Category Archives: Public Service, Civics, Government, Activism

I love the smell of Web mobs in the morning

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It’s been an interesting week and a half in American politics, but today, the Web is going to take a special role, the blogosphere in particular, and in an a real ugly way.

There are pictures floating around of some MySpace pages, with titles and comments that are easily misunderstood not given appropriate context.

And based upon our biases we will automatically believe what we want to believe about them.

While we all take special delight in exposing hypocrisy, as we should as it reveals much about character, sometimes things go way, way too far. And I have a feeling this is about to.

We’re all flawed human beings and the sooner we each recognize that, and be understanding towards that, the better this world will be. From all sides of the political isle.

I think Obama’s speech last week was a bit of an inspiration. And this is an expression of that.

Electronic Voting Machine Revelations

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Washington Post: Ohio Voting Machines Contained Programming Error That Dropped Votes

Brad Blog: Diebold Admits Their Tabulator Software Doesn’t Count Votes Correctly

Bruce Schneier: Diebold Finally Admits its Voting Machines Drop Votes

Social Media/Software Links for Today

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There’s a theme going on here that is a bit hard to place… but it’s there.

Jon Udell: Homophily, anti-recommendation, and Driveway Moments , shout out to Global Voices Online:

Recommendation systems don’t help me much. They only suggest things similar to other things I’ve shown interest in. Increasingly that just frustrates me. The most delightful recommendations are those that connect me with things that interest me in unpredictable ways. That happens serendipitously, and I haven’t yet found a reliable way to manufacture the serendipity.

Crooked Timber: Blogs, Participation and Polarization:

So whether you like political blogs will depend to some extent on whether you prefer deliberation across party lines to participation, or vice versa. Personally (at least as regards political efficacy in the current era), I’m on the vice versa side, but we leave this question deliberately open, as people from different perspectives may disagree &c &c.

NYTimes: via rc3.org: Undecideds More Decided Than They Think, Study Says:

Voters who insist that they are undecided about a contentious issue are sometimes fooling themselves, having already made a choice at a subconscious level, a new study suggests.

Wired: Presidential Election Already Decided … in Voters’ Minds:

The electorate has already made up its collective mind who it will vote for in November. Even many of those all-important and highly coveted undecided voters aren’t really undecided.

They may think they are carefully weighing their choices, but their decision is rigged in advance by their subconscious minds, say psychologists, and they just aren’t aware of it.

CJR: Echo Chamber: How blogging failed the war in Georgia:

There are, of course, many others. The point is not that some blogs covered the conflict well, and fulfilled the promise of a blog network that transcends the spin and amplifies ignored voices: it is that the majority of blogs did not. Watching the most prominent blogs turn into their own worst enemies largely deflates much of their egalitarian mystique–and drives home just how important it is to remain a skeptical reader.

Slate: What’s Really Killing Newspapers: Not that long ago, the daily newspaper was an indispensable coiner of social currency, and it gave its readers piles of the stuff in each edition.

Corante: Transforming American Newspapers (Part 2):

It is almost impossible to overstate how utterly the supply of news and information available to most Americans has changed during the past 35 years. Within a single generation, the Supply & Demand equation has gone from relative scarcity to certain surplus. People now have so much access to information that some are complaining about ‘data smog’.

Bubblegeneration: Data is a Commodity, or How Not to Revolutionize…:

This is an old question. We discussed it at USV Sessions two years ago – I think it was phrased, “What’s the value of data in an open world”. And even then, little insight was generated.

It’s the wrong question. Data isn’t the valuable.

In fact, data’s a commodity. We’re drowning in data.

Think about it this way: the lower the cost of interaction, by definition, the more abundant data is – because every interaction creates reams of data. More data is created tomorrow than was created yesterday. And so on.

What is valuable are the things that create data: markets, networks, and communities.

Chicago Tribune interviews Adrian Holovaty of EveryBlock.com and Django: Cyberstar.

Current issue of Scientific American deals with privacy and identity: How I Stole Someone’s Identity, Internet Eavesdropping: A Brave New World o Wiretapping, Data Fusion: The Ups and Downs of All-Encompassing Digital Profiles, Do Social Networks Bring the End of Privacy?, Cryptography: How to Keep Your Secrets Safe.

And Apple bans a… comic book.

Blogs that deal with mental illness

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My wife, Richelle, has been encouraging me to talk more about Mom, including here on the blog. I don’t talk about her that much because I have yet to find the words that can adequately express my childhood, but I grew up with a mother who wrestled with a condition called “Schizoaffective Disorder”. I can go into detail about how the disease affected her reasoning and capacity to deal with day to day life, maybe one day I will, but for now, it probably says much by simply indicating that she was aware she had a problem, she sought out help, and that it was episodic, and that those episodes could be heart rendering.

It’s scary talking about such subject matter, many are dealing with such issues in our lives, in our families, and feel forced to conceal such knowledge from others for fear of how it will reflect.

That’s why blogs that talk about mental illness are so important. They are few and far between. And some face insurmountable pressure to represent the views of one establishment or another.

I want to mention two blogs that are worthy of your RSS reader:

Furious Seasons: Ran by a journalist, and psych patient Philip Dawdy, Furious Seasons wrestles with the ongoing, terrible state of psychiatric care.

The Trouble With Spikol: Ran by executive editor of the Philadelphia Weekly, Liz Spikol documents her fight against her illness and her takes on all matters that strike her to write.

Of course I’m biased due to the experience of growing up with Mom, but both these blogs stand as the most courageous I have encountered on the Web.

You know you are dealing with these issues in your life somewhere. Subscribe. Read. Relate. Maybe even comment.

The Evolution of George Carlin

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WFMU’s Beware of the Blog has a great piece on George Carlin’s early years, including clips and audio.

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog: “The Early George Carlin 1956-1970”:

“The musicians I knew had gone through that transition … I’m listening to Bob Dylan … and I realize these artists are using their talent to project their feelings and ideas… not just please people … I was in the wrong place. In 1967 … I was thirty. I was entertaining people in nightclubs who were forty. They were at war with their kids who were twenty. There was a generation war. I was in the middle of it. I said ‘what the fuck am I doing over here?’ [The twenty year olds] are the people who will understand me and give me a chance … I took two years to change and it happened on television … happened on … shows like Della Reese, Virgina Graham and Steve Allen,” He added, “Virginia Graham was a real shit stirrer. She just loved to get me to talk about smoking pot and Henry Mancini… she got Henry Mancini to cop out to being a pot smoker on TV … I went on there … my beard was growing … my attitudes … were changing. And I talked about my changes on the panel… a lot.”

Funding journalism: the way it is, the way it will be

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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 advertisers

The 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.

NYTimes on Jon Stewart

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NYTimes: Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?:

Most important, at a time when Fox, MSNBC and CNN routinely mix news and entertainment, larding their 24-hour schedules with bloviation fests and marathon coverage of sexual predators and dead celebrities, it’s been “The Daily Show” that has tenaciously tracked big, “super depressing” issues like the cherry-picking of prewar intelligence, the politicization of the Department of Justice and the efforts of the Bush White House to augment its executive power.

For that matter, the Comedy Central program — which is not above using silly sight gags and sophomoric sex jokes to get a laugh — has earned a devoted following that regards the broadcast as both the smartest, funniest show on television and a provocative and substantive source of news. “The Daily Show” resonates not only because it is wickedly funny but also because its keen sense of the absurd is perfectly attuned to an era in which cognitive dissonance has become a national epidemic. Indeed, Mr. Stewart’s frequent exclamation “Are you insane?!” seems a fitting refrain for a post-M*A*S*H, post-“Catch-22” reality, where the surreal and outrageous have become commonplace — an era kicked off by the wacko 2000 election standoff in Florida, rocked by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and haunted by the fallout of a costly war waged on the premise of weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

February 8, 1996 was “Black Thursday”

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To protest the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a large portion of the Web had turned their site’s background color black. Read about it on Wikipedia and read Howard Rheingold’s thoughts on the historic day.

It’s interesting to hink about the collective action that it represented and to think about that in today’s context. I mean – Yahoo! turned its home page black!