Monthly Archives: December 2009

So you don’t have to surf the Web …

1. Your weekly “get off my lawn” rant about participatory media this week comes from The Digital Journalist via the provocatively titled “Let’s Abolish ‘Citizen Journalists’.” I kid, of course, because I have more respect for journalists who come out and just say what they think rather than pick at the edges. To wit:

There are citizens and there are journalists. Everybody can be one of the former, but to be called a journalist means that you are a professional. Either you have been schooled in journalism, or you have “paid your dues,” rising slowly through the ranks.

I disagree, of course, and I don’t think the pros help their cause a bit by arguing on the basis of elitism. For an interesting follow-up, check out Jay Rosen’s virtual interview with Dirck Halstead, editor and publisher of The Digital Journalist.

2. Via Mashable, Twitter is about to open up the “firehose” to API developers by making all data for all tweets available. This will put developers on more even footing, but more important, it will really spur more creative Twitter applications. Between that and the launch of Google Real-Time, which will be indexing social media content continuously, it looks like 2010 will be a big year for the growth of the conversation Web.

3. What makes an academic tick? A great post by my colleague Hans Meyer at Ohio U unpacks it a bit. It starts with an exploration of how the iTunes shuffle feature is so-not-random but uses that to demonstrate the change that happens in the process of becoming a scholar. Rather than ask how or why things work (or in this case don’t work), you set about trying to determine it for yourself. It’s intellectual self-reliance. Good stuff:

So what does this post have to do with the media? Nothing really, but I wrote it so I can refer back to it on days when I don’t feel as smart as the other bloggers and researchers I read. Maybe I’m not as smart as they are, but at least I’m working on it, at least I’ve come to the point where I don’t just ask questions, I actually try to find the answers through rigorous application of scientific methods. Even if I don’t have all the answers, I have something valuable to add to the discussion. I have my perspective which I can defend because I’ve objectively looked at the evidence, as stupid as it may be.

4. President Obama visited the Lehigh Valley last week to talk job creation, and Twitter was abuzz. Citizen journalists (sorry, I won’t abolish the term) took photos, and folks from all walks shared details and info using the #obamalv hashtag. It was interesting to read through the feed in real-time and see people of different views converging together in a shared space of discussion.

5. Via The Oatmeal, you don’t have to be a Web designer to have experienced this type of misery before, but you might laugh with a bit more understanding.

6. David Cohn of the most excellent Spot.Us wrote an interesting piece for PBS’ Idea Lab walking us through the cool bit of innovation that happened this fall between his site, McSweeney’s, and the SF Public Press. The collaboration helped create a dynamic story, “The Bay Bridge Explained,” that got wider exposure via partners in the process. I’m pretty upfront in my love for Spot, and they remind me every day that there’s a difference between trying something (anything!) and trying something good. Cohn may not have hit on the future here, but this is going to be a part of it.

7. Good post by Dan Gillmor today attacked ghostwritten editorials used by the mainstream professional press, in this case inspired by a piece “written” by Sarah Palin. I agree with Gillmor insofar as we’re talking about transparency; while these editorials are really advertorials for a candidate, source of the writing aside they can help drive public discussion and so I have no problem with using these pieces per se. What’s dishonest, as Gillmor notes, is printing bylines when nobody really believes the candidate actually wrote it. Even a one-sentence agate line at the end saying the column used a ghostwriter would be a welcome change. If we don’t do this kind of thing, it really keeps us from doing what we should be doing as media, which is deconstructing the myth of image-candidates.

So you don’t have to surf the Web …

1. Big changes are coming to Facebook (cue scary music and get yer “1 MILLION STRONG TO GIVE US THE OLD FACEBOOK BACK!!!1!” group ready). Founder Mark Zuckerberg explains that they’re going to disband the network-style mode of grouping people, and this is important because privacy settings are often determined by the network you’re in. It looks like network-based privacy settings will go away in favor of the ability to clump custom settings and apply them to groups of people. Not sure how this will play out until we see the changes, but it looks like they’re going to incorporate more intuitive privacy options.

2. Rupert Murdoch, among others, have been making noise about putting online news behind a paywall. Steve Yelvingon explains why this would be an incredibly bad idea. This is one of the best reads of the week for me. The hard data seem pretty clear that an all-or-nothing approach isn’t wise, nor is a blanket view of your audience. The suggestion at the end as a potential way to shape new models to the data is interesting.

3. Another point, while I’m here with Murdoch and pay walls. The 2006 version of Murdoch sounds a lot more like a guy who understands what’s going on with the Web than the 2009 version. And for what it’s worth, Twitter founder Biz stone thinks Murdoch is off his rocker too. Still, the Fox News critic in me is almost dying for Murdoch to try this.

4. Something for the kids: Colin Horgan at True/Slant has an interesting take on why Radiohead’s Idioteque (from the genius Kid A in 2000) defines the 2000s. Read this as literary criticism, not ironclad truth, and you’re fine. You have to think that Radiohead was eerily prescient about how technology would evolve during the decade to buy into all his assertions. Like I said, read it like art and not reporting. By the way, can we just declare Kid A the best album of the decade by unanimous consent?

5. A haunting and fascinating piece of work by Wikileaks, as they published more than 570,000 messages sent on 9/11 in a type of chronological order. It’s a living history of how 9/11 unfolded through the eyes of those using text messaging.

LARRY, CALL BRIAN. WANT TO KNOW IF OUR MEN ARE OKAY, SAW A PLANE HIT BLDG

The project is really interesting, like reading a historical novel or watching a historical movie where you know something bad is going to happen. It starts with mundane calm-before-storm types of texts and slowly shows it all unfolding. There’s a lot there, but it’s a sobering read.

6. Clay Shirky warns us that things are going to get worse for journalism and community before it gets better. His argument, among other things, is that we’re going to have to go through a journalism period of community decline in the absence of news before we can recreate this thing. His thoughts are part of Yale’s “Journalism & The New Media Ecology: Who Will Pay The Messenger?” which features some big names in journalism scholarship. It’s a link I’ll be using as they release more.

7. We’ve been saying for a while that Google Wave is going to change our relationship with media. The first really good example I’ve seen came in the past couple days related to the Lakewood shootings of four police officers. The Seattle Times created a public wave that allowed citizens to share information and edit one another, a crowdsourced type of citizen journalism that improved the Times’ coverage [search "with:public seattle times" in Google Wave to check it out]. Others were using G-wave to help in the manhunt after the trail went cold, and people shared sightings and information. Pretty cool stuff. This is just the beginning, folks.