Wait, that didn’t sound right. But it’s true. I love technology so much that I know that I would be distracted in a course should I have the choice between paying attention to the course or looking around online. I’m just a year out of grad school, and even in some of my amazing graduate courses the temptation was strong.

Now, self-discipline is the best policy, and generally I will let a student suffer the grade consequences if they want to screw around during class. So while a recent article about professors observing bad grades among students and using that to justify laptop bans did resonate, it wasn’t the bulk of why I decided to do it.

Shared by bionicteaching (full size) via Creative Commons license.

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I’m more concerned about the “halo effect,” frankly. When a student has a laptop open, invariably the cone of people next to and behind that student get caught up watching as well. The movie playing or the Facebook page on the screen can be a huge distraction to both those students and to me, frankly. It’s hard to keep your train of thought going when you see students looking, pointing, and laughing at something on a screen.

So at some point it became a larger issue for me. If a student wants to kill their grade by not paying attention, fine, but when it starts to affect those around them it becomes an issue of respect, both for their students and their professor. Respect is a key value in my classes; if I ask for it as students express their views, it makes little sense for me to not expect it in other areas.

Now, some of this is on the professor. A professor has to be engaging enough to warrant the ban. I don’t mean to sound boastful, but I think I do a lot to make my classes plenty engaging. Even a lecture course like this with 55-65 students has a good mix of A/V, lecture, and discussion. The students tell me the class is engaging, and my reviews to this end have been pretty good.

So, mission accomplished, right? Well, no. While the reviews are good, the test scores don’t always match. And this is why I worry about the halo effect, that research is showing that there is a relationship between having no laptops and improved scores. Perhaps we just haven’t figured out how to structure curriculum to match the age of laptops, but then again maybe in this case technology in the context of class time for a course so heavy on lecture and big-idea concepts isn’t consistent with course goals.

Look, laptops and computers are great. For the engaged student, they can open up new avenues of inquiry and help you sort material. But I don’t buy the notion that they are always good in all contexts. That’s technology optimism without any real thought. I’m worried of being seen as a Luddite, but the extreme opposite isn’t exactly tenable ground either.

As I said, I’m not worried about the student who doesn’t care. I’m worried about the poor student who has to sit next to them, distracted from class even though they really want to pay attention to material they find interesting. I’ve been there, and quite recently. And I worry a little about a society that uses technological innovation as a reason to avoid certain things such as respect and courtesy. Imagine if I had a laptop out the whole time during student presentations in my M&S course, what kind of message that would send?

The other point I make is that education is communication, and communication is co-created in classrooms. Even in big lecture courses. Students might gripe about me being boring, but in classes like this where I try to engage them and open things up, what are they doing to make the environment more vibrant? Are they prepared for class, thinking and listening to the material, and ready to discuss? The greatest teacher in the world would seem boring if nobody talked, and honestly it’s hard to be at my best when I see groups of students distracted by a laptop. I have to bring it every class; so should the students.

All that said, my ban is a soft one and I’m taking a more incremental approach at first. For one, I know some students with disabilities need them for note-taking. So here is my policy:

Use of laptops in class is forbidden except if you can show me that it will improve your class performance. Thus you must be given prior permission. If you are granted permission to use a laptop in class, you must sit in the back row of the class. If there are no seats in the back row, you may not use a laptop at all. All laptops must be closed for group presentations.

This seems like middle ground that allows for some students who need them. Others have to jump through a hoop, but it lets me know they’re on my radar and that I’m going to blame that laptop for bad performance the first chance I get. And at least maybe it will get some of the slacker types to show up on time to grab one of the 12 or so seats in the back row.

Final note: I am not anti tech in the classroom. I consider computers vital to the experience in my Multimeda Reporting class, and other courses I might teach here would be the same. This is for the context of a large course that is heavy on lecture, discussion, and big concepts.

Like I said, I love technology. And students who have had my courses know I encourage them to integrate technology as much as possible into learning and growing. But understanding where technology helps us also means trying to figure out contexts where it might hurt us as well.

Liberty Tree planting ceremony at Lehigh University in October 2009.

There’s a small tree to the left of the door outside Coppee Hall, my home building at Lehigh University. We call it the Liberty Tree, and it’s been there almost a year now. Kathy Olson, one of my journalism colleagues, worked hard to bring Ken Paulson and the Freedom Forum to campus last October to celebrate Lehigh’s commitment to the First Amendment.

I see the tree every day (it’s blooming better than the picture at the right, thankfully!). It reminds me of why I do what I do, and why free expression is so vital to a country that strives to model free democracy to the world.

We even had signs we passed out and planted saying, “I support free expression.”

I have been teaching long enough, though, to know that supporting something doesn’t really take hold until a person is confronted with it. In my Media & Society class last spring, for example, we got into a pretty spirited debate over whether the KKK has a right to peacefully march through town and air their hateful views.

I believe that nobody really understands what it means to support free expression until they have to articulate why a group they strongly dislike has the right to speak freely. That means being in a position where they have to defend the right to speak of a person with whom they disagree, sometimes even vehemently. The test of free speech is not whether we have that right in our laws, or even whether we use it. No, the test is whether we allow our political and ideological enemies to enjoy the same right.

Most of us have heard the quote commonly attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” We don’t often face this choice, thankfully.

Right now, we are facing this choice. I don’t blog much about poitics in this space, but the recent faux controversy over the proposed mosque near Ground Zero in New York City is a classic case study in free expression.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

“Congress shall make no law” has been interpreted by the courts for years as saying government can’t restrict the forms of expression protected by the First Amendment. One of those is religious exercise. The government, the representative arm of its citizens, cannot inhibit religious freedom. Period. It was the first guarantee we were given when ratifying the Constitution.

I understand the ethical problems people have with the proposed mosque. It is offensive to some people and they argue this is a slap in the face to victims of 9/11. Even if that isn’t the Islamic group’s intention here, I completely understand that this is how some would react.

But that’s an ethical argument, and those have no bearing on law. The First Amendment is about as crystal clear here as it can get: if New York City allows houses of worship in the area, it cannot legally stop the mosque from being built without violating the most sacred right granted to U.S. citizens.

The citizens support it? Who cares? When have we ever put the right of free speech and the freedom to assemble up to a vote? When we argue about the KKK in class, I always flip it around on my students. Would we have been OK with governments restricting the rights of civil rights protesters during the 1950s and 1960s? Both they and the KKK are exercising the same right: the right to speak out and challenge current law in order to make change.

We allow this to happen because, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote in Abrams v. United States, the theory of our democracy is based on equal access to all ideas so that society can decide what is best. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, in the case of the KKK; the more they march, the more their hateful ideas are exposed and the public sees them for who they are. It’s all in the light of day, no cloak-and-dagger stuff. For civil rights protesters, the truth of their arguments resonated and public opinion changed. Putting these ideas out in public for all to see is a sort of crucible by which we learn to separate truth from falsehood, as John Milton once wrote.

So what are we so afraid of? A mosque downtown gives people access to Islamic teachings, and if they are the violent religion their detractors allege they are then wouldn’t we want them out in the light of day so the public can see it? And if the detractors turn out to be wrong (and in full disclosure, I think they are) then no harm, no foul.

Are our ideas as Americans, Christians, freedom lovers, and so forth so tenuous and frail that it can’t deal with a robust exercise of expression in the public square? I say no. The people fighting the mosque are giving in to fear and are not showing confidence in the truth of their ideals. We owe it to the public and to democracy to not shut down forms of expression just because they offend some.

Why Groud Zero, people argue, and not somewhere else? Doesn’t matter. If NYC allows religious congregations in the area, they can’t keep out a mosque. Motivations of the builders don’t matter. The government has no right to decide just because it feels wrong. The minute we empower government to shut down mosques, we empower it to shut down other things. Like churches.

Do you?

Imagine if the city of Wichita shut down Christian churches after the murder of Dr. George Tiller last year. Abortion activists could argue that the nut who shot Tiller was a Christian, and having Christian churches too close to the site of the shooting would only inflame peoples’ grief. This is ridiculous, of course, but it would essentially be the same argument on a smaller scale. This is the subtle racism of the mosque situation, though, the casual linking of a few Muslim terrorists to an entire faith. It confuses being brethren in a faith with having the same ideology.

Imagine if people did the same to us, how horrified and offended we’d feel. How oppressed we’d feel.

The other argument that has gotten traction has come from folks like Newt Gingrich, who say the Muslims want to build a mosque to symbolize Islam’s triumph over America. It would be all scary if it wasn’t such a ridiculous argument.

Symbols are funny things. They mean things to people who put stock in that symbol, but they can mean completely different things (or nothing at all) to others. Take the U.S. flag. I poll my M&S students every term about what it means. I usually hear about 10-15 different answers (freedom, prosperity, war, oppression, sacrifice, honor, etc.) and not all of them are congruent. You can’t believe, for example, that the flag stands for both freedom and oppression in full.

The point is that if Muslims really thought this mosque would be that kind of symbol, let them. I say letting them build the mosque would symbolize something different to people in the U.S., such as what Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested when he said it would represent tolerance. I say it would be a symbol of the fact that we prize the exercise of our values even when it pains us to do so. Fight to the death for your right to say it, and all that.

I seriously doubt Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaida cohort are hoping beyond hope this gets built. I’d be shocked if they cared, and in truth my gut is they hope we don’t build it. Americans seem to think that the terrorist’s view is that their greatest victory over America came on 9/11, but not me. I’m pretty sure they think their greatest victory has come every day afterward, as we have gutted freedoms and expression through odious legislation such as the Patriot Act and fought every day to supposedly preserve freedom by killing it. Terrorists might rejoice in small victories, but real victory for them comes as they rewire our DNA by making us do things we once found repulsive. They can preach about the hypocrisy of American freedom by pointing to the fact that we’re trying to force on the Muslim world a view of the world that we don’t even want to exercise in our own country. Freedom for some, if they agree with me.

That’s the cruel paradox of the war on terror. When we beat back Al Qaida, they win because it inflames anger about American imperialism and helps recruiting. When they make advances, they win too. No matter what we do, it has positive implications for a group as nihilistic as Al Qaida. Anything can become a positive for them.

We can beat them, of course, by rewiring their DNA. We show them that freedom does matter, that you don’t throw away your own principles in order to save them. We value freedom of religion for all above our own fear and grief, so go ahead and build your mosque. It will be a symbol of tolerance and equality, but it will be much more. In the very place where 18 hijackers attempted to kill our notion of freedom, we beat it back by affirming it more strongly than ever. No thinking Muslim can look at a mosque near Ground Zero, with all the emotion we attach to that place, and think we are not truly committed to free expression.

Denying this group their mosque is the other path, the coward’s way out. It’s the wrong signal to send to the Muslim world, and it only serves to embolden an enemy convinced we are a nation of hypocrites. The irony is the same people using the First Amendment to speak out against the mosque (which is their legal right) are trying to make the First Amendment optional for Muslims in NYC.

I understand it is raw for people, and that it feels wrong. It feels a little weird to me as well. But I will defend this group’s right to build the mosque anyway. When I protect their rights, I ultimately am protecting my own.

I support free expression, after all. Do you?

A shameless plug for our panel: If you like what you hear, please vote for us using the link a couple grafs below this one. It requires a short registration but you aren’t obligated to attend the event in Austin. Ours is the only panel tagged “journalism education” and so I think we bring a lot to the table here.

Our panel: “Six Ways Social Media Can Invigorate Journalism Education”

You can read the description and vote, but beyond what we have there I wanted to say a little more. The proposed panelists are myself, Jen Reeves and Joy Mayer from the University of Missouri, Carrie Brown-Smith from the University of Memphis, Hans Ibold from Indiana University, and Jonathan Groves from Drury University. This is a unique group. We have strong Mizzou ties, but several of us have gone to other places and the things we are all doing with social media are diverse. This will be a lively panel featuring six folks coming from different angles. Carrie, for example, is doing great things with blogging and Twitter. Jen and I are both using location services such as Foursquare and Gowalla in our classes. Joy is doing work in participatory media.

We are planning on creating a Web site for our panel beforehand that has our own remarks and curriculum/assignment ideas. The audience will be part of the conversation with us in Austin, and we are going to invite people to share their own social media curriculum/assignments on our site after the panel is through. This is intended to be interactive before, during, and after SXSW. We are really excited for the chance to create a conversation in Austin and hope you are excited enough to vote for our panel!

Anyh0w, we humbly ask for your vote and for you to spread the word if you are jazzed. We are!

While I am at it, here are some other panels that got the thumbs up from me. No use hoarding the love!

• “Social Media and Higher Education: Connected, Smarter Communities“ featuring Yong Lee from the Social Media Club … I think we need to continue the discussion about education’s coming reinvention in the age where information-as-commodity is over.
• “Conversational Journalism: Do’s and Don’ts of Audience Participation” featuring Doreen Marchionni. I did my PhD work with Doreen and her work is amazing. Check out her other stuff at Sasquatch Media.
• “Predictions and the News: Getting the Future Right” featuring Matt Thompson from NPR. I shouldn’t say such things out loud, but I am a Matt Thompson fanboy. The guy sees media in unique ways and is asking some of the most important questions facing our field.
• “Human Centered Journalism: Changing News with Design Thinking” featuring Andrew Haeg of Public Insight Network. I met several folks involved with Public Insight last year in Austin and am impressed with their initiatives. The description is really interesting, but it’s backed by a good brand too.
• “Bloggers vs. Journalists: It’s a Psychological Thing ” featuring Jay Rosen of NYU. Many of us are getting sick of the “are bloggers journalists?” question, but hopefully Rosen can put that old dog down once and for all. He was on a panel last year with Thompson and it was pretty good; better, it sparked a lot of discussion. That’s what SXSW should do.

So those are my early favorites. What are yours?

This wasn’t my first AEJ rodeo (it was #6, actually), but all in all it was my favorite one so far. I’m not sure what it is about going as a professor instead of a graduate student, but I had the best networking time meeting new and interesting people. It didn’t hurt that people actually knew who the hell I was this time thanks to the fact I was honored with the Nafziger-White-Salwen Award (my remarks), but even that aside it seemed like AEJ was teeming with interesting people this year.

The best part was the good vibes. To be honest, the past couple conferences were a bit of a downer, what with the cratering of the print news industry and a solid dose of misdirected anger that sometimes pointed at new media folks. I’ve gotten the sense that a lot of academics were working these past few conferences to save the industry and restore what was. Not this year.

Thankfully, we’ve moved on. It’s not entirely about some of the new junior scholars, because a lot of long-timers are doing some innovating things both with news and in the classroom, but I think this year offered a sign that a lot of the younger guns like myself are making a mark. Maybe our research agendas are helping shift the research and teaching conversation ever so slightly toward newer forms of journalism.

Like I said, we aren’t the reason, but I felt like I was making an impact this year for once. I am not sure I ever felt that way before at an AEJ convention. My work is in areas that have had to work hard to gain even grudging acceptance at times (i.e. citizen media), but this year I didn’t feel like an outsider anymore. The conversation has shifted.

I did catch a couple “are bloggers journalists?” or “how do we get bloggers to follow standards?” types of questions, but thankfully they are much fewer in number and are met with a lot more subtle eyerolls. That argument is officially so 2005.

I even saw someone tweeting asking who was teaching advocacy journalism. You had me at hello.

I was really, really pleased to see so much backchannel discussion on Twitter using the #AEJMC10 hash. Due credit to Mich Sineath who put in a lot of planning to make this happen and did yeoman’s work making it awesome while the convention was going on. He had to know he was doing it right when the fight for the AEJMC10 mayorship on Foursquare was so hotly contested.

The backchannel discussion leads me to the main point I want to make, and that is a lesson learned from a really great panel that happened Thursday. I was lucky enough to lead a great discussion with Carrie Brown-Smith, Bob Britten, Jeff Inman, and Dan Brogan at 8:15 a.m. called “Bringing in the Audience: Social Media and New Connections in Magazines and the News Classroom.”

Honestly, it was an early panel, and I wasn’t sure we’d get much attendance. But it ended up being lively and interesting, with lots of audience interaction. I think I might know what put us in that position to succeed.

The panel was set up to model something I learned from SXSW in March after watching Matt Thompson, Jay Rosen, and Tristan Harris give their well received panel. Essentially we had each person give a 5-6 minute “opening statement” on the panel topic (in this case, social media for publication). Carrie and Bob talked about it in terms of teaching. Jeff gave us some theory and models to think about, and then Dan talked about it from the professional side. It was a diverse set of views and highly interesting while made for high density learning.

After that we opened it up for a freewheeling discussion. I kicked it off with a question or two I made up on the fly as I listened, then opened it up for the audience. It worked so well and I could not be pleased with how lively the conversation ended up being. We just talked to each other for an hour, and I think we could have gone another.

The panel was asking questions of the audience, the audience talked with the panelists and with one another, and so forth. We essentially had 1 hour of conversation after the opening remarks. My job as moderator was sort of to direct traffic and get out of the way, although I did learn from the SXSW panels I saw and monitored the discussion happening on Twitter with folks in the room via my iPad. I directed questions toward what I knew was resonating with folks via Twitter, and I even asked a question posted by an audience member on Twitter.

I don’t know whether this format always works (I am particularly skeptical about its usefulness in research sessions), but I think it really works well for conceptual panels or for teaching panels. The moderator’s job is to keep the audience engaged by mixing up where conversation comes from, and the panel gets to do what it does best.

If you’re moderating a panel or if you are working on a panel at a future conference, I would highly recommend giving the format a try. It takes a little practice and it’s very much a multitasking sort of process, but I think it puts everyone in a position to be their best if you do it right.

Anyhow, that’s the one takeaway I had that potentially is worth sharing with others. Thanks everyone for a great conference!

Thank you for that kind introduction and I apologize for the length of that dissertation title. This is such an amazing honor and I would like to thank the committee for their work on this award. It is so humbling to join the incredible list of past winners, many of whom I consider to be intellectual heroes and whose work I not only admire but also cite with great frequency as part of my own work.

So, I got through May thinking about how wonderful my first year was at Lehigh thanks to great students and wonderful colleagues in my department and at the University. And then when I didn’t know how much better it could get, I found out about this award and it was like the cherry on top of the sundae.

I have some people I want to thank for making this entire journey possible. First, my wife Amy. I wish she could be here to hear this, but she is an incredible support and I don’t think I could have gone through this process without her partnership. Second, I want to thank the Missouri School of Journalism. They gave me a top-notch education and introduced me to world-class people – wonderful faculty and students that give you such fertile soil for your intellectual development.

My committee deserves so much thanks. David O’Brien from the Department of Rural Sociology. From the School of Journalism, Shelly Rodgers and Clyde Bentley. Margaret Duffy, who is here – wave your hand so everyone can see you!

Finally, I am so gratified to recognize my dissertation adviser Esther Thorson. I realize I am one in a chorus of people singing Esther’s praises in this organization. We all know what an amazing scholar and leader she is in our field, but I had the special privilege of knowing her as a mentor as well. And I want to take this opportunity to make sure she is recognized for her work and passion in helping develop graduate students into thinkers and change-agents in our field. I appreciate you so much, Esther, and share this award with you.

Thank you!

This semester we learned (in the words of Cassie) everything. Yeah, we learned video. And photos. And Twitter. And blogging. And Web building. And maps. And a little Gowalla. And SEO. And podcasting. But there’s a common thread there. We used it to build something greater than the whole, and that something was the story. If there’s one lesson I want you all to take away from this course it’s something Steph said during her group’s presentation: When we learn the technology to the point where operating the equipment is second-hand, you realize something: It’s always about the story. Always.

You learned a lot about technology and networks this semester, and that kind of information will be vital. But now that you’re at the end of the term, zoom out and see the big picture. See how this all works together. For example, we didn’t use Twitter because it is all-important. We used it to build up networks and relationships with people, to listen to them in shaping stories and work with them to promote the work you did. We used it to get information and push information.

And it works. For example, Google south+bethlehem+arts and what do you get at the top of your search hits? Why, the very site put together by Andrew, Lauren, and Ope. Why is this? Because it was set for SEO, it had a clear title that was reflected in the URL, and it was sold in social media by both you and your followers. In other words, “everything.” All of it was pointed toward benefiting from Google’s system of rewarding clicks over big media brands.

Now, it probably won’t stay there. Fresh content would be needed to keep it being supplanted by a newer, more current site. More content means more clicks. That’s the way the Web works; the point is, you get that now. The social connection was merely a nexus point for something much bigger this semester: the story. When a new innovation comes along, look for journalism uses but don’t make it about the technology. It always, always, always comes back to what you can do with it. It’s about the story.

So what we did this semester, really, is remove technology as a barrier for you. You can’t say any longer that you’re limited in ways to tell stories. You have added skills and techniques to your toolkit that have given you more ways and avenues to do storytelling than you had coming in.

Second point: Think community – it’s the starting point of everything when it comes to the Web: If you’re staying in the area, stay in conversation with those around you through the online local networks you’ve constructed. It will make you better at what you do in media, no matter what that is, and it’ll make you a better human. Ideas, stories, concepts, initiatives – it’s great if you have them, it’s better when they are shared. Media should go hand-in-hand with conversation; we can’t survive in this business anymore if we try to keep them separate, because the world doesn’t work that way anymore. Information should be the start of a conversation, not a replacement for it. Don’t hoard what you know, and learn how to listen to others in these spaces so that you can benefit from it.

Third point: Keep using the tools. Don’t abandon them: With the semester over, you really aren’t required to stay up with the tools we used. You can abandon Twitter, ignore doing video, and so forth. This is one of those make-the-most-of-your-education moments, though. Keep using them. You’ll get more adept with time and be able to offer potential employers a much greater breadth of experience than you could ever get in a classroom. It took me a year to really find my voice on Twitter. Don’t look at these tools as something you have, but rather something to refine. I didn’t practice the skills I learned in college nearly enough, always thinking I had time. But we all know how busy you are. Don’t think of it as something you can put off; truth is, the next step is to immerse yourself even more deeply in it than you were in J198.

Lastly, I want to thank you all for giving me the ride of my life this semester. I really mean that. Teaching this course was exhilarating in a way that is totally unfair to the non-professors of the world. I appreciate the thorough reviews in your blogs and hard work all term, and I definitely appreciate the kind words.

But mostly I appreciate the open minds that let you stay aware of new ways of doing things. Any success you had this term came because you embraced the material wholeheartedly.

We’re building a great new media experience at Lehigh and you are all a part of that. Congrats to those of you graduating this semester. Drop me a line every so often and let me know what’s going on. And for those of you returning … my door is open, as always. Let’s figure out a way to keep this going.

The app is pretty good, though it could use a WYSIWYG interface. Formatting links and text is sort of a pain, but then again I was surprised WP even had an iPad app so quickly, so maybe the limitations are due to them just getting something out.

I played with the WiFi version at the Apple Store, but I spent about 6 hours with this thing tonight. Immediate things that jump out with the luxury of time:

E-mail is real nice on this thing, much better than the iPhone. I like the flat design, where you can see your inbox and the called up message in one pane.

The A/V is sweet. Great screen quality and robust speakers. Resolution on pictures and video is eye-popping, far better than a computer. I streamed a couple ballgames using the excellent MLB app (more on this in a second) and got uninterrupted viewing at HD quality. Amazing.

Any app that uses Web browsing within its interface (i.e. not using Safari) better put out an iPad app quickly or they are toast. If there is no iPad version it loads at iPhone size and you can blow it up, but it usually pixelates. That works ok at times for the app itself, but it kills Web pages and often makes them hard to view.

Students love it. I have let about 15 students tool around on the thing for a while. Some were skeptical of it before using, but I have yet to find a user who doesn’t love it after trying it. Better, they generally see a use for it that either is unique or inadequately filled by a device they already have. I think this thing is going to be a hit for students once the textbook market revs up in the iBook store.

My own media habits are changing. Pre-iPad, I often had my laptop out in the living room with me for media browsing (quick email checks, news, looking up things on IMDB). Now I barely pull it out, and I don’t miss it. If I need more computing power or things for work, I use the laptop. But that’s what it’s for. Regular surfing for info or quick looks is easily filled by the iPad. The laptop was always clunky for around-the-house stuff, and the iPad has simplified my life a lot. Not once have I found myself wishing i could plug in a USB drive.

Favorite app: MLB At Bat, and it’s not even close. Especially with MLB.tv streaming games. A really nice way to watch a game. Pitch speeds and types, player stats, live video, and all kinds of info at your fingertips.

Unexpectedly cool app: Star Walk, which uses GPS and the compass functions to locate constellations and planets in the sky. Really cool for star gazers or space lovers like myself. Awesome app.

Other apps: I’m looking forward to checking out the magazines on this such as Vanity Fair (not a magazine I normally read; I feel I should point this out). Twitteriffic is probably my favorite Twitter client on there, but Tweetdeck is nice too.

Overall my sense of this device is unchanged: If you understand what it is and is not, you’ll love it. Most of the critiques I read are from programming and architecture enthusiasts. Their criticisms are valid and usually true, but it’s a mistake to think these views match the general perspective. So I think public perception of the iPad depends largely on how Apple sells this thing. It can’t market it as a computer, but if it sells the value of a niche device then it has a hit on its hands. The experience is that good.

Three weeks ago I engaged my Media & Society class here at Lehigh in a discussion about Facebook and privacy. I asked them how many considered their photos, status updates, and wall posts to be private. More hands were raised than not. I asked them how many thought their email was private. All but one hand went up.

Then I asked the kicker question: Why the difference? The minute you send that message, whether it is an email or a wall post on Facebook or clicking to “Like” something, you are losing control of that information. Several students looked alarmed, but I pressed it further: the only privacy you have is in your head. The minute the things you think become the things you say, you lose control of those bits of information.

This one has been on my mind since SXSWi, when danah boyd delivered an excellent keynote address about privacy and social networks (full text). The definition of privacy, boyd argued, is having control over how information flows. Using Google Buzz as an example, boyd argued that when services take a system that is understood as private and makes the information shared on those networks public they are violating a user’s sense of privacy.

Something else boyd argued was more on point: there is a difference between something being public and publicized. When people share information with others in a self-selected network, they are in a sense calculating the odds that the person would violate their trust by gossiping. We do this all the time, of course. There are some people I wouldn’t trust with any information I would consider sensitive and othes I would trust with my life. While telling a friend a deeply held secret is in a sense making it public, that “public” is limited to a self-selected circle of friends. We have to share to get along in society at some point; would we argue that telling a doctor about an ailment would be public as well because it went from our head to our mouths?

Well, yes. But boyd is right; the answer is more complicated. The minute something we think becomes something we say, we are taking a gamble that we’ve chosen our network wisely.

Which brings us back to Facebook. McKeon’s graphic is interesting, but just like with the rollout of Open Graph, really my criticism of Facebook lies is in how new initiatives are implemented. Facebook has repeatedly told its users it cares about privacy, but lately most rollouts have been done with the default being toward less privacy. In fact, when Open Graph launched it didn’t even tell me that my Likes were being shared with people (even if that should have been obvious; otherwise, what is the point?). I had to wade into my privacy settings and find it.

Here’s the thing: I understand Facebook’s desire to make more of the information shared on its site public. It is looking for ways to make money and it is facing a heck of a battle with other social networks such as Twitter that tend to be more public (and thus easier to monetize). Second, it’s their network and really they can do what they want. But most important: I really like Open Graph. I think it has enormous promise for us and the way we do the Web.

My criticism of Facebook, though, is that it has been less than upfront about privacy. Mark Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in a college dormitory, has essentially said privacy is dead and yet Facebook assures its users on the site that it takes privacy seriously. This creates an illusion of privacy on a site founded by a guy who doesn’t believe it exists anymore, and it’s made worse that Facebook is trending toward making things default public even though the sense of privacy is still there. I am gambling with every Facebook post that my self-selected users won’t do me harm. If I am wrong, that is my fault, but that doesn’t absolve Facebook of speaking out of both sides of its mouth on the issue of privacy.

Tech Crunch posted a pretty good rant about people who whine about Facebook and privacy, and for the most part I agree. You can’t post things on a social network and expect it to be private. It’s not Facebook’s fault that someone misuses it; it’s the fault of those who publish it in the first place.

So I tend to agree with Zuckerberg that privacy is dead. My only beef with Facebook is that it is helping to kill privacy while perpetuating the myth that it exists by its official statements to users.

Thankfully we dispelled that notion in my class. I told my students that if they want their personal updates, photos, and the like to be private then they have to ditch Facebook and really reduce themselves to just e-mail, and even that is not a guarantee. There really is no other way. But you shouldn’t be shocked that people, you know, actually see what you post on social networks. You joined to share information, after all, and the minute you do so you lose control of the information.

The question you should be asking yourself is whether it is worth the cost, and whether Facebook’s unique take on privacy is of concern. Not an easy one. If you’re looking for a job, you should have some common sense and realize that those things shouldn’t be posted online if you are concerned about how employers see you.

The current generation of young people coming through my classes consists of students growing up in a world where living out loud is the norm. They may yet change our expectations of privacy, but the smart money is that the tech changes us as much as we shape the technology.

So this is a retrospective post on the semester, but before getting to that I wanted to plug their converged semester project sites for the non-J198 class crowd:

• Bethlehem Beyond Steel: A look at how the city is continuing its economic development in the wake of Bethlehem Steel’s collapse while also preserving the history that is so closely tied to life here in the Lehigh Valley.
• Housing Market: Bethlehem’s South Side: A look at the state of the housing market in south Bethlehem both from a residential and commercial view. And gumption, with a video look at a foreclosed home.
• South Bethlehem Arts Revival: The growth of the arts culture in South Bethlehem, complete with a Gowalla walking tour!
• Lehigh Valley Homeless: A great project with some outstanding video stories that talks about how we help an invisible population here as well as available resources.

Take a chance on these sites and look around. This is the first attempt at some of this from students who have never produced stories in this type of platform. Overall I am pretty impressed. If you are interested, check out some of the students’ evaluations as they roll in from their blogs. The themes that are emerging are pretty telling.

When I started this course I had no idea how it would go, and secretly feared it would flop (things I can reveal now, heh). Fact is we had never done this before in our small department at Lehigh and I have a fairly specific way of teaching that could have made it an utter failure. Essentially, I didn’t want to set up a class that ran well due merely to the excitement of a particular personality (though I have excitement in spades). I’ve seen this happen before from my undergrad days: professor comes in, sets imaginations on fire, then they leave and the whole thing breaks down. Not that I’m planning on leaving or anything, but I wanted sustainability from this course so that if someone else teaches it for a semester then we have continuity. This kind of goal required me to structure it in a way that meant buy-in from the students was essential to success – not easy to get, but when you do get it the results can be spectacular.

The results were spectacular, and I am happy to say that beyond the standard claims of credit that I need to make for The Record as it relates to tenure and promotion, we succeeded because the students bought in. Simple as that. I could have all the ideas in the world, but they have to run with them.

Some things I learned that have become something of a running list for me:

Model, model, model: Bad news for educators scared of blogging and The Twitter: Your students won’t get it if you don’t use it. Much to their probable annoyance, I was engaging my students outside the classroom in these spaces, using @replies and retweets to get their attention. I wanted them to see I was watching in that non-creepy way, yes, but I wanted them to see how this stuff works too. Would my students have gotten Twitter if they didn’t see me modeling it for them in these spaces or showing them how to livetweet using the Super Bowl as a backdrop? Doubt it. Would they get a feel for blogging and a better sense of Web culture if I weren’t in these spaces? Don’t think so. So you need to take the plunge in this stuff and use it. Don’t just dabble. I don’t think you can fake your way through this. [Side note: Is this made well for the way the academy is set up? I don't know and am in the middle of that grand experiment. As a tenure-track professor I am still feeling my way through the need to be in these spaces so that I can be a great teacher while still making sure to not neglect research needed to get me tenure. I have done OK with it so far, but don't think that worry is gone.]

Simple is not bad: I focused on new media concepts and provided them with entry-level equipment. The stories they are telling are not any more complicated than what they were doing with writing. We can’t fetishize the camera equipment to the point where they are so focused on pressing buttons that they forget the humanity in the story. I feel very strongly about this. So if they have a cut off head or a lighting issue, big deal. Was the story any good? We can fix the technical stuff, and my rallying cry has been, “That was a damn good story, now imagine how much better it could have been once you clean up the technical stuff.”

Adjust to technical difficulties: I had a group come back with great footage but no audio because of a lapel mic battery going out. How do you grade that? Well, you can’t. So I learned to have a very flexible grade book with technical problems. And I bet they always test the mic at the start from now on.

They learn quickly: I think we could have left Windows MovieMaker behind fairly quickly and moved to Sony Vegas mid-semester because they picked up editing fairly quickly and in fact might have become faster at it had they had more powerful tools. This is where I failed: I wasn’t ready for this. I have just started playing with Vegas, which is the most FinalCut-ish program I have seen on PC but one I have never used. I wasn’t ready to teach it. I’ve already gone into why it’s impractical to go full bore on Macs right now for us given that most of our other classes need the PC, but there was a middle area that I should have been more prepared to leap into once I saw how fast they picked it up. Lesson learned, and guess what I’ll be doing this summer?

Patience: I learned to have a lot of it, both with myself and toward the students as an instructor. I think the biggest asset I bring to the working lab environment is that I try to keep it light. I want them to learn and work hard, of course, but if things are going nuts I try to keep the humor of the situation in mind. No technical flarb is the end of the world; I’ve learned lessons from being on the other side of the teaching relationship.

Social media emphases: I was delighted to see how fast they took to Twitter and owned it. When showing them hashtags I created #j198 on the spot, and they began to use it outside of class. It became a conversation index and soon they were creating their own tags. Totally unexpected but it shows the buy-in. They struggled more with blogging this term. Part of it is that I don’t think I defined the expectations enough or gave them room to explore enough, so I’m thinking about having them blog about non-class material and we work on a theme together, then have a blog for their group to which they publish class work. Not sure if that will work, but I have the summer to think about it.

Equipment: The Zi8 was just perfect for this kind of class, so we made a good choice there. They did video, photos, and podcasts with the thing and battery life was just fine. We quickly realized that lapel mics were a must for any kind of decent sound, so that will be standard next term. I’m wondering if a monopod might be a good item for them to have too based on good input from my colleague John Jirik.

Resource guides!: The ones I made for the class were well received and I’m thinking of just publishing the PDF versions online; would any of you find that interesting? I have step-by-steps on how to blog, podcast, use Twitter, make slideshows, make maps, etc. I suppose I could just do them as a blog post too. They didn’t seem to find the books handy but I think I want to keep the Briggs book for next term and just emphasize it as a resource guide.

Co-create: I made it clear at the outset we were doing this journey together. I was learning how to best integrate this course into our curriculum and they were learning, in the words of one of my students, “everything.” So I learned to give them freedom to find their own stories and voice while also being a sounding board. I don’t do the authoritarian thing all that well. I wanted them to take ownership of their work and not do what they thought would please me the most. This was an important part of the process. On presentation day with some excellent faculty and guests in attendance, they spoke with excitement about their work. That’s what we call a WIN.

Feedback: I didn’t do nearly enough of this in class in formal class time, another failure of mine. I tried to pack so much into the course that I didn’t spend enough time doing the one thing I love in classes, which is going over work done by classmates. So I am revising next term’s schedule with that in mind. I provided feedback individually or at the group level, but I was a little distressed to see students worrying about their performance in the end and think that’s directly related to this hole in the process. Speaking of grades ….

Throw those grades out: I quickly junked the points structure because it wasn’t working. How do you grade a video assignment from a student who’s never held a camera? Baffled me. I could do this at Missouri because the students were a little more technically prepared by the time they got to me, but at Lehigh it didn’t work. So next term the grading process is really easy: 50% participation, 50% final projects. You come to labs, do the assignments, work hard, meet deadline marks, and you get your participation credit. All of this feeds into an excellent final project as well. Work hard and kick ass on your final project, you get an A. How hard is that?

Get an iPad: This has nothing to do with the course, just figured you’d expect me to say that.

Will I revise? Sure. I have big plans for smart phones when we teach this next term that will emphasize some of the location services I’ve been thinking about this term. And I have a cool PR project in development that will add another layer of this for the class and deal with that strange convergence between journalism and marketing. Last, while I spent some time on it in class the final projects revealed to me I didn’t go deeply enough into hyperlinking. They got the linking component, but not always the why. It’s good to take people to others’ sites; don’t reinvent the wheel.

On the whole, this class in many ways embodied my entire teaching philosophy: learn by doing, be allowed to make mistakes, and learn from one another. The last part is crucial: they worked together and learned from each other, they learned from me, and I learned from them. I’ve always hated the term “expert” because it is pretentious and implies that one can keep up with the steady stream of knowledge in our field, especially in new media. I see myself as a guide that uses the knowledge I have to help them learn what they want and need to know.

It’s not hard to see if I am successful at this in a given term. I pretty much know. As I watched my students present last Wednesday, I couldn’t stop beaming at their success. And it was theirs. You gotta own it, after all. They have a ways to go and skills to sharpen, but they’ve taken a huge first step and are that much more ready for this really hopeful time in our journalism.

If you’re a small school making this conversion, let’s talk. I’m working on a case study that we’ll look to get published sometime soon, but this plunge isn’t all that daunting. It takes time and energy and some know-how, but it’s completely doable.

This is huge, and I can’t state this enough. It’s taking some of the game-oriented concepts found in location-based apps such as Foursquare or Gowalla and implementing them in news delivery. These simple games build on the notion that object collection in gaming can be rewarding, and by applying them to news formats HuffPo encourages behaviors complementary to what the news site wants to accomplish.

When I got to Lehigh I hardly imagined being the guy advocating gaming concepts in news, but here I go again. I have already said quite a bit about gaming and news, such as the potential with Foursquare, Gowalla, and transmedia as a way of bringing context to our news (the latter of which is an offshoot of a great panel at SXSW), but it’s emerged as a running theme on this blog over the course of the year

This is not an entirely new idea. Gawker, for example, uses tiered comments by giving the community’s best users a star icon. Gizmodo also recently unveiled a tiered system where valued users get better placement in the commenting thread. It’s a recognition of a lesson we’ve learned in blogland: comments and community are content that should be valued in a same what that the original article should be valued.

Here’s what I love about HuffPo is doing by taking this to another level: the gaming aspect has a purpose.

The third badge, called “Moderator,” is given to those who are on the lookout for comments that clash with the site’s mission of civility. The concept of community moderation in comments is not new, of course, with Slashdot being a good example of how it can work well. The badge isn’t given for random flagging, though, but rather for flagging posts that eventually get deleted. Quality over quantity when it comes to moderation.

I wonder whether in doing it this way it also helps teach the user community about the site’s values by having people flag inappropriate comments with the site’s values and mission in mind. At the SXSW “Future of Context” panel we talked about gaming as a type of learning about the news, but this could be an extension of that by showing users what it means to be a user in a news community.

At the same time, the “Superuser” badge (boo for stealing that one so shamelessly from Foursquare) is given to prolific commenters. So right away you have two badges that work together to increase comment volume while also allowing for ways to up the quality.

There are good reasons to think HuffPo’s system is going to work. Nieman Lab noted that by emphasizing quality in comments it actually led to more and better comments in the Gawker universe of products. This makes logical sense; if I think my post is going to be buried by the community, I will try to make it entertaining, witty, insightful, etc.

The one I’m excited about is the “Networker” badge because this is at the heart of the scholarly stuff I think about. My dissertation argued a new type of social capital known as Web-network social capital, which basically consists of the networks and ties created in user communities for the purposes of building that online community. The badge looks like it has potentinal to start increasing and rewarding network ties. We’ve already started seeing people thinking about Farmville and the potential for building social ties through gaming. WNSC has the potential to explain some of what we’re seeing, and sites that look to build it are helping to create something unique in the process.

When I argued for WNSC, I was looking broadly at social networks and blogs. What excites me about gaming entering the news is that this is a further area for study and a potential growth area for news sites interested in building up communities that help serve a site’s core mission.

HuffPo says it will be adding more (my suggestion: “I’m on a boat”). Of all the new avenues I’ve seen in news this year, Gowalla tours and this effort by HuffPo are two that have my eye. Gaming holds a lot of potential for news outlets, and I hope they’re paying attention.

When I was at SXSW last month I got my first look at Gowalla, which is similar to Foursquare in that it uses location services, check-ins, and little incentives for keeping you in the game. I like Foursquare’s interface a bit better and find their badge system more appealing, but Gowalla has a couple things it does better.

First, you can create trips. What this means is a user can go to the Gowalla site and create a themed trip (“top places to eat downtown” for example) that a user’s Gowalla friends can then participate in by following the trip by going to the places listed and checking in on their smart phone. I like this because it means you can have people participate in social mapping, but in a journalistic sense it also lets us put geolocation layers on stories and let the audience experience key locations in a story themselves. And Gowalla has done a great job integrating the Google map function into the application so that getting walking directions is easy.

Second (and this is huge), users can add content when they check in. Like a restaurant? Check in there and add a picture of yourself outside of it, or take pictures of that fantastic night out with friends. When others go to the site and check in later, they will be able to see your content. You, in a sense, help add to the story of that location. Sites and businesses, then, become as much about the location and what is there as they are a collection of our stories.

While in Austin I got to try out Gowalla. Along with Jen Reeves and Joy Mayer at the MU School of Journalism, I did the Chevy Walking Trip of the downtown Austin Area. If you click on that link, you can see the map it calls up as well as the sites. Click on the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue link and notice on the right you can see uploaded photos. You can click on the “See All” link to see all the photos, and notice the ones taken by both Joy and Jen at the site. Now that’s on the Web, but if you have a smartphone such as an iPhone all of that would be viewable at the site menu via the Gowalla app as well.

Oh, and our group also won a Hot Wheels Corvette by showing the folks at the Chevy Volt Lounge that we had completed it (we won because we were the first to finish it). And Jen told the world our story on CNN iReport. But that’s just shameless self-promotion.

No, what I’m really excited about here is that the students in my J198 Multimedia Reporting course already have found a use for this stuff. The final project they’re working on is a converged site that tells the story of the growing Bethlehem arts scene. Andrew Daniels, editor of the Brown & White (and a graduating senior … if you are into big opportunities, hire this kid right now because he totally gets this new media world of ours), and Lauren Kelly decided they wanted to try this out.

Do the tour. No Hot Wheels for being the first, though.

So they created a trip that has eight spots. Really interesting and I can’t wait for a non-rainy day to give this a shot, but I love the initiative to try new things. What they will do with this is put a link with the Gowalla icon on their converged Web site, publicizing that it exists and inviting folks to try it out. Also, people who are around town will see the trip when they are within range and get to try it themselves.

Andrew created most of the sites for this trip and seeded a few of them with photos. I am most excited to see whether others do the same once they start participating. The potential for sharing is tremendous here. What local arts site wouldn’t be thrilled to find enthusiastic users sharing content and memories from one of their venues? I like this kind of stuff because it gives our journalism something tactile to go with those stories. In this case, seeing the sites or walking the venues.

This is our first crack at it but I’m excited about the enthusiasm they put into this. My hope is that next fall this is going to be a standard component in my class. The issue is getting the hardware in their hands, but I don’t think it’s insurmountable. And I have some bigger plans and ideas for the University as a whole once we get there.

We’re not the only ones doing this. As I was putting this together I noticed Jen Reeves posted something on her blog about something they did at KOMU. There is huge potential here both for journalists and journalism education.

Not an unusual request by copyright standards, of course, but this one is personal. The segment in question fuels one of the greatest Web memes of all time: the Hitler meme.

You’ve probably seen at least one Hitler meme video. They all have one thing in common: the same climactic scene from Downfall, where Adolf Hitler learns that his rule is about to end. The subtitles take a scene full of rage and realization and apply it to a variety of things happening in society or on the Web, including politics, entertainment, pop culture, and so forth. Here’s one of my favorites, from the 2008 presidential campaign:

Yeah, OK, we’ll get it out of the way early: “Anyone who thinks YouTube’s decision to take the videos off their service is a good idea, please leave the room now.”

The Hitler meme has produced thousands of videos to date and has become an important part of Web culture. Some of them are silly and uninteresting, but it has slowly become a meta channel for conversation about what is going on in society. I tell my students that if something is important it will find them in social media via their self-selected network. Same goes for the Hitler meme. If big something happens in society, it is sure to have enough conversation attached to it that someone will make a Hitler meme video.

I have a soft spot for the Hitler meme. When I was a doctoral student at Missouri, I taught a small group of students how to use iMovie by having them create a Hitler meme (and no, this was not MU approved curriculum). They started with raw footage, and from there the job is to edit and create a story. You learn how to do subtitles, cuts, and all of the little functions that are needed to make iMovie work. Plus you learn how to tell a story. Lastly, you get plugged in to Internet culture by immersing yourself in it. Doing the Web and understanding its culture are two very different things.

So in terms of teaching media production and Web culture, the Hitler meme has it all.

Virginia Heffernan wrote an interesting piece for the NYT on what the Hitler meme means to us as a society.

We may have repressed that speak-for-the-people Hitler, the one he decided to be in “Mein Kampf”; but in the form of these videos, he has returned. Isn’t that the outcome that Adolf Hitler, the historical figure, sought? Didn’t he see himself as the brute voice of the everyman unconscious?

Heffernan’s piece is pretty good, but left off the table is the subtle genius of the meme. If something big and newsworthy happens in society and there is general agreement as to what it means, the easier thing to do is blog it or write it with the dreaded beginning “I think that ….” The Hitler meme turns the whole thing on its head, taking perhaps the most despicable human being ever to live and having him deliver the message as a spokesman for the perceived majority view.

The result? Even Hitler can see the truth here. Or maybe if Hitler takes this so damn seriously maybe we shouldn’t. Or even the ironic twist of Hitler criticizing people or actions that would have been welcome in Nazi Germany.

That’s the thing about the videos. Hitler isn’t making fun of one person or group. He’s making fun of everyone, and often time the video maker even turns the parody on themselves in the process. Even in the Palin video above, Hitler is railing against a system that is corrupt and cynical, a system that ironically looks similar to what he had going in Germany. Wondering what Hitler might think about X is something that can go in a lot of different directions.

There’s a reason why this meme has survived and thrived, of course. To get the joke you have to get the context; nobody makes a Hitler meme video about something nobody else would understand. And so we have seen videos about Kanye interrupting Taylor Swift at the MTV VMAs, John McCain losing the 2008 election, Barack Obama winning the Nobel prize, the new Star Trek movie, health reform passing, and so forth.

But sometimes the knowing audience can be quite small. After a dark horse won the fantasy football league that I do with my old college buddies, I made a Hitler meme video. It was filled with inside jokes and humor that goes back over 15 years of knowing these guys, and while an outsider might get some of the humor, to really understand all the of the textual layers you have to be on the inside.

But the real point of this post is that Constantin’s decision is shortsighted, to the point where I wonder whether news executives got into the movie business. Downfall is a movie that few would have even bothered to see had it not been for the Hitler meme. It is a foreign film (strike one), it was boring (strike two), and it was unnecessarily melodramatic (strike three). And yet I rented it one night because I wanted to see the original behind the meme.

In other words, interest in an otherwise bad movie has been spurred by the meme video and kept it alive in our consciousness. I know of quite a few people who saw the movie only because of the meme; YouTube was essentially free advertising. This hearkens back to AP’s threat that people merely linking to news stories was a violation of fair use. If you like the golden eggs, you can’t threaten to kill the golden goose and expect it to end well.

Dan Gillmor made the point on Twitter last night that there could be a fair use issue here and that by acquiescing YouTube actually is letting Constantin break U.S. copyright law. A late-night reply from my colleague here at Lehigh, Kathy Olson (a media law scholar) noted that fair use only would apply if they were parodying the movie itself. I am admittedly not up on this part of law, but I tend to think the movie parody argument is plausible.

After viewing the original, I began to think the Hitler meme was a parody of the movie itself as much as it was an ironic parody on popular culture. Bruno Ganz was so over the top in his portrayal of Hitler that it would make Al Pacino blush. The climactic scene that fuels the meme is so ragetastic that you don’t even have to read the original subtitles to know what’s going on. I call it overacting.

Even if it turns out this doesn’t violate fair use, Constantin’s decision is the same mistake news companies have been making for years now. Thy chose to take their ball and go home rather than figuring out how to capitalize on a meme that is driving interest in a product that otherwise might languish in obscurity. They may yet be legally justified in doing so, but from a business standpoint it’s a dumb idea.

So dumb that I wonder what Hitler would think about it.

This picture within a picture will BLOW YOUR MIND.

I’ve had a number of conversations in the past few days with people who don’t seem to know what to do with the iPad. Buy? Don’t buy? Is this going to change my life? Is it going to be a waste of money?

If you’re still confused, Guy Kawasaki posted a pretty good decision-point flowchart that might help you out. It’s pretty funny and even this Apple fanboy can admit it’s pretty right on.

I posted the other day that the iPad is a complementary device for almost everyone. You aren’t going to ditch your desktop and likely won’t ditch your laptop for it, although you might get rid of the latter if you don’t use your laptop for much more than news browsing, video/photos, and e-mail. No, the iPad is a device for consuming media while comfortable.

My wife’s latest issue of Newsweek seems to confirm this idea (pictured). The back page of the mag has an iPad ad featuring a person writing a fairly mundane e-mail. Interesting, but the feature isn’t the thing. Notice the positioning. It’s on the user’s lap, feet propped up and crossed.

Apple has a little more of a sell job on its hands than it had with the iPod and iPhone. The iPod was a breath of fresh air after a few years where tons of complicated MP3 players had flooded the market. It simplified the mobile music experience and solved all kinds of problems related to music purchase thanks to the iTunes store. The iPhone filled a similar void. A lot of smartphones were of the BlackBerry variety, with reputations more rooted in business use than personal use. The smartphone market wasn’t going to grow past the business base unless a smartphone came along that was fun and easy to use.

The iPad is different. Consumers have to think a little harder about whether this device makes sense for them. Unlike the iPad and iPhone, most people don’t have a tablet computer and haven’t thought about one. So people have to sit down and think about how they browse and use media before taking the plunge.

That’s why I think Apple has created ads such as the above. It’s selling features in a sense, but Apple also is tying it to a type of experience. In this case, comfortable media browsing. We’re going to see more of this, not less. Obviously Apple has to sell what the iPad can do, but it also has to help people imagine what it can be or what spaces in our lives it might occupy if this is going to go mass market.

Resistance is futile. That isn't the only Star Trek reference in this post, unfortunately.

I love it. I love the iPad.

I had some big expectations going in, but I was really blown away by the 20-25 minutes I spent with it on Saturday at the Apple Store in Whitehall. I have to admit I got a bit of iPad envy watching my friends tweeting, blogging, and Facebooking about getting their iPad, knowing full well I have to wait another few weeks until my pre-ordered 3G model arrives. Although I did receive my VGA connector by FedEx on Saturday, so I’ve got that going for me. …

So I did the next best thing, and that was to sneak in a little time to play at the Apple Store in between some other shopping. By 6 p.m. the crowds were thinned from what had been there earlier, but there were still pretty sizable crowds around the 12-or-so display iPads.

There was a lot of buzz in the air to go with the nonstop media coverage around the device this weekend. But the question is whether it’s worth the hype and, more importantly, that spare $500 that I’m sure we all have just lying around the house.

People are saying this will be a netbook killer or (even more audacious) a laptop killer. I don’t agree, but I do think it has a chance to kill something else: the iPhone.

Before I get to that, some first impressions:

• This thing is fast. Really fast. Apps respond quickly to your touch, opening up instantly. Videos play at an impressive size with impressive quality.
• The speakers are surprising. I was expecting something slightly better than what I have for my iPhone speakerphone, but they were more robust and of better quality than I thought I’d get. I still will go the headphones route when I am using it among people, but it’s nice to know I have options for playing without them.
• The iBook reader is great. Tap to define words, lightly touch the edge to flip pages, zoom in and zoom out, play embedded media. I’ve never been that into eBooks as a concept enough to buy one, but this made me think about it. I’m thinking my next book purchase will be an eBook just to give it a shot.
• The keyboard isn’t ideal in the sense that you can’t do with it what you’d expect to be able to do based on what you see. Like the iPhone before it there’s a learning curve. On the iPhone, you learn the keys are small so you evolve – my method is grasp on the side and use my thumbs. With the iPad you’re tempted to put your hands on the home keys but that just means you’ll type all kinds of random letters. The keyboard is that sensitive. Very quickly I learned that two-finger typing works very well. If I ever need to use it for large amounts of typing I’ll just pull out the Bluetooth wireless keyboard I use with my MacBook.
• The NYT app is pretty nice, but not quite what I expected after seeing the demo. I was expecting more of a browsing experience and maybe I just didn’t get enough time with it to figure it out. It does have the ability to save stories, which is nice; you can quickly mark the ones you want to read after some light browsing, then go into that save menu and get what you want.

Using this thing a bit confirms what my intial thoughts were after seeing Jobs’ presentation and then viewing some of the videos, and that is that this is a device for media consumption, not media creation. You can do some media creation on it (the Keynote app for creating slide shows is nice, and I think photo and video editing will be superior on this thing compared to the iPhone), but that’s not what this device does best. As I held it in my hands and played around, it reaffirmed my initial take that this is a device for consuming media in a relaxed way; sitting in an airport terminal or on a plane, laying down in bed, or on your living room couch with your legs crossed in an easy chair. Reading news and answering email in some environments is nice, but it’s sort of a pain to take out the laptop in my comfort spaces. You don’t need that much computer to do some things.

I see the iPad filling a space in my media use that is either unoccupied or currently taken by a less-than-ideal device: reading in bed, reading in the living room, working on the road, and so forth. Rather than lugging home a ream’s worth of PDF files every night consisting of journal articles and research I’m reading, I can shove it onto a device that weighs about a pound and travel light. And that says nothing of the reading convenience.

And here’s the thing: This thing has all the things I love about my iPhone, but it does a better job. I read a lot of email and respond to the occasional one on my iPhone, but the screen is small and the experience is not as good as a laptop. As I was playing around with what some have called essentially an oversized iPhone, I have to agree a bit but probably not how they mean it. I love the apps and the functionality. I like having my information mobile. And as I was playing around with it, I found myself wondering if I could downgrade my phone to just calling (so 1999) and use my iPad for all the functions I love about my iPhone. I’d be getting everything I get on my iPhone but better. It would save me some money, that’s for sure, but the experience would be better too.

I don’t think it’s there yet, but I can see the day coming. Perhaps a good phone with a great camera would be enough to make me ditch the iPhone. I don’t know, but it was running through my head. So maybe the device this thing could kill is not what everyone’s talking about.

Overall I’m seeing a lot more naysaying today from those who bought the device and have played with it. Dave Winer had the boldest take, calling it “a toy” and little more, and Jeff Jarvis worries that this device is an attempt to turn us back into consumers and not creators. I see the points they make, but I think they’re missing a few points.

First, not everybody wants to create. I really love the read-write Web and am an evangelist for it. I don’t want to go back to an age of big media controlling what voices get heard in the marketplace of ideas. But some people just want to read and write. Or when they do create, they don’t want to create stuff all that much. The occasional photo or video could easily be handled with an iPad, and it’s far less complicated. And if you like to publish a lot and need more power, you know what’s great for that? A computer. If your life and career is content creation, don’t get an iPad. But I suspect critics are overemphasizing how much people want to create media. I’ve done enough work in participatory media to know that some people couldn’t care less.

Second, people are criticizing the closed architecture of the iPad system. Again, I get that, but I think that’s an argument that tech heads tend to make. Most of my non-media friends don’t think a bit about closed operating systems. They want things that are easy to use and do the things they want it to do. As much as I’d like to have an open system, I realize it would be a mistake to generalize my view of it to larger groups.

Third, I think people need time with this thing. You can’t multi-task with the iPad, and as I sat there only watching a Battlestar Galactica video clip or only reading a news story, I realized a little bit what I am missing in an era of multiple gadgets where we consume several types of media at once: the singular focus on enjoying what’s in front of me. Even as I’m writing this I have the Yankees/Red Sox game going on the teevee and my iPhone chirping at me. Where’s my attention? I’m not saying we should regress to one-media-at-a-time and maybe this experience on the iPad isn’t for everyone, but it’s noticeable when I do it and I found myself enjoying what was there in front of me a bit more.

So what is the iPad? It’s a supplemental device. If someone just does basic computer tasks like e-mail and photo browsing, perhaps the iPad will be enough. But most of us want a laptop or a desktop to do the powerful stuff, and that’s fine. Sitting at my desk and reading news, though, has never been very comfortable. The iPad is a device that makes consuming media comfortable, whether it be for pleasure or for work. I can see myself doing both a lot. And when I want to do more word processing or heavy duty photo/video work? That’s what my MacBook is for.

The people who think this is a replacement for any computing device are getting ahead of themselves. That day might come, but that day is not today. It reminds me of the false binary choice we get from the professional journalists, that it’s either citizen journalism or professional journalism, as if we couldn’t have an ecosystem that supports both. Same with the iPad. There’s plenty of room in our media use ecosystem for devices that specialize in consumption or creation (or both). The iPad isn’t the end of all things for the read-write Web, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have something for us when it comes to purely enjoying content.

I think there will be some must-haves to go with it. If you plan on doing a lot of typing, you might want the keyboard dock. I plan to get the camera connection kit so I can work with photos and video.

And if that missing front-facing camera is a problem? Either get a workaround or wait. I fully expect the second-gen version will have a camera of some sort. The iPhone evolved a lot between the first and second version, and Apple is good about getting in the features people want. There’s no problem in waiting. If it had a camera, it would be just about perfect; but I don’t want to wait.

But the one thing I would say is don’t dismiss the iPad because of what it lacks. One thing my mentor Clyde Bentley taught me is to think about technology based on how people use it, especially in unexpected ways. I can’t wait to use the iPad to see how I will use it in ways Steve Jobs didn’t expect, and I’m really excited to hear others’ stories as well. Whether this thing will save professional journalism is a whole other debate (and I am a skeptic on that one), but I don’t doubt that this is going to change how we consume media.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to download the Captain’s Log app. It will turn my iPad into a Star Trek PADD, and I couldn’t be more excited.

This is necessary in elite political journalism, of course. It shies away from tough questions because tough questions mean no guests for Sunday morning talk shows. Wash, rinse, repeat, frustrate your audience.

Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos.com likes to describe the outcome a different way, such as how he did during his SXSW panel when he argued that journalists have become “stenographers for those in power” rather than people who fact-check.

I was thinking about this as I followed the Twitter stream last night during the health care vote. The endless coverage on the cable nets had to fill airtime somehow, and so we got a fair amount of the usual stenographer action. Republicans say X, while Democrats say Y, meanwhile there’s an actual bill online against which we can check such claims. The result is repeating two contradicting statements, at least one of which by definition is actually false, rather than verifying both claims and reporting only the correct one.

In other words, the press didn’t really learn from the Joseph McCarthy problem.

It’s no wonder that so many Americans think the bill still has death panels even though it has been debunked to death. Why would they know this when the reporting process is entirely about the conflict, about the he-said-she-said misery rather than context? Journalism ideally reports only the facts, but often nowadays it is reduced to reporting the fact that somebody says something regardless of how true or untrue it is.

Or, as Rosen said on Twitter yesterday:

“Democrats: See that table? It’s painted white. Republicans: Americans know the table is black. The savvy: How will this play politically?”

There are a lot of examples like this throughout the health care debate. My favorite recent one has been the charge that the Democrats forced through a bill that “the American people don’t want” and that they weren’t “listening to the American people.” Such a claim is impossible, of course, because it’s not as if everyone was against the bill. But Republicans claimed poll data that showed a lack of support for the bill, so naturally we have data that we can mine through and verify the claim.

Except it didn’t happen. Polls can be used to say many things and interpreted many ways, and if there’s one thing PhD school taught me it’s that interpreting survey data can be an art as much as it is a science. But looking inside poll data is the job of journalism, for this is where we find context. The GOP, for example, was citing a Rasmussen poll showing that 54% of people opposed the bill. Now, others have noted that Rasmussen sometimes has a GOP lean to the numbers, but for the sake of argument let’s stipulate that number is an accurate snapshot of the American mood. If journalists report the GOP charge and cites Rasmussen, it has provided information but it has not done its job.

Journalism is a profession based on skepticism, as we know. And journalists should have been more skeptical of the charge. CNN, for example, published a poll today that showed 59% against the bill, but it had another question: why? And when you add that context, the opposition to the bill becomes clear as we see 46% oppose the bill because it’s too liberal. The other 13%? It wasn’t liberal enough.

So the story changes a bit; when you add that 13% to the 39% that supported the bill you get 52% who either want the current bill or more compared to 46% opposed outright. Yes, a majority of Americans opposed the current bill, but it’s not always because the opposition agrees with the GOP argument that this was too much. A sizeable block of that opposition wanted more, not less. They might not be happy with what the Democrats produced, but it’s not difficult to see how they are probably putting a decent amount of blame on the GOP for the fact that the bill wasn’t more.

In the end I think it’s easy to overinterpret. If you look inside the numbers, I’d say Americans were pretty well split down the middle on the bill and the margin of error could pull it either way. Pretty hard to argue that Americans didn’t want this bill. Some? Yes. Many? Sure. But I don’t think either side could credibly claim a majority outside the margin of error.

Of course, that is of no use to the savvy, already hard at work framing this vote in terms of the upcoming midterm elections in November. After all, if Congress defied America then this can be spun forward into future coverage. It gives us Very Smart Questions we can ask pundits on the cable news and Sunday shows. Elections are the only things that matter; the consequences of those elections (you know, actual legislation) only matter in terms of their impact on future elections.

I’ve made it clear that I’m a bigger fan of context. I want to see more journalism that breaks down what the bill means for people, and it’s frustrating to see publications like the New York Times running several stories about the impact the day after it passes after spending so much space before the vote covering the squabble. This should have been the news industry’s focus in the leadup to the vote; perhaps then a lot of the misconceptions about the bill would have at least been off the grid and people could choose based on truth rather than rumor or baseless accusation. Imagine if all that effort had been devoted to giving people context rather than a political sideshow.

This post isn’t an argument for a particular view on health reform. My view is pretty well formed and my guess is yours is too. But one persistent criticism I heard from the bill’s opponents was they were afraid of what might in it. They didn’t know despite pages and pages of information out there. This is not a failure of information delivery; it is a failure of our journalism, too focused on process and petty controversy rather than context. There was plenty of information out there by which to form a meaningful consensus about what the bill did or did not have; this should have been a debate about personal liberty vs. government intervention, not nonsense such as death panels or obscure procedural tactics like “deem-and-pass” that get used all the time in Congress.

We should have at least been able to agree about the facts.

Not everyone was doing it wrong. Ezra Klein at the Washington Post was one of my favorite reads during the health reform process. He did yeoman’s work in adding context to his many months of reporting on this issue. It’s funny to hear journalists who complain about whether bloggers can replace the pros, because in Klein’s case he started out as a blogger. My guess is that it’s Klein’s background in blogging, which relies on sourcing via hyperlinks, that has made him a rigorous fact checker. This is what blogs do really well, and it has made Klein an all-star in health reform coverage.

On the first day I attended a session called “How to rawk SXSW Interactive.” Much of it was fairly run of the mill (wash your hands to avoid the dreaded SXSW SARS, etc.), but one part stood out. They said that the best parts come in conversation, not in panels, and so doing it right means networking. A lot.

“This is your tribe,” one of the panelists said. “This is where you can talk about ideas and projects you’ve got and people won’t get glassy-eyed or want to run away.”

I thought the statement was silly. Tribe? Really?

Really.

I believe in organizations and organizing in general. I believe it’s good to be a part of something bigger than an individual, channeling creative talents and energies into things that serve a good beyond who you are. I’ve been part of a lot of different types of these things in my life: churches, teams, professional organizations, academic societies, clubs, service organizations, and so on. When you’re the type who does affiliation, you invariably have a couple different directions in which to go. You can be a lurker or you can be involved, but both come with a price. If you lurk, you don’t get a chance to tap the potential that comes with relationships from involvement. If you are involved, there is the pressure to conform.

One of the sessions that really got me thinking was Jaron Lanier’s presentation, a riff on his controversial new book “You Are Not A Gadget” that challenges the current orthodoxy as it relates to social media and open culture in Web development. The presentation was great for a lot of reasons, namely that I didn’t agree with everything he said but I was glad to be exposed to it. Lanier is the father of virtual reality and so it’s not like he is some sort of Luddite, yet his book has been heavily critiqued by people who’ve turned the open Web into orthodoxy. In spite of the controversy, though, people of different views showed up, listened, and considered the material. People like me.

Lanier argued that social media actually forces us into individual reductionism. That is, a site like Facebook is an online representation of oneself and you have to fit who you are into categories that Facebook chooses. Fill out (or don’t fill out) the name, age, relationship status, favorite books, and so forth and that is “you.” Add some status updates, or links to things you’re reading, and that adds to the picture. If something is outside of Facebook’s categories, you have a few choices: stay within the system (conform, and be reduced), break out of it by using it in ways that aren’t “intended” (social norms being created in this space every day) or abandon it altogether.

It’s a terrible choice, in some ways. Conform or try to be yourself, the latter of which can have a high cost especially for those who are merging the virtual “you” with the real-life person that they know.

Lanier’s presentation (and based on the first half of it, I highly recommend the book) has me thinking about the nature of heresy. I mentioned my organization involvement earlier to underscore the point I’m about to make: Of all the things I’ve been involved in, I’ve never felt as at home in them as I did at SXSW. The folks there, as it turns out, are my tribe.

I write that knowing it is a bit controversial, especially considering my faith and church involvement. It feels weird to say it. Shouldn’t I feel more at home in a church of like-minded believers than I do at a festival full of technology nerds, especially given that tension between the spiritual and material? I’ve been pondering this one for a few days now, and in some ways (thanks to Lanier) I think I have the beginnings of an answer.

I’m a bit of a troublemaker, I think, to some who know me online. My Facebook wall erupts in all types of arguments over things I post or say in a given day. Some have emailed me to tell me to stop stirring up trouble, and that exasperates me a little. Usually I’m just posting what I’m thinking or reading. It’s not like I am sitting at home trying to manufacture trouble, and yet it seems to naturally follow what I do in these spaces. I decided when I first plunged into social media to make those spaces an attempt to translate an honest representation of myself.

So I get this weird collision on my Facebook wall. My friends who know me in a church context are shocked, sometimes outraged, by my political views or opinions. My academic friends are at times puzzled that I haven’t left the life of spirituality in the pursuit of a science-only view of the world. Facebook, in some ways, is the perfect online representation of my real-world self. It paints a picture of a person who straddles several sometimes-contradictory worlds. Thing is, I’m at peace with it, but the chaos that erupts when my friends from these different worlds collide on my page is anything but. The mad scientist in me loves the chaos of free expression, but the reality is that tempers get hot and feelings get hurt in this social experience of my avatar life. I understand all these worlds in which I live, but I don’t think people in those worlds often understand one another. And in turn, I don’t think people in those worlds understand those other parts of me; where I see a wholly represented self, they live in fragmentation.

There’s a reason why I don’t let my students or fellow Lehigh academics into this space.

Some of what I post and think on Facebook is half-baked. I consider Facebook and Twitter to be something like a sketch pad as I work on deeper understanding. Maybe it’s the academic in me, I don’t know. But I feel like I need a place to play and be free with different ideas. But more than that I crave the feedback because I believe in co-producing ideas as much as possible (what we call “crowd wisdom” in my area of work). I actually believe in this stuff enough to do it.

And yeah, some of it is heresy depending on the discipline I am offending. Mind life is a work in progress. Knowledge is always evolving.

What Lanier presented on Monday flew right in the face of Clay Shirky’s presentation on Sunday, in many ways. But we didn’t have a riot. Lanier wasn’t tarred-and-feathered or told never to come back. One of the pure joys of SXSW is that you’re going to run into divergent views on things. It’s fertilizer for the mind. I can’t express how awesome it is to sit in a session and hear someone say the exact opposite thing you think and have it be OK.

Allow me to talk about this vis a vis churches for a second. I promise there’s a media payoff at the end.

In churches we don’t encourage heresy and in fact move to isolate the heretic. This can come by direct expulsion or from the type of shunning where people don’t associate with you. The problem here is that heresy can take on broad standards in American churches, or at least it has in my own experience. This means that it goes beyond violation of the 2-3 core tenets of the faith and morphs to encompass anyone who believes something that goes against the mainstream.

It happens all the time. Try being a journalist in an evangelical church where people feel the need to complain about the “liberal media” and expect you to care while hearing trite throw-ins of “but you aren’t like that” which only are an invitation to conform to their standard (also, with the weird twist that it’s somehow socially permissible to rip on my profession all the time but nobody else’s; it’s an epidemic). Worse, try being an evangelical who voted for Barack Obama. You face not only the scorn for holding a different belief, but accusations that that belief means you’re automatically judging those who believe the opposite.

It’s a real kick in the head. Try it sometime.

To be sure, there are a lot of things that SXSW and churches have in common. Both bring together people who believe in something similar (a faith vs. interest in interactive media) and both have their norms and orthodoxies. But SXSW is an intellectual exercise that is different than church. There is Q&A where you can ask questions and challenge orthodoxy (committ nerd heresy), and it’s accepted that as a person in the audience you have knowledge and expertise to add to the record. You aren’t a passive recipient of someone else’s view.

In other words, I go to things like SXSW and hear things I disagree with all the time, sometimes things with which I disagree in vehement ways. But it shapes me and sharpens me, and it’s a good exercise for the mind. How often do we as people sit, listen, and actually consider what another is saying? And even when I hear the person I disagree with, I can’t wait to hear more.

I don’t hear this in church; if anything my experience is that a desire to consider something outside the norm leads to a type of intellectual suffocation. Nothing that gets said ever offends me, whether it comes from the clergy or the parish. Within those walls we’re often too dang nice to each other to the point where it becomes the false choice between conformity and disconnection. Yes I’m sketching with a broad brush, but if you are tempted to offer an example or two to the contrary I would caution you to not mistake an outlier for a modus operandi. When’s the last time someone stood up during the pastor’s sermon and offered a countering view?

Life is a struggle. Spirituality is a mystery. It should be a lot messier than we make it.

So if SXSW taught me anything, it’s that if we’re going to define heresy as being something as simple as going against the norm (or standing up and telling the pastor they are wrong), then I want more heresy in church, not less. I want new ideas and views to penetrate those walls. I want a rich and diverse intellectual journey of life and mind, one that comes from being in touch with rich differences. And maybe we keep the old views after the exercise, but maybe we also change a little bit too.

I sketched out the above thoughts in part because I am critical of church culture, but in also part because that kind of culture is exactly what we’re facing in media innovation. When we launched MyMissourian six years ago we faced a lot of the same criticisms. We were heresy, violating an orthodoxy that elevated the journalist to a special place in society. We were trying to destroy the industry.

That battle was hard, but it was hard because we committed heresy but kept yapping until people stopped and listened. We changed our views a little, and some of our academic brethren and sistren changed their views some too. Now citizen journalism is mainstream, the idea of the participating audience is normal. We actually changed the academy a little bit, I hope, because of that struggle, that clash of ideas.

I’m finding that my tribe more and more is located in places where ideas clash. I still am attracted to that basic notion of the marketplace of ideas that Milton first articulated centuries ago. Truth emerges when ideas of all sorts collide and we’re forced to sort it out. The presentation of orthodoxy to the exclusion of all else just leads to intellectual laziness, whereas a robust discussion (and I mean discussion, where we actually listen and consider other views) will eventually lead to the best way.

Am I being too idealistic? I am not sure. Like I said, some of these ideas are sort of half-formed and I’m still trying to figure out everything I have learned.

Cloud compute this with me. Is there something I’m not considering here?

I’m back in town and have a few more blog posts bubbling about things that interested me at SXSW. But for now, since I like lists here’s my running list of things I learned at my first SXSWi …

Noobs call it “South by Southwest” or “ESS-EX-ESS-DOUBLEU.” The wily veterans call it “Southby.” I was tagged the entire time. Must spend all year practicing.

Drink. A lot. (of water) … and don’t forget to snack. Energy is vitality here.

At the same time, go the extra granola bar. Easy way to strike up conversations and network between sessions. You have to eat, but having an extra to share is good karma and will make you friends.

It pays to know a veteran. The illustrious Jen Reeves gave me great advice beforehand so I was a little more prepared, but she knows the tricks. Bring a powerstrip to charge the laptop and make some friends by not being an outlet hog. Talk to EVERYONE. She even knew where all the free food was.

Make the plan minimal. I planned a lot of panel surfing, but I found myself sticking to it less and less. Find your 4-5 core sessions and plan for those. After that, be the ball and let it come to you. Ask what sessions others are hitting

For journalists, try to stay away from panels on your discipline. Honest, most of the journalism panels su-huuuucked save for a couple. The sessions that blew my mind were in the areas of gaming, marketing, PR, social media, and augmented reality. I found threads in the keywords based on stories and storytelling, but they weren’t about journalism. And it makes a lot of sense; I’m not at AEJMC, I’m at Southby (a-ha!). I want to think about new avenues for doing journalism, not think about the same old stuff. I’m here to get my mind blown.

There are a lot of stickers here. A lot of them. This isn’t sustainable.

Talk to anyone who will talk to you. I met people doing all kinds of stuff that isn’t in my area, but that’s OK. At worst you practice networking. At best, you’re making it possible for serendipity to take over.

Know when to arrive. If it’s in a small room, get there 10 minutes early. If it’s in a big room, make it 15.

Don’t forget to blog. I had bigger plans for blogging, but it was overwhelming to find time. I finally found a rhythm with the schedule toward the end. I’ll have a better idea what is realistic next year.

Big-time everyone not at SXSWi. Make sure to mention in every conversation via e-mail and Twitter with people not there that you’re at SXSWi in Austin. Just kidding, don’t do that. That would make you a jerk. Seriously, though, totally do this.

Play! Seriously, try new stuff. Some of the most fun I had was playing with apps that were being promoted there. I did a walking tour of Austin on Gowalla and won a Hot Wheel car (and a little love on iReport). OK, so the Hot Wheel car isn’t great, but one of the nice things is that you can TRY new stuff because it’s available and companies are careful to make sure the experience is good. I got a lot of ideas for journalism courses just from doing a walking tour. Where else can you try so many things like this with a journalist’s eye?

Plan meetups. I did a horrible job at this. I met really good people and waited to catch them again to do some sort of coffee or lunch gathering. But there are thousands of people there, and the chance of running into them isn’t as good as it could be. Set up plans in advance. And maybe even organize a meetup beforehand. I think we need a journalism educator meetup for sure, unless one happened and I didn’t know about it (which is totally possible).

Look for student connections. While I was sitting in on sessions, looking through the schedule, and networking I had one of our students, Andrew Daniels, in the back of my mind. He’s a graduating senior and the current editor of the student newspaper, and I think he would thrive in places like this. There were a few people who would have liked to have gotten to know him too, I think. So I’m wondering if there’s a way to identify students who would benefit from this experience and then figure out ways to get them to SXSW (fundraiser, grant, etc.). This festival isn’t for everyone, but the ones who are interested in interactive media and have that natural curiosity that is impossible to teach would have a good time here.

Tacos! They’re excellent and abundant in Austin. Seriously. Tacos.

One panel I have been looking forward to actually exceeded my high expectations. “Future of Context: Getting the Bigger Picture Online” with Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, and Tristan Harris was everything I was looking for here at SXSWi: important questions, big ideas, and a focus on discussion and solutions. No teeth-gnashing over stale questions like “Will bloggers replace journalists?” and other such important chatter from 2005.

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel and recap this thing. Elise Hu at the Texas Tribune did an excellent liveblog summary of the panel and discussion, and if you want to hack the raw tweetstream check out what the audience was doing with the #futureofcontext hashtag. What I want to do here is briefly sketch out the argument and where my mind has been going with this since the panel spoke.

Rosen had the best visual description of the context problem facing our journalism today. Imagine, he said, downloading a software update to your computer for a program that isn’t installed on your machine. The absurdity of such a situation should be self-evident. The update does the user no good because it’s an add-on to a program that doesn’t exist on the machine. It’s a waste of the user’s time, it’s a waste of resources, and it doesn’t accomplish the mission set out for the software patch.

News, Thompson argued, is like that nowadays and he used the health care debate as an example. Thompson threw out a bunch of phrases that were highly charged and drove a lot of the news coverage of the health-reform effort in the past year: “Excise tax,” “reconciliation,” “bending the cost curve” and so forth (he neglected my favorite, “death panels”). News coverage coalesces around these episodic controversies, strategies, tactics, and jargon and assumes too much of our audience, namely that they have been following the story from the very beginning and can place the latest day’s news in the framework of what already has happened.

It’s easy to see what happens. People get confused. Or afraid. Or they think the news doesn’t have any value to them. They might not pin any of the blame for this on a lack of context, but our audience is smart. They know something is missing even if they don’t have a name for it.

Journalism then privileges episodic frames that assume systemic understanding rather than systemic frames that offer some episodic details. Which makes no sense given a couple of realities. First, the Web is ideal for systemic frames that give the news context. Second, the Web rewards systemic information flow. When the news goes away but I want to search for it later, am I getting news results in my Google hits or am I getting Wikipedia?

OK, so that’s the recap in short terms. If you want more, read the links above. They offer a ton of detail.

What I want to talk about is gaming and news context, because it was the big takeaway I got from this discussion. My mind was already starting to turn as I came to SXSW thanks to my use of Foursquare, but after sitting in on a great panel about transmedia storytelling I was over the edge. Harris mentioned game mechanics in the presentation of news, and Thompson riffed on that a bit by talking about ways we can let users “level up” (like Super Mario Bros …. appealing to my generation!) as they go through the news and context process.

Thompson later talked about the idea of a journalist on a “hero’s quest,” where they take a big idea topic and set about trying to solve it. My mind was already teeming at that point. He might have been thinking Lord of the Rings, but I was already going Legend of Zelda.

I’ve covered some of this before on my blog as it relates to Foursquare, and some of the ideas come from my colleague Bob Britten. But the essence is this: My generation, in particular, is conditioned toward gaming that is centered on collecting things. It’s a reason why Foursquare is genius. Badges and mayorships are trivial status symbols in the larger user network, but they mean something to the users. And it keeps us coming back. Farmville is kind of an idiotic game in terms of sheer gameplay, but there’s a reason why they passed 80 million users last month. It isn’t the desire to plant sugar beets. Imagine if newspapers in the U.S. had an audience of that size that was this loyal.

This is why I don’t buy the “I don’t have time for the news” excuse people give in surveys. If news execs take that at face value then they deserve their fate. The audience is telling them they’d rather plow their fake farm than read the news. And I don’t blame the audience for this, really. A contextless news environment is partially to blame.

So, gaming. I sat in on a few video gaming sessions at SXSWi and was struck by how attuned programmers are toward what it takes to keep the user’s attention. The session I attended on transmedia stories (“The 10-Minute Transmedia Experience“) was the one that broke down the walls in my mind. Transmedia, in a nutshell, incorporates a multiplatform searching game into an overall narrative that helps tell the story. They walked us through a neat example that started with a “trip down the rabbit hole” at a Web site the speakers had designed. From there we had clues to call a number, which took us to another Web site, then YouTube video, then had us search Google and email the answer to a problem to an email address set up by the storyteller. It was interesting trying to figure out the clues and solve the problems.

This is the kind of stuff they do in marketing, and the speakers cited promotions such as the campaign for The Dark Knight as an example. About 15 minutes in, Sanden Totten of Minnesota Public Radio asked the question I’d been queueing to ask: Has this been done in journalism? The speakers’ answer was no, but they thought it would work well. The hashtag discussion on Twitter blew up from there, and the journalism folks in the room caught fire (we exchanged cards afterward as well). Clearly the pot had been stirred.

Which brings me back to the excellent panel and discussion that happened today with Thompson, Harris, and Rosen. I’m not proposing that we make transmedia the centerpiece of any work toward context, but I think it could be a piece of this and certainly is a worthy area for experimentation.

The way I envision it is to create some sort of social gaming experience that fills in the gaps. Want to fill the audience in on why health care costs so much? Why not an audience scavenger hunt that takes them through insurance companies, doctors, service providers, employers who pay premiums, and such? Or why not a Farmville type of game run in a hospital where users have to try and actually bend the cost curve themselves lest they go bankrupt, a situation that allows them to experiment with different health care systems so they can see the cause and effect of the choices we make as a society (in terms of patient coverage, costs, profits, etc? If Mafia Wars on Facebook can take off, surely this could.

And how do they make these choices along the way? With blasts of information, ideally pulled from well reported news stories, that the user can actually apply to the situation in a way that increases both recall and understanding.

So that’s where I am, and I realize that was a long post with some halfway-developed ideas. This is really the first time I’ve put down some synthesized thoughts about what I’ve been pondering here in Austin. But the gist of what I’m trying to say here is that I’m getting the sense that journalism is thinking about the idea of “story” way too narrowly. The missing link here is context. Transmedia is made for this type of storytelling mode.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t encourage you again to read the links I posted above to the presentation and discussion, and I encourage you to add your thoughts at the site set up by our speakers. I want this conversation to evolve. Our industry is dying to have it.

You can get a good rundown of his main points from Liz Gannes at Gigaom. My takeaway was a little bit different, but then again I’m coming at this from the side of people creating content and so I think about business models a little bit more.

As I see it, here is the thread of logic in Shirky’s presentation …

1. We are wired to share information. Shirky noted that from an evolutionary standpoint we are wired to hoard physical goods or products, things that are tangible and have scarcity. At the other end of the spectrum, we are inclined to enjoy sharing information. It comes at no cost to us, but it has value to both the person sharing and the person receiving.

2. We have a word for not wanting to share information that comes at no cost to us: It’s called being spiteful

3. Media has gone from being a physical commodity to being information. The newspaper in my hand or CD in my possession is hard to give away or even loan out. As the owner, I lose control of the product. Digital media, though, is easy to give away. You can give away copies, and thus it comes at no cost to the giver. Shirky notes that “abundance breaks more things than scarcity.” I loved his point that the original aim of the printing press, for example, was to print indulgences, something that should have entrenched the Catholic church. In fact it had the opposite effect; the abundance of indulgences led to backlash that was part of the seeds of the Reformation.

4. Media companies are freaking out about this change, but rather than realigning to a new reality they are trying to protect the old one. He noted that businesses create workarounds to problems, but part in parcel with that is that this builds in a desire to not solve the original problem lest the solution make itself obsolete. There is no profit motive in fixing something once and for all.

5. User behavior, which is motivation filtered through opportunity, is being rewritten as access opens up. In light of #4, Shirky aked a salient question in light of this: What kind of society will we create if the media companies win? If we are wired to share information at no cost, and the opposite of that is being spiteful, then in essence media companies are trying to encourage us to behave in ways that make us more spiteful through the act of denying ourselves the enjoyable act of sharing information? This comes at an enormous cost to society.

So where’s the value in systems that figure out how to use open information? It’s in the co-creation of civic goods. Shirky noted a couple examples that illustrate that thinking.

Patients Like Me is a site that crowdsources symptoms and medical ailments among a user base, and the aggregate is essentially a knowledge base that might help people better figure out what is going on with their health. This flies in the face of the U.S. medical system, which has privatized patient information and made a good living off of it (i.e. why switch doctors when they “know” my medical history and are an expert on it?). PLM is creating a public good using medical information, but Shirky argues it won’t be successful unless it completely changes the health care industry. I saw a lot of parallels between that example and media companies, and all of a sudden a light switched on. The intense fight being put up by healthcare companies in the latest reform debate is a lot like the RIAA suing illegal downloaders.

Pickup Pal was another example. It uses information sharing between users to arrange rides for people going to the same places, saving money and maybe even a slice of the environment. The service was so successful that a bus company in Canada successfully sued the site for breaking the law. You can read about the details if you want, but the general point is that businesses are going to protect their model when a new idea comes along that fixes an idea too well. Fortunately the public outcry was so strong that it changed the law.

Both examples highlight a basic point of Shirky’s talk: We use free information sharing to create public goods through better efficiency, but at some point it’s going to trip over business models that depend on the problem not being solved. Abundance of information, in this case, breaks a lot of business models based on scarcity.

The upshot of all this? Shirky says that we’re going from a society that emphasizes “doing big things for money and little things for love to point where we can do big things for love.” The best, the coolest stuff we are doing with interactive media happens when we create these civic goods using information.

This lecture drove home a number of things for me. I’m teaching multimedia reporting at Lehigh, but I’m reminded there are a wider array of projects I can be doing. What are we doing to create civic goods in the Lehigh Valley through data-driven projects that are built on users sharing their own stories?

In a larger sense, the talk crystalized the feeling I’m getting after four days here in Austin. Journalism has a bright future, but the traditional players are so screwed. They’re chasing the wrong solution. I just don’t see a future for them when they’re trying to protect information as a scarce commodity. The scarcity, in truth, is in media companies trying to create civic goods via user sharing.

The info-must-be-free thought process has been argued against for some time even though it lacks specific proponents. Shirky was not making that kind of claim about information either, although I think it might be plausible to conclude that he made a compelling argument for the info-free notion from a sociological point of view: we’re wired this way, and what are we doing to ourselves by trying to restrict this type of behavior?

Other things that stood out from the Q&A:

Innovation: If you’re a company wanting to innovate, take the person who has one big idea and lock them out of the building. Tell them they can’t come back until they have 10 medium-sized ideas or 100 little ideas. Try a lot of everything, and double down on what works. Brilliant.

Education: The same transformation happening to media companies is coming at education like a freight train (and in fact from sitting in on other sessions I think it’s happening now). Shirky noted that we have cognitive dissonance in how we sell education. We tell students they’re joining a community of scholars, and we’re telling the private sector we’re managing the student mind such that when we churn them out they’re going to be excellent creators and workers. There is an inherent tension (and disconnect) between these two sales pitches.

It was a fantastic presentation. Thanks, Clay Shirky, for blowing my mind (again).

“Community Funded Reporting” with David Cohn was excellent.

Cohn is the founder of the excellent Spot.Us, a site that allows the audience to fund stories that are meaningful to them. Lots of useful info here. First, I didn’t realize that Spot’s code was free for distribution, meaning that if you wan to replicate what they do then you can. And in fact Cohn basically dared someone to try this nationally, saying that it’s more lucrative than the hyperlocal project he’s doing.

The more meaningful stuff to me was how Cohn talked about the concept of CFR. He sees each story, pitched by the potential author, as a type of campaign. You’re selling the value of the idea and the audience gets to vote. It’s a model we don’t do enough in media. Second, he noted they’re working on other ways of funding, such as having users interact with advertisers so they can earn credits, and those credits are ad dollars that users can spend to fund stories. Really interesting.

The standout: Users don’t fund ideas that suck or are obvious. This is something tradmedia could do more.

“Universities in the “Free” Era” with Glenn Platt and Peg Falmon was intriguing.

They argued that as we go toward more networked ways of learning and information exchange, we are facing either a complete remaking of education or a total meltdown. The disconnect, they say, is that we sell a mountaintop-with-the-guru experience even while information and specialization are flattening in a digital world. They offered seven tips for being a new kind of professor. The standout was that professors need to be linking students with collaboration and lab experiences, and be “experience creators” with students (i.e. helping them create the education they need). And they also shredded the idea of tenure. Really fascinating time.

“Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies” featuring, among others, Markos Moulitsas of DailyKos and David Carr of the NYT

I was provoked by the panel title, but really disappointed with the questions. They spent too much time asking the stale old question “Can bloggers do investigative reporting?” types of questions that are so five years ago. I didn’t like the moderator’s questions at all. It seemed a bit dismissive of the blogosphere (typified by him referring to Gawker’s Nick Denton as a “former journalist.”). Fortunately the panel was saved by the banter between Markos and Carr. I think Carr is more new media savvy than he was getting credit for, but Markos made a good point: the blogosphere wants the NYT to survive and succeed so long as it does its job.

I have a separate post bubbling about a session on augmented reality. It was probably my favorite of the day, but I want to collapse it with another post so that is coming.

Tomorrow is the first day of SXSW Interactive, and I’m like a kid on Christmas Eve. Before I dive in I wanted to pound out some thoughts about how I compiled my schedule and a few panels I’m psyched about going into the festival.

Generally, I’m here to learn. I want to hear more about some of the ways people are using interactive media to create content and share information, but I also want to get a lay of the land about SXSWi in general. With stuff lke this I use the same approach I do when I’m new to listservs: I lurk a little and slowly dip my toe in as I learn how things work.

At the same time, I am here to network. I want to make some contacts with people that will help us put smartphones in our students’ hands for Multimedia Reporting at Lehigh. I’m also hoping for networking contacts that will help me in the research realm. So I’m here to lurk and network, which will be a challenge.

SXSWi has a bazillion different offerings and it was overwhelming to go through the schedule. The panels have to number in the 500s or so. Given the time constraints, you can’t hit them all. So my process in narrowing it down was twofold. It made the cut if the topic was interesting for my work or teaching, or it made the cut if the people presenting were interesting.

Social networking, online communities, Government 2.0, citizen journalism, and multimedia reporting were common topics that made the cut. Two new topics also cut my eye: augmented reality (AR) and transmedia storytelling. I’ve heard of AR before but don’t know much about it, so I’m really looking forward to learning about it a little bit more. I also have some qualms about it making its way into journalism based on how it’s been described to me, but I don’t claim to be an expert on it so I’ll be doing a lot of listening. Transmedia storytelling is a term I’ve heard before but it seems like it’s gaining steam as our technology options get better. I added a few sessions on both these topics.

The second category is interesting people who see the media differently than a lot of journalists, and I think it’s helpful to hear people who offer that different kind of perspective. The panel I’m most looking forward to is the provocatively titled “Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies” featuring DailyKos founder Markos Moulitsas. Other interesting folks I want to see include Ana Marie Cox, Clay Shirky, Mark Briggs, and Jeff Jarvis.

Obviously there’s no way I can hit everything on my schedule, but here are a few key panels that are on my list of definites:

• “Community Funded Reporting” (Saturday, 9:30 a.m.): Features David Cohn of Spot.us
• “Media Armageddon: What Happens When the New York Times Dies” (Saturday, 3:30 p.m.): A panel of five including Moulitsas
• “Online News of Tomorrow” (Sunday, 11 a.m.): A panel of five that includes Jeff Jarvis and Adrian Holovaty. This was a brutal choice because Clay Shirky is also presenting at the same time (“Monkeys with Internet Access: Sharing, Human Nature, and Digital Data“) and I’d love to hit that one, but I think the panel I chose is more up the alley of why I’m here. I may change my mind on this one based on how the votes come in on my last post.
• “After Magazines: WIRED’s Digital Rebirth” (Monday, 11 a.m.): Looking for some ideas of how publications are remaking themselves. Really hoping to hear something about the iPad or eReaders in general.

Digital media? Social media? Interactive media? Yes please!

This week I get to cross something off of my bucket list.

I leave Thursday for my first-ever trip to South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX. This one has been on my to-do list for a while but the costs just weren’t workable for someone in graduate school during my PhD student days (even if you are an early bird the conference alone is still about $400). So I am thrilled to be going; this is my own personal Nerdstock.

What is SXSW? From what I’ve been told (and from looking at the awesome schedule of events) it’s something like a cross between a conference and a festival with a focus on media. There are three facets to this thing that run together: one is a five-day portion called Interactive followed by another five-day portion called Music. Running concurrently with both of those is the Film portion. You can buy an individual badge for one of these three portions or an über badge that gives you access to all of them.

The event is a little bit of everything. It brings in leaders from each of these areas, practitioners, educators, devlopers, theorists, and so forth for panels and demonstrations. There is also plenty of time to network during some of the daytime happy hour events and the socials at night. If you’re a newbie like me, my colleague Jen Reeves at Missouri has a bunch of helpful tips about how to rock this event.

I’ll be attending the Interactive portion, known by the cool kids as SXSWi. Interactive deals with emerging media. There’s stuff for the user side, the developer side, the entrepreneur, the academic, the educator, and on and on and on. Here’s their description of what SXSWi is:

SXSW® Interactive features five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology, scores of exciting networking events hosted by industry leaders and an unbeatable line up of special programs showcasing the best new websites, video games and startup ideas the community has to offer. Join us March 2010 for the panels, the parties, the 13th Annual Web Awards, the ScreenBurn at SXSW® Arcade, the Film and Interactive Trade Show and Exhibition, Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW® and, of course, the inspirational experience that only SXSW® can deliver.

I’ll be going to learn about what’s coming in interactive media, particularly in the social realm as it relates to applications and content production. I’m also hoping to network by meeting people that can help us bring innovative things to my classes here at Lehigh. At the same time this is a learning year for me to see what I bring to the table at these events that might be unique; I am looking for ways to potentially contribute down the road.

I’ve sorted through all the panels and events offered using their really cool my.SXSW tool and picked ones that interested me. But there was huge overlap, with some times having 5-6 sessions that interested me. I have it mostly narrowed down (my tentative schedule) but could use a little help. The 11 a.m. times on my Saturday and Sunday schedule are both packed with options. Sunday in particular is giving me fits. So I’ve decided that in the spirit of interactivity to let you all vote. Which one would you attend as a journalism educator?

If you want to know more about the sessions, go to my custom schedule and click on the session name under Sunday at 11 a.m., and this will expand the view outward so you can see a description. I’ll make sure to cover that session in a blog post next week so you can learn a little bit from the session that my four loyal readers select.

This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be doing before, during, and after SXSWi. In the next day or so I’ll have a preview of why I picked what I picked on my schedule. From the conference itself I’ll be livetweeting sessions from my iPhone via my @jlittau account (using the #sxswi and #nerdstock tags), and at night I’ll be putting up some initial blog posts about the day’s standout sessions. In addition to my iPhone 3Gs, I’ll be using one of our Kodak Zi8 cameras to capture footage and post some of it as well.

One last note for any Mizzou folks attending. We are having a meetup at 6 p.m. on Sunday, March 14 at The Belmont. RSVP on Facebook if you can join us!

These Olympics are made for an American TV audience. Vancouver is in the Pacific time zone, meaning that audiences all over the U.S. should be able to watch the drama unfold in real-time. NBC, with its ability to carry coverage live on three channels (NBC, CNBC, MSNBC), seems uniquely aligned to make that coverage all the more compelling in a real-time world.

The problem is that NBC seems to have not gotten the memo that we live in a world of media immediacy.

The first clue emerged on the first day of the Games. While sites all over the Web were breaking news about results and events, NBC’s Winter Olympics home had lots of splash and glitz but little in the area of breaking results. Their early strategy seemed to be geared toward keeping live results from popular events off the site in hopes of building an audience for its evening coverage.

But the thing is that they were getting scooped on their own site anyway. Real-time tweets from their Olympic Pulse spinoff had athletes commenting about results and medals while the front page of the NBC site was strangely silent. NBC’s news presentation used social media, but they weren’t talking to one another.

Thankfully they must have seen how backward this approach was, because after only a couple days that practice changed. Results were being trumpeted on the front page of the site. Crisis averted, sort of.

Over the next week or so, though, we saw the unfolding of a poorly designed strategy. Results flowed in from the day, including big wins by folks such as Lindsey Vonn, but they weren’t shown live on TV. The results were tape delayed for the night audience, presumably to get the widest viewership. I totally get that strategy, but even so the broadcast was poorly packaged. We already knew the results, but NBC played it as if we didn’t. In Vonn’s case, you had to sit through a litany of skiers that everyone knew hadn’t won to watch the one skier you did want to watch (Vonn) as well as a handful of Americans.

It was clear that NBC was behaving as if the Web doesn’t exist. It’s not just anticlimactic to sell it this way, it’s also a farce to an audience that knows better. And don’t get me going as to why the events I’m actually getting to see live at night are tape-delayed on the West Coast. They aren’t seeing anything in real-time.

The final straw was last night, though.

I worked from home much of Sunday and kept noticing a lot of buzz about the USA/Canada hockey game on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, even from people I don’t think of as big sports fans. Given that Canada is the host, the presence of NHL players, the rivalry, and so forth, it was clear there was a lot of interest in the game. Any NBC producer paying attention to the conversation on social media platforms would know that interest in this game was extremely high.

The game was on Sunday night. Perfect time to put it in NBC prime time, right?

Well, wrong.

NBC shifted the game to MSNBC, its cable news channel with a fraction of the audience. Not only that, but the potential of seeing it in high def on NBC was gone, so the lucky few who got MSNBC and didn’t miss the game because of regional contract issues still got it in standard def.

The journalist in me made me wonder what compelling event was happening on NBC during the hockey game that was (and still is) the buzz of the Olympics so far. So I flipped over to the parent channel and got my answer. Ice dancing, and a tape-delayed(!!!) run of Bode Miller’s gold-medal skiing performance from earlier in the day.

I’m sure ice dancing is a tremendous sport for those who care about it, but there simply is no reason to show that and a tape-delayed(!!!!! …. seriously, how many exclamation marks do I need to hammer this home?) performance. Even if you could argue for it, the latter could have been shown live earlier that Sunday in lieu of the hockey game.

Had it just a one-off mistake that would have been understandable. But this has been a pattern for NBC during the Games. It has surprised me because they’ve done such a good job fully wiring these games and making them for social media. There really is no excuse for it.

It serves as a reminder to me as I think about these tools and news organizations. Yes, we can have them, but we have to use them. NBC built a wonderful window on its viewers that would allow them to figure out how to best position its programming. It shouldn’t have taken a genius to use the tools and figure out the obvious choice.

I was honored to give a lecture about Twitter last week here at Lehigh due to an invitation from the Friends of the Lehigh Library. One of the points I made is that Twitter, like all social media, is made for listening. Just using it as a content stream not only greatly misses the point, it actually can further increase the rift between source and audience. Users bring an expectation to their media experience based on their use of media that are increasingly more networked. If it’s not a conversation, it’s inferior.

NBC’s approach in getting the networks set up has been top notch. Its execution has been miserable. You don’t want to seem behind the times, broadcasting in a world that assumes no Internet, and you sure don’t want to be ignoring valuable feedback from your audience in real-time.

So here is my simple suggestion: do it live. You’ve got three networks. Show me as much as you can as it’s happening. Use your night broadcast to show the popular sports and the best from the day’s events, but don’t pretend as if this is “new.” This would let people watch it live if they want, or catch it later if they can’t. But it would end this farce that pretends the Web isn’t a factor.

One of my most enjoyable experiences this Games was watching the biathlon last Saturday. It’s a quirky little event that combines cross-country skiing with shooting. I don’t care about it outside of the Olympics, but they showed it live the first day of the Games and it was surprisingly entertaining. Life’s funny that way; we enjoy it when we don’t know what’s going to happen.

Thirty years ago, when the U.S. won the hockey gold after the Miracle On Ice, those games were shown to us on tape. It was riveting, in part, because we didn’t have immediate media. There was a sense of the unknown back then. Nowadays, you can’t avoid the results, and you shouldn’t. Television has to evolve with the Web or risk making the same mistake newspapers did. You can’t pretend as if the Web isn’t a threat to every programming decision you make.

I’m talking about Google Buzz, a newly unveiled service that has been rolling out since Tuesday to people who use Google products such as Gmail. You should know if you have it the minute you log in, as it will ask you if you want to try it. And if you try it and hate it, don’t worry; buried at the bottom of your Gmail page is a link to turn Buzz off.

How to explain Buzz? Imagine if you’re a media company that, oh, begins with a “G” and really doesn’t have a product ready-made for social sharing of news and information. You’d probably take a hard look at Facebook and Twitter, see what ideas work best, build your engine around those things and sprinkle in a few innovations of your own to encourage folks to make the switch.

What you get is Google Buzz, a service that is part innovation and part technological Frankenstein. It functions on the basic unit of sharing that drives both Facebook and Twitter: the status update. You can update people on what you’re doing, thinking, reading, etc. You can reply to others. And you can socially share things you are producing, such as blog posts, videos, photos, and so forth.

Google has a built-in engine for this last one, because it has over the years either bought out or created an array of choices from Picasa (photos) to Google Reader (RSS reader) to Blogger. It has a lot of features that über services such as Facebook have, but it’s never had a way to link them all together using social networks.

I might be reading too much into this, but I think it’s telling that you can have your status updates from Twitter automatically feed into Buzz, but you cannot do the same from Facebook. Twitter’s feed provides loads of instant content for Google’s real-time social search engine, but it’s a small operation with a limited ability to cut into Google’s broad base of products.

Facebook is a much different bird, more diverse and able to compete with Google on a wider landscape. The lack of Facebook linkage to Buzz says to me Google views Facebook as the main threat to its business. You can do a lot of things on Facebook that leave Google’s products worthless to some users, such as e-mail, photo hosting, blogging, etc. If Buzz is trying to kill anyone, it isn’t Twitter. Paint the target right onto Facebook’s back, and get ready for World War 2.0.

Buzz works a lot like Twitter. It's a chronological collection of posts from people you follow.

I’ve been toying with Buzz for a day here. This is not a comprehensive review of what Buzz does. If you want that, read Mashable’s take or Google’s informational video to get those. Reaction to Buzz is widespread, but it has its critics already. This is more a collection of initial thoughts about Buzz, listed in the form of what I like and dislike about it. These are very rough initial thoughts, but when stuff like this comes along I like to look at it like a regular media user before imagining the new media producer possibilities. After all, what’s the point of using it as a journalist if our audience doesn’t have use for this?

Things I like

Ability to embed photos in posts.: No need to use Twitpic, a service that wouldn’t exist except for a shortcoming of Twitter’s design.

Buzz lets you post photo(s) as part of your updates.

Edit function!: I’m notorious for posting things with typos, deleting them, and reposting them. I like being able to fix little stuff like that, and Buzz has it. I can see why Twitter doesn’t have this function since you can’t fix a text message and the whole service was built on this principle, but it’s still pretty nice.

No need for link shorteners: It really is a true archive of hyperlink in context with posting. Others have written about the problem with link shorteners as a necessary evil for a 140-character world such as Twitter. Dave Winer has a great recap of the multitudes of problems that come with this necessary evil, as well as a plan for how to fix it. I won’t add to that conversation other to say that shortened links expire. But this issue really is a longer-term structural problem when it comes to archiving the social Web.

Location-based systems technology: I’ve blogged about LBS before and said that geolocation as a way of sifting through social media data is the next wave for us. Still, I’m limited on this one because LBS and privacy don’t mix well at times, but adding geographic context to posts can make data more interesting. Mashable’s breakdown of LBS possibilitie within Buzz is a pretty good read on what could be coming down the pipe as Buzz evolves. I’ve fiddled with it on my iPhone a bit and have come to the conclusion that the best possibilities for Buzz are on the phone, not my Web browser.

Posting replies via e-mail: Because I have Gmail, replies to my Buzz posts go to Gmail as well and I can reply right there. Very handy. But I can’t help but wonder if Google really wants me to think of Buzz as a Gmail-only thing.

Things I sort of like, sort of don’t like

Easy sharing: If I used Google Reader, Picasa, Google Video, etc. then it’d be easy to share this stuff on Buzz because it’s integrated. But I don’t use any of these things, and the easy integration sort of turns me off. See #2 on my list of don’t likes.

Suggestions: I’m putting this here because I haven’t really seen it in action yet. Supposedly Google’s goal is to cut through the noise of all the information in the social Web by offering suggestions based on what it thinks you like. I can’t really comment on this one because I don’t have enough followers or time logged on Buzz for that to be working correctly. Still, one thing I love about Twitter is that it cuts through that noise for me. I self-selected my own audience and depend on them to let me know when something is important. Do I trust an algorithm to do that for me? Even if it could, do I want to give up that control after I wrested it away from the media gatekeepers? I’m keeping an open mind on it, but I’m skeptical. And it feels a bit too much like Googlezon to me.

Things I don’t like

No sharing similar to retweeting: The absolute best thing about Twitter is the ability to retweet others’ posts. Facebook liked it so much even they implemented a way to share others’ status updates and content postings. That point of discovery, where you learn new things or maybe even find others worth following, is very much tied to content. I’ve met several folks online and gotten to know them via Twitter because they are interested in the same content that I am interested in. This is a huge problem with Buzz, and I have a hard time getting around that. Now, could we create a retweet syntax similar to Twitter’s “RT” feature? Totally. But why wait for this to get standardized when Twitter already works?

Seems the only purpose REALLY is to drive you to Google and its products: Pictures post on Picasa. Replies go to Gmail. It seems that Buzz is an attempt to socially link all of Google’s products together rather than offer a service that links my chosen social spaces together. It’s a weakness of Google’s system that they didn’t have this social engine in which to embed all of their other products as they bought/purchased them, but I consider that their problem and not mine. Of course, Twitter wants your traffic too, but all of its innovations seemed aimed at taking the message you have and figuring out how to spread it. Buzz seems aimed at getting you to use Google’s other stuff. It’s a vibe I get, and it’s offputting to me as a consumer.

No limits on characters or words: Twitter focuses the mind with its rigid 140-character limit. Facebook limits posts and, to a lesser degree, comments on posts. The idea is if you have a ton to say, get a blog. I don’t want to wade through long diatribes. I want short bursts of information to see if I want to know more. Just give me a link already if you have more.

Commenting on others’ posts: You’d think this would be good, but this is where the Twitter/Facebook mashup just falls flat.  I like Facebook’s commenting system better. It’s easier to navigate with user photos there, unlike Buzz where it’s easy to miss comments because you only see them if it’s on a post from a person whom you are following. In other words, no ability to eavesdrop on others’ conversations like you can on Twitter by seeing random replies to people whom you don’t follow. This is a fun way to discover new folks on Twitter, and completely absent on Buzz.

Bottom line

Buzz offers some good ideas here that push social media forward. People think this will be a Twitter killer and should have Twitter nervous. I don’t buy it. If anything, Google has imagined other ways to do things, such as photo posting, and perhaps given Twitter some ideas worth stealing.

But when I ask myself whether Buzz is worth adopting, I keep coming back to the integrated products thing. One thing I like about my setup now is I have an exit strategy if something like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, etc., start to suck. To the degree that they are integrated, it makes it that much harder to extricate myself from that network.

Don’t believe me? Scan your Facebook news feed and read all the things people are saying about the latest redesign. It’s the same people who were complaining about the last redesign, the redesign before that one, and so on. They complain, they hate it, but they never leave. The complain-but-don’t-leave crowd have a lot of different things invested in the system: maintenance of social ties, e-mail, photo hosting, video hosting, blogging, and much more. They don’t have somewhere else to go; their whole virtual lives are maintained on one site, for the most part.

Me? I could drop Facebook in a second if something better came along or if I just got tired of it. I have Twitter. I have other social media outlets. I have a blog that I can port to another service should I so choose. These are unlinked, but I use them in a way that works together. The possibility that I could drop any of these products overnight and go with a competitor probably keeps them innovating; they’re worried about losing someone like me, not the perpetual complainers.

Google Buzz seems specifically designed to take care of that worry, and that’s the kind of thing that makes me think it’s not worth adopting. The worry is Google’s, not mine. I really don’t care if I have accounts in five different places; in fact, I like it. I like having social spaces where I can hide a bit, but more to the point I just like things that work the way I want them too. And sometimes I just don’t want everything to look like Google.

In other words, social media’s strength is it allows us to construct a media experience that is uniquely ours from a varying array of parts we choose. An integrated Google product scares me because it’s an attempt to take me back to one platform, one experience. It’s hegemony in product form. We have all these wonderful tools available to us, and we should fight any attempt to take those choices away from us.

That said, this feels like a transition product for Google, not the end result of what they want it to be. They can’t imagine this being the social media nirvana in version 1.0 in spite of how they sell it. It needs some tweaking. Less than Google Wave needs, but tweaking nonetheless. And it does duplicate a lot of what a person shares on the Web. Do I really need that tweet posted and archived twice? Feels like space junk to me.

I’m not ready to tell Google to Buzz Off (sorry, had to do it), but I’m not ready to jump in full bore yet either. I don’t see it offering anything groundbreakingly new except an integrated LBS and microblogging component. Buzz seems buzzworthy only in the sense that it’s going to drive better development for Facebook and Twitter. It’s worth keeping an eye on, but it’s a skeptical eye.

If you’ve used Buzz, leave your thoughts below. And feel free to follow me via my profile if you’re wanting to test drive it yourself. Fellow digiphile Geoff Brooke likes the edit function and ability to import Google Reader articles easily, but does note it’s frustrating to find followers when it’s tied so closely to those who have Gmail.

The column dissects some of the troubles journalists face when covering athletes who profess faith. Journalism is a profession based on inquiry and skepticism, and so when covering athletes who talk about religion this can get complicated. Pulliam neatly summarized some of this clash:

• Journalists see a lot of sides of athletes, including their bad sides. How do they match words with deeds, and are they qualified to judge hypocrisy or a person’s devotion to their faith?
• Journalism is empirical, a discipline that requires observation and the testing of facts. How does one materially test something such as faith?
• How do you honestly tell an athlete’s story without talking about the faith that motivates them? Out of that, how can you determine that the motivation is real?

Obviously an athlete’s faith becomes part of the news at times. Pulliam cites Cassius Clay’s transformation into Muhammad Ali as an example of something that is news itself and impossible to ignore.

In all, Pulliam does a good job sketching out some of the general issues concerning the intersection of faith and sports as it pertains to journalism. What I found unsatisfying was her advice on how to navigate the troubles.

If journalists are asking the right motivational questions (why did an athlete retire? why does he do prison ministry?) they might find religion in the answers. When appropriate, it’s the reporter’s responsibility to dig out the underlying story and present it to readers.

While I don’t disagree, her advice should apply to journalism as a whole and at some point is rendered obvious to the daily practitioner. Reporters should always ask deeper and more probing questions. That’s part of the job. While Pulliam constructs a solid argument, I think she leaves out some critical parts and because of it avoids one of those conversations we badly need to have about the relationship between faith and material success.

Speaking as a person of faith who has done some journalism in my time, it’s a whole lot more difficult than simply quoting an athlete or asking a follow-up question. She cites a great quote from Sports Illustrated’s Peter King but at the same time doesn’t really offer a way out of this:

“One of the problems that we have is determining the veracity of a person’s claim that he has just won this game for his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

The thing is, while digging deep is great in practice, having done sports journalism most of the faith encounters I’ve had on the job were of the variety King gets into. Athletes attributing a win, or a strong performance, or something else to God and his influence. While Pulliam doesn’t address this part of the gig in her column, I believe she missed an opportunity in doing so.

There’s a broader cultural argument here for keeping athletes from attributing any type of success to God. Even as a person of faith, I am deeply uncomfortable taking someone’s quotes attributing a victory or well played game to God if I don’t hear similar things said by that athlete in times of failure. The reason for this is that without the necessary context, the journalistic narrative can become such that faith breeds success, and left unchecked a trail of stories in this vein convey an impression in the macro that God only makes winners.

This certainly would be a sentiment that many faith-professing athletes would dispute in the micro, but in the glow of a recent victory the context is easy to lose. And is a locker room or live on-field interview after the game, asking whether they’d give God the glory win or lose, the time and place to gently challenge this lack of context? Most in the audience would probably call that journalistic malpractice on the order of badgering the witness, and that “most” would include me.

It’s easier for us to mentally link Kurt Warner’s success to God’s hand without thinking about the troubling implications of that statement. What of his fellow believers on the other side of the field who just lost the game? What of the Christian quarterback of inferior abilities who toils as a career backup and never has success in a way that would be embraced by an American culture that sees the only two places as first and last? Did God really arrange for him to get all of those concussions he suffered in his career, and where was he then?

There are answers to these questions, of course. But they are answers rooted in faith, and if we talk about success then we ought to talk just as much about failure. I am pretty sure God doesn’t need Kurt Warner to be a successful quarterback to show his greatness, but perhaps only talking faith in terms of athlete success inadvertently becomes The Latest Greatest Proof That God Exists.

So the question I’d ask is whether we should ignore the faith stories of those who fail more than they succeed? We shouldn’t, but then again that isn’t how news is done. News is a collection of the unusual or extraordinary, of “man bites dog” and so forth. We don’t write stories about the guys that finish out of the medals at the Olympics. You won’t see deep coverage on Sunday, even despite a pregame show that starts at breakfast time, of the other 30 teams that didn’t make the Super Bowl.

There’s a simple reason for this: we could produce it, but who would consume it? In America the cycle of sports news coverage is such that we cherish winners and ignore those who lose.

Over time, the overlap of faith and sports can breed some destructive thinking that actually hinders the cause to which these athletes subscribe. You don’t want to say Jesus is only about winners, but that is the subtle linkage made when you allow athletes to make statements attributing their success to God go uncontextualized. And so the journalist faces a pretty brutal choice: badger the witness, or leave it on the cutting room floor.

Pulliam seems to take the view that the journalist who cuts it out is being lazy, or perhaps is uncomfortable with faith to the point where they are paralyzed when confronted with this information. Perhaps that is true with some sports journalists. But I can say with certainty that my decision to cut this material out was the result of deep thought and reflection, and ultimately it was from the desire to be sincere with my audience and be sure to not subtly communicate some untruth with which both I and the athlete would be uncomfortable.

When you add into the mix some of the concerns that Pulliam sums up, about how a journalist really can’t be sure about an athlete’s faith based on direct observation, it becomes more troublesome. I’m not sure Pulliam’s argument truly appreciates what a minefield this is for a journalist interested in both truth and context.

So, instead of Pulliam’s advice I offer my own. I’d take her advice to dig deep on profiles and stories and build on it. Create a new genere of stories, about people who toil in obscurity or don’t find much success in their athletic pursuits. Show me what sustains them when life is tough.

Man-bites-dog has nothing on that, and the information might be so useful you might even call this type of faith/sports mix news. Then when the winners give glory to God on Sunday, we have enough journalistic evidence on the record to show that he cares about the least of those in the sports world too. Even kickers.

Since it’s Super Bowl week, we’ll kick off with a football analogy. Old timer quarterbacks often compare the process of maturing as a player as being somewhat correlated with the speed of the game. Consider NFL great Warren Moon:

“You’ve seen pretty much everything. I think the big thing for older guys, at least for myself, is the game really slows down for you. It really is a slower game. And even though you might be slower because you’re getting older and you’re not as quick as you used to be, because the game has slowed down to you mentally and the way that you view it, you’re still at the same speed of the game.”

Experience, the “I’ve seen that before” kind of recognition, allows you to focus on the game and not technique. NFL rookie QBs get overwhelmed by how fast defenses are, but in time they adjust as they learn to read blitzes, recognize defenses, and so forth. What they’ve had to learn on the fly soon becomes instinct. The game slows down.

The game is slowing down for the students in J198 as well. The focus is shifting from the entry level work with technology and back to the familiar stuff: storytelling.

Last week I kind of overwhelmed them. In the first week it was a simple assignment of shooting video, getting it in Windows Movie Maker (WMM), creating a video, and uploading it. Last week, I sped up the game. They had to go out on campus and shoot the video on the fly, come back and work on it. In addition to just making it into a video, they had to apply newly learned skills to add title bars and video credits. All in 2 hours.

About half of the students finished by lab’s end. Before the assignment started I had no idea how many would be done by lab’s end, but I wanted to throw them into the deep end and see what they could do. This is the Missouri Method part of me at work, the thing I learned so well at the world’s first school of journalism: you learn by doing. Better, you learn what you need to know by doing and failing a little bit.

Still, the professor side of me spent some time over the weekend thinking about how to handle lab this week, just as I have been doing every weekend as a way of constantly reassessing where we are in this experimental course. I told those who struggled to spend the weekend practicing by redoing the assignment (“Practice, Practice, Practice”), but I contemplated giving them the same assignment again on Thursday just to see if they could improve.

But in the end I decided that when you struggle, you plow ahead. On some level I have to trust that my students are going to practice the things they know they’re not as good at, and so instead of retreating I upped the ante this week. I had them shoot video outside of class this week and bring it to class. One clip would be an on-camera interview where a person talks about a job or activity that they do. The second clip would be footage of them doing that job or activity.

The goal of the assignment was a simple audio overlay, where they would take footage from the visually boring interview and overlay it on something action-oriented. At the same time, they had to do all of that other stuff (title bar, credits, and fade transition) that had been struggle points last week. So they were doing all the old stuff plus adding new skills to the toolbox.

The results were quite good. Recall that many of these students had never held a video camera before this course:

That one was by Liz Martinez, who showed that knack for curiosity that I have come to love about Lehigh students. Really this assignment was about muting the video audio and overlaying another audio file, but she instinctively knew that blending some of the video’s background audio would be good. So she asked me how to combine them using fade techniques. I showed her how to do it on the fly.

I had been planning to show this later on as a more advanced technique, but I was more than happy to give a little one-on-one lesson on the spot. This is one reason I really like the lab format.

I really liked this one by Alyssa Salem. I didn’t require fade transitions but she wanted to add them, partly to practice but partly because she knew they might look less abrupt than rough video cuts.

The thing is, we haven’t spent a minute in class yet on good video composition, lighting, sound, etc. Really the first three weeks were about how to work the Zi8 cameras and the editing software. So the rough edges will be smoothed, but this is a hell of a starting baseline. I couldn’t be more pleased.

So today I’m a little bit pumped, and labs like today are really exciting when you see the game slowing down for them. We’re going to rest on our laurels for the rest of the day, but tomorrow it’s back at it. This week we talked about blogging and my assignment for them, after letting them kind of feel their way through blogging, was to kick it up a notch. From my recap e-mail to them:

I’d also like to take this discussion online. Andrew had a great ending to his latest post today, asking others for comments. So I’d like you to post comments on the blogs of 2-3 other students, if for no other reason than to see how this 100/100,000 readers thing works. Andrew also did something else good with Twitter that we’ll talk about on Monday: He posted a link to his latest blog post. Now his Twitter followers are sharing in his J198 work. He is now turning his readers into nodes. I practice what I preach here. I’ve left some comments on a few blogs here and there in the past couple days, and I’ll be leaving more. If you haven’t enabled the ability to leave comments on your blog, make sure to do so. What we’re creating here is a type of online community through social media, starting with blogs and next week into Twitter. This thing is going to grow, and you’ll be watching it unfold firsthand.

I have thrown so much at them in the first three weeks. They have learned for the first time how to shoot video, edit video, stylize video, upload to YouTube, blog, and tweet. They’re learning about the structure and architecture of the read-write Web, and they’re learning it by doing it. Walter Williams would be proud, I think.

Best part: the students haven’t wilted a bit, and in fact the energy of the class has been one of soaking it up. As I said before, we’ll refine this as it goes along and make it better. But I couldn’t be more pleased with where we’re at to this point in the semester.

The page, linked off the main home page, is essentially an aggregation for Twitter feeds featuring athletes and NBC broadcast personalities. You can sort between these groups or have a combined feed. Off to the right are links to other social media outlets where folks can find Games content, such as via Facebook.

Blogging was the big new media thing at the Beijing Games in 2008. Missouri sent several students to China to work one media coverage as part of an internship-type thing, and in fact one of my students was blogging daily from the Games. And boy did blogging take off across all types of media, which is interesting because really it’d been a growing phenomenon for about four years before that point.

If the Games in China were about blogging, the Vancouver Games are made for social media. Twitter has really taken off in the past couple years, offering a many-to-many conversation that will allow athletes and fans to interact on a level that subverts the traditional media gates and filters. The direct access to athlete voices (as well as the potential for livetweeting) is tremendous and adds another layer of live coverage and access that we normally would just get with television. A fanatic of the Games probably will get a richer experience than they’ve ever had if they choose to tap into it.

To this point you have gotten coverage direct from NBC or from elite media. Imagine now being able to get photos from Twitpic via Twitter or video straight from YouTube, and not just athletes but also fans in attendance. Of course this should make NBC squirm, as it has ponied up billions for the exclusive broadcast rights to the 2010 and 2012 games.

From a fan’s perspective I don’t know if I could be any less interested in the Winter Olympics than I am right now. I am from California, after all, and snow is something you visit. But from a media perspective, the Games should provide a multimedia assault unlike anything we’ve seen. Should be fascinating.

Behold, the iPad (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ndevil/ / CC BY 2.0)

My dad has this habit of printing out e-mail. Occasionally he’ll get something that captures his interest or makes him think or makes him laugh, but his first reaction sometimes centers on this urge to print the thing out and pass it around. When I go home to visit my parents these days, it’s almost a guarantee that at some point dad’s going to break out the paper e-mail to share a joke or something that he read about.

Needless to say, I think this is weird. It’s not how I use e-mail and feels like one of those Stuff Old People Do kinds of things. If I wanted to share it, that’s what the “forward” button is for. But even as I shake my head at the notion of my dad clear-cutting whole forests to share that latest e-mail joke going around the Intertubes, I realize that there is something there. We live in a networked world, and we like to share our media. It’s just that he likes to physically hand his e-mail to me.

And I do my fair share of, well, sharing. One of the things my wife and I have had to work out as fairly newish married folk is the use of laptops in the living room. We both have work to do at nights at times but it seems nicer if we’re at least spending time together in the same room, even if we have our heads down and are staring at our laptop screens. And while we might be exchanging information back-and-forth in that Only In The 2000s kind of way, there can be some sense of human disconnection even as we collaborate.

Even tougher, sharing something on my screen is more difficult if all I’m doing is playing. You can’t just pass a laptop to someone so they can quickly read an email, see a photo, or watch a video, and so I’m stuck with either e-mailing it to her or sitting next to her and trying to orient the crazy thing so she can watch it while still being able to access the controls. The former is just another impersonal manifestation of our highly wired society, whereas the latter is just clunky.

And this is why I want an iPad. I haven’t even held one in my hands and am stuck with presentations and commercials, but I want one.

This is a post about the iPad, but not from an insider who was lucky enough to touch one yesterday. This is about me, the consumer looking at all of this stuff and deciding whether it’s worth being an early adopter. For the first time in a while, this is an Apple product I’m actually excited enough about to think about getting at initial release.

The fanboys have had their say, and the Apple naysayers (a cottage industry unto themselves these days) have taken their shots. I’ll let you decide what features it needs, but really I don’t care. We know with things like the iPod and iPhone that Apple likes to release these big-idea things in v1.0, then listen to its customer base when it makes improvements. With Apple the initial release is always about the big concepts. In the end, you buy it if it has utility at the price they set. This thing has utility for me.

My impression after seeing the demonstration videos and coverage is that I view the device in two ways: it puts the human touch back in our media experience, and it’s going to be a game-changer with the way we do wireless data in the U.S.

On the human touch, getting back to my original anecdote …. this thing seems like a really nice way to share media interpersonally. If I’m reading an email or viewing a photo I want my wife to see in the living room, or looking at something in a conference room that I want to show someone, you can pass the device. It weighs 1.5 pounds and it’s compact. It’s my dad’s e-mail printing dream without all the tree-killing. And it makes media sharing interpersonal again, not just a push-button experience. Handing it off, acknowledging the person who’s taking the pad from me … *mon dieu* making eye contact??? That human connection, that’s why we share, and the iPad looks like a device that lets me share things any way I want, including passing the device to someone else in the room.

As I think about the iPad it reminds me of how much more gratifying it is to sit down with someone and go over photos from a trip by sifting through the printed paper versions. Way more gratifying than posting them to Facebook and wondering if anyone is seeing them (or cares). There’s something tactile, human if you will, about the experience. I’ve watched slideshows on a laptop with people before, but it does lack that tactile feel of flipping through the photos. It’s one of the things I love about viewing photos on my iPhone, and I can’t wait to see it done high-res.

I also was super interested in the body language during Steve Jobs’ presentation yesterday. As Jobs was presenting, he was seated in a comfortable chair, legs crossed, and reading it pretty casually like one would read a book. You can sit like that with an iPod or iPhone, but that device isn’t made for reading for long periods of time. And you can read quite well on a laptop, but you can’t sit like that (or comfortably, for that matter). I’ve long liked the notion of e-readers precisely because of the potential it has to let us read in the way we’re most comfortable.

It’s the thing I keep hearing when people rave about the Kindle, and it seems like the next evolution in media devices. Jobs described it as the “bridge” between mobile devices and laptops that netbooks were alleged to be but were not: the comfort of ease of reading while using a powerful computing device but without the bulk of a laptop.

I’ve been intrigued by the Kindle for a while, but I’ve never really had the urge to own one. As much as I like the concept of an electronic medium that allows me to read while lounging around the house, I’ve never had utility for a single-use type of device that basically is for reading. The iPad is like the Kindle on crack; it does a lot more, it has the Apple app store, and it gives me the function of a mini computer without forcing me to assume the laptop position. So while I’ve never seriously thought about taking the Kindle plunge, I want an iPad now. Not because I’m a fanboy (which I am), but because I could see myself using this thing in a way that’s distinct from my iPhone and my Macbook.

So, to sum: Human connection, comfort, and actual utility. Yes please!

Will this thing become as popular as the iPhone or iPod? I don’t think so, but if people think that’s a disappointment they’re using the wrong metric. What this will do is increase the appetite and market for eReaders more than the Kindle ever could because it is far more than a reader. And knowing that the iPhone runs a Kindle app, I find myself wondering if this thing will kill the Kindle in the long run and turn Amazon into a book distributor again and take their focus off the actual hardware.

At the very least, this might be something that makes netbooks useless in the long run.

The other thing I want to mention is what I think is really the huge, huge takeaway from yesterday, and that’s related to data plans. My mentor at Mizzou Clyde Bentley, a brilliant fellow whom you should all get to know, had a similar reaction to what the most standout announcement was from yesterday’s presentation: few are talking about it, but this is going to change the way phone companies price and do data delivery.

This is not new for Apple. Before the iPhone the notion of unlimited data came with a hefty price tag, but Apple used its leverage to change the market. Quite simply, the iPhone wouldn’t have worked without it. But even now with iPhones you’re talking $30 a month for unlimited data. There are no “lite” plans and it comes as part of a 2-year contract.

The iPad’s data options are different. First, the thing works on wi-fi so you can run it for free without a 3G network if you want. There are two different types of iPads: both work on wi-fi, but you have to pay a bit more to get one that works on wi-fi or 3G. If you want 3G, you can buy data from one of two tiers ($14.99 for 250 MB per month, or $29.99 for unlimited). But the best best best part? NO CONTRACTS. You can use wi-fi if you want, then maybe go in for 3G if you feel like you need it or if you’re, say, traveling and need more mobile access. And you can cancel at any point. It really is brilliant.

When Apple launched iTunes few expected it to change the music industry’s business model in such a meaningful way. An industry built on the idea of whole album sales over time realized the value in selling songs a la carte. Apple already has changed data delivery once, and it seems poised to do it again. The ability to buy a lite version of a data plan and, God forbid, cancel at any time is a game-changer. Other companies are going to have to follow suit if they want to be able to capture the iPad user market in the future. Price wars, so absent in the mobile market these days, are a good thing.

I love the technology of this thing because I love gadgets, but I didn’t expect the big reveal to be Apple using its leverage to improve wireless data for the consumer.

Does the iPad have everything? No. First of all, the name is you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up funny (huge props to MadTV for seeing the future three years ago). It’s what happens when you develop this stuff in a secretive mad-scientist lab environment; tech nerds don’t make good focus groups. Second, some of the criticisms like a closed OS or lack of USB or memory card slots are valid, although I think it’s overblown. The first iPhone didn’t have an app store, text messaging, a video camera, Bluetooth, and so forth. Apple does a good job listening to customers and, more importantly, figuring out how they want to use it. They won’t deviate from this course with the iPad, and while you can’t have every feature people want there is room for it to grow.