News and content based business models online links for thought

Both sides of the fence represented in the following links:

Tech Crunch: The End of Hand Crafted Content

Daily Patricia Daily Patricia – Dumb Things Media 2.0 Loves To Say

Doc Searls: The Revolution Will Not Be Intermediated

Jeff Jarvis: Content farms v. curating farmers

Paul Kedrosky: Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail

Clay Shirky lays out the issues confronting the future of news journalism

Read the whole thing. Nieman Journalism Lab: Clay Shirky at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy:

…in the nightmare scenario that I’ve kind of been spinning at for the last couple years has been: Every town in this country of 500,000 or less just sinks into casual, endemic, civic corruption — that without somebody going down to the city council again today, just in case, that those places will simply revert to self-dealing. Not of epic, catastrophic sorts, but the sort that just takes five percent off the top. Newspapers have been our principal bulwark for that, and as they’re shrinking, that I think is where the threat is.

…So we don’t need another different kind of institution that does 85 percent of accountability journalism. We need a class of institutions or models, whether they’re endowments or crowdsourced or what have you — we need a model that produces five percent of accountability journalism. And we need to get that right 17 times in a row. That’s the issue before us. There will not be anything that replaces newspapers, because if you could write the list of stuff you needed and organizational characteristics and it looked like newspapers, newspapers would be able to fill that role, right?

It is really a shift from one class of institutions to the ecosystem as a whole where I think we have to situate the need of our society for accountability. I also want to distance myself — and I’ll end shortly. But I want to distance myself, with that observation I also want to distance myself from the utopians in my tribe, the web tribe, and even to some degree the optimists.

I think a bad thing is going to happen, right? And it’s amazing to me how much, in a conversation conducted by adults, the possibility that maybe things are just going to get a lot worse for a while does not seem to be something people are taking seriously. But I think this falling into relative corruption of moderate-sized cities and towns — I think that’s baked into the current environment. I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of that kind of thing. So I think we are headed into a long trough of decline in accountability journalism, because the old models are breaking faster than the new models can be put into place.

Again read the whole thing.

People tend to pick apart Shirky’s writings to find what supports their arguments. Which, I partially just did in fact, so don’t do that – absorb the nuance because the opportunities and problems at hand are far more complicated than the either naysayers or utopians would lead us believe.

Internet life links for October 31, 2009

Alex Hillman recently tweeted: “Twitter lists illustrate the most important shift in the internet: your bio is now written by others, and what they say about you.” He follows up with a longer piece on his blog.

Google Wave: we came, we saw, we played D&D: It’s easy to see why many people who use it for the first time wonder what the big deal is–as I said above, you really need to try to accomplish something with it as part of a group before you understand what it’s good for.

Rafe shares the frustration he has trying to correct the the misinformation friends and family are consuming off the Web and from cable news media.

I had my Twitter updates streaming to Facebook, but recently discontinued that. danah boyd shares some of the reasons in her blog post: Some thoughts on Twitter vs. Facebook Status Updates:

One way to really see this is when people on Twitter auto-update their Facebook (guilty as charged). The experiences and feedback on Twitter feel very different than the experiences and feedback on Facebook. On Twitter, I feel like I’m part of an ocean of people, catching certain waves and creating my own. Things whirl past and I add stuff to the mix. When I post the same messages to Facebook, I’m consistently shocked by the people who take the time to leave comments about them, to favorite them, to ask questions in response, to start a conversation. (Note: I’m terrible about using social media for conversation and so I’m a terrible respondent on Facebook.) Many of the people following me are the same, but the entire experience is different.

Seth Godin comments on the penalty you face exceeding the Dunbar Number

And finally, this is brilliant.

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

A Blogging History Worth Reading?

I’m really looking forward to reading Scott Rosenberg’s “Say Everything”.

I’m sure “Say Everything” will be a book I can share with others (which I do with “Dreaming in Code”) to provide them insight into why I do some of the things I do and why I get so damn passionate about them.

Writing a book on blogging’s history and how it related to the Web, Internet, and society is a difficult task. Based upon excerpts I’ve read so far, Rafe’s review of the first half, and reading his fantastic “Dreaming in Code”, I know this book is going to be terrific and insightful.

Speaking of blogging, I got to agree with Rafe – the most awesome thing about blogging *is* “corresponding with so many of the people I met through blogging back then here, on Twitter, and elsewhere.”.

Absolutely.

Thank you Web.

Getting rid of ‘social media’ and ‘social software’ tags here

The terms ‘social media’ and ‘social software’ may have been useful for educational purposes a few years ago when development or business leaders were not versed in the changing nature of media or online tool sets, but no longer. Both terms have long ago been appropriated by marketers. The term ‘social media expert’ means that person is a marketer. Nothing more, nothing less. And nothing against marketers.

So first, I am simply renaming all ‘social media’ and ‘social software’ tags across the site to ‘internet’. I will do the same with the site category (that requires a proper 301 redirect) hopefully later tonight.

Parenting, Education and Inspiration for Sunday May 17, 2009

Inquirer: Bari Pepe, 46, Years of trauma behind her, now she wants to aid others – ex-addict acheives master’s in social work. Very inspiring story. Read it.

The Boston Globe: Inside the baby mind: It’s unfocused, random, and extremely good at what it does. How we can learn from a baby’s brain. – “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” – Metafilter thread.

New Yorker: The secret of self-control. – let your toddler’s imagination be free, encourage creativity, to try and try again, and understand that we have the power of choice.

Hacking Education – A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing

NYTimes: Marc C. Taylor: End the University as We Know It – straight up inspiration about tearing down the status quo to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.

CSMonitor: In tough times, graduates (and parents) assess the worth of a liberal arts education – just an opinion – I think liberal arts majors are well positioned for the economy of today and tomorrow.

Deseret News: Universities will be ‘irrelevant’ by 2020, Y. professor says

The Atlantic: Who Needs Harvard?: The pressure on smart kids to get into top schools has never been higher. But the differences between these schools and the next tier down have never been smaller

Chronicle: What Colleges Should Learn From Newspapers’ Decline – Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear.

Tom Baker: Getting Involved in Higher Education – software engineers should seriously consider teaching, here’s why.

Slashdot.org: With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35?

Inquirer: Daniel Rubin: Grads, please note: It’s not about you

xkcd: 1000 Times – its all about context isn’t it?

Smart aggregation and API use in NPRbackstory

NPRbackstory is an automated Twitter feed that attempts to add context to the news stories trending popular today according to Google’s Hot Trends. It leverages NPR’s archives (very smart, as Joshua Benton notes archives are underused assets), and Yahoo! Pipes to produce a RSS feed that is fed into the NPRbackstory account. It was developed by Keith Hopper of NPR’s Public Interactive group.

Read Joshua Benton’s piece at Nieman Journalism Lab

Read more about it at Keith Hopper’s blog.

Check out his other Twitter related project – Twitterstars – a tool to find local Twitter power tweeters.

Refresh Philly Followups

Following Refresh Philly May have been some great discussions in its related Google Group.

Technically Philly posted two followups: City CIO’s $100 million Digital Philadelphia vision and Editorial: City government calls for tech support

Jonny Goldstein, on his blog, envizualize, had literally, visualized the discussion with some art live at the discussion that is just terrific, you got to take a look: Visual Notes From Philly CIO Allan Frank at Refresh Philly

Two efforts to collect what people want from Philly governments online efforts and the data it makes available have been launched by participants in the discussion:

Wikispaces: phillydata

Google Moderator: Philadelphia – What can we do for you?