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

Easy target: knocking the press for the housing crisis

Posted on by

Dan Gillmor is right to knock the press in its coverage of the housing bubble. It didn’t do its job. But I thought we were in the age of the crowd having more information than the experts? In the age of news that bubbles up from the conversation where knowledge of something as disastrous as a oncoming financial collapse of the country would umm… be somewhat noticeable.

Beat up on the press all you want Dan. They are an easy punching bag in an age where over 60% of the public have lost confidence in them.

While I am sure we can find voices in the blogosphere that were warning us to impending troubles, as we probably can in the press, it didn’t get surfaced to wide enough audience.

The media failed certainly. And so did We the Media fail.

And it is something that must be confronted.

I am a big trumpeter of social media and how it can empower each of us to connect in ways that were impossible just a short while ago. I’m planning to share some great examples here in later posts. But as you say Dan, there’s plenty of blame to go around in this mess.

As Dave Rogers recently pointed out many tend to look to technological solutions to problems when what they are really dealing with is something different. We prescribe solutions way before we even understand the problem.

And hard enough, sometimes understanding the problem involves a hard look in our own mirrors.

Shelley Powers: “If you do it right, you get Techcrunch. If you do it wrong, there’s the ditch”

Posted on by

What Shelley Powers describes in the below linked piece is the current economy that encourages folks like Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears to do whatever it takes to get publicity.

David Shenk’s “Data Smog” put it like this “All high-stim roads lead to Times Square”.

That’s the Web. It is nothing if not high-stim.

Folks like Michael Arrington not only have embraced where that leads, but know how to make a profit from it.

Kevin Kelly, in a piece that cuts away at the hype, describes one possible business model for artists in in “1,000 True Fans”. But he never describes how you are going to find those fans. In an attention based economy, will it force artists to involve the kind of marketing that, in the words of Dave Rogers tries to “exploit love”?

Bb’s RealTech: Shelley Powers: Stop Creating and Get a Real Job:

According to people like Michael Arrington all recorded music should be given away for free, and artists make their only income from concerts. If they can’t make their living from concerts, or busking for tossed dimes in the subway, than they should consider music to be their hobby, and get a job digging ditches.

Of course, if we apply the Arrington model to the music industry, we should be able to download all the songs we want-as long as we’re willing to sit through an ad at the beginning and in the middle of every song. Isn’t that how Techcrunch makes money? Ads in the sidebar, taking time to download, hanging up the page. Ads at the bottom of the posts we have to scroll past to get to comments? And in between, loud, cacophonous noise?

It angers me how little value people in this online environment hold the act of creativity. Oh we point to Nine Inch Nails and Cory Doctorow as examples of people who give their work away for free but still make a living. Yet NIN levies an existing fame, selling platinum packages at several hundred a pop to make up for all the freebies, and Doctorow has BoingBoing as a nice cushion for the lean years. They bring “fame” to the mix, and according to the new online business models, you have to play the game, leverage the system if you really want to make a living from your work. We don’t value the work, we value the fame, yet fame doesn’t necessarily come from any act of true creativity.

All you have to do to generate fame nowadays is be controversial enough, say enough that’s outrageous, connect up with the right people in the beginning and then kick them aside when you’re on top to be successful. You don’t have to have artistic talent, create for the ages, or even create at all-just play the game. If you do it right, you get Techcrunch. If you do it wrong, there’s the ditch.

Using Our Powers For Good

Posted on by

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.

Read the whole piece.

Share It When You Can Find It: Investigative Journalism

Posted on by

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.

It’s never as simple as either/or

Posted on by

There are far too many who like to paint the future of quality filtered media as either entirely driven by ‘the wisdom of the crowds’ or entirely by ‘the experts and the elite’.

Both these extremist views are wrong as hybrids that combine the best of both have already proven successful and will continue to do so over the long haul, no matter the fashion of the moment.

Newsweek.com: Is User-Generated Content Out? | Newsweek Technology (Stupid)

MSM Blog Networks Aren’t All That Bad

Posted on by

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.

It stinks going to CrunchNotes lately

Posted on by

I’m one of those guys who really appreciates folks who shoot from the hip and share what they feel, especially in the face of lots of heat. That’s one of the reasons why I follow many of the writers I do on the Web, including Michael Arrington and his blog CrunchNotes.

But his latest post just won’t go away. It’s been sitting as his latest now for over a week and the longer it sits there, without correction, the further it spreads mis-information.

What is that mis-information? Well it’s one thing to dislike Shelley Powers and to back it up with facts, and even feelings.

It’s another thing to spread a falsehood, which is what the post in question does. Shelley Powers, unequivocally, will criticize anyone, regardless of sex or station. She really puts her self on the line by speaking truth to power day in and day out.

Questioning dogma is a lonely place to be sometimes.

How this happened is a mystery really.

There was an argument that erupted over the use of an image in an online video, produced by a band.

You can read about the controversy at Wired.

There was some interesting discussion about copyright, much that resembling that which followed other similar controversies in the past.

Conversation that is again springing up about Fox helping itself to someone’s Flickr pictures.

I simply feel that without a lawsuit, contrary to the opinions of folks I respect – because of lack of clarity – no one knows who was in the right and who was in the wrong.

During arguments like this, where facts are few and opinions are many, where clarity is hard to find, I tend to absorb all view points, to weigh my own opinion. This was a great opportunity for that.

That is, until it ran off the rails at at Mathew Ingrams’s blog. Normally a place, like Shelley’s, for some of the best discussion about social media and the Web.

Rogers Cadenhead said that Shelley is due an apology – I agree.

Jeneane Sessum looked at this as a bigger, cultural issue with the blogosphere:

…the larger LARGER problem for the blogosphere and twitterspehere is that a culture is developing — thanks in part to time-saving, fragment-tossing platforms like twitter, that by design silence dissenting voices — we have all become easy targets for extinction, the casualties of casual dismissal.

THAT’s what bothered me about this situation, about what Mike said to Shelley, about what Mike and others said about Lane without asking Lane anything, and STILL DOES bother me.

The “you’re just” mantra is getting way out of hand.

It is cultish and thought canceling.

The irony is that my attraction to ‘shoot from the hip’ opinions is part of the problem.

When I look around me, it seems more and more that context or historical background doesn’t matter – all that matters is the headline, the blurb, and the attention driving influence of the one sharing it.

Increasingly it seems our culture encourages ‘winning it all costs’ behavior – no matter the right and wrong.

And I guess, at Christmas time especially, these things make me sad.

Want to learn a bit about the work I do?

Posted on by

I’m 2/3rds of the way through reading Scott Rosenberg’s “Dreaming In Code” and wanted to share with you my enthusiasm for the book – I’ll be buying it as a gift for a few folks this year.

The NYTimes gets into Blog Aggregation!

Posted on by

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 🙂

A Great Example of Networked Journalism

Posted on by

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.