NPR.org profiles the hosts of Snopes.com in “Mom-And-Pop Site Busts The Web’s Biggest Myths”.
Tag Archives: influence
Blogging is dead (no its not)
Seth Finkelstein posts “Why (individual) Blogging Is Dead – Objective Measurement” – but his own thread proves otherwise if you ask me.
It comes down to who you want to hear you.
For me, its friends (online and off), family, co-workers, and those that might seek me out (or my opinions) for some reason or another.
If you happen to follow this blog for other reasons, you’ve always been welcome to.
Hopefully we make a connection. I have lots to learn and hopefully something to share.
If so, well all this is worth it.
Challenging conventional wisdom about the direction of media
New Yorker: Malcolm Gladwell: Priced to Sell – a scathing review of Wired’s Chris Anderson’s new book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” and the concepts promoted within.
NYTimes: Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia – the NYTimes coordinated with Wikipedia staff to keep a factual event from appearing on the service.
Say Everything: Chapter One: Putting Everything Out There [Justin Hall]: a review of Justin Hall’s history and his efforts on the Web. How they laid the foundation for all that came later.
NiemanJournalismLab: Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment
Scott Rosenberg: Salon.com IPO: It was ten years ago today
Chris Anderson (not Wired’s): We’ve Been Living Through a Twitter Revolution for the Last 10 Years
“Amusing Ourselves to Death” a comic by Stuart McMillen
Thought provoking, conversation starting, and probably controversial counting upon who you are, check out the whole single page comic.
“A New Media Tells Different Stories” by Bruno Giussani
“A New Media Tells Different Stories” by Bruno Giussani April, 1997:
There are also many other ramifications that the new journalist will have to take into consideration while handling information and exploiting the different tools.
quote First, the behavior of online information seekers is very different than the traditional readers: some surf, some search. The first group is satisfied which just seeing what’s there – they seek pleasure and surprise. The second group is looking for specific information – their priorities are easy and rapid access, and accuracy.
Second, geography is no longer an issue. Because of the Internet global reach, geographical audiences and ethnic audiences can overlap (for instance, Swiss readers living in the United States access our magazine online) as well as thematic audiences (say, worldwide car racing fans hooking up to an Indianapolis newspaper).
Thirdly, the development of the many different types of intelligent agents will double the human public in all of its diversity by becoming an artificial public. We will have to think of a way to present our information so that it reaches both people and robots: software which behaves according to their owners’ desires.
Forth, we will have to handle many different types of information that previously were not taken into consideration and which do not necessarily respond to the traditional definition of news: weather forecasts, traffic updates, sport results, real estate markets, transcripts of school board meetings, unedited documents, etc.
Fifth, we will have to face new competitors coming from outside the field of publishing, using different approaches and different techniques. The first name that comes to mind is, of course, Microsoft, a software company which has recently rolled out a magazine (Slate), launched a TV/Web station (MSNBC), and started projects for local Web guides (Sidewalk). But there are thousands more doing the same, becoming news publishers all the while being car manufacturers or phone companies.
Finally, and it’s an essential point, we are going to witness an explosion in the media diversity. It would be incredibly naive to envision the future looking only at what we can see today – the computer as a plastic box with a screen and a keyboard. The digital revolution is giving birth to multiple new forms of devices bringing together the quality of television images, the communication power of telephones, the memory and speed of computers, the selection and ease of use of newspapers. They are spreading out in different shapes and forms and locations: cellular phones with e-mail capability, network computers, videotext, electronic paper, digital wallets, voice recognition, audiotex, pagers, beep-watches, and so on. The future will allow us to access worldwide information, in many different forms, adapted to needs and places
Tim Berners-Lee new foundation the W3F is timely
The World Wide Web Foundation has a broad scope as described in its one page concept paper, but in short, where the w3c focuses on technologies and interoperability the w3f looks to to focus on technology and society.
arstechnica.com: WWW creator Berners-Lee launches ambitious Web Foundation
BBC.com: Warning sounded on web’s future
The Register: Berners-Lee backs web truthiness labelling scheme
Wow. Talk about timing!
Take the current campaign for President. How could a labeling scheme help or hurt?
Take a walk outside of your political bias for a moment, and realize, you might not be part of the majority, nor may your take on ‘truth’ be the prevailing ‘truth’ as per attention influence on the Web (anyone with high SERPs on Google for example).
Marc Ambinder: What We Learned This Weekend:
The McCain campaign has gone thoroughly post-modern on us! Truth? Schmuth? It’s all a struggle for power.
ScienceBlogs.com: Cognitive Dissonance And Politics:
…dissonant facts made them double-down. It would be too painful to be wrong, and so they convinced themselves that they were right.
USNews: The Campaign, “The Matrix,” and the GOP Offensive Against Truth:
Among historians, there’s a raging Great Debate about the question of Truth.
Wall Street Journal: The Triumph of Culture Over Politics:
For this season has given us the first truly postmodern election. Modern political campaigns are amalgams of politics, spectacle and entertainment. Postmodern campaigns teem with fluid identities, unmoored meanings and blurred boundaries to the point that stable terms like “politics,” “spectacle” and “entertainment” barely exist as separate concepts. These innovations, if you will, are shifts in the culture, and the total submersion of politics in a cultural atmosphere is a trend perfectly suited to the party of organic culture.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Barack Obama:
In my book “True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society”, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call “media fragmentation”–the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio–lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don’t, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it’s clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.
If postmodern behavior is just human nature (and I am not convinced), then ‘truth’ is in serious trouble since the Web mirrors human nature.
I guarantee you a labeling scheme, in the political sphere, would favor the those who could utilize attention influence the most effectively, and have little to do with actual ‘truth’.
Is the reason why Steven Colbert rocks so damn hard is because he confronts us with our lack of belief in a common ‘truth’ ?
YouTube: Stephen Colbert on The O’Reilly Factor
Google Video: Colbert Roasts President Bush – 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner
What to do or not do? Are there technological solutions, or does technology have no role to play? Or are we dealing with human nature at work, and if so, is it something to embrace, and we’ve come to a core reason why computer programming is so… flawed – that software is an attempt to model processes where there is no true or false, with a tool that only understands true or false?
And if it seems odd that I am making connections between tech, media and politics, well Dave Winer posted yesterday “People thought I stopped writing about technology but the technology and politics are all one and the same.”.
I’m just asking questions here, I have no answers. And probably need to drink less coffee in the morning.
Social Media/Software Links for Today
NYTimes: Brave New World of Digital Intimacy: About social networks and software and how we are using them to connect with one another.
Mind Hacks: The distant sound of well-armed sociologists – Reflections on the above mentioned NYTimes story.
wordle.net – generates graphical ‘word clouds’ from the text provided.
Reflections of a Newsosaur: Newspaper sales fall record $3B in 6 mos.
NPR.org: An Uneasy America: ‘Why We Hate Us’:
The Reality Club: A coversation On “Is Google Making Us Stoopid”.
J-School: Philly.com’s Convention Coverage and the Ethic of the Link
J-School: The Future of Journalism
Annenberg’s FactCheck.org: is doing a great job fact checking our candidates. Anyone listening?
SciAm.com: The Political Brain – Brain-imaging study shows political predilections are a product of unconscious confirmation bias. How we see reality is biased towards our own currently held beliefs.
McCain Campaign Manager: ‘This Election is Not About Issues’
That’s a real quote folks. Parse it carefully. Take it for what it is – a rare moment of revealing honesty.
Rick Davis, campaign manager for John McCain’s presidential bid, insisted that the presidential race will be decided more over personalities than issues during an interview with Post editors this morning.
“This election is not about issues,” said Davis. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”
Source: Washington Post: The Fix: McCain Manager: ‘This Election is Not About Issues’McCain choose Palin to reinforce the false idea that the GOP is the ‘regular people party’. (Is either party the ‘regular people party’ anymore?)
It’s human nature that drives us to choose leaders that remind us of ourselves in someway. Who we can relate to or hopefully relate to.
McCain is exploiting this, in the most craven, reckless way I have yet seen in my short life.
We need to stop looking at our leader’s personal lives to find things we can relate to or denounce and we need to cast light on our leaders policies and how they effect us.
But will that happen for this election? Will we rise to the challenge?
BTW – did ya know that Mayor Palin wanted to ban books (via rc3.org) that disagreed with her religious views?
Or that she slashed funding that helped teenage moms in need?
Or that she’s proud of her daughter’s decision to keep her baby? (Note that word – decision – shouldn’t everyone have that right?)
There is more than enough on the face of the issues to wage a good conversation over who is best to represent and lead the country.
I love the smell of Web mobs in the morning
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.
Social Media/Software Links for Today
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.