thread (Santelli-Stewart-Cramer, 20 to 30 Tweets over weeks) or a characteristic-to-me theme (curmudgeon studies, hundreds of Tweets over many months). That's the varying rates I spoke of. So the flow is Jay's new media newsfeed in divergent micro-posts flowing "against" repeating elements that give form and thread (and value) to the flow over time. Mindcasting reaches the users with BOTH kinds of value. "It's the mix!" - Jay Rosen

A satisfied customer! @studentactivism: @jayrosen_nyu Got it, thanks. I agree. And I find that the themes reveal themselves at least as often as I plan them out." Yes, that too. It's part of the mix: patterns injected, patterns emergent. - Jay Rosen

@karthauser: @jayrosen_nyu "Mindcasting is link flow adjusted by repeating themes that rise and fade"--And memes are what emerge systemically?" - Jay Rosen

Thus: people who equate message length--140 characters--with the length of a thought you can sustain over Twitter are wrong, or just limited in their thinking. Using myself as an example. "More and more cracks in the wall for the View from Nowhere..." is a thought I feel have sustained over Twitter. See: http://is.gd/ogaZ - Jay Rosen

Another thought I have been developing in a sustained away with a term that returns amid new illustrations and an accumulation of links: the ideology of fluff. http://is.gd/ny9N - Jay Rosen