Arg! The Kodak ZI8 doesn't remember your microphone gain settings between power ups. Not a problem when you are using the internal microphone as it is sufficiently sensitive enough. But it is very noticeable if you are using an external microphone.
Lesson learned for the day.
The Atlantic: James Fallows: "On Today's Hot Media Stories: Sherrod, "Journolist".
The only way it would be so is if we collectively stop watching, stop clicking, and stop linking to such witch hunts, such hatred, served in pursuit of traffic and ratings.
And you would think that by now, in our media-savvy land, we'd instinctively know that soundbites out of context lead to misunderstanding.
For a world of context from all sides, check out the Memeorandum thread.
Interested in how information reaches those it needs to reach? Intersted in acts of journalism crossing cultural gulfs and divides? Interested in web services and connectivity? You will want to watch Ethan Zuckerman's talk at TEDGlobal 2010 and I hope be inspired: "Ethan Zuckerman: Listening to global voices":
Check out his ideas on how to use Twitter to open up your world.
Zuckerman and danah boyd are helping establish a reasoned view of the Web and its potential based upon its now decade-plus history. It is why I feel project's like Zuckerman's Global Voices are so important. Following is danah boyd's talk at PDF 2009: "danah boyd - PdF2009 - The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online":
Related:
Ethan Zuckerman's transcription of the talk
danah boyd: transcription of her Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) 2009 talk: "The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online"
Clay Shirky: "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality"
Guardian.co.uk: John Naughton: "The internet: Everything you ever need to know"
Previously:
"If you believe in The Long Tail, then stop saying the web is "flat" okay?"
"It exists, and its influence matters"
The call to action:
raise voices, go beyond babel, engineer serendipity, build bridges, cultivate xenophiles, rewire
Well this doesn't get you exactly there, but László Kozma has a Perl script and some analysis that points you to the top sentences on the Web that start with "How can I" using Google. Fascinating stuff.
You can read about it at Nieman Journalism Lab.
Check out some sample reports:
ProPublica: Buried Secrets: Gas Drilling's Environmental Threat
Related:
I have a Kodak Zi8 recorder that I am planning to use to upload videos to YouTube with. It produces fantastic quality videos, but more important, it has a stereo microphone jack, so that I can use it to record live music or interviews with a high degree of audio quality.
Tim Conneally, over at Betanews, has put together a great guide to putting together a kit that will fit into a 15 inch notebook sleeve.
Based upon its recommendations, I have already purchased a Dynex Video Bracket.
Next steps are two by a microphone and lastly, a lamp. I'm looking for recommendations if you have them.
Mat Schaffer has offered, based upon personal experience, the SP-BMC-1 from Sound Professionals.
My price limit is up to the Rode VideoMic being used by Tim Conneally.
Fran Guidry recommends the SP-SPSM-15 from Sound Professionals and the (discontinued) AT825 from Broadcast Production & Microphones.
G4 and Kevin Pereira: "BP Oil Spill Effect on Wildlife".
G4, the games channel. Yes, the games channel!
This makes sense in a world where the most informative pieces of national news journalism are coming from a music magazine and nightly comedy show doesn't it?
This sounds like a fantastic opportunity for programmers who want to become familiar with journalism, and journalists to become familiar with programming.
O'Reilly Radar: Mike Loukides: "What is Data Science?"
Media Shift: Marc Glaser: "Why Journalists Should Learn Computer Programming"
Rafe Colburn: "Why journalists should learn to program" - with a suggestion on what really to be digging into - and I agree.
Resource: Hacks/Hackers
Good move on Google's part. Nieman Journalism Lab: "Google News experiments with human control, promotes a new serendipity with Editors' Picks"
Mashable: "Google News and Why Human Editors Still Matter"
Previously: Techmeme: "Guess what? Automated news doesn't quite work."
I try and spend some time each week serving lunch at Project H.O.M.E.'s "Women of Change" with other fellow CIM Volunteers. I'm engaging some of the folks who work at Women of Change into possibly trying a project along these lines. I think Mark Horvath is onto something by sharing these stories as raw as he does.
NPR.org: "Former Homeless Man's Videos Profile Life On Street"
Reference Links:
eMedia: Remix the News: "Remix the News: what news can learn from Last.fm and Pandora": "there is no service that adequately customizes content to my tastes based on previous reading"
A good read with some important ideas. The only thing close I can think of is Google Reader's recommendations which are based upon my clicking activity in Google Reader.
One of the commenters in Sean's post added some thoughts about 'intelligent serendipity'. 'Intelligent Serendipity' will be all important if we intend to help people get the news they need to hear, but might not be aware of it.
Some links on 'intelligent serendipity':
Jeff Jarvis: "Serendipity is unexpected relevance"
Chis Anderson: "What would it take to build a true "serendipity-maker"?"
Mathew Ingram: "In defence of newspapers and serendipity"
Inside Guardian.com: "The Random Guardian"
Somewhere in here is the news experience of the future. Helping people connect with what they are interested in, and helping them connect with what they would (should?) be interested in, but just aren't aware of it yet. Isn't that the essence of 'news'?
Read Roger Ebert's latest post: "The golden age of movie critics".
Starbulletin: "Khan's tutorials display promise of broadband".
PBS NewsHour: Math Wiz Takes Education to New Limits on YouTube
Related:
NPR.org profiles the hosts of Snopes.com in "Mom-And-Pop Site Busts The Web's Biggest Myths".
NYTimes: "Building a Better Teacher":
But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. "Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn't have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching," Gates said. "I'm personally very curious."When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn't expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. "Stand still when you're giving directions," a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don't do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.
It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?
Related:
Change This: Jon Wortmann: "The Best Communicator in the World"
They say that history is written by the victors. But now, before the victors win, there is a chance to scream out with a text message that will not vanish. What would we know about what passed between Turks and Armenians, between Germans and Jews, if every one of them had had the chance, before the darkness, to declare for all time: "I was here, and this is what happened to me"?- Anand Giridharadas in the NYTimes in "Africa's Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis".
Ushahidi sounds inspiring.
The project is on Github.
Seth Finkelstein has posted his answers to a Pew survey on the future of the Internet, and Google making us stupid (or not) in a thought provoking yet grounded (which is rare on the Web - admit it!) post.
Seth - if you're reading - I miss your blogging.
Boston Globe: Joe Keohane: Imaginary fiends: In 2009, crime went down. In fact it's been going down for a decade. But more and more Americans believe it's getting worse. Why do we refuse to believe the good news?
Boston Globe: Easy = True: How 'cognitive fluency' shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel
Clay Shirky, in a recent talk at Web 2.0 Expo New York, challenged us to stop talking about information overload as an excuse, recognize it as a fact (one that's existed for a long time and will not diminish in the future), and to work on building better filters.
Watch Clay Shirky on information overload versus filter failure:
Titles like the Boing Boing one are kinda unfortunate because they frame Shirky's view to be one that would be in opposition to lets say, David Shenk's from his book "Data Smog".
Far from it.
David Shenk attempted to identify the information landscape we are living in now way back in 1997. In a 2007 piece in Slate he took a critical look back.
As with any look forward, the book wildly missed the mark with some of its more grim predictions, but in many ways still has much to offer and think about.
In particular, towards the end of the book Shenk proposed a personal call to action for building better filters (learning to be our own for example) and to be better information producing citizens (being our own editors). Big foreshadowing of Shirky's talk there.
Most reviews of the book focussed on Shenk's definition of the problem and pooh-poohed his suggestions. So here we are, many years down the line, and most of the focus is *still* grousing about 'information overload'.
Clay Shirky's point is its high time to stop doing that and get busy building the tools, protocols, customs and businesses that will help us not only deal with it, but thrive from it.
danah boyd: "Facebook's move ain't about changes in privacy norms"
Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we've changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn't be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don't have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they'd like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don't think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don't want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?
Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don't have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That's the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn't dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?
Related:
Bruce Schneier: "The Eternal Value of Privacy"
Nicholas Carr: Other people's privacy
I'm cautiously optimistic about this and am excited to see it play out. There is dire need for continued experimentation.
The strategy being discussed this go around is a Financial Times-like metered system (they call it the "frequency-model" - more at Portfolio). This would, theoretically, allow the New York Times to retain its reach and users driven to it via search, links, etc, while deriving revenue from heavy readers:
At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: "At the end of the day, if we don't get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system."
But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year's financial crisis, the argument pushed by Keller and others -- that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper's high-cost, ambitious journalism -- gained more weight. The view was that the Times needed to make the leap to some form of paid content and it needed to do it now. The trick would be to build a source of real revenue through online subscriptions while still being able to sell significant online advertising. The appeal of the metered model is that it charges high-volume readers while allowing casual browsers to sample articles for free, thus preserving some of the Times' online reach.
Read all about it in New York Magazine's "New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers".
It used to be common place when a women was raped to blame her in America: to say that she wore the wrong clothes, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time, or sent out the 'wrong signals'. Unfortunately, this attitude still exists in parts of the world.
It is still commonin America to take the default position that when a person loses their job, their house, their lively hoods, to put the blame on their shoulders. Even in the 'Great Recession' we are now in. They didn't work hard enough. They didn't move with the times fast enough. They were losers or uneducated due to their own laziness.
I have heard, horrifically, when people have lost children, or gotten cancer, or were dealing with mental illness, they simply didn't *pray* enough. That God must be teaching them a lesson.
All this is echoed in what Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson spewed this week.
I'm a free speech absolutist, so I'm not going to say these creatures don't have a right to speak.
But fuck them.
You have the power to walk away, turn the channel, delete that bookmark.
Events like the earthquake in Haiti do put things in perspective. In addition they help separate those that actually *care* for other human beings from those that think they are the center of the world or are the marketers of that.
Update: Satan writes Pat Robertson a letter.
As Fred Clark says Pat Robertson would tell Jesus he must have deserved it.
I started to pull together some choice quotes from Bruce Sterling, answering questions about the "State of the World 2010" at the WELL, but realized I'd be quoting far too much. You are better off reading the whole thing yourself. Enjoy.
Okay, one quote! In this he is discussing network-culture:
It's not that print's a medium, and the web's a medium, and you get to migrate between media. The Web is a metamedium that turns everything it grips into network-culture.
*So it's easy to see that mags are in for it. What's a little harder is looking at the hollow shell of your once-favorite antique shop and realizing that's all about eBay. "Gee, I'm on the web all the time now... time for a stroll, it's a sunny day... Gosh, my neighborhood's full of spooky holes." Gothic High-Tech.
Update: Wired: Katie Hafner The Epic Saga of The Well
NPR: In Memoriam: Sweet, Sad Rocker Vic Chesnutt
NPR: The Man Is Gone, But Long Live The Blogosphere (via Garret Vreeland). Jeff Jarvis knows blogging as well as anybody, but NPR should have talked to people who knew Brad Graham, or, as Garret suggests, were at least among his contemporaries in that first wave of blogging. He offered way more than the word 'blogosphere' to the history of blogging and way more to the world other than blogging. Check out this related Metafilter thread.
Being the Difference names Mark Horvath "Person of the Year".
Read the link - be inspired - then find a way to act. No matter how small. A tweet here, a blog post there, actually can push the ball forward. Making a donation to organizations like Project HOME or donating your time, even better.
Lately, my mind has been thinking about Camden Hopeworks. They are a nonprofit teaching program that provides youth with experience building websites and GIS/Mapping solutions for clients across the area. Check out the Hopeworks GIS Gallery.
Bob Burtman, for Miller-McCune, recently wrote a related piece about GIS, "The Revolution Will Be Mapped". You will want to check out the Metafilter thread it spawned.
Both sides of the fence represented in the following links:
Tech Crunch: The End of Hand Crafted Content
Daily Patricia Daily Patricia - Dumb Things Media 2.0 Loves To Say
Doc Searls: The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated
Jeff Jarvis: Content farms v. curating farmers
Paul Kedrosky: Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail
Read the whole thing. Nieman Journalism Lab: Clay Shirky at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy:
...in the nightmare scenario that I've kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption -- that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they're shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.
...So we don't need another different kind of institution that does 85 percent of accountability journalism. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they're endowments or crowdsourced or what have you -- we need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row. That's the issue before us. There will not be anything that replaces newspapers, because if you could write the list of stuff you needed and organizational characteristics and it looked like newspapers, newspapers would be able to fill that role, right?
It is really a shift from one class of institutions to the ecosystem as a whole where I think we have to situate the need of our society for accountability. I also want to distance myself -- and I'll end shortly. But I want to distance myself, with that observation I also want to distance myself from the utopians in my tribe, the web tribe, and even to some degree the optimists.
I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it's amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns -- I think that's baked into the current environment. I don't think there's any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.
Again read the whole thing.
People tend to pick apart Shirky's writings to find what supports their arguments. Which, I partially just did in fact, so don't do that - absorb the nuance because the opportunities and problems at hand are far more complicated than the either naysayers or utopians would lead us believe.
Dries Buytaert: Whitehouse.gov using Drupal
Tim O'Reilly: Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal
PDF: WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal
Content Here: Is Drupal the right platform for whitehouse.gov?
I think you can trace this way back to 2004 and Howard Dean's run for the presidency. Their team chose Drupal as the framework to leverage for their web efforts and it paid off as part of what was the most Internet-savvy campaign by that time. Inspired by that campaign and their use of technology, I had relaunched Philly Future in fact.
Dries Buytaert says of the choice:
First of all, I think Drupal is a perfect match for President Barack Obama's push for an open and transparent government -- Drupal provides a great mix of traditional web content management features and social features that enable open communication and participation. This combination is what we refer to as social publishing and is why so many people use Drupal. Furthermore, I think Drupal is a great fit in terms of President Barack Obama's desire to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal's flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems. In other words, Drupal is a great match for the U.S. government.
I can't help but agree.
Dave Winer: What I've learned about Hyperlocal
OJR: Tom Grubisich: What are the lessons from Dan Gillmor's Bayosphere?
Mark Glasser: Dan Gillmor Finds His Center
Different situations, but lessons to learn from each are there. And in both cases, the founders shared those lessons with the wider Internet audience. Hopefully more do the same.
Kickingbear: "Blog Archive » Don't Be A Dick: Compiled Flash and You.":
Programming is an exercise in overcoming how wrong you've been in the past. At first you'll overcome the syntax errors, then you'll overcome the structural errors, and then you'll come to align your code with the standards of a greater community and you'll feel safe and like you've made it. You haven't - you're still wrong because you're always wrong. You are playing a game you cannot win. And let's face it - if it was a game you could win you'd not be playing at all.
The Nieman Journalism Lab: Mathew Ingram: Newspapers get the kind of communities they deserve:
many newspapers still see comments as some kind of necessary evil: a bone tossed to readers to help drive traffic, but something that produces little else of value
That attitude is behind what renders the commenting at most newspaper websites so defective.
Surfacing the community around your news has way more to do with participating with it online than just enabling comments and walking away. In fact, doing the later by itself never works.
The web is littered with sites where commenting is enabled, and the hosts do not participate, do not curate, do not even moderate in a transparent fashion. The results of which are never good - thread after thread of trolling, personal invective, and lack of communication. This leads to far too many finding commenting as worthless add-on that you must have for a website, but for no other reason.
It's a missed opportunity and for many of these sites, part of their failed web strategies.
If you have 10 million visitors a month and only 1 person focused on 'community' or 'commenting' - you have already failed.
Will Bunch: Inquirer editor says you're going to pay for this
Joshua-Michéle Ross : Stop Giving the Newspapers Your Advice - They Don't Need It
Realistic views I heard at the norgs unconference maybe finally taking hold.
Smokescreen is a privacy and data sharing awareness game for teenagers. via Boing Boing.
Shelley Powers was outright slandered by taking a sentence out of context from a comment she made: link.
This is part of the game of modern politics and modern media. The lack of apology from those involved is pretty damning, because no one wants to admit they participate in it or are part of the larger problem. A larger problem that is leading all of us to be less informed about the world around us when there is so much media available.
We have a responsibility one another. When you write from a position of trust - don't abuse it.
I was contacted by someone who teaches journalism for my thoughts on Daily News and Inquirer plans to charge readers - how they might affect local bloggers who often link, comment, or refer to the news from those online publications. He asked three difficult questions.
I have to add that my hopes are that the papers remain local and that the bankruptcy proceedings are favorable to the local ownership. While I may disagree on paywalls, I feel that the news organizations within the papers stand the best chance at survival that way.
Alan Kay on comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.beginners: Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms:
What is wrong? Why is mere opinion so dominating discussions held on the easiest medium there has ever been that can provide substantiations with just a little curiosity and work? Is the world completely reverting to an oral culture of assertions held around an electronic campfire?
That quote is going to be passed around a lot.
It's a one paragraph penetrating question into why the Bill O'Reilly's of the world have so much more popularity then those who pursue the fact based journalism that a Bill Moyers pursues.
BTW - Howard Rheingold's recent post at SFGate, "Crap Detection 101" is highly recommended (via Rebecca Blood).
Researchers at Cornell have published a paper titled "Meme-tracking and the Dynamics of the News Cycle" that I need to dig into. They've published visualizations of their research at a NYTimes piece on the study says, "This is a landmark piece of work on the flow of news through the world... And the study shows how Web-scale analytics can serve as powerful sociological laboratories."
Chris Anderson, who in May presented his own research into this to the International Communications Association (ICA) posted his reflections on that research and how it relates: Another Perspective on How "News" "Diffuses": The Francisville 4 from Inside the Newsroom
Scott Rosenberg shares some criticisms in: "Newsies beat bloggers? Some caveats on memetracker study".
Nieman Journalism Lab's Zachary M. Seward summarizes it up: In the news cycle, memes spread more like a heartbeat than a virus.
Tim O'Reilly: Radical Transparency: The New Federal IT Dashboard (and check out the site itself at it.usaspending.gov)
Data.gov iteratively grows from 47 to 100,000 data feeds (source Atrios)
EveryBlock blog: EveryBlock source code released
Tim Bray: "Hello World" for Open Data - Tim Bray reviews, and is inspired by, happenings in Vancover.
And locally SEPTA has started to work with Google to help riders plan trips online
A huge round of thanks needs to go to the folks behind iSepta for showing just what is possible.
This and more was discussed at this year's Personal Democracy Forum - which I missed, which I hopefully won't next year. Sounds like it was a great event.
Related:
O'Reilly radar: John Geraci: The Four Pillars of an Open Civic System
Ignite Philly 2: Geoff DiMassi and Paul Wright "Open Source Philadelphia"
New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell: Priced to Sell - a scathing review of Wired's Chris Anderson's new book "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" and the concepts promoted within.
NYTimes: Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia - the NYTimes coordinated with Wikipedia staff to keep a factual event from appearing on the service.
Say Everything: Chapter One: Putting Everything Out There [Justin Hall]: a review of Justin Hall's history and his efforts on the Web. How they laid the foundation for all that came later.
NiemanJournalismLab: Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian's (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment
Scott Rosenberg: Salon.com IPO: It was ten years ago today
Chris Anderson (not Wired's): We've Been Living Through a Twitter Revolution for the Last 10 Years
I'm really looking forward to reading Scott Rosenberg's "Say Everything".
I'm sure "Say Everything" will be a book I can share with others (which I do with "Dreaming in Code") to provide them insight into why I do some of the things I do and why I get so damn passionate about them.
Writing a book on blogging's history and how it related to the Web, Internet, and society is a difficult task. Based upon excerpts I've read so far, Rafe's review of the first half, and reading his fantastic "Dreaming in Code", I know this book is going to be terrific and insightful.
Speaking of blogging, I got to agree with Rafe - the most awesome thing about blogging *is* "corresponding with so many of the people I met through blogging back then here, on Twitter, and elsewhere.".
Absolutely.
Thank you Web.
Thought provoking, conversation starting, and probably controversial counting upon who you are, check out the whole single page comic.
Inquirer: Bari Pepe, 46, Years of trauma behind her, now she wants to aid others - ex-addict acheives master's in social work. Very inspiring story. Read it.
The Boston Globe: Inside the baby mind: It's unfocused, random, and extremely good at what it does. How we can learn from a baby's brain. - "Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will." - Metafilter thread.
New Yorker: The secret of self-control. - let your toddler's imagination be free, encourage creativity, to try and try again, and understand that we have the power of choice.
Hacking Education - A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
NYTimes: Marc C. Taylor: End the University as We Know It - straight up inspiration about tearing down the status quo to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.
CSMonitor: In tough times, graduates (and parents) assess the worth of a liberal arts education - just an opinion - I think liberal arts majors are well positioned for the economy of today and tomorrow.
Deseret News: Universities will be 'irrelevant' by 2020, Y. professor says
Tom Baker: Getting Involved in Higher Education - software engineers should seriously consider teaching, here's why.
Slashdot.org: With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35?
Inquirer: Daniel Rubin: Grads, please note: It's not about you
xkcd: 1000 Times - its all about context isn't it?
NPRbackstory is an automated Twitter feed that attempts to add context to the news stories trending popular today according to Google's Hot Trends. It leverages NPR's archives (very smart, as Joshua Benton notes archives are underused assets), and Yahoo! Pipes to produce a RSS feed that is fed into the NPRbackstory account. It was developed by Keith Hopper of NPR's Public Interactive group.
Read Joshua Benton's piece at Nieman Journalism Lab
Read more about it at Keith Hopper's blog.
Check out his other Twitter related project - Twitterstars - a tool to find local Twitter power tweeters.
Yesterday afternoon, encouraged by Roz, I found a way to attend BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly. I'm happy I listened to her. It was a great event.
I was late, but in time for four discussions, the biggest highglight of those was TechnicallyPhilly. They gave an enthusiastic, concise description of what they do, how central community and chosen niche were to it, and even had some hints on how to earn a living doing it. Other interesting discussions included Scott Karp's presentation on Publish2 and collaborative news rooms, and the folks behind copress.org, who while working to solve problems commonly found in college online news organizations, are inadvertently addressing many of the problems found in large mainstream online news organizations. There is another presentation, on how to make money on the Internet, that was infuriating for how it looked down on people. As Chris Krewson ponintedly asked, "The take away seems to be that the public is stupid and so are your advertisers".
Biggest highlight for me was getting to meet Amy Z. Quinn after all these years. Amy is someone I "met" online via Philly Future more than three years ago. As were meeting Howard Weaver and Scott Karp for the first time and getting a chance to hang out and catch up with Wendy Warren, Chris Krewson, Aaron Couch, and Chris Anderson.
BTW, if you want a terrific summary of how news gets chosen for Philly.com's (and more than likely the majority of news orgs) home page, the tensions present in its production and what drives it, Chris's research paper: "Web Production, News Judgment, and Emerging Categories of Online Newswork in Metropolitan Journalism" is where you want to go.
Yesterday was quite a day. In the morning I went out with fellow co-workers to Hunting Park to help do some clean up and planting for Comcast Cares Day. It was a small personal victory for me. Previous two years I haven't been able to attend due to the back pain issue. This year, not only could I attend, but I was able to assist for a few hours. There are pictures up on Flickr. Felt great to go out and lend a helping hand with fellow friends.
This is a backgrounder primarily for Arpit who discussed with a few thoughts on Clay Shirky's latest piece on Newspapers.
I wrote an intro for readers of paradox1x, on Clay Shirky, back in September.
A few favorite pieces:
Help, the Price of Information Has Fallen, and It Can't Get Up
A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality
How fun?
Check out the following videos. We're going to eBay to load up on track today.
YouTube: Lieshout Duplo train track (part 2), the helix
YouTube: Just another Sunday afternoon
YouTube: Daniel's Duplo Trains
YouTube: The duplosmasher - for you metal fans out there.
YouTube: The Information Train - for you CompSci fans out there.
Clay Shirky: Help, the Price of Information Has Fallen, and It Can't Get Up
The interesting thing about this piece, written way back in 1995, is that it leaves wide open the concept of information.
Just what is information? People instinctively grasp for "facts" as their definition. But in computing, we think otherwise. Can music be described as information - sure can. Opinions? Yep. Visual arts? Certainly. Video. Yes, even video. Anything that can be described in ones and zeroes can be thought of as information that can be transmitted and shared on a network.
Well, what about advertising? Yes, that too.
Jeneane Sussum: The Value of Words: These. People. Are. Lying. To. You. And. Themselves.
There is a paradox at work here. As the cost of generating and transmitting information decreases, more of it becomes available, thus increasing the need for better filters.
Advertising, Newspapers, and Libraries were the premier filters of the pre-Internet age.
So were the 'big 3' TV stations, radio conglomerates, record companies, book stores and magazine stands for that matter.
Search engines, blogs, social networks, and smart aggregators are those of the now.
How the practices of the old evolve in the infrastructure of the new, how new disciplines arise to meet the needs of today and tomorrow, will determine how informed, or how uninformed, we will be as a society.
Other interesting links for today:
P'unk Avenue Window: What should a modern library be?
reddit: Young Deer hit by google map VAN. Caught on street view.
keithhopper.com: A Brief History of Hyperlocal News
Fanboy.com:
Social Media "Experts" are the Cancer of Twitter (and Must Be Stopped)
MediaPost: Yelp Reviews Spawn At Least Five Lawsuits
Epicenter: eMusic Says Data Supports Long Tail Theory
Epicenter: Want Proof OpenID Can Succeed? Just Scroll Down
ComputerWorld: What the Web knows about you
Nice work New York Times.
Miller-McCune: Deep Throat Meets Data Mining: In the nick of time, the digital revolution comes to democracy's rescue. And, perhaps, journalism's.:
Investigative reporters have long used computers to sort and search databases in pursuit of their stories. Investigative Reporters and Editors and its National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting, for example, hold regular computer-assisted reporting training sessions around the country. And the country's major journalism schools all deal in some way with computer-enhanced journalism. The emerging academic/professional field of computational journalism, however, might be thought of as a step beyond computer-assisted reporting, an attempt to combine the fields of information technology and journalism and thereby respond to the enormous changes in information availability and quality wrought by the digital revolution.I would be remiss to write about computational journalism and not mention Irfan Essa, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who teaches a class in computational journalism and is often credited with coining the term. He says both journalism and information technology are concerned, as disciplines, with information quality and reliability, and he views the new field as a way to bring technologists and journalists together so they can create new computing tools that further the traditional aims of journalism. In the end, such collaboration may even wind up spawning a new participant in the public conversation.
"We're talking about a new breed of people," Essa says, "who are midway between technologists and journalists."
Tools for news is a Django driven application that lists web apps, references, software, and more that would be useful to anyone building a mashup, but in particular if you are a journalist. Via DigiDave.
The NYTimes uses Flash to produce analysis of each match-up in the NFL playoffs and a fun game to predict winners.
Here is one example of upcoming game analysis: Inside the Playbook: Philadelphia at Minnesota
Here is the predict the winner game: Inside the Playbook Challenge
And go Eagles!
Doc Searls: Beyond mediation: We are all media now, right? That's what we, the mediating, tell ourselves. (Or some of us, anyway.) But what if that's not how we feel about it? What if the roles we play are not to pass along substances called "data" or "information" but rather to feed hungry minds? That's different.
I believe that we truly are the media now.
When we criticize 'the media' we are criticizing ourselves. Media is intermingled. It's everywhere and each of us take part from the smallest of web forums to the largest of social networks. That implies a civic responsibility.
People hate that word - responsibility - but there it is. And when it comes to media - the responsibilities that spring from it are now shared by us all.
This much is clear - by the end of 2009, there will be many fewer newspapers publishing in America.
Some attribute the fall of newspapers to:
Coming from where I come from, with the experience that I had at Philly.com, I couldn't help but think that Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky's point of view is a damaging re-write of history that obscures complicated truths. This is disappointing for me because both of them have important knowledge for newspaper organizations that can help them in their on going efforts to evolve, and their posting of what are essentially pieces that incite rather than provide insight did no one any favors. Jeff Jarvis, in particular, has been a major force in pushing along papers to meet the future. And I am literally a *fan* of Clay Shirky's writings - I share many of them with who I work.
It could be that Clay Shirky was trolled by the off the wall piece by Ron Rosenbaum in Slate about Jeff Jarvis. It was a true blue hatchet job. Still, I felt the need to reply in comments to Shirky's piece and to Jeff Jarvis's piece celebrating Shirky's article.
Me, replying to Clay Shirky (paraphrasing):
Sadly it is people like Rosenbaum who get the limelight, when perspectives of those within the industry are far, far different.
In fact they are so different that I say it is a dangerous re-writing of history to say that "The people who made their living from printing the news listened, and then decided not to believe us."
You can pull famous examples such as Dan Gillmor or Jay Rosen or Jeff Jarvis himself.
You can look directly at archive.org to see the competitive state of newspaper websites in the late 90s or early 00s (note when they stopped evolving - the .com crash).
Undeniably there some within news organizations that are (were?) willfully ignorant - for sure - however I can tell you from personal experience that the majority of my ex-co-workers were not keeping their heads in the sand and had fought (are fighting) tooth and nail to bring culture change to their organizations.
Take a look at
http://inquirer.philly.com/packages/somalia/
1997.
These organizations were doing fabulously well in their economics btw. So much so that what is occurring is a textbook example of "the Innovator's Dilemma" (thank you Henry Copeland for suggesting that book to me so long ago!).
You are more correct in your glacier analogy - however - think of it as a slow approaching death - a frog in a slow boiling pot of water.
Speaking of Dan Gillmor - I remember the difficulties he faced in getting his first blog off the ground within Knight Ridder. But he wasn't alone in pursuing the future.
It is factually incorrect to state otherwise.
If there are any lessons to be learned by all this - they won't occur if the narrative becomes a simplistic "we spoke - they ignored".
And to not expect people to cry out as they lose their jobs - jobs that many have been fighting to transform when they are still relevant (the reporting not the papers) is bull.
Oh, and speaking of those in the trenches, consider speaking to Wendy Warren, Will Bunch, and Daniel Rubin of Philly.com, the Daily News, and Inquirer.
As Jeff Jarvis himself spoke well of two years ago:
http://www.buzzmachine.com/2006/03/25/saving-journalism-and-killing-the-press/
This narrative of "us smart people verus those dumb-asses who deserve what they get" needs to stop.
Me, replying to Jeff Jarvis (paraphrasing):
I'll call bullshit on Clay and you both on the idea that no one has been "caught up in this great upheaval". I'm a big fan of Clay Shirky. I share his writing with folks at work all the time and I've actually quoted him to you in various responses to you over the years. There have been many newspaper folks fighting for change in that industry over the past ten years.
Ya know, there is part of me that is downright mad at this - it almost resembles a re-writing of history.
I maybe in your ignore list now Jeff, I'm not sure.
But I am secure in knowing that of the many, many people losing their jobs and careers in the midst of this ongoing revolution - a revolution I feel part of as an early adopter, promoter, evangelist, software engineer, blogger and more - there are thousands that do *not* deserve blame for what is going on.
I WILL NOT thumb my nose at them.
They fought, and in many places continue to fight, to drive business and culture changes in organizations that still have relevant value in a world where we are no better informed then we were 10 years ago according to Pew.
Change is life. But the big story here isn't in the numbers of people who willfully looked the other way. There was some. But not the vast majority of people I worked with in the trenches at Philly.com.
Hell no.
And my heart goes out to them who fought (and continue to fight) with everything they have - to turn their ship around from the glacier that Shirky is right to indicate.
When the definitive history of this is recorded, hopefully it will capture the truth - that many of the guns pointed at the patient were those of the patient - but willful ignorance was the least of these. That many knew they were pursuing immediate profits over long term investments. Others were fighting for change and evolution to meet the future in every single project they worked on and found frustrating blockers in culture and immediate ROI turnaround demands of established businesses meeting the calls of investors. That culture and technology were dealing death blows to the 'paper' as information costs dropped towards zero and we each became empowered with our own printing presses - the Web.
There are *many* reasons. But I repeat - the narrative of "us smart people verus those dumb-asses who deserve what they get" needs to stop.
Everyone needs to get over themselves already.
Elsewhere and recent:
Talking Points Memo has announced it will be sending two new additional paid reporters to Washington DC while it has been reported that newspapers will be sending far fewer to cover happenings at the Capitol.
Pew Research Center, in a recent study, has announced the Internet has overtaken newspapers as a source of news.
Consumers Union (publisher of Consumer Reports) is buying Consumerist from Gawker Media. More on the news at Consumerist.
Business Week takes a look at other business models for journalism including a glance at Spot.us.
And at the LA Times an important milestone has been reached Web site revenue now exceeds its editorial payroll costs.
Meanwhile, Gabe Rivera speaks some hard to hear truth (to some) about automated news filters: Guess what? Automated news doesn't quite work.
Jay Rosen summarizes the moment: Migration Point for the Press Tribe:
The professional news tribe is in the midst of a great survival drama. It has over the last few years begun to realize that it cannot live any more on the ground it settled so successfully as the industrial purveyors of one-to-many, consensus-is-ours news. The land that newsroom people have been living on--also called their business model--no long supports their best work. So they have come to a reluctant point of realization: that to continue on, to keep the professional press going, the news tribe will have to migrate across the digital divide and re-settle itself on terra nova, new ground. Or as we sometimes call it, a new platform.
Migration-which is easily sentimentalized by Americans--is a community trauma. Pulling up stakes and leaving a familiar place is hard. Within the news tribe some people don't want to go. These are the newsroom curmudgeons, a reactionary group. Others are in denial still, or they are quietly drifting away from journalism. Many are being shed as the tribe contracts and its economy convulses. A few are admitting that it's time to panic.
I expected this to be bigger news in my circles, but it hasn't registered. CNN has rejected the news crawl for a far less busy headline flip in its news broadcasts. The new UI makes it far easier to absorb the news broadcast without constant distraction and sometimes even helps to clarify whatever it is that is being reported. Great job CNN.
NYTimes: The Flipper Challenges the Crawl
Nice work NYTimes.
Open: Represent:
We built Represent with Django, the Python web framework. Although we do most of our work with Ruby on Rails, we chose Django for this project so we could use GeoDjango, an add-on that supports geometry fields and extends the ORM to allow spatial queries.
We started with maps from New York City's Department of City Planning showing district boundaries for City Council, State Assembly, State Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives. We used the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library, a translator library for raster geospatial data formats, through GeoDjango's LayerMapping class to populate a PostgreSQL database extended with the PostGIS spatial extension. The geometry relationship functions provided by PostGIS allow for quick, accurate lookups to determine which legislative districts contain your address.
Represent shows you your address in relation to each of the political districts that contain it. To draw the maps of your districts, we used GEOS, a C++ port of the Java Topology Suite, an API for modeling and manipulating 2-dimensional linear geometry, via GeoDjango's GEOS API. GEOS allows for the conversion of a geometry to KML, which can then be consumed by Google Maps.
But to do all that, we need an address: yours, hopefully, if you live in New York City. To turn that address into coordinates, we built a geocoding service based on Geo-Coder-US, the perl library that powers geocoder.us.
Blame it on changing technology, blame it on the journalists, blame it on shortsighted management, blame it on missing that oncoming glacier, blame it on the economy (everyone is WAY to concerned with throwing stones right now if you ask me) everyone is feeling pain right now and many institutions people rely on are being shook.
I shared this previously, but it is worth a repost (many reposts), via Jay Rosen (as does title!). I'd say my entire career has been formed by this effect one way or another. And I am thankful.
When we think about the problems we face today, here is how the Internet provides a participatory platform to help. There's nothing in here that refutes human nature - it just celebrates an important facet of it: When we gather around communities of interest we care deeply about - we look out for others within that community of interest. The Internet changes the stage for which we can connect across those passions.
YouTube: Cay Shirky on Love, Internet Style:
Here is another must read from long ago. So much is still perfectly relevant to today. Tim O'Reilly: 1995: Publishing Models for Internet Commerce:
We've based our work in these two areas on two distinct but overlapping observations about publishing:
1. On the net, "Information is plentiful. Trust and attention are
scarce." (David Liddel) The development of brand identity is a
critical part of publishing success in what you might call
"commodity information businesses" where no one has a lock on
proprietary content.
2. A reference work is essentially a "user interface" to a body
information. What does that interface look like online? How can
a publisher who specializes in making sense out of complex
topics do it better on the net?In an information glut, it is not content but context that is king. Someone chooses the New York Times over the New York Post not because of any kind of proprietary lock on content (though to be sure there is a role for scoops and special features) but rather because it has developed an editorial point of view that appeals to a particular class of reader. In a similar way, there is an enormous role for the establishment of "information brands" on the net--publications that have established relationships of trust with particular audiences.
...The actual content is valuable--but far more valuable is the relationship with the people who like the same kinds of things we like.
This relationship runs all through publishing--and not just magazine publishing. Publishing marketing is always affinity marketing:
"If you liked Steven King's last novel, you'll like this one even better." "If you like Steven King, you'll like Peter Straub." "If you like Steven King, you'll like these other books from the same publisher."
...In the old model, the information product is a container. In the new model, it is a core. One bounds a body of content, the other centers it.
...I believe that there's a tremendous market for those in the publishing business to turn their experience in making sense of complex bodies of information to this new world of online information publishing.
...In many ways, selectivity is the inevitable "other face" of universal distribution. When you can get anything you want, how do you select what you want? At the end of the day, while a consumer can walk into a bookstore and order any book in print, he or she typically browses through a much smaller selection offered by the bookseller. In fact, one of the key grounds on which a bookseller competes (other than location) is the nature of the selection that it offers.
And information has a funny characteristic. Up to a certain point, more choice is better. Then the situation flips. The user gets overwhelmed, and less is more. Publishing shows us the role not of the gatekeeper (who allows only certain content to be published), but of the adviser, whether that adviser is a trusted columnist or reviewer in a newspaper, or a trusted clerk at the local bookseller.
Understanding this role will be important to the future of commercial online services.
...The net isn't 30 million people, it's tens of thousands of overlapping groups ranging from a few people to perhaps a couple of hundred thousand at the largest. As I told one large publisher trying to figure out what to do about the Internet: "Yes, there is a billion dollar opportunity here. But you're going to find it a few million at a time."
Think niche. It's the net's greatest strength.
Look for opportunities to reinforce the fundamentals of the Internet--participation, access, communication.
A story about people dropping their cell phones in the toilet.
Followed up by a story about drug violence in Mexico.
The transition from theft of my time to an illuminating story about a growing problem in another country was fun.
Christopher Anderson, after noting the conversation that Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer are having on the future of news reporting, and after outlining how a specific story was produced at the Philadelphia Daily News, lays down a interesting challenge to Jeff Jarvis and Dave Winer.
"A New Media Tells Different Stories" by Bruno Giussani April, 1997:
There are also many other ramifications that the new journalist will have to take into consideration while handling information and exploiting the different tools.quote First, the behavior of online information seekers is very different than the traditional readers: some surf, some search. The first group is satisfied which just seeing what's there - they seek pleasure and surprise. The second group is looking for specific information - their priorities are easy and rapid access, and accuracy.
Second, geography is no longer an issue. Because of the Internet global reach, geographical audiences and ethnic audiences can overlap (for instance, Swiss readers living in the United States access our magazine online) as well as thematic audiences (say, worldwide car racing fans hooking up to an Indianapolis newspaper).
Thirdly, the development of the many different types of intelligent agents will double the human public in all of its diversity by becoming an artificial public. We will have to think of a way to present our information so that it reaches both people and robots: software which behaves according to their owners' desires.
Forth, we will have to handle many different types of information that previously were not taken into consideration and which do not necessarily respond to the traditional definition of news: weather forecasts, traffic updates, sport results, real estate markets, transcripts of school board meetings, unedited documents, etc.
Fifth, we will have to face new competitors coming from outside the field of publishing, using different approaches and different techniques. The first name that comes to mind is, of course, Microsoft, a software company which has recently rolled out a magazine (Slate), launched a TV/Web station (MSNBC), and started projects for local Web guides (Sidewalk). But there are thousands more doing the same, becoming news publishers all the while being car manufacturers or phone companies.
Finally, and it's an essential point, we are going to witness an explosion in the media diversity. It would be incredibly naive to envision the future looking only at what we can see today - the computer as a plastic box with a screen and a keyboard. The digital revolution is giving birth to multiple new forms of devices bringing together the quality of television images, the communication power of telephones, the memory and speed of computers, the selection and ease of use of newspapers. They are spreading out in different shapes and forms and locations: cellular phones with e-mail capability, network computers, videotext, electronic paper, digital wallets, voice recognition, audiotex, pagers, beep-watches, and so on. The future will allow us to access worldwide information, in many different forms, adapted to needs and places
In Episode 6 of "Shadow World", David S. Kessler took a break from giving interviews to let the location speak for itself - Front and Berks - the Berks El Station.
I can still recall the elderly man following me from the train station, as the sun was setting, when I was just a kid. He propositioned me for a blow job. He said he would pay me money. I walked faster and acted as if I couldn't hear him. Eventually, he got the hint.
Right around that corner, on a different day, maybe that same year, I was jumped and earned one of the broken noses I'd keep as souvenirs of my days in Fishtown and Kensington.
David S. Kessler's effort, to me, qualifies as a powerful act of journalism. One that provides insight into a world many of us in Philadelphia are familiar with, but to those on the outside, would have a hard time fathoming.
He spent a year recording short, under five minute, video interviews with those he met under the Frankford El in Kensington. Philadelphia Weekly wrote about the effort last year but you can experience it yourself at undertheheel.blogspot.com.
Another great piece of journalism that documents the true life story of four teens who commit murderer in Fishtown is "Fishtown". It was was recently published in hardback. You can read more about "Fishtown" at Geekadelphia.
Update 11-30-08: Alfred Lubrano, in the Inquirer, writes about Witness to Hunger, a program of Drexel University that distributed digital cameras to 40 women in North Philly who documented their stories, and in the process exposed realities of living in poverty in North Philadelphia. Make sure to visit the site.
Imagine if the project's next step was to enable these families to publish to Flickr and YouTube next. It would enable them to reach wider audiences and raise awareness so much further.
Fred Clark offers up his theory as to why things are as dire as they are for the newspaper industry - that the expectation for profit margins has been grown to something unrealistic these past twenty years: Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?:
So why oh why don't we have a better press corps?Part of the answer to that question is that our newspapers are being asked to do something they were never designed to do and something they are fundamentally and structurally incapable of doing: they're being asked to provide shareholders with double-digit and ever-increasing profit margins.
This is a ridiculous expectation. If you are an investor looking for a 15- or 20-percent return on your investment and you've purchased newspaper stock, then you're a bad investor. You are, in fact, a stupid and a silly investor. You have invested in the wrong thing for the wrong reasons and you are expecting the wrong results. You are expecting impossible results.
Newspapers have a solid and reliable, but modest, business model. Owning a newspaper -- even now, even with competition from cable news and the Internet, and even with Craigslist all but eliminating the classified ad market -- is like owning a license to print money. But only a modest amount of money. Buying newspaper stock is thus much like investing in CDs. It's safe, but humble.
Remember the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980s? That's what's happening right now with newspapers.
Amy Webb is wondering why so many are arguing about arguments instead of focusing on what really counts (I am guilty as charged unfortunately) : Reshaping the Conversation:
Raise your hands: Who's got an hour today to learn about the geospatial web? What about reality mining using cellular data? What about semantic tagging? 2d barcodes? Mobile frameworks using advanced SMS?That's what I thought.
Here's the real problem facing our newsrooms. Most people are out there playing checkers while companies like Google and Adobe are playing chess. NOTHING WILL CHANGE in journalism unless the conversation is refocused on what matters most: How can the ever-hastening disruptive change be either met or overcome by adapting technology and creative business models?
No one is above criticism, but the knock Jeff Jarvis took from Slate from Ron Rosenbaum missed the mark badly. It attempted to paint Jarvis as just another new media guru in pursuit of a buck it at the expense of others. Jarvis responded here. Many of Jeff Jarvis's ideas are very much up for debate - I don't think journalists are anywhere near as responsible over what's happening as much as he does (shortsighted publishers, corporations, management, business and technology changes are *far* more to blame (read "The Innovator's Dilema" - NOW)) and his tone can be brutal in the face of so much pain (so many jobs lost, so many families thrown into upheaval), but he's willing to debate his ideas and seek out those of others. The author went personal and attempted to de-legitimize ongoing efforts that Jarvis has been leading that are important to journalism, like the recent conference on the future of news at CUNY or hosting so much relevant conversation on his blog. It's a shame because argument is needed to address where we were, where we are going, what the consequences are. Blunt, honest talk. The Slate piece was a distraction from that.
Related:
Steve Outing: Do newspapers have 6 more months?
Nick Denton: A 2009 Internet Media Plan
Wired: Poll: Internet, Fox News Are Most Trusted News Sources
Silicon Alley Insider: Record Traffic Not Saving Financial News Sites
Metafilter: Can nonprofit news models save journalism?
Jeff Jarvis: Saving Journalism (and killing the press)
And, because this vid is so fit for the Daily Show, I just have to share it (vegetarians - do NOT click this):
David Cohn, contributor at Columbia Journalism Review, Seed Magazine and Wired has been exploring the future of journalism for a long time now, notably on his blog, at NewAssignment.net and NewsTrust.net.
His latest effort, funded by the Knight News Challenge, is Spot.us - a service founded on the principal that journalism is a process and not a product.
It's an interesting effort. It joins other non-profit journalism resources such as NPR and ProPublica in working to solve the funding question that has been consuming those who want to see journalism flourish as business models and technologies shift. In this particular solution - it is YOU who determines what stories you fund directly.
Commentary by Dan Gillmor: Spot.us Launches
Commentary by Beth Kanter: Spot.Us: Community Funded Reporting
By Digidave himself on his blog: Launching The Spot.Us Ship: Community Funded Reporting
And introducing the service at vimeo: Spot.Us - Community Funded Reporting Intro:
Spot.Us - Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.
And yes, this is me riffing off of a great conversation that was held by Aaron and Arpit at BarCampPhilly.
Metafilter: If information is power, then access is empowering
NYTimes: Overfeeding on Information
NYtimes: Spinning a Web of Lies at Digital Speed
NYTimes: The Rise of the Machines
Andrew Sullivan: Why I Blog
Reason.com: Every Man a Derrida
Rough Type: Googling and intelligence
Mark Glaser asked his audience to imagine "a Future Tense for Newspapers", back in February 2007, inspired by a post by Jeff Jarvis. Among many great responses, I added my own two bits:
The way it is:: Newspapers judge readership size/demographics via subscription numbers and use these numbers to make themselves attractive to classified advertisersThe way it will be: A combination of metrics that combine traffic with online relationships/connectivity statistics will become the new way news sites make themselves attractive to advertisers.
The way it is: Newspapers finance the cost of in-depth journalism via the selling of classifieds.
The way it will be: I have no idea.
This is a problem because newspapers provide the financial, legal, organizational and attention driving infrastructure that acts of journalism largely require.
To lend credence to how much this is a problem, consider the results of Pew's News IQ Quiz (take it - I dare you - it is short and fun!). Do you think a community so ill-informed can drive its government effectively? Try driving with one eye closed (no don't do that!).
And it is getting worst.
But hey, don't listen to me, listen to Google's Eric Schmidt:
Newspaper demand has never been higher. The problem is revenues have never been lower. So people are reading the newspaper they're just not reading it in a way where the newspapers can make money on it. This is a shared problem. We have to solve it. There's no obviously good solution right now."
As indicated by Bethany Anderson in a conversation Leonard Witt:
strictly speaking, the American public does not pay for its journalism - nor has it ever, really.
Advertising and Classifieds subsidized journalism as a side-effect - not directly.
So I tend to disagree with Leonard Witt when he says that "if advertising and journalism are forever linked, we will not have a problem."
Advertising never directly paid for journalism. Acts of journalism bolstered the reputations and influence of newspapers, that drew demographics, that advertisers wanted to reach. It was the audience that advertisers were paying for.
Attention driving influence is flowing elsewhere now. Like Twitter (yes, I'm on Twitter now).
Read Jack Shafer in "What's Really Killing Newspapers":
You no longer need to rely on a paper for the social currency that a weather report, movie listings, classified ads, shopping bargains, sports info, stock listings, television listings, gossip, or entertainment news provide. As falling circulation indicates, fewer do. And the newspaper isn't the only media hub suffering in the new era. Radio, which once served a similar social role with its menu of music, news, and talk, is plummeting.
One of the more interesting research exercises in all this is examining how we got here.
Christopher Anderson is doing a terrific job of that working on his dissertation, "Networking the News: Work, Knowledge and Occupational Authority in the New Metropolitan Journalism" in the Philadelphia area.
His latest posts (from oldest to newest) "Paying For Reporting, Paying For Conversation ... a Thought Experiment.", "Adding Nuance to the Journalist / Blogger Relationship", "Philly Newspapers Under Knight-Ridder: By the Numbers", "Philly Newspapers Under Knight-Ridder: Beyond the Numbers" are must reads.
I say this as a former employee of Philadelphia Newspapers and Knight Ridder.
So if you are interested in the topic, and want to read the thoughts of a non-insider who is doing considerable research in the trenches, go forth and read.
Boing Boing decided to un-publish, remove from public view, Violet Blue related posts.
What does it mean when our media rewrites itself?
NYTimes: Link by Link - Poof! You're Unpublished
Boing Boing on the matter.
Violet Blue (NSFW) on the matter.
There are quite a few fellow bloggers who have linked and commented about this - but without more info, it is just conjecture and I don't wish to add to any of it.
However, I do want to stress the importance of the de-linking - note that the first two pages of Google search results on this subject don't point to Violet Blue what so ever. You would think they would, but they don't.
As Rafe states - links are currency on the Web. When we reach a certain level of influence, we've earned a responsibility, whether we want to own up to it or not. When we don't live up to that responsibility, we lose credibility.
Boing Boing, in my book, has lost some.
Related:
Jeff Jarvis: Media is Singular (about time folks come around to this)
Politico: Media hype: How small stories become big news (what happens when new media take on old media mores or old media takes on new media mores or... well.. see above)
I recently re-read Rebecca Blood's 2003 BlogTalk presentation: "waging peace: using our powers for good". It is worth revisiting by anyone who is a blog evangelist or critic. Taking a look at the daily lack of cross linkage on memeorandum.com, unfortunately, it seems almost prophetic.
...People agree most readily with the things they already believe, and everyone has only 24 hours in a day. Because of these two factors, weblogs are too often enclosed in echo-chambers of their own making.In the book 'Data Smog', David Shenk says: 'Birds of a feather flock virtually together' and this is certainly true of weblogs. He goes on to say: 'The problem... is that people are tuning in and becoming informed--but they're tuning into niche media and they're acquiring specialized knowledge. As our information supply increases, our common discourse and shared understanding decrease. Technically, we possess an unprecedented amount of information; however, what is commonly known has dwindled to a smaller and smaller percentage every year. This should be a sobering realization for a democratic nation, a society that must share information in order to remain a union.'
Let me add that it's not just specialized knowledge that we are accessing. It's news and opinion about current events. The Web has given us the ability to retrieve news accounts from around the world. It used to be that most people got their news from just a few sources. This limited access meant that most of us were evaluating events from a common pool of information about the world, or at least a pool that was common to the people around us. But Web users can choose to get their news from wherever they like. And factual accounts of the same events quite often differ substantially in their wording, emphasis, and in the conclusions they draw. We now have the ability to choose from among news accounts until we find one that we feel gets it right.
Now, I don't advocate returning to the pre-Web world of local newspapers. But there are consequences to the wide access we have gained.
Democracy depends on groups of people coming to terms with one another, and devising solutions that will address the needs of most, if not all, of its citizens. Even a system like mine, in the United States, where majority rules, cannot afford to completely ignore the needs of anyone not in the winning party. Democracies simply cannot function unless citizens and policy-makers can talk to one another and achieve some sort of common ground in addressing the issues of the day.
However, when people can choose their news and information from an unlimited variety of sources, they usually will choose sources that confirm their pre-existing biases. According to theFolklorist.com, confirmation bias is 'a tendency on the part of human beings to seek support or confirmation for their beliefs.' It makes sense, if you think about it. The only basis we have in evaluating any source of information is the set of information--including opinions--that we have already decided is true. Very few people will be inclined to choose primary sources of information that consistently put forth ideas that just seem wrong.
This isn't deliberate malice. It's a simple matter of choosing, from the available sources, those that seem most accurate, and those that seem most accurate will always be those that most closely reflect one's own view of the world. So while the Web, in theory, makes it possible to explore many more points of view than ever before, in practice, few people actually do this to the extent that they can.
88 percent of newspaper coverage is 'churnalism': rewritten wire copy and PR. Only 12 is derived from reporters initiative or is fact checked.
That's the state of newspaper journalism in Britain according to what Nick Davies has written in his book "Flat Earth News". You can read more about "Flat Earth News" in a recent London Review of Books article (via dangerousmeta).
No wonder the majority of Americans no longer trust the media and folks like Jeff Jarvis are making an issue of it.
We have a clue we are being spun. And I bet that niche media's pursuit of 'authenticity' - the practice of wrapping news in greater and greater extremes of opinion to seem 'genuine' - folks probably feel at an instinctive level the exploitation.
In this environment, it has become more and more difficult to find investigative journalism you might care about or might need to know about.
There are many initiatives that have sprung up over the past few years that attempt to address how investigative journalism can be pursued, developed, created and funded.
Scott Rosenberg shares his doubts about one of the latest, "ProPublica", a non-profit driven by some big names in traditional journalism.
Think about a story the Philadelphia Inquirer recently published: "Philadelphia faces shortage of housing for mentally ill". It was front page of the Local section. Some editor thought that I, as a reader, would find that story interesting or pertinent.
In a world driven purely by linkage, PageRank, traffic counts, and other topic based story algorithm filtering systems - would I see that story? Would that story even be written? Who is its audience?
Think about it. And what it means for your knowledge of others that sit outside your topical or social spheres.
Now I'm not saying that algorithm driven - or crowd driven - news filtering is bad. Far from it.
Nor am I saying that a world where only 'experts' provide access to the news stories is good. Again far from it.
But the folks who *do* say one or the other are selling something. And it is at our expense.
I hate the term "MSM" (Mainstream Media) that we bloggers use to describe older media and news organizations, but sometimes you need to acquiesce.
Lots of folks thought that members of traditional media couldn't 'do blogging' for various reasons. They were wrong. Take a look around and you will find some of the best blogs are being produced in places once thought unlikely.
Wired Magazine's Wired Blogs have some of the most interesting technology/geek focused blogs you could subscribe to.
For politics there are those hosted at The Atlantic.
And, at least in Philly, local newspapers have fully embraced them at Philly.com (The Inquirer and Daily News), philadelphia weekly, and Philadelphia City Paper.
Shoot, even local TV News shows have gotten in the act at NBC 10 and Fox 29.
TechCrunch: NYTimes Blogrunner v. TechMeme.
They are using a technique I had originally suggested while I worked at Philly.com to handle the enormous legal and quality concerns - use a third party aggregator service like Blogrunner.
Bravo to the NYTimes :)
EarthTimes.org: "Consumer Reports Names Their All-Star Appliances":
"Our brand-repair histories are culled from approximately 450,000 respondents reporting on nearly 2.5 million appliances," said Robert Markovich, editor at Consumer Reports. "Choosing a reliable brand will boost a consumer's odds of getting a reliable model and in the end often save consumers money."
You can even say the report was 'crowdsourced'.
Now if only we could collate a list of safe and fun toys that parents would want to buy.
Unbelievable isn't it?
Editor & Publisher: "Hit and Myth: Poll Shows 1 in 3 Americans Still Believe Saddam Involved in 9/11".
Wow.
The sad thing is, predictably, pundits and experts on both sides of the new media debate (something I have yet to understand) will inevitably point fingers.
Nick Carr: "The people formerly known as informed".
Dan Gillmor: "Journalists Failure to Dispel Saddam-9/11 Myth is Media Scandal".
Mathew Ingram: "News flash: Digg headlines not "real" news".
Fact: Despite the information revolution, despite the advent of 24/7 cable news, despite the advent of 24/7 talk radio, despite the Internet, set aside the Web and participatory media for just a minute, it's already been determined we're no better informed about our world than in 1989.
So those who long for the good old days can point your fingers at bloggers all you want.
And those who say today far better than the past can point your fingers at 'traditional' media journalists all you want.
The failure is complete. It is across the board.
And it portends terrible things for our democracy and society as a whole.
Yahoo! has relaunched it's local search service. It better surfaces community driven participation and feels far more like a destination than before.
Screenwerk: Yahoo! Refreshes, Redesigns Local.
They still haven't gone as far as I expect them to one day do - integrate Flickr, del.icio.us, and Groups, and Maps into a cohesive whole, but the potential is there.
On the other side is Google, which recently launched its Business Referral Representative program.
Google will now pay you as an independent contractor to collect information on local businesses, telling them about Ad Words, and submitting them to Google Maps. You can read more about it from here and a recent SearchEngineWatch article.
Despite the information and communication revolutionary time we live in, Americans remain in the dark about our world.
Pew released a survey back in April detailing Americans knowledge of current affairs, comparing the status quo to that of 1989.
We've had a literal explosion of new media and communications services and tools come into being these past 15 years. They have completely reshaped how we get our news and how we connect with our communities.
Social Networks, Blogs, RSS, News Aggregators, Email, Email Lists, Message Boards, Websites, News portals, the Web, the Internet, Cable network 24/hr. news, talk radio, online magazines, collaborative news filters, algorithmic news filters, the list goes on and on.
You would think with so many choices, so many avenues to get informed, we'd actually be better informed.
You'd be wrong.
On average, today's citizens are about as able to name their leaders, and are about as aware of major news events, as was the public nearly 20 years ago. The new survey includes nine questions that are either identical or roughly comparable to questions asked in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 2007, somewhat fewer were able to name their governor, the vice president, and the president of Russia, but more respondents than in the earlier era gave correct answers to questions pertaining to national politics.In 1989, for example, 74% could come up with Dan Quayle's name when asked who the vice president is. Today, somewhat fewer (69%) are able to recall Dick Cheney. However, more Americans now know that the chief justice of the Supreme Court is generally considered a conservative and that Democrats control Congress than knew these things in 1989. Some of the largest knowledge differences between the two time periods may reflect differences in the amount of press coverage of a particular issue or public figure at the time the surveys were taken. But taken as a whole the findings suggest little change in overall levels of public knowledge.
The survey provides further evidence that changing news formats are not having a great deal of impact on how much the public knows about national and international affairs.
I'm among a bunch of folks who tend to trumpet online services as a cure-all for our past lack of information awareness and communications access.
On the opposite side of the bench have been those who have sounded alarm after alarm about how our ever growing media-and-communications-scape will fragment us ever further and result in ever tightening echo chambers, making us less informed about subject matter as a whole.
Turns out both perspectives are wrong.
Here we are, with so much new technology, so much new media, transforming the way we live our lives, and yet we are as informed, as ill informed, as we were in 1989.
Related:
Newsweek: Dunce-Cap Nation
Wired: Infoporn: Despite the Web, Americans Remain Woefully Ill-Informed
Congrats to Rajiv Pant, who has taken a job in NYC at Conde Nast Publications as VP of Information Technology for CondeNet!
Rajiv was my manager (and eventually VP) at Philly.com and Knight Ridder, before the dotcombust, back when KR took risks and had a future. He's a real visionary who always finds a way. I learned a lot from him during my time there and miss our deep talks about the nature of well.. just about everything.
Rajiv, my friend, congrats to you :)
danah boyd: "The Significance of Social Software" (pdf)
Guy Kawasaki: By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09
Seth Finkelstein: The Dr. Robert Lindeman / "Flea" anonymous blog outing - Blogging HARMS! (Read "Blogger unmasked, court case upended" right away!)
Invisible Inkling: 10 obvious things about the future of newspapers you need to get through your head (subscribe to this blog now!)
A VC: The Free Music Business
akkamsrazor.com: The New Creative Class: A Threat to the Republic...
MediaShift: Interview with Placeblogger's Lisa Williams. Read this for some insight into why I'm excited to have joined the advisory board.
KCNN: Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?. I was honored to be interviewed and a few of my answers are quoted in the report.
fortuitous: How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs
NYTimes: For Pornographers, Internet's Virtues Turn to Vices
TechCrunch: The New Portals: It's the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter (wow, I've linked to TechCrunch - it's gotten better as of late - gotta give credit where it is due.)
Deep Jive Interests: The Trouble With "The Decline In News" Has Nothing To Do With Journalists
Dare Obasanjo: Why Facebook is Bigger Than Blogging
Publishing 2.0: User-Generated Content Is Not A Panecea
Chris Daly's Blog: Readers to the rescue?
Doc Searls: Because paper is scarce. And so is time.
Mathew Ingram: Doc Searls is dead wrong on newspapers
Kent Newsome: News in an Accelerated World
Rough Type: Happy Birthday, Cathedral & Bazaar. Notable for ESR's comment:
...Open source is, fundamentally, about the software. Spewing a lot of Web 2.0 hype around it confuses more than it clarifies.It's legitimate to argue that open source software is strongly suggestive that similar arrangements that might work elsewhere. But it's also way too easy to forget that some of the critical enabling factors for the open-source software movement are hard to replicate elsewhere.
Of these, the most important is the fact that the correctness and performance of software can be objectively measured -- whether or not an application segfaults is not a matter of political dispute.
This, not the presence or absence of particular kinds of authority structures, is why Linux succeeds and Wikipedia fails.
Yaouch!
Dave Winer: What is Web 3.0?:
...There's always been too much made of death in the tech world, in fact newspapers are still published, you can pick one up at any airport or train station. Many people have them delivered at home. We often go to newspaper websites for the news. Sure, there are problems, and the world is changing, but imho, we'll all do better if something called the San Francisco Chronicle continues to be published, even though the form of the newspaper will certainly change in the future. It would be a waste of a tradition, of a good coral reef, if newspapers really died. They need to change, and imho, when that change happens, we will safely be in the era of Web 3.0.
Congratulations to Will Bunch whose book, "The News Fix: Ink-stained Wretches and Digital Rabble Rousers Reviving American Media" is available for pre-order at Amazon.com. Will Bunch, one of the terrific columnists at the Philadelphia Daily News, coined the term and kicked off the norgs conversation, when just under two years ago he broached the idea on his blog and courageously, openly, talked of re-inventing the news organization business.
Congratulations to the Winners of the Knight News Challenge who have been awarded grants to innovate in community news.
Comments from some winers and commentators:
holovaty.com: Knight Foundation grant
Placeblogger: Placeblogger Wins Knight News Challenge
Global Voices: Global Voices wins Knight Foundation News Challenge
Center for Citizen Media: Citizen Media and the Law a New Project
Recovering Journalist: Hyping Hyperlocal
Publishing 2.0: Knight Foundation Funds Innovation In Online Journalism And Civic-Minded Digital Media
Socialmedia.biz: News Challenge winners
I almost applied for the grant for Philly Future, however, it just didn't feel like the right time for Philly Future, or for myself. Maybe next year.
Speaking of myself, congratulations to, ummm... me, for joining the Placeblogger advisory board. Philly Future is a placeblog. It's a place blog of placeblogs :) And if PF can help, I hope, me and we, can be of some service.
This morning I read a few posts, about a conference session and a panel at Berkley, that focussed on "Web 2.0", online journalism, and amateur participation.
While the topics discussed at both meetings seemed to overlap with many of those we discussed at the norgs unconference, I couldn't help but feel that the folks involved are far behind the discussion that's been ongoing in Philly.
So much so, I actually felt a bit sad. So wound up they are in false choices and pointing fingers. Jeff Jarvis had a recent, heated thread on the subject.
Read for yourself at down the avenue and Union Square Ventures (who has yet to approve my following comment - update:comment approved, good old spam filtering :)).
I posted the following at both blogs, and fully expect to be ignored or put down, because what we did in Philly was to stop pointing fingers. We stopped preaching to each other. And we listened (read Jeff Jarvis's take here and here).
For some weird reason, folks on either side of this debate, don't seem to care for that.
My comment:
------------------------------------
I wish I was at this event.
We had a similar event in Philadelphia last year that was focussed on news journalism and the web. It sounds like it covered related territory. (link).
Fact of the matter is, there is room enough for numerous approaches to filtering/finding news.
Algorithmic - Memeorandum, Google News
By the crowd - Digg, Newsvine.
By a single unpaid editor - A blogger.
By communities of unpaid editors - A genre specific slice of the blogosphere.
By a news organization - A newspaper with staffed editors - Yahoo News, Salon, Slate.
By hybrid community/editor efforts - Slashdot, Indymedia.
There seems to be an effort on the parts of some to create some false conflicts between these approaches. To promote one approach over the other as the *ultimate solution*.
That's a shame really, because in the dust of that are people becoming less and less informed (check out the latest Pew research) while wealth and fortune flow from one kind of media organization to another.
We can do far better. All of us can. My bet is that will happen when groups of us decide to put down our guns and work together.
Karl
------------------------------------
We've seen this story before. Newspaper announces cuts. Pundits and experts speak out about how to fix things. Then, more cuts, then, a sell off. It doesn't need to be that way.
SFGate.com: Chronicle to cut 25% of jobs in newsroom:
To cut costs and try to adapt to a changing media marketplace, The Chronicle will trim 25 percent of its newsroom staff by the end of the summer.
IP Democracy: Why Can't Newspapers Get With the Program?:
If somehow the newspaper industry just understood that even now the Internet is still the wild west, they'd take the journalists they're jettisoning and instead use them to create new web-based businesses.
Dan Gillmor: San Francisco Paper Whacks Jobs:
When Hearst bought the Chronicle years ago, it pledged to keep all the employees from the old Chronicle. Then it brought the SF Examiner employees along, and had what can only be called a bloated staff.But the paper did improve - wow, did it improve.
The city always deserved a vastly better paper than it had. It still deserves a better paper, but the positive change has been incredible since the Hearst buyout.
Yet that didn't translate to subscribers - circulation kept dropping, in part due to deliberate corporate decisions, and advertising didn't recover after the burst of the tech bubble and the increasing inroads from classified-ad competitors that work better for buyers and sellers. The newspaper was said to be losing $1 million a week a year ago, an amazing number. I've heard that the losses were slowing, but obviously not enough to matter. (For the record, we get the Chronicle - and several other papers - delivered to our door each morning when we're home.)
The Chronicle's website has been among the most progressive anywhere, and it reflects the dilemma many publishers face. The site is free, with no registration requirements. There are ads, but not enough revenue to make up for the whacks to the print advertising that are hard to stop. The archives are also free and open - which I have to believe is on balance a revenue booster over the paywalled archives at most other local papers.
Reflections of a Newsosaur: Staff cuts won't cure Chron woes:
The Chronicle's year-to-date deficit of $165,563 per day is roughly equivalent to the annual pay and benefits of two journeyman reporters. If the paper continued losing money at the same rate every day for the rest of the year, it could fire every journalist in the joint and still not break even.With continuing uncontrolled losses of this magnitude, the Chronicle, if it were a standalone company, would be going out of business.
The only reason the Chronicle is still around is the continuing forbearance of the Hearst Corp., a family-owned, $7 billion-a-year media conglomerate whose other newspaper, magazine and broadcasting interests are sufficiently profitable to effectively subsidize the struggling newspaper.
Not directly related, but worth a read or re-read:
Recovering Journalist: Betting on the Future:
Or this, from a Microsoft exec: "This is about the opportunity," said Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platforms and services division. "We believe that there are tens of billions of dollars in economic value that can be generated in this industry, and we are committed to getting a bigger share of it."Bingo. We're in the very early stages of Web advertising, and there's nothing but growth ahead. That's what Microsoft, Google and others know, and are betting on--while newspaper execs complain that the online business can't seem to catch up to the losses on the print side.
Oh, and why didn't a big newspaper company, or perhaps a consortium of them, step forward and buy DoubleClick or aQuantive? Good question. It would have been a very smart acquisition, a real bet on the future. The technology companies seem to have that vision. The newspaper companies apparently don't.
A few years ago, I was privy to a conversation among board members of a newspaper-centric media outfit about the possibility of buying a major Web company (I have to fudge a few details here to protect confidences). One short-sighted board member protested, "It would cost us hundreds of millions of dollars." But a smarter exec said, "Yeah, but if we don't do it, in a year it will cost us a couple billion dollars." He couldn't convince the others, and it turns out he guessed low: The Web company was sold a year later for several billion dollars--to another technology company. Once again, the newspaper industry failed to pull the trigger on the future. Some things never change.
Publishing 2.0: The New Vertically Integrated Media And Advertising:
It's clear now that the media and advertising industries, which thanks to Google and Web 2.0 now include the software industry, will be dominated by a new breed of company - the vertically integrated media and advertising company. Google's AdWords created a new model by combining a media company - Google's search results and its network of AdSense affiliate websites - with an advertising agency, i.e. advertisers buy ads directly from Google through its AdWords platform. Google also revolutionized the media and advertising business by introducing a data-driven dynamic marketplace into what had once been a market based largely on human relationships.
Doc Searls: How to Save Newspapers:
Informing is not the same as "delivering information". Inform is derived from the verb to form. When you inform me, you form me. You enlarge that which makes me most human: what I know. I am, to some degree, authored by you.What we call "authority" is the right we give others to author us, to enlarge us.
The human need to increase what we know, and to help each other do the same, is what the Net at its best is all about. Yeah, it's about other things. But it needs to be respected as an accessory to our humanity. And terms like "social media", forgive me, don't do that. (At least not for me.)
norgs.pbwiki.com: The Norgs Unconference Statement Of Principles:
7. The Internet 'disintermediates.' Business models based on scarcity of media and high barriers to production and distribution, are not only threatened, but are terminal. It's change or die time for broadcast TV, traditional record companies, and yes, newspaper companies.
fortuitous: Matthew Haughey: Some Community Tips for 2007 - Seven tips on how to run a successful community
Dare Obasanjo: "Social" is More Important Than "Software" in Social Software
InformationWeek: Cory Doctorow: How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community
Derek Powazek: The Real Story of JPG Magazine (Metafilter thread)
Mathew Ingram: Community is the hard part
Jeff Jarvis: Smartest media quote of the year
NYTimes: Clive Thompson: Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog
Blog Law: 12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know
Not all "old media" has turned against "new media". The situation isn't as bad as this discussion on Techmeme may present. Far from it.
Here is, what I am sure, is just a small example: On March 25, 2006 a group of about 40 technologists, bloggers, newspaper and media execs and business leaders got together to discuss the future of journalism and held an unconference in Philadelphia.
The history of the unconference and on going conversation can be found here, but an important artifact of that day has been missing online until now.
A statement of findings by those that came to the unconference and conversed.
There's a lot here to chew on, as it walks the line between recognizing reality and finding a way to meet the needs of the future.
Some will find the following too general to be useful, others will think it nothing more than marketecture-PR-speak, others will be surprised that newspaper folks and bloggers, in a heated, intimate, discussion, came to conclusions as robust as these are.
I tend to think it it was great start, and I am working to gather the sign offs of those who attended the conference on what will be an evolving document.
The Norgs Unconference Statement Of Principles:
- The 'product' of a newspaper isn't the newspaper. In the sense that the 'product' of a musical act has never been the CD, or the Cassette, or the Album - mediums come and go - the music lives on.
- Newspapers are aggregates of information *and* relationships.
- Newspapers have been traditionally bounded by time and space. Inches on paper, space on news stands, the daily news cycle. The Web changes our relationship with time and space. The 'audience' isn't confined by physical boundaries now, neither should the 'newsroom'.
- Healthy democracies must have informed citizens. The reach and production of acts of journalism plays a major role.
- Lets be honest, most of the pieces in a newspaper aren't acts of journalism, but these additional bits are almost as important.
- Newspapers - for a time - defined the 'fourth estate', having near monopoly over attention driving influence. They were influence intermediaries.
- The Internet 'disintermediates'. Business models based on scarcity of media and high barriers to production and distribution, are not only threatened, but are terminal. It's change or die time for broadcast TV, traditional record companies, and yes, newspaper companies.
- The Internet and Web are a platform for collaborative communications and social/participatory media. Blogging, Citizen Journalism, message forums, email lists, Usenet, YouTube, Google, Digg, Slashdot, Flickr, Wikipedia, are just some examples of the many.
- The most successful Web services have recognized and utilized its participatory architecture. It's a read/write Web. eBay, Amazon.com, Slashdot, Yahoo!, Google,MySpace, have all leveraged this and based their businesses upon it.
- As technical barriers have fallen, and broadband availability widened, different forms of participation have proliferated - text, software, images, music, and now movies.
- 'Users' of the Web are not passive consumers. They are 'The People Formerly Known as the Audience'. They know more then you do.
- Acts of journalism can be produced by anyone and the Web blurs distinctions between the professional and the amateur.
- Producing certain successful (but not all) acts of journalism requires knowledge, skill, infrastructure (legal and financial), marketing and influence.
- The existence of ever increasing flows of media does not portend the same for acts of journalism.
- There is no news media versus blogging conflict. Blogging does not remove the pressures that existed on journalistic endeavors - corporations, politicians, forces of power - anyone who wants to manipulate a message - will try to do so.
- Journalists must become familiar with the medium they are communicating over. Editors have an important new role that will be embraced by someone, if not them.
- Participating on the Web means more then simply publishing files to a Web server. It means providing a means for those outside the organization, for the community, to participate in what you've published (link to, comment on, extend). It means going out of the confines of your Web presence and participating elsewhere.
- Authenticity, transparency, voice, and ultimately trust not only matter - they are central.
- Publishing systems and CMSes must be far more nimble. Stories are no longer static pieces that once published, are of no additional use. Collaboration must be enabled not only across a newsroom, but across the world, especially taking into account a newspaper's existing community.
- Stories on the Web gain in value long after original publication. It's the economics of the Long Tail. Reference archives - link to individual items prominently!
- Collections of stories, and our interactions with them, define communities.
- While birds of a virtual feather may flock together, this presents opportunities for those willing to provide new aggregates of news, opinion, and information.
Albert over at Philly Future has been covering the latest series of mayoral forums.
Check out his photos and commentary at: Mayoral Forum at Friends Center and Mayoral Forum at Old Pine Church.
Norgs discussion participants Lisa Williams, and Dan Gillmor, along with Jane Mackay produced a must read report that documents a group of newspapers that have either dived in and embraced social/participatory media as part of their mission, or are dipping their toes in the water.
The report shares the tools, methodologies, and approaches these newspapers have taken - along with splashing some cold water on the hype that some of us are apt to shout.
The report includes findings on what works, what hasn't worked, and provides recommendations.
You can read it here: http://citmedia.org/frontiers.
Google now makes it easy to read ratings, reviews and other associated information about businesses you find on Google Maps. Google has taken its usual approach of aggregating the participation of multiple services and communities across the web to provide a fast way to consume related information. It's an impressive effort since no metadata or microformat standards exist that make it easy to produce.
Lets use a local Philadelphia business, the Khyber rock club as an example, to contrast and compare Google's approach with that of its competitors.
Click to open a new window: Google Maps page for the Khyber.
It's a very tight page featuring most of what you need to know about the Khyber at a glance. Contact information. Hours of operation. Reviews and ratings posted from various services across the web, including Citysearch and Yelp. There is a details page with aggregated information about the Khyber including the club atmosphere. There is a link for me to go to the Khyber's home page, but at this point, do I need to? I have the many of the vitals I need right here. Except for an events listing.
Now lets check out Citysearch.com and AOL's Digitalcities entries on the Khyber. Citysearch and Digitalcities have been around for as long as I can remember.
Click to open a new window: Citysearch Khyber page
Click to open a new window: AOL Digital Cities Khyber page
Both Citysearch and Digitalcities incorporate hosted user communities to provide ratings and reviews, these accompany information provided by editors and the businesses themselves. The additional information, which in this instance includes an Events listing - very important for this kind of business - makes them well rounded resources. There is even less reason here for me to visit the Kyber home page.
The last two services I want to compare are Yahoo!'s and Yelp's entries for the Khyber. First Yelp.
Click to open a new window: Yelp Khyber page
Yelp's page on the Khyber is information sparse. No editorial reviews. No business provided information. No information aggregated from any other source. Businesses do have the capability to add some basic info to their Yelp page however.
What you do find is an intense social networking focus. Yelp encourages reviewers to maintain profile pages like those you would maintain on Digg, Facebook, Myspace, etc. The kind of information you would share on your own personal blog if you had one. The intersection of sharing local places and services you use, with social networking, provides social opportunities along the lines of MySpace.
So is Yelp a good place to learn about businesses in your area? Maybe. In comparison with Google Maps or Citysearch? No. But it maybe a good service to meet people.
Lastly, lets look at Yahoo!. Yahoo, provides elements of *all* of the previously mentioned services. Aggregated reviews. Editorial content. Some social networking. But participation is lacking. I get no sense of an existing Yahoo! local community I want to interact with.
Click to open a new window: Yahoo! Khyber page
Some thoughts
Local newspapers have been urged by many to go 'hyper-local', precisely because they used to have the market cornered for such information. Each of these services attempts to be a regional information and community home page and if the papers don't look out, these services will eat the last of their lunch left over by Craigslist.
If you're a local business owner, you have to be concerned. Why? Because these pages are indexable by search engines and will compete with your own home page for visibility in search result placement. Where before a local business would only need to concern itself with an advertisement in the Yellow Pages, and local advertising, now it must gain competency in online marketing to compete for attention-share across enumerable services. It's a whole lot more work. And if your product isn't one that is globally deliverable - lets say - pizza - then that work offers no real reward for effort.
Yahoo! is a sad case. If it leveraged Flickr, deli.icio.us, upcoming.org and its other engaged online communities in a coordinated fashion, could be a winner here, but for now, especially since search is the biggest 'front door' to this kind of information, it's Google for me.
And I'd be at Yelp if I was single or looking to network with others.
Update 2/2/07: It looks like Yahoo! is working on *exactly* what I suggested above! GigaOM: Yahoo tests Local mashups. I wonder how long they are going to take before rolling this out. Like Om, I think missing Yahoo! Map integration is a mistake. That, and adding Yahoo! local and Yahoo! Answers to the mix, could make it a useful service to any particular region.
Placeblogger, an effort by The Center for Citizen Media, Pressthink, and Lisa William's H20town launched on New Years. It's focussed on sharing with you blogs that cover a geographical region. I believe this will grow to be an important service over time. And I gotta admit - it is great to see so many ideas expressed from Philly Future adopted in a national effort. (disclaimer - they might make me an honorary adviser due to influence). Read Pressthink for more.
One of the ideas that gets branded about whenever slumping circulation numbers are screamed from headlines, CD sales are found to be tanking, movie ticket sales slumping, or broadcast TV viewers disappearing, is the notion that because the Web disintermediates the middle-man between content creator and content consumer, people are going to the Web and abandoning "traditional" media.
There is some truth in that to be sure, but there is also truth in that human nature abhors a vacuum. We seek out sources of information and entertainment we decide to trust. And as such, the Web has always created a new opportunity for intermediaries, bundlers of information and entertainment, and aggregators to help manage the flow we partake in each day.
A simple out of the box example - What is a good link blogger like Eschaton, other then an aggregator of sorts?
How about YouTube? What of Google or Yahoo!?
Something to chew on as you read the following stories:
paidContent.org: Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are King in Entertainment (source for the graphic)
Philly Future: MyFox Philadelphia - Fox News Wants Your Blog
Philly Future: DigPhilly.com - NBC 10 Wants Your Blog (includes a who-who in local social media efforts)
Washington Post: Howard Kurtz: At the Inquirer, Shrink Globally, Slash Locally?
Center for Citizen Media: Newspaper as Blog Portal
There is a great profile of Dan Gillmor in CommonWealth Magazine's Fall issue. Dan has always been someone I've thought of the highest integrity, someone who isn't looking at our new web empowered present and future with rose colored glasses, and someone who wants to help build real bridges of understanding. A rare combination, that I wish there was more of in the world.
So lets take a minute to discuss the Internet's latest king maker Michael Arrington. He's dealing with a lot of heat for how he decides who and what he covers at TechCrunch, a web publication that recently scored a profile in The Wall Street Journal. He's read by quite a few friends of mine. Here's what he had to say about some of the controversy:
TechCrunch is a new kind of publication. We don't fit into a neat little box like traditional media, who refrain from financial conflicts of interest with their readers and feel that they are therefore above reproach. They aren't, but they really, really feel that they are, and look down on blogs and other media as the unwashed masses. Yes, I'm grouping them unfairly, but the really good reporters will all soon be on their own anyway, so this will be completely true eventually.TechCrunch is different. TechCrunch is all about insider information and conflicts of interest. The only way I get access to the information I do is because these entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are my friends. I genuinely like these people and want them to succeed, and they know it and therefore trust me more than they trust traditional press.
I am an active investor, board member and advisory board member with a number of startups. That isn't going to change. I also write about startups. That isn't going to change, either. Obviously people like what we write on TechCrunch or they wouldn't come back. But no one should think TechCrunch is objective or conflict-free. We aren't. We never have been. We never will be.
That's brutal honesty, the kind of honesty I'd wish more pundits and writers would practice. And there is nothing wrong with publishing a web site for that purpose. But that doesn't change the fact that a great many folks go to TechCrunch, believing it akin to a CNet or Wired, publications that attempt to key you into what you should know, regardless of who is associated with them.
CrunchNotes is Arrington's personal blog. There is a difference in tone, voice and intent between TechCrunch and CrunchNotes. So your expectations are different. TechCrunch has seemed like something more then 'a blog' for a long time now. Even though that's exactly what it is. Hence the passion over what gets covered there. I think most folks go to TechCrunch believing they are getting acts of journalism, produced *in spite* of relationships, not because of them.
Fact - acts of journalism can be produced by anyone.
Also a fact, and not often told, journalism is the kind of profession that can get you sued, jailed, or even killed. It requires a desire to share some form of 'truth' with someone else. And often, it requires courage.
The kind of courage that led to Will Bradley Roland, one of IndyMedia's contributor's, a journalist in every sense of the word, being shot dead in Oaxaca, Mexico last week.
An increasingly common event in our world.
A world that enables us to shape our media-scape to fit our own view of the truth.
"What is truth?" our new blogosphere empowered media masters seem to ask. Objectivity is a tired concept, some say (which I agree with). But few talk of the principals Dan emphasized when he wrote "The End of Objectivity" (and I'm not talking about "ethics"). And this seems the case with ALL news media doesn't it? Especially coverage of our elected leadership.
And some wonder why a majority of Americans still believe WMDs were found in Iraq.
Well it's tough for two different people to come to the same conclusion when they don't share the same set of facts. It's terrific to disagree about what facts mean. But it's downright horrifying to see we're coming to a place where that discussion is impossible because we disagree about existance of facts outright.
Dave Winer wrote of programmers back in 1997:
Programmers have a very precise understanding of truth. You can't lie to a compiler. Try it sometime. Garbage in, garbage out. Booleans, the ones and zeros, trues and falses, make up the world programmers live in. That's all there is! I think programming is deep, it teaches us about the non-cyber universe we live in. There's something spiritual about computers, and I want to understand it.Programming is good training in the scientific method. For example, last week I spent five hours learning that "50" + 1 = 501 in my scripting system. That truth was available to me the instant I discovered the malfunctioning software, but it took five hours of investigating, digging in, and challenging assumptions before the truth was clear, and I could move on to the next problem.
I'm a code guy. A programmer. Maybe that's why I have some affinity for investigative journalism. The processes are different, but there is some kind of shared goal here that is hard to put into words.
That's why I'm helping do my part by hosting the norgs conversation, and why I am looking forward to seeing efforts like Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.net evolve, which just launched its test site btw (I'm an advisor).
Interesting things are already brewing there. Including sponsoring an interesting collective approach to covering November 7th. And this will require some courage - take your camera with you when you vote. Photograph your polling place and share it. Maybe it will help all of us understand how voting happens in this country, just a little bit better. Note that laws on taking photographs vary from state to state.
Another way you can support journalism is by taking a moment and making a donation to IndyMedia in Will Roland's name.
Last week a prime example of the utility and the need, for news organizations like those in our newspapers, played out in the pages of the Philadelphia Inquirer as it reported on mismanagement in Philadelphia's Department of Human Services.
Mismanagement that has led to up to five children deaths in 2006.
In the report's wake, two officials have been ousted and workers are left up in arms and in disarray, organizing a huge protest last Friday.
Contract negotiations are taking place at the Inquirer and Daily News, in the midst of huge shifts in the newspaper marketplace. Shifts that have been taking place for sometime now, shifts that force the issue - newspaper companies must change their business models or die.
Knight Ridder papers responded to changing marketplace, the past six years, with ever shrinking budgets, ever tightening belts, and consolidation of resources and empowerment in the hands of the few. The culmination of which was the fire sale that took place over the past year.
In Philadelphia a sense of optimism sprung as it was a group of local business leaders that purchased the papers. They talked of investment, and a recognition that further cuts were almost impossible to make.
So you gotta give the Daily News's Will Bunch a pass for the bleak tone in his latest piece on the situation at the papers and the industry at large. I'm reflecting his irony here. This post being an echo of his in a sense.
How could he not feel that way with the memo him and other Philadelphia Media Holdings employees received Friday? A memo that sounded, I bet to his ears, all too familiar.
While saving the paper isn't about saving jobs - it is about investment. Bold bets. A look towards the future. That's hard to do with less and less resources, with folks busy just trying to keep up.
There is massive opportunity for the papers to reinvent their business models. And there are folks at the papers with the knowledge and wherewithal to do it (read all of Will's post). But time is running out.
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More at PJNet by Leonard Witt.
To Susie Madrak, who said goodbye her father last weekend. Read her tribute to him. If you don't know her, you are missing out on knowing a special, passionate soul. Her part in running the Norgs unconference was central to it being a success, in every way.
And to my friend Lynne, who lost her grandson this weekend.
My heart goes out to you.
Craig Newmark doesn't plan to cash in on the current tech media bubble: "We both know some people who own more than a billion (dollars) and they're not any the happier. They also need bodyguards."
Michael Kinsley in Time asks Do Newspapers Have a Future?.
Seth Finkelstein in the Guardian writes why you might not want a Wikipedia piece on yourself. Leads me to comment on his blog, "I feel craven and souless - but I *want* someone to care about what I've done so much as to contribute to Wikipedia article on me and Philly Future. But I'm not *notable*. Just an average Joe. And as some would say (Ben Franklin I believe) - I guess I haven't done anything worthy of being written about yet."
Newsvine plans to expand into local news coverage according to Mike Davidson in a thread at paid Content having to do with the economics of local news coverage and an interesting article at The Seattle Times on Citizen Journalism.
Does Bob Woodward have enough juice left to influence the debate on Iraq? Or will his book be looked at as just another partisan hit job (ridiculous considering the other books he's published painting Bush in a positive light)? Do facts matter anymore? Or is all that matters in this post-modern me-media age is our own points of view?
I'm starting to see technologists waking up to the political situation in the country now. About time. Lets ask ourselves, in this age of uber-connectivity and communications tools - why are we growing ever more divided, and ever more frightened?
Jay Rosen is taking questions about Citizen Journalism at Slashdot.
Mark Glaser publishes a guide to Citizen Journalism referring to a timeline published by IndyMedia's Chris Anderson.
But where's the mention of Slashdot?
Terry Heaton says that papers should work harder to provide databases of local information:
Remember that Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it easily accessible. That ought to be the core goal of any Media 2.0 business, because that's where the eyeballs and the money will be. We can either be contributors to the knowledge/information base by supplying content (the expensive end of the value chain), be the aggregator of local the local knowledge/information base, or we can do both. Let's see, hmm. Which path should we take?
Hitwise opens up to reveal some interesting information from its datacenter. Look at the market share the top 25 have. It strikes me that it is so... small. Think about it.
Journalists confronting each other was a theme this week as The Philadelphia Daily News's Will Bunch challenged the Washington Post's David Broder to do better journalism and Salon's Scott Rosenberg challenge's Slate's Jacob Weisberg to do the same.
Google Reader, Google's RSS personal aggregator, upgrades. Its new functionality and UI are good enough to provide Bloglines with its first real challenger, as far as I'm concerned. I think I'm switching.
Jeff Jarvis gets on ABC with a clever piece about participatory media.
Hey - what's a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.
Hehe. That's Ed Cone sharing the news about the Daily News's Wendy Warren joining the Inquirer's Daniel Rubin, participating at ConvergeSouth. It already looks to be an interesting gathering, one that I want to make if fates permit.
Speaking of Philly, did you know that YearlyKos might choose our town for the location of next year's convention?
I can't explain why Philly has such a preponderance of great, nationally known bloggers, but we do, that's for sure. Maybe it's the cheesesteaks or water ice? Maybe it's old Ben's legacy. The great blogosphere here, and the new local ownership of our two big papers might herald a new age for media, communications, and civic involvement (yes civic involvement). Check out The Next Mayor or Young Philly Politics.
Speaking of Philly being a great place to blog, and while there's no denying that Philadelphia is facing some huge challenges, it truly is a great place to live and work. Comcast is hiring.
Reuters has donated $100,000 to NewAssignment.Net, enabling it to hire its first editor. Jay Rosen:
It's going to be a fun job. This is editing horizontally amid journalism gone pro-am. The idea is to draw "smart crowds" - a group of people configured to share intelligence - into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren't getting done now. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of volunteer users can find things out that the larger public needs to know. I think that's most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadines, and to set a consistent standard. Which is the "pro-am" part.NewAssignment.Net is a not a plan for a company; in fact, it's closer to a charity, an editorial engine anchored in civil society itself, rather than the media industry or journalism profession. As today's announcement shows, New Assignment can be on friendly terms with Big Media, which it is is not trying to destroy or supplant.
Read the rest of Jay Rosen's thoughts about the development over at Comment is free.
* NewAssignment.net has launched a blog and is looking for potential stories to cover. Mark Glaser has been surveying folks at MediaShift and it looks like they want to see the U.S. Government as the focus of any investigative reporting. I've been asked to help advise NewAssignment.net. Finding models to pay for acts of investigative journalism is crucial. If, in any way I can help, I am happy to do so.
* keepgoing.org: The Big Fish: The story of Suck.com, it's rise and eventual fall, is chock full of early web publishing lessons. Suck (and Feed) are two efforts that don't get mentioned very often in these conversations, since they no longer exist, but maybe should.
* Mark Glaser: News21 Produces Investigative Reports, But Can Universities Think Different?: Last year the Carnegie Corporation and Knight Foundation joined with five journalism schools in pledging $6 million dollars to create the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Education - News21
* Tom Mohr, formerly of Knight Ridder Digital, has a solution for the newspaper industry's woes: and it sounds suspiciously like recreating the Market Leader CMS platform and Knight Ridder Digital.
* Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post, describes a fundamental way newspaper sites need to change. It costs money, but the end result is an investment that will help papers be far more flexible in their reporting.
Hey - what's a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.
Adrian Holovaty: A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change:
This is a subtle problem, and therein lies the rub. In my experience, when I've tried to explain the error of storing everything as a news article, journalists don't immediately understand why it is bad. To them, a publishing system is just a means to an end: getting information out to the public. They want it to be as fast and streamlined as possible to take information batch X and put it on Web site Y. The goal isn't to have clean data -- it's to publish data quickly, with bonus points for a nice user interface.But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible. The problem is particularly frustrating to explain because it's not necessarily obvious; if you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it's a problem of lost opportunity. If all of your information is stored in the same "news article" bucket, you can't easily pull out just the crimes and plot them on a map of the city. You can't easily grab the events to create an event calendar. You end up settling on the least common denominator: a Web site that knows how to display one type of content, a big blob of text. That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect.
I left a comment responding to a poster saying this sounded like the Semantic Web, I've been meaning to write Adrian for a while now as well:
Hello Adrian,I've been meaning to say hello to you for a number of different reasons over the past few years.
I'm an old Knight Ridder Digital developer. One of the folks that helped develop the Cofax CMS that was later replaced by KRD with... something else.
Cofax was a framework as well as a CMS, and in some very positive ways (well *I* think so :)), Django reminds me of it. Cofax was open sourced, but when KRD replaced it, well, work pretty much kept me from going back, refactoring, and taking it where it could still go. It's still in use in many places. Well enough of that...
I definitively agree with you that newspapers are terrific places to work if you are a software engineer. The pace is quick, the work challenging, and you get the rare opportunity to not only practice your profession, but do so building tools and services that connect, inform and empower people.
It's hard to beat.
anonymous - yes, I think Adrian is talking Semantic Web here. But like Adrian's call for newspaper organizations to take a hard look at how they manage information in their publishing systems, Tim Berners-Lee has made the same call to the web developer community. The hard sell has been that that the Semantic Web likewise solves a series of problems of lost opportunity. It requires an investment in time and effort by the developer community to see its potential archived. Adrian, please correct me if that's an incorrect understanding on my part.
Great piece.
Related reading material: Aaron Swartz: "The Semantic Web In Breadth" and Shelley Powers: "The Bottoms Up RDF Tutorial". Then there's "Practical RDF" also by Shelley Powers (which I ummm need to get around to reading, but have always heard good things about).
More at Techdirt.
Lisa Williams: What if citizen journalism is just a mirage?
Jeff Jarvis: Networked journalism at work
VideoJug. Neat. Check it out.
The same economic drivers that are disrupting the newspaper industry, indeed any industry built on the distribution and packaging of creative acts that can be transmitted digitally, on the Internet, are the same.
I don't think it's all that different whether you are talking about newspapers, music, radio, TV, or movies.
Musicians have been the canary in the coal mine for some time now. These past few years they have been finding new ways to fund their art and reach fans and new audiences. God knows the previous arrangement's math didn't favor them anyway.
The important thing - from records, to 8-tracks, to cassettes, to CDs, and now to mp3s, it's the music that survives.
And it is going to thrive. No matter what naysayers may believe. The industry, on the other hand, has been and continues to be transformed. The economics have irrevocably been changed.
This while the news paper industry is still flailing about. In some instances working to produce less of its core product, in pursuit of profit.
Then again, what is the product? Is it the package (CDs in the music industry, the morning paper in the newspaper industry), or what is contained within?
The web presents a true medium to re-invigorate democracy. It's a participatory architecture, built for collaboration and communication above all else. Every person that is on the web expands its usefulness, and presenting new opportunities to connect, converse and share.
So if you consider the product of the papers news and opinion, you'll see the monolithic fourth estate crumbling as either a sign for alarm or celebration. With us barbarians at the gates. Unlimited choice, simple to use tools to find and share information and opinion, being the unintentional weapons.
The primary difference between losing the music industry and losing the work of newspapers is that we still need systems to research, filter, and present the news in a way that is beneficial in our lives. For our livelihoods. There are dire consequences to democracy, if we continue down a path of more media, less news and not find systems for people to deal with the ever growing fire house of information we are hit with day in and day out. I think we are already feeling some of the effects.
There is hope. But the choice for the newspaper industry remains as stark as Kent Newsome laid out for the music industry - find new business models or hold on as tight as you can until the well dries up.
Some in the industry know this already and are facing the future with open eyes and open minds. The new, local ownership of Philadelphia's largest dailies might result in nimbler, more responsive, more participatory media. And conversations are underway exploring new infrastructures to support acts of journalism.
Others? Well hopefully Nick Lemanns of the world learn to recognize that the best way to move reporters to the web is to embrace the web as the participatory media it is. That the web, while offering challenges, presents terrific needs that journalists can fulfill. But it requires building bridges. And fast.
In-depth journalism requires legal, financial and information infrastructure. No one has solved these issues in a way that leverages the participatory nature of the web and has solved the funding equation. That's why efforts like NewAssignment.Net are so crucial. Its work to put together a path is one to watch, and one to take part in. Tools like Memeorandum and Bloglines, along with plumbing like RSS and Atom, along with participatory news filters like Slashdot, Digg, Newsvine, IndyMedia and Philly Future, early news magazine efforts like Salon, Slate and Suck, and early newspaper efforts, many of which are lost to the nineties dot com crash, provide us with additional lessons to learn from. Not to mention the millions of blogs, and social networking users, many who have participant loyalty, that for some, rivals the relationships newspapers have forged with their readers. And what about Wikipedia?. These early efforts will help lead the way, but that's no reason to sit on your hands. In this environment, those that wait too long for others to lead, will die.
Other stories of note this weekend:
Washington Post: An Eye for Cool, and Cash: Social news sites paying people to write. Imagine that!
paidContent: Advertisers Will Follow Audiences
NYTimes: What-Ifs of a Media Eclipse: Knight Ridder was ahead of the Internet curve, back in 1996. It even beat a threat from Microsoft (Sidewalk) remember. What happened?
Jay Rosen: "The Era of Networked Journalism Begins":
Today marks a key moment in the evolution of the Web as a reporting medium. The first left-right-center coalition of bloggers, activists, non-profits, citizens and journalists to investigate a story of national import: Congressional earmarks and those who sponsor and benefit from them.This is networked jounalism (“professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story”) beginning to come of age, and it’s very much in the spirit in my initiative NewAssignment.Net.
The partners in the Exposing Earmarks Project are the Sunlight Foundation, Citizens Against Government Waste, Porkbusters, and the Examiner Newspapers, along with Club for Growth, Human Events Online, The Heritage Foundation, Tapscott’s Copy Desk— and you, should you choose to be involved.
I'm really excited to see this get launched, so in comments I replied:
Wow this sounds like a great effort. It's a shame it can't help but be looked at as political, but to me, what's important here, is the methodology, the technology, and the participatory nature of it.Let me say it again - Wow.
Jay, while your title is great, I would argue the era of Networked Journalism began a long long time ago - with the launch of AltaVista perhaps. When tools emerged that those interested could pull from multiple resources of information on the web and the barriers to sharing that information fell down to consisting only of time and knowledge. I tend to see all of this as an evolution of the foundations of the web itself, as a collaboration tool.
This is simply a terrific effort and one that will stand up as an example as what is possible.
I also wanted to highlight a previous effort that that is very, very notable notable, an early mashup that seems forgotten about:
I'd like to remind folks of another interesting effort here - GovTrack.GovTrack is a mashup that pulls together data from various sources to provide views of information about bills, representatives, and conversations taking place about them them.
The interface is a bit complicated. Maybe that's why it hasn't earned the attention it deserves. But it is a powerful tool to look into what those who represent us are doing in Washington.
The service won Technorati's Developer Contest back in 2005.
Dan Gillmor says Doc Searls committed an act of journalism, even if he wasn't a journalist, when he posted his report from Logan Airport . Albert Yee, in Philadelphia, attended a community meeting on violence at Louis Kahn Memorial Park and and reported on the experience and the event itself. A powerful example of the same.
As Dan said of Doc, "He witnessed something and told the rest of us what he was seeing. It's ordinary, but also extraordinary in the meaning for society in the long run.". Indeed I believe that to be the case. But there is two ways of reading these acts of journalism. You can look at them as threats to 'the establishment', revolutionary examples of why we no longer need paid journalists and editors filtering the news for us. Or you can look at them as opportunities. Opportunities for paid journalists and editors to expand their role as as news gatherers. What if paid journalists and editors opened their horizons and looked outside their newsrooms to look for, discover, and empower those voices that wanted to contribute reports like Doc's and Albert's to a paper, or didn't realize it's a possibility?
Services like Inform.com and Technorati enable this on one level. Witness how WashingtonPost.com uses Technorati to expand coverage and discussion on their articles. But what if an editor at a paper was proactive in seeking out these acts of journalism? Using toolsets that enabled them to pull together reporting and opinions from across the blogosphere and to connect with those who have already contributed something? What if?
Jeff Jarvis makes a point I agree with, but I'm afraid not many look at it this way, at least not yet:
The Times has two good stories today that were both helped by the work of bloggers. I don't say that at blog triumphalism or as a war cry of bloggers replacing journalists. Quite the contrary, I say that because these are the sorts of examples of networked journalism at work that I hope we'll be seeing more and more....It's not about them v. us, as Nick Lemann would have it. It's about them and us. The more we work together, the more informed society will be. It is a good thing for journalism that there are now more people than ever doing journalism and these are just two small illustrations of that.
I replied (paraphrased) in his comments:
Wish the rhetoric from the community that spread word of the doctored photos shared your way of looking at things.Because they don't you know. And maybe it's from their rallying cries that the Lemanns of the world derive their fear and concern from.
According to to Pew's latest study, "Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers", "Bloggers are about as likely as the general internet population to pursue non-partisan news sources. Forty-five percent of bloggers (and 50% of all internet users) say they prefer getting news from sources that do not have a particular political point of view. Twenty-four percent of bloggers (and 18% of all internet users) say they prefer getting news from sources that challenge their political point of view. Eighteen percent of bloggers (and 22% of all internet users) say they prefer getting news from sources that share their political point of view.".
That's interesting since linking patterns of fellow bloggers suggest otherwise. But maybe, just maybe, folks are reading what they are not linking to.
One place to get exposed to new and different conversations and discussions is Global Voices Online. It's a Philly Future style service that "seeks to amplify, curate and aggregate the global conversation online - with a focus on countries and communities outside the U.S. and Western Europe. We are committed to developing tools, institutions and relationships that will help all voices everywhere to be heard.". Sounds a lot like our mission.
It's a great service, one I wish there were more emulating, but the business model might not be there and that maybe why we see so few try.
Having the possibility to open our minds so simply, by just a few clicks, is a large part of what the web offers that excites me so much. Of course, the web can help us hear other points of view, in the end it may not change how we listen. We still need to click, even if we don't link. The great thing is that according to Pew, we do. Let's hope they are right.
The Long Tail suggested that it will be within narrow communities of interest where the future of entertainment lies. Jeff Jarvis has long been a proponent of this point of view. With online music it is probably already so (Washington Post). But would you ever think this applied to Beer?
Check out this quote by Scots whisky manufacturer James Thompson in comments at gapingvoid: "We have decided to create a drinks product that will never be made available to large retailers - ever. We don't need them and we don't like them that much."
Technology shortens distance and time between people and the things they desire. Likewise, it enables companies to market to individuals, or small communities, instead of the masses.
Related thread in Slashdot.
Chris Anderson analyzes some Rhapsody and Wal-Mart figures revealing the Long Tail at work. Question: If Wal-Mart is selling a particular track, doesn't that help make it a popular hit?
AOL and Yahoo set their guns on Digg, NowPublic, Newsvine (and ummmm... us?)
The inevitable MySpace social networking backlash?
Using Google to mine MySpace for Philadelphia drug users
Link removed at request
Online media has got to cost somebody... right?
"The death of Wikipedia" and "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy"
Some reactions to the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News sale: one, two.
Slate: Paul Boutin: A grand unified theory of YouTube and MySpace:
When trying to rope in the movie and TV studios, YouTube should point to MySpace, where A-listers like Eminem peddle their wares alongside unsigned bands and lip syncers. MySpace makes it easy for musicians, kids, and grandparents to post their own pages by removing the technical hurdles. I created a profile page in three minutes, complete with an auto-play jingle. I'd planned to upload an MP3 of a band I used to play in, until I found they already have their own MySpace page. Clicking "Add" instantly copied the song from their page onto mine. Another one-click tool imported my Gmail and Hotmail address books so I could mass-invite everyone to join me.MySpace isn't that much easier to use than Friendster, or than other shared-user-content sites like Flickr (photo sharing), del.icio.us (bookmarks), or Digg (tech news). But it mixes multiple publishing models—blogs, photos, music, videos, friend networks—into one personal space. Most important, it doesn't presume to know what your goals are. The site's management ditched their early focus as a home for musicians when they realized Margaret Cho and my crazy friend Kenny wanted spaces of their own. Next, MySpace may let marketers set up profiles for brands. That's a great idea—the same people who'll bitch about Snickers having a page will add Wikipedia as their friend.
I think MySpace's popularity has to do with its puppylike accessibility. A typical page looks like something a Web-enthralled high schooler might have put up in 1996, but with more pics and a soundtrack. I agree with design guru Jesse James Garrett, who says the site's untrained layout sends a "we're just like you" message to newcomers. That encourages them to experiment with content genres the site's designers didn't build into templates. If tech builders want to hand the controls over to their users, shouldn't they presume they haven't thought of everything? Apple's iWeb publishing system is easy to use and way more attractive than MySpace, but we'd have gotten old waiting for Apple to invent a Lip Sync Video template.
The secret to success is to make everything one-button easy, then get out of the way. If you think collaborative architecture matters more, click the charts: The same Alexa plots that show MySpace and YouTube obliterating top sites reveal that Flickr, Digg and del.icio.us have plateaued with audiences barely bigger than Slate's. Photos, news, and other people's bookmarks just aren't as interesting as bootleg TV and checking out the hotties . The easier it gets to use, the less geeky the Net becomes, and the more it starts to look like real life (emphasis mine - Karl).
That's not me saying it, it's forevergeek. Just passing it along.
del.icio.us does not allow me to push my feeds to it, forcing me to spend effort using its service that is better spent elsewhere. The pattern emerged where I would post links on del.icio.us far more frequently then paradox1x or at Philly Future, which, in the end, is counter productive - I already have a publishing platform!
Many of these services have tools that enable you to post on them and have that participation pushed back into your site. Other tools exist to grab your data from these services and pull them into your primary space. That's not enough.
I predicted earlier that these services will have to acknowledge and leverage what we already do in our own spaces, in our own environments. As each of us start our own blogs - our own publishing systems - what do we gain by posting twice? Three times? Four times? Not all that much when I should be able to post once, in an environment of *my* choosing, syndicate what I want, and be done with it.
RawSugar gives me this capability, saving me a lot of time in sharing what I want to share with a larger community.
I'm happy you kept after to to try it Bill, so I am going to stick with it for now.
Philadelphia Inquirer's Kristen A. Graham deserves credit for writing about teenagers and MySpace and not putting out yet another sexual-predator, obscenity, fear-fest as so many others have.
She parses the real issue that few fellow technologists address or want to concern themselves with - how MySpace has empowered millions of children to share their private lives in full public view, the repercussions of which are not yet understood.
In fact, I've only seen one post, by Scott Karp, and he was met with a chorus telling him he didn't get it or that "no one has privacy anyway so who cares".
One oh his critics attempted to reduce the concern to that of a parent allowing the child to ride a bike, and of course we let our children ride bikes. So why not allow them participate on MySpace? Shoot - we should be encouraging both right?
How great it would be if it were that simple.
When you address privacy concerns on MySpace (or Xanga, or any other social media platform), you MUST address the nature of the web - when you post you are not simply sharing that participation with those who visit your site, but you you are contributing to a store of information that is cached on servers you don't know of, syndicated to places you have no control over, retrievable, sortable, and searchable again and again and in perpetuity. Forever.
Sure sexual predators are a concern, but threats to living so publicly - in such a scale - permanently - are manifold.
The job we mysteriously couldn't get. The date who ditched us for some unknown reason. The apartment application denied. The business loan we were turned down for. The incapability of moving on from past mistakes since anyone can now retrieve them and use them for their purposes. That new 'friend' of ours telling us about the new shoes that we just have to buy.
Imagine if your credit report was in public view. If you could not get a report of who was requesting it. Think about it.
That's small fry in comparison to what we are *willingly* doing here.
I'm not some Luddite. I've had a web presence since 1996 and a blog since 1998. I don't know many who have lived so openly on the web. But I do keep somethings close to chest and off my blog, understanding, long ago, the responsibility I had to my employers, my friends, my family, and myself - long term.
I've attempted practice, over the years, the good advice Rebecca Blood gives in the article:
"people forget they are publishing when they are blogging. It feels personal, it feels like a conversation - but it's not."In today's TMI age, it's a given that that new boyfriend or girlfriend, that recruiter for the job you desperately want, is going to Google you, she said. Then they'll find out that you've written about how you keep multiple sex partners and play endless rounds of Minesweep on company time.
"Whoever you don't want to read your blog - your mom, your boss - will probably find it. Keep that in mind," she advised.
You need to wonder why others in the digerati don't share her concerns... maybe she sounds too old fashioned? Too old school?
Maybe Rebecca Blood just doesn't get it?
The price we're all going to pay is huge.
I wanted to post this quickly to point you to a few participants and their reports, the day was too big skip without getting at least this up. I will have more later, about the day, the format (hey - the unconference format works!), and thoughts for the future.
While not as diverse as we would have liked, we had around 40 attendees participants (everyone was a participant - there was no panel or speakers - thanks Dave) from blogging, independent publishing, and newspaper industry backgrounds. Folks that normally don't see eye to eye - let alone see common cause. I believe we succeeded in building bridges while exchanging ideas, thoughts, and concerns.
Jeff Jarvis: Saving journalism (and killing the press): "I say this is the day that the war ends. This isn’t journalism against bloggers anymore. It never was, really. This is journalists and bloggers together in favor of news."
Howard: After the unconference: "The room was swarming with ideas from not only veteran journalists and editors, but also from bloggers, students and people simply passionate about the future of news delivery. It was pretty exciting."
What comes next is the rub. The next few days will determine much for two cornerstones of our community and for a number of others across the country.
Blinq: Blue Sky On a Gray Day: "The elephant of the room is the iffy futures of The Inquirer and The Daily News. Knight Ridder has sold us to McClatchy, which doesn't want us. Bids to buy the dirty dozen are due Tuesday."
Albert Yee in Norgs and his Flickr set captured the day in picture, in addition the folks at PhillyIMC took video. Expect that up shortly.
I'm honored to have worked with Susie Madrak, and Wendy Warren, and Will Bunch of the Daily News in pulling this together. I couldn't imagine a better team. Thanks to Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania for providing the facilities and for participating (Dean Michael X. Delli Carpini was an integral voice of the day) .
And speaking of participating - thanks to everyone that came out, spoke up, and listened to one another.
We're going to work hard at bringing together a living Norgs resource based upon the work of the day and its related continuing conversation. It will include a forum provided by the folks at PhillyBlog.com, a Wiki, and blog. Keep an eye out for it.
More linkage to come your way at Philly Future: The Un-Conference: Putting Norgs into Context.
Now I need to get back to getting ready for tomorrow (today!), a big one for Emma :)
But are any lessons learned here?
Jim Brady at WashingtonPost.com:
...When we hired Domenech, we were not aware of any allegations that he had plagiarized any of his past writings. In any cases where allegations such as these are made, we will continue to investigate those charges thoroughly in order to maintain our journalistic integrity.Plagiarism is perhaps the most serious offense that a writer can commit or be accused of. Washingtonpost.com will do everything in its power to verify that its news and opinion content is sourced completely and accurately at all times.
We appreciate the speed and thoroughness with which our readers and media outlets surfaced these allegations. Despite the turn this has taken, we believe this event, among other things, testifies to the positive and powerful role that the Internet can play in the the practice of journalism.
We also remain committed to representing a broad spectrum of ideas and ideologies in our Opinions area.
Then there is Ben Domenech himself at at RedState.com. RedState.com is the online community he co-founded. After reading thru this long piece, where he belittles the charges against him (that look very confirmed by the way) his signoff is what really struck me:
To my friends: thank you for your support. To my enemies: I take enormous solace in the fact that you spent this week bashing me, instead of America.
That says it all if you ask me. But ya know, I'm kinda slow sometimes, so not being a RedState.com user I followed the comments from Domenech's post and found this beauty:
Should the entire American Left fall over dead tomorrow, I would rejoice, and order pizza to celebrate. They are not my countrymen; they are animals who happen to walk upright and make noises that approximate speech. They are below human. I look forward to seeing each and every one in Hell.To those conservatives who couldn't wait to find wrongdoing where none existed: Gee, funny you didn't get all hyped up about this with Bob Bork. Or Sam Alito. I guess maybe your common sense detector -- or decency reserve -- only kicks in when it gets you something you want?
You're all dead to me, as well. Too bad: One lady in particular was a favorite writer of mine. Ah, well.
Nice community there. Real swell. Not that they'd want me - but I'm certainly never going back.
Here's the thing, from Atrios, and what I pretty much agree with:
The Post does not have to provide balance in its opinion section any more than the Wall Street Journal does. What the Post should not do is hire a conservative for the purpose of balancing journalists in order to bow to the pressure of conservatives. The former is an editorial decision, the latter is fundamentally dishonest as it tacitly admits something which isn't true.
Pundits != Journalists. It's apples and oranges. If they hired a liberal and a conservative pundit to go at each other, Crossfire style, there would be no uproar. If they hired a conservative JOURNALIST to provide contrast to a liberal journalist, there would be no uproar.
I know there is nuance there. People don't like nuance. But it's important and has to do with trust.
More by Jay Rosen who has a few ideas for washingtonpost.com.
I've helped organize a discussion and unconconference having to do with the future of local journalism since the economics that supported it for the past 100 years have been blown apart in the wake of the web and the empowerment it gives consumers to not just consume - but create (blogs/myspace/citizen journalism/craigslist/livejournal/mp3s/you tube) , syndicate (rss/bloglines/my yahoo/podcasting) and aggregate (tagging/vertical search/social bookmarking).
These same economics are pressuring a diverse array of media industries - music, TV, movies, and others - any industry where distribution/delivery/bundling are main means of revenue to cover costs of creation.
Nick Carr summarizes the quandary well:
Traditional newspapers sold bundles of content. Subscribers paid to get the bundle, and advertisers paid to have their ads in the bundle, where those readers would see them. In effect, investigative and other hard journalism was subsidized by the softer stuff - but you couldn't really see the subsidization, so in a way it didn't really exist. And, besides, the hard stuff contributed to the value of the overall bundle. That whole model has been slowly unraveling for some time, but the web tears it into tiny little pieces. Literally. The web unbundles the bundle - each story becomes a separate entity that lives or dies, economically, on its own. It's naked in the marketplace, its commercial existence meticulously measured, click by click. Advertisers, for their part, pay not to be seen by a big group of readers, but to have their ads clicked on by individual readers. They'll go where the clickthroughs are. Clickthroughs themselves are priced individually, depending on the content they're associated with. As for readers, they're not exactly trained or motivated to pay to read anything online. The economic incentives created by the web model are very different from those of the old print model - and it's economic incentives that ultimately determine business decisions.Sure, this is how markets should work, but let's not kid ourselves: the precise nature of the correlation between efficient markets and good journalism remains to be seen, and so far the indicators are less than encouraging. The result may leave a lot of people disappointed - or out of work.
These new realities are driving what the Project for Excellence in Journalism, in it's annual report on the state of the news media, calls "the paradox of journalism":
The new paradox of journalism is more outlets covering fewer stories. As the number of places delivering news proliferates, the audience for each tends to shrink and the number of journalists in each organization is reduced. At the national level, those organizations still have to cover the big events. Thus we tend to see more accounts of the same handful of stories each day. And when big stories break, they are often covered in a similar fashion by general-assignment reporters working with a limited list of sources and a tight time-frame. Such concentration of personnel around a few stories, in turn, has aided the efforts of newsmakers to control what the public knows. One of the first things to happen is that the authorities quickly corral the growing throng of correspondents, crews and paparazzi into press areas away from the news.
The effects on journalism as a practice have been especially severe these past few weeks.
The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are up for sale. There are some writing off the Daily News as a goner.
This maybe a stretch - but I think not - these papers are as much a glue to Philadelphia as our sports teams.
I think this is especially the case with the Daily News and its focus on our home town. I'm not sure of any big city paper that has such an intimate relationship with its subject matter. One so willing to speak truth to local power, and truth of our local experience.
Yes, as Dan Gillmor has said, no industry should have a right to exist, and I submit that in order to save the Daily News, might mean losing the paper itself. However, the folks at the Daily News, believe it or not, are well aware of this. Read Will Bunch. It was his powerful, forward thinking request for conversation that got this discussion rolling. He's proof in black, white and pixels that they are more than willing to face the future if given the opportunity.
Having been blessed with not only experimenting with my own efforts (Philly Future), but also with working in the online/social media industry since 1999, I've had contact with many terrific online publishing and journalism leaders. I figured the one way I could help is to bring as many of them together as possible to build bridges, share perspectives, and discuss the future. The ongoing conversation includes folks like Scott Rosenberg (Salon), Ed Cone, Lex Alexander, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Dan Gillmor, David Weinberger, Scott Karp, Dave Winer, along with members of our local press, from the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, Calkins Media, and the Philadelphia Weekly, along with some of the brightest stars in our local blogosphere. As the conversation goes on, it has expanded far beyond my small email list, indeed, we now have 50 people (and climbing) involved. The talk has sometimes been heated, sometimes been difficult, and lately has took an urgent tone considering the dire straights PNI is in. I'm a firm believer the discussion is worth having. Email me at kmartino at pobox dot com if you want to take part.
I am doing this as a "hobby" - outside the context of my work - as concerned citizen/technologist/resident of Philadelphia interested in the future. For our communities - for our democracy - I believe it is a question that effects our health, safety and function. But for folks at PNI and at other threatened organizations across the country, it is a question of survival.
Numerous members from the discussion will be at a related unconference being held March 25th at Annenberg in Philadelphia. If you would like to attend please let me know. It would be terrific to have you there.
Please. Please stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America. You are partisan... what do you call it...hacks.
The link is to the Washington Post's new blog - ment to speak to just one segment of America's population - its largest - in the WaPo's quest to connect with the part of the nation it seeks the most sales, subscriptions, and click thrus from.
If the Washington Post ment to reach out to an underserved audience maybe it should have launched a blog with a focus on 'BlackAmerica' or 'HispanicAmerica', 'JewishAmerica', 'MuslimAmerica', 'WomenAmerica', 'GayAmerica' or 'CatholicAmerica'?
'CatholicAmerica'? Underserved? Gettoutta here you sneer. Hey - I'm Catholic. I feel underserved. I'm sure Steven Colbert would agree with me. It's all about how I feel dammit.
Really though.... why not go for broke and focus on 'WorkingClassAmerica' or 'WorkingRealJobsSoYouDontHaveToAmerica'? No one seems to give a shit about that demographic, Heaven's sake.
What? Not enough hits you say? They're too busy working to click and comment? Yeah. Fuck that. Better to serve up division - far better "heat" that way ya know - and will keep folks from thinking too deeply.
So we get something that might as well be named the 'WhiteAngloSaxonProtestantAmericaBlog'. I don't know. Maybe 'OurAmericaRocksYoursDontBlog', 'WereTheMajorityGetUsedToItBlog' or 'WeRunTheCountrySoShutTheFuckUpYouTraitorsBlog' fits better don'tchya think?
Good job on broadening the discourse WaPo. Good job.
See Jon Stewart let them have it on Crossfire for the reference.
Note: this post is obviously satirical in nature. But my disappointment is real.
Update: David Brock writes a letter to the Washington Post asking if there are plans to give a liberal blogger equal exposure. It's a good letter that I agree with. Domenech isn't simply a journalist ya know. But let's not stop there. I want Libertarians, Independents, and the Green Party to have *their* operatives at WaPo.com too. Hey - on the web - there is no such thing as space. So much division to exploit - so little time.
Jon Stewart hosting the Oscars has helped draw the attention of many, many bloggers. Lots are trying to cash in on the hype by publishing prediction lists of winners - an old cheap writing trick. Admittedly, I'm curious, so for once I will tune in for a few minutes, but nothing more. If something interesting happens, I will hear about it from my online community of friends and I will download it via Bittorrent. Even with all the new buzz this year, I'm sure the Oscars remain the self-congratulatory circle-jerk they always were. 'Nuff-said, right? Well no. This opens a door to connect some dots...
Publishing a list is one type of attention drawing tactic, being snarky is another...
These days you could rename Memeorandum to Snarksforall, with one blogger trying to top another for the most vacuous post.
So true! Performancing has a handy guide to these techniques: 10 Killer Post Ideas:
...Here are ten proven post formulas to get your creative juices, and your traffic, flowing....1. How to...2. Lists...3. Campaign...4. Interview...5. Review...6. Case study...7. Research results...8. What's new, trends...9. Attack!...10. Ask the audience...
There are other linkbait guides out there for you, go ahead and search if so inclined. Howard Stern was ahead of his time man. Way ahead of his time.
Then again, you can have the best writing or service in the world, if no one knows about it, you're shit outta luck. You need to know how to get the word out. You need to know who has influence and who doesn't.
Publishing 2.0: Who Are the New Media Gatekeepers?:
Who decides what�s worthy of your attention � a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, a community of thousands, a community of millions?
Answer for today: bloggers!
Jeremy Zawodny: How to give Oral Sex to Bloggers in Return for PR Favors:
..there's nothing like a few excited bloggers to kick off a good viral marketing campaign, right?! Who cares if your product is lame. Just get some bloggers to talk about it!
But which ones? Well it's Technorati to the rescue...
Guy Kawasakli: How to Suck Up to a Blogger:
...Nowadays buzz begets ink. Journalists no longer anticipate or create buzz--rather, they react to it: "Everyone is buzzing about FaceBook. There must be something to this, so I had better write a story about it." This role reversal has fried people's minds.The latest development is that blogs beget buzz. Blogs have changed everything because they represent a cheap, effective podium for creating buzz on a massive scale. Technorati provides an easy way to identify the A-listers, so all you have to do is attract the most influential bloggers.
...Sucking up is not an event--it's a process.
Don Dodge: The new way to launch your product or company:
It doesn't cost anything to publicize your new product or service. Simply engage a couple of the "A-List" bloggers (Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble, Dave Winer, Om Malik, Steve Gillmor, Cory Doctorow, Richard MacManus, Stowe Boyd, and others) by sending them a link to your new product or service. Tell them what problem it solves and why it is cool. When they blog, people listen. When their stories hit Tech Memeorandum, Digg, TailRank, and other services the story explodes across thousands of blogs within hours.
You see, if you don't have buzz, you don't have reach. You don't have reach, no one will know you exist without one hell of a hard slog - no matter how good you are.
NYMag: Blogs to Riches: The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom:
...By all appearances, the blog boom is the most democratized revolution in media ever. Starting a blog is ridiculously cheap; indeed, blogging software and hosting can be had for free online. There are also easy-to-use ad services that, for a small fee, will place advertisements from major corporations on blogs, then mail the blogger his profits. Blogging, therefore, should be the purest meritocracy there is....In theory, sure. But if you talk to many of today�s bloggers, they�ll complain that the game seems fixed. They�ve targeted one of the more lucrative niches�gossip or politics or gadgets (or sex, of course)�yet they cannot reach anywhere close to the size of the existing big blogs. It�s as if there were an A-list of a few extremely lucky, well-trafficked blogs�then hordes of people stuck on the B-list or C-list, also-rans who can�t figure out why their audiences stay so comparatively puny no matter how hard they work. �It just seems like it�s a big in-party,� one blogger complained to me. (Indeed, a couple of pranksters last spring started a joke site called Blogebrity and posted actual lists of the blogs they figured were A-, B-, and C-level famous.)
That�s a lot of inequality for a supposedly democratic medium.
It's because the web resembles the wishes, desires, and motives of humanity. And humanity, while striving for something greater, is grounded in behaviors inscribed in our hearts, in our minds, in our genes.
Clay Shirky: Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality:
...In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution....inbound link data is just an example: power law distributions are ubiquitous. Yahoo Groups mailing lists ranked by subscribers is a power law distribution. (Figure #2) LiveJournal users ranked by friends is a power law. (Figure #3) Jason Kottke has graphed the power law distribution of Technorati link data. The traffic to this article will be a power law, with a tiny percentage of the sites sending most of the traffic. If you run a website with more than a couple dozen pages, pick any time period where the traffic amounted to at least 1000 page views, and you will find that both the page views themselves and the traffic from the referring sites will follow power laws.
...any tendency towards agreement in diverse and free systems, however small and for whatever reason, can create power law distributions.
Because it arises naturally, changing this distribution would mean forcing hundreds of thousands of bloggers to link to certain blogs and to de-link others, which would require both global oversight and the application of force. Reversing the star system would mean destroying the village in order to save it.
Given the ubiquity of power law distributions, asking whether there is inequality in the weblog world (or indeed almost any social system) is the wrong question, since the answer will always be yes. The question to ask is "Is the inequality fair?"
So, lets get this straight shall we? The new way of doing things looks remarkably like the old way. The names and methods have have changed, but that's pretty much it. At least Technorati lets me see who those with influence are. I wonder when that will go behind a pay wall?
Some A-listers seem to want to keep this knowledge obscured while selling an ideal that doesn't exist. It's a very sellable ideal. In a way, these few folks exhibit a form of long tail denial. Kent Newsome connects the dots nicely here: Bloglogic and the Litmus Test for Link Love:
...making traffic and links your focus is not the most effective way to build a blog. Most of the people who have been at the table when we've talked about it seem to agree with that.But just because traffic and links aren't the focus doesn't mean they aren't legitimate goals. To tell someone that traffic and links don't matter at all is a little like a rich guy telling a poor guy not to be so concerned about money. I don't obsess about money, but making some is certainly one of my goals when I head out the door each weekday morning.
The key is to have many goals, but a narrow focus.
...Here's the only question you have to answer to determine whether traffic is one of your blogging goals: would you blog happily for an extended time if no one ever read your blog? No Comments, no clicks, no links. Just a dark corner of cyberspace where your blog sits idle and completely unnoticed
It's just marketing.
Indeed.
For my part, I'm going to keep doing it the way I always have - by trying to put out the best service I possibly can, and be a good person. That service attempts to use its influence to expose those who should be heard to a wider audience. I don't have the time, nor inclination, to play suck up. I guess that's my loss.
Update: I check Technorati fairly regularly to see who is linking here and to my surprise, Memeorandum picked me up. I was indeed there for a few seconds, as you can see from this archived page, but whatever algorithm Memeorandum uses has replaced me, with someone who ranks higher.
Update: Whups. Incorrect. It moved my link reference to someone else. I'm still there. It's fascinating to watch it move links and references every few minutes to help present a picture of the thread. Okay.. I'm breaking my Lent promise...walk away... walk away...
