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.
