Norgs stories of the week

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* NewAssignment.net has launched a blog and is looking for potential stories to cover. Mark Glaser has been surveying folks at MediaShift and it looks like they want to see the U.S. Government as the focus of any investigative reporting. I’ve been asked to help advise NewAssignment.net. Finding models to pay for acts of investigative journalism is crucial. If, in any way I can help, I am happy to do so.

* keepgoing.org: The Big Fish: The story of Suck.com, it’s rise and eventual fall, is chock full of early web publishing lessons. Suck (and Feed) are two efforts that don’t get mentioned very often in these conversations, since they no longer exist, but maybe should.

* Mark Glaser: News21 Produces Investigative Reports, But Can Universities Think Different?: Last year the Carnegie Corporation and Knight Foundation joined with five journalism schools in pledging $6 million dollars to create the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Education – News21. It’s already producing results and lessons.

* Tom Mohr, formerly of Knight Ridder Digital, has a solution for the newspaper industry’s woes: and it sounds suspiciously like recreating the Market Leader CMS platform and Knight Ridder Digital.

* Adrian Holovaty of the Washington Post, describes a fundamental way newspaper sites need to change. It costs money, but the end result is an investment that will help papers be far more flexible in their reporting.

Hey – what’s a Norg? And there was an unconference you say? Uhuh. And an ongoing conversation. We need to get our site rolling.

Adrian Holovaty: “Newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview”

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Adrian Holovaty: A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change:

This is a subtle problem, and therein lies the rub. In my experience, when I’ve tried to explain the error of storing everything as a news article, journalists don’t immediately understand why it is bad. To them, a publishing system is just a means to an end: getting information out to the public. They want it to be as fast and streamlined as possible to take information batch X and put it on Web site Y. The goal isn’t to have clean data — it’s to publish data quickly, with bonus points for a nice user interface.

But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible. The problem is particularly frustrating to explain because it’s not necessarily obvious; if you store everything on your Web site as a news article, the Web site is not necessarily hard to use. Rather, it’s a problem of lost opportunity. If all of your information is stored in the same “news article” bucket, you can’t easily pull out just the crimes and plot them on a map of the city. You can’t easily grab the events to create an event calendar. You end up settling on the least common denominator: a Web site that knows how to display one type of content, a big blob of text. That Web site cannot do the cool things that readers are beginning to expect.

I left a comment responding to a poster saying this sounded like the Semantic Web, I’ve been meaning to write Adrian for a while now as well:

Hello Adrian,

I’ve been meaning to say hello to you for a number of different reasons over the past few years.

I’m an old Knight Ridder Digital developer. One of the folks that helped develop the Cofax CMS that was later replaced by KRD with… something else.

Cofax was a framework as well as a CMS, and in some very positive ways (well *I* think so :)), Django reminds me of it. Cofax was open sourced, but when KRD replaced it, well, work pretty much kept me from going back, refactoring, and taking it where it could still go. It’s still in use in many places. Well enough of that…

I definitively agree with you that newspapers are terrific places to work if you are a software engineer. The pace is quick, the work challenging, and you get the rare opportunity to not only practice your profession, but do so building tools and services that connect, inform and empower people.

It’s hard to beat.

anonymous – yes, I think Adrian is talking Semantic Web here. But like Adrian’s call for newspaper organizations to take a hard look at how they manage information in their publishing systems, Tim Berners-Lee has made the same call to the web developer community. The hard sell has been that that the Semantic Web likewise solves a series of problems of lost opportunity. It requires an investment in time and effort by the developer community to see its potential archived. Adrian, please correct me if that’s an incorrect understanding on my part.

Great piece.

Related reading material: Aaron Swartz: “The Semantic Web In Breadth” and Shelley Powers: “The Bottoms Up RDF Tutorial”. Then there’s “Practical RDF” also by Shelley Powers (which I ummm need to get around to reading, but have always heard good things about).

More at Techdirt.

You just know it’s bad when they censor little old me

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The folks at ABC are screening comments and mine looks to not appear on their “Path to 9/11” blog. I assure you I posted nothing offensive. It was a pointed question. I guess too pointed. Later I might be able to dig up the comment and post it here.

The more I’ve read about this “docudrama” the more concern I’ve felt. While it looks like the findings of the 9/11 Commission need to get out further, as the movie’s producers claim this to do, they also admit it is a work of fiction. A work of fiction that lays blame, scorn, and according to those who have written the commision report and were actors in the events, falsehoods, on the Clinton Administration.

There is a good thread on Metafilter. Editor & Publisher has a summary of the film here. And the Washington Post reports here. And lastly, a petition over at Think Progress.

When so many die each day, why pause to comment on Steve Irwin?

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Some folks I know are scratching their heads at the coverage Steve Irwin’s death has wrought this week. I’m not. It’s because so rarely do we meet someone, and yes, we’ve met Steve Irwin, who in public life displays so much passion, heart, and faith, and who radiated so much love.

He was real. In a public figure, that’s a rarity.

Like Liz Spikol, I found John McManamy’s tribute, at BipolarConnect.com a must read.

Now if we could look to those that die everyday in our streets, who we haven’t met just yet, maybe the world could be a better place.

Long whispered, now in the open?

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Ever wonder why we haven’t captured Bin Laden yet? Well according to ABCNews Pakistan has given Bin Laden a free pass. As Will Bunch notes, our policy with Pakistan has long seemed to be one of looking the other way.

I’ve long thought that this was the case and talked of it in conversation with friends and family. Wouldn’t dare post it online because it comes close to conspiracy talk and I don’t fancy myself as some kind of expert or pundit. But now it looks like this is seeing daylight.

Democrats should increase the call for answers as to why Bin Laden hasn’t been captured or killed yet. Or why those that *currently* harbor his organization have not been touched.

Watch close over the next few days folks. Either this blows up into a political storm, and Bin Laden is finally – finally – taken out. Or the reality of it will get twisted and turned in the news, and it will get downed out, in the ceaseless din of our media-rich days.

Kinda like so many other forgotten stories.

Once around the blog way

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My brother Dante has a blog (hi Dante!).

Howard is posting poetry.

And read the Inquirer’s Dan Rubin, who wrote about the passing of his beloved companion, Twinkle. I wish I had the capacity to write so well about one loved so much. It’s a moving tribute that will make you cry.

Being there, at the vet’s, when Teddy passed, changed Richelle, her mom and me in some indescribable, significant way. If we had the opportunity to change the decision to be there, I don’t think the three of us would decide differently, no matter how painful. Teddy is still walking around this house and Richelle’s parents. He’ll always be with us.

53 men and 1 woman

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That’s the composition of speakers at an upcoming Office 2.0 conference.

WTF?!?

Read Shelley Powers and Jeneane Sessum.

Edit: I removed an unfunny reference. This isn’t subject matter to take lightly.

Having one woman speaker among so many men seems shortsighted, and honestly – weird. It’s especially a shame, because the subject matter being covered is important not only to enterprises, but small and home businesses.