In an interview at Dangerous Minds, William Gibson (@GreatDismal) raves (in an understated way) about Twitter.

Q: Every morning, when you fire up your computer, where do you start looking?

A: Twitter… I find Twitter to be the most powerful aggregator of sheer (shared?) novelty that humanity has yet possessed… Quite seriously. If you are following the right 70 people, and each of them is a full-on aggregator of novelty, you’re getting their picks… It’s like you’re getting this incredible triple-filtered hit. It would be the 1990s equivalent of a shopping bag filled with $500 of imported magazines.

Q: Who on Twitter do you follow that has the best information?

A: I don’t think I have one favorite .… The people who provide me with the most novel and diverse material are often people who have no particular reputation for doing that.… You can date the entry of Twitter into my manuscript by the porn bot reference. They’re gone now.

Q: Steven Johnson was writing about Twitter in TIME magazine and he said that you have a peripheral awareness of a lot of things… you’re getting things in the ether, around you… Do you think that fringe ideas are coming more into the mainstream as a result of things like Twitter?

A: I think that the concept of mainstream is probably becoming archaic. We have the paradigm as very central to our society. We take it culturally for granted. The way things are going on the Internet, I’m starting to wonder if the paradigm is still valid.

Q: Relating to corporation money-making efforts on the Net.

A: For a quarter of a century, I’ve been saying we’re living in a world of exponential change driven by emergent technologies. That was the cyberpunk chorus… it’s starting to look like it’s finally happening big time.

Q: Relating to cultural artifacts like Lost.

A: Generally we don’t know what we were doing with something until we stop doing it.

In the chat, Gibson talks about the importance of peripheral awareness, his filter on mainstream culture (which is in the ‘on’ position most of the time), political consensus (he thinks it may be history). He thinks Google has changed the “meaning of exposition.”

Over at 10000Words.net (a wonderful site for digital journalists), Mark S. Luckie describes how he transitioned from Twitter skeptic (“I am suspicious of anything being touted as the next. best. thing.”) to evangelist (“It took being unemployed to really understand how Twitter could be used to foster community and relationships.”).

Mark shares how the Twitter community gave him job leads as well as encouragement to write a book.

Read it and be inspired.