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.
Thank you sir.
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.