Wednesday is for links (11/25)

So you don’t have to surf the Web …

1. I blogged about Google Wave earlier in the week, but I really want you to check out Mashable’s piece on how it is going to transform media. The idea of a “public wave” is intriguing to people like me who think about journalism’s role in public discourse.

2. Best thing I’ve read this week: Clay Shirky’s piece about authority and credibility in the digital age. He’s using the term “algorithmic authority” to describe a process by which people put levels of trust in aggregators and filters on the Web simply due to things like hits and popularity. The piece is mind-bending and I’m still digesting it, but it has me thinking a lot this week about how the wisdom of the crowds works to create new authorities on matters even as we dismantle old ones. It has implications for how we think about people cutting through media noise in the era of overload. If you read anything this week, read this.

3. Twitter’s basic question “What are you doing?” has been changed to “What’s happening?” This may not seem like a huge deal, but it’s a new paradigm. It is a signal that Twitter recognizes a shift from the service being a me-centered medium to one that is we-centered. And, it seems, that the audience has evolved past Twitter’s original intentions for what it would be.

4. Media coverage falsely framing ACORN by falling into the he-said-she-said trap rather than providing some context via, you know, reporting? Shocking! Editor & Publisher lays out the case.

5. Blog of the week: Take a look at Jonathan Groves’ corner of the Web. Jonathan’s a buddy from the doc program at Mizzou, now setting the world on fire at Drury University. Best post of the past week is his piece about the 10-year anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

6. Frontline did an episode recently on the now-famous “Neda” video out of Iran that went viral this past summer. There is some excellent reporting here, and they broaden the argument on why citizen journalism matters by giving us the context. My first thought is that I still wince every time I see the Neda video. My second thought is that it’s terribly important that we keep showing it, if only to reinforce the idea that good media use means we encounter abuses of authority structure that make us angry. We aren’t outraged enough.

7. Just for fun, what if Star Wars characters were socially connected on Facebook? Good times, that’s what.

8. If you read ESPN, you probably know of Bill Simmons (a.k.a. The Sports Guy). Well, he’s been told by ESPN to cool it on the Twitter thing for a couple weeks. His crime? Insulting a radio station that is a partner with ESPN. Just in case our students think the corporate conglomerate media structure that sacrifices competition for the sake of efficiency isn’t such a bad deal ….

9. From the invalidate-my-own-argument department, Jackson Sun columnist Tom Bohs makes the very scary argument that citizens can’t fact check well enough to produce consistent journalism like the pros can. So we should trust the pros. Such as the kind of pro who’d misspell “Berkeley” or the last name of Dan Gillmor (not to mention get his current locale wrong). And I’m pretty skeptical Bohs actually has read We The Media. It’s all sorta funny/ironic considering Gillmor was the prime target of this fine piece of opinion journalism. If only citizens could crowdsource the editing on this piece like a real professional journalist! Oh wait, they already are doing it.