Category Archives: Communications, Connection, Internet, Web, Media

How about some realistic expectations, more experimentation, and less punditry about punditry?

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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?

The more things change….

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Dave Rogers: Blind Faith:

As the stock market continues its free fall into the Clinton era, and the economic news grows worse and worse, we are cheered by the report of a study that indicates that “Teenagers’ Internet Socializing Not a Bad Thing.” Of course, irony being the fifth fundamental force of the universe, that little online headline was placed immediately across from this one: “Woman Who Posed as Boy Testifies in Case That Ended in Suicide of 13-Year-Old.”

John Scalzi: Technology Changes, People Not So Much:

Technology changes, social trends change, hairstyles change, but people – the actual human animals inside all that technology, sociology and tonsorial grooming — are the same as they have been for thousands of years. Grab a time machine, go back to ancient Egypt, and swap an infant there with an infant from today, and in twenty years you’ll likely find two people perfectly well integrated into their cultures because there is no difference in the human animal between now and then. Even within generations (which are an artificial construct in themselves, but never mind that now) there’s enough variation to drive you a little batty: The same generation that gave us the hippies went for Nixon in 1972, and that same generation gave us both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Go figure.

Jon Udell: Carl Hewitt on cloud computing, scalable semantics, and Wikipedia:

In one of the most striking moments in that talk, Carl says:

“What can I change? Just me. For anything else, I send a message, I say please, and I hope for the best.”

Then he laughs and adds:

“Does this sound like some circumstances you are familiar with?”

Having thought deeply, for 40 years, about the intersection of computation and human affairs, he has arrived at an elegant synthesis: The same organizational and communication patterns govern both realms.

What is Cognitive Science?

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Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Cognitive Science:

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary study of mind and intelligence, embracing philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and anthropology. Its intellectual origins are in the mid-1950s when researchers in several fields began to develop theories of mind based on complex representations and computational procedures. Its organizational origins are in the mid-1970s when the Cognitive Science Society was formed and the journal Cognitive Science began. Since then, more than sixty universities in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia have established cognitive science programs, and many others have instituted courses in cognitive science.

You don’t need to knock a man down to argue his ideas

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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?

norgs – the unconference

the norgs must read list

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):

Evil and… advertising?

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“Advertising is social psychology. To understand how advertising affects people, you have to understand why people follow the group and how the brain works.” – Ad Savvy on Philip Zimbardo, whose talk at TED explains how ordinary people can become monsters.

TED: Philip Zimbardo: How ordinary people become monsters … or heroes

Books to read by two friends

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Scott McNulty, Philly blogger, food blogger, Apple tech blogger, longtime (now former) organizer of the Philly Blogger meetup, longtime contributor to Philly Future, and good friend, has had a book published on WordPress and blogging best practices.

Buy it here at Amazon.com.

Howard Hall, likewise a long time contributor to Philly Future, friend, writer and poet, had a book of poetry published.

Get it here at Amazon.com.

(I feel like building a widget to highlight Howard Hall haikus – hmmmm… )

A mash of cogsci, socioliology, and psychiatry interesting links

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WashingtonPost: Bytes of Life: For Every Move, Mood and Bodily Function, There’s a Web Site to Help You Keep Track

Jeff Jarvis: The perils of publicness

The Atlantic: He Saw It Coming: The forgotten filmmaker who anticipated our modern media madness:

…the world his early films anticipated is the world we inhabit now. Like no filmmaker before or since, Watkins captures the constant manipulation and counter­manipulation of the modern media, the push-pull of image projection and message management that has blurred the line between news and propaganda. His films are testaments to central truths of the current media environment: that mere logic is powerless against a brilliant projection of personality, that self-conscious “objectivity” and truth-telling are very different things, and that compelling narrative is impervious to facts. From the selling of the Iraq War to the selling of Sarah Palin, Watkins, like Orwell before him, shows how we are lied to, and how we lie to ourselves.

Furious Seasons: FDA Panel Slams Antipsychotic Use In Kids, Teens

NYTimes: What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?:

At least we know one thing: it’s possible to have about the same number of men and women in computer science classes. That just about describes classrooms of 25 years ago.

Malcom Gladwell’s new book is getting trashed by some rather big name bloggers. Me thinks they doth protest too much because – for once – one of his books runs counter to Web’s domineering libertarian culture. If you’ve read “Blink”, read “Tipping Point” – what I consider a far better book and more applicable to the Web. His new one, named “Outliers” looks like a must read.

To Watch: “Strive For Happiness” – a documentary about sensitive subject matter – what the lives are like for those in families with loved ones dealing with mental illness.

A question to think about – will Britney Spears’s struggle with mental illness make it easier to talk about it?

Technology and business model shifts can drive innovation

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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.

Blog Design Update

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New site design! I finally got around to upgrading my templates to the latest and greatest in Movable Type.

My RSS feed has relocated to http://www.paradox1x.org/atom.xml. Please re-subscribe there.

This led to me changing my URL design significantly. Previously, I had used entry_id as each post’s slug value, which wasn’t optimal, SEO-wise, or for file system management (having over a thousand files in a directory is rarely a good idea), so URLs are now based upon post titles, as is the default of most MT sites. This forced me to find a means to redirect the old pages. A .htaccess file with 2500 entries didn’t sound like a good idea. Instead, using a .htaccess file in the old design’s weblog/kmartino/archive directory, I mapped .shtml to PHP. I then modified the templates of the old design to output some PHP that wrote the appropriate response header to do 301 redirects to the new URL each page would reside in. Seems to work well.

I like the default MT look and feel for now. I’ll tweak latter to re-add some things I miss from the old design later, plus add some new sugar like pagination in my monthly and category archives.