Author Archives: Karl

Latest Norg and Social Software/Media Must Reads

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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!

Frank Paynter: “There is no room for prophets…”

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Tabs from my browser…:

The moment the writers of the Gospels set down the words of Jesus they began to kill the message. There is no room for prophets within religious institutions – indeed within any institutions – for as Paul Tillich knew, all human institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Tribal societies persecute and silence prophets. Open societies tolerate them at their fringes, and our prophets today come not from the church but from our artists, poets and writers who follow their inner authority. Samuel Beckett’s voice is one of modernity’s most authentically religious. Beckett, like the author of Ecclesiastes, was a realist. He saw the pathetic, empty monuments we spend a lifetime building to ourselves. He knew, as we read in Ecclesiastes, that nothing is certain or permanent, real or unreal, and that the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal, that, since death awaits us all, all is vanity, that we must give up on the childish notion that one is rewarded for virtue or wisdom.

A thought to ponder for the day. (actually a few…)

What’s exciting about Google Gears

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A lot of folks are going gaga over Google Gears and its capability to enable partially connected web applications (web applications that can run offline).

Here is a paraphrase from a comment I left at Burningbird (Shelley Powers’s blog is one of my favorite places to discuss web technology and how it relates to society, politics, and more):

What really interests me about Google Gears is the local web server.

It’s the Dave Winer Fractional Horsepower HTTP Server idea (from back in 1997), that’s finally come of age.

Just what is possible when each of us have our own web servers, running on our desktops?

Immediately you think p2p heaven. But the possibilities for building collaborative apps is just massive.

I know, I know, for anyone who knows Perl, Python or Java, it’s never been too much of a big deal to spin up your own webserver, but this looks like it makes it more than simple – it makes it practical.

If I’m reading it right, you’ll need some form of centralized web app to co-ordinate collaboration across machines, which is no big deal.

The web’s about being connected. And it’s the online possibilities that Google Gears opens up that are rather mind boggling.

Dave Winer: “There’s always been too much made of death in the tech world”

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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!

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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.

Law of Data Smog 13: “Cyberspace is Republican.”

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I made a few important edits to my post yesterday. Added links that gave context. Removed a typo here and there. Did you notice?

Well that’s your fault you see. You’re not media literate.

You are expected to revisit my posts to see edits and updates. As a good host, I should indicate my edits in one fashion or another (which I didn’t do).

See Dan Farber: Media literacy in a media saturated world.

Very, very related if you want to see the societal shift this is part of: BusinessWeek: “I Want My Safety Net”.

We are shifting risk from institutions, the producers of things, to the consumers of things.

The expectation is that since we are all now producers, we must individually keep BS meters up and running at all times, otherwise, it’s our own damn fault if we get fooled by something.

While people point to blogs as the primary purveyors of this kind of thought, in actuality, it seems prevalent in all forms of media.

Scott Rosenberg: Amateur hour:

…saying the answer to the crisis in journalism today is “better media literacy” is like saying the answer to the crisis in education is “better learning skills.”

He says this sarcastically but the redistribution of risk is a trend in everything from the food we give our dogs, to the education we give our children, from what we expect from our government (just re-look at Katrina), to the relationships we have with our neighbors.

The lesson – keep your guard up. You are on your own. Trust nothing and no one except yourself.

Good or bad? You decide.

The title of this post refers to a “law of data smog” in David Shenk’s terrific book, “Data Smog”. He was referring to the libertarian impulse that was prevalent in the late 90s Republican movement. He should have said “Cyberspace is Libertarian” and it would have been timeless.

Update:David Shenk posts a comment in this post’s thread that in the paperback version of “Data Smog” he put down Law 13 of Data Smog to be “Cyberspace is Libertarian” instead of “Cyberspace is Republican”!

The battle between old and new media rages on… really? REALLY?

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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:

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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
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