Saturday, January 10, 2009
Friday, January 09, 2009
The Here, There & Urban Everywhere of Information OverLoad
Now scientists have begun to examine how the city affects the brain, and the results are chastening. Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting - that's why Picasso left Paris - this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.
From Boston.com.
A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception - we are telling the mind what to pay attention to - takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.
Ok, let's throw in wi-fi, mobiles, IPods, PSPs, cameras....
Who says the city narrative isn't changing?
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Now Adult Publishing Wants a Slice of Bailout
That's not a title, btw.
[Larry] Flynt and Joe Francis, best known for persuading college grads to take their tops off in Girls Gone Wild, are the latest to line up for a Washington handout. They claim that their business is battling competition from readily available online porn. Worse still, in these times of economic turmoil, it's suffering from a depressed American libido.
From The Times.
Pay by the hit: didn't someone come up with this before?
But what healthy news organizations should really be offering this new breed of capable writers is a sort of insurance against unsuccessful articles consisting of an up-front payment for any piece of writing. The rest of the writer’s income should come from performance earnouts — another formula that is yet to be mastered. Keeping it to those basics would be a radical change from the wage-based compensation model of print, along with its sprawling hierarchy of editors and publishers, costly offices, expense reports and support staff. When that world meets the internet’s stripped-down operating model, there may well be money for good journalism again.
Nick Negroponte used to say this in 1994. Ahead of his time, I guess - and he didn't mention the "up-front payment".
Chris Morrison in Venture Beat responds to End Times in The Atlantic.
Here's a bit of that:
Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: “Fitch believes more newspapers and news paper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.”
There is almost too much of this stuff now: journalism finally unmasked as a business! How much paper has been used to write about the death of newspapers? Is it just part of our self-flagellating times? The smart operators are somewhere else already: and that is called thinking.
Google: we 'could' buy newspapers, but we'd rather not
Fortune magazine asking the questions, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt giving the replies:
How about just buying them?
The good news is we could purchase them. We have the cash. But I don't think our purchasing a newspaper would solve the business problems. It would help solidify the ownership structure, but it doesn't solve the underlying problem in the business. Until we can answer that question we're in this uncomfortable conversation.
I think the solution is tighter integration. In other words, we can do this without making an acquisition. The term I've been using is 'merge without merging.' The Web allows you to do that, where you can get the Web systems of both organizations fairly well integrated, and you don't have to do it on exclusive basis.
If not buy, how about just pump some cash into them, the way Microsoft famously once did with Apple?
There are no current plans to do that. The necessary criteria to get us to make that decision are not currently in place.
Enter the Book
First Inkheart, now...Victor Hugo's Les Misérables...
...at long last the classic French novel is coming to PC in Chris Tolworthy's Les Misérables: The Game of the Book.
An independent production begun by Tolworthy ten years ago, Les Misérables marks the first interactive novel in a planned series called Enter the Story. Though the developer refers to it as "more like a book than a game", it most closely resembles a "classic 'point and click' adventure game, with some refinements. Gameplay is simple: you explore, you listen, or you suggest." With its unique minimalist art style and faithful adaptation of the original story, Les Misérables invites players into the world of 19th century Paris, focusing largely on ex-convict Jean Valjean as he seeks redemption from his past.
More here.
Moving the Library to the Mobile
We increasingly have a ‘mesh’ of entry points: PC and phone, of course, but also DVRs, cameras, navigation systems, and consoles. We increasingly use a range of shared network level ‘cloud’ services: for search, for social networking, for content and information, for communication. Providing service in this environment is very different than in one where the model assumes a personal desktop or laptop as the place where resources are accessed and used and the institutional Web site as the place where they are delivered.
A couple of thoughts from a long and thoughtful piece by Lorcan Dempsey that sets out some of the issues for the library of the future.
As a growing proportion of library use is network–based, the library becomes visible and usable through the network services provided. On the network, there are only services. So, the perception of quality of reference or of the value of particular collections, for example, will depend for many people on the quality of the network services which make them visible, and the extent to which they can be integrated into personal learning environments. Increasingly, this requires us to emphasize the network as an integral design principle in library service development, rather than thinking of it as an add–on. The provision of RSS feeds is a case in point. Thinking about how something might appear on a mobile device is another.
From First Monday.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
After 50 years on the beat...a veteran signs off from the Village Voice
Around the country, a lot of reporters are being excessed, and print newspapers may soon become collectors' items. But over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: "He never lost his sense of rage."
By Nat Hentoff
Tuesday, January 6th 2009 at 4:34pm...[and at age 83 and a half].
On one of his rare nights off, Duke looked very beat, and I presumptuously said: "You don't have to keep going through this. With the standards you've written, you could retire on your ASCAP income."
Duke looked at me as if I'd lost all my marbles.
"Retire!" he crescendoed. "Retire to what?!"
Tuesday, January 06, 2009
Journalism: the new architecture?
With a masterful hand, Victor Hugo, a noble lover and a great student of architecture, traces her fall in Notre-Dame.
The prophecy of Frollo, that "the book will kill the edifice," I remember was to me as a boy one of the grandest sad things of the world.
After seeking the origin and tracing the growth of architecture in superb fashion, showing how in the Middle Ages all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one point - architecture - he shows how, in the life of that time, whoever was born poet became an architect. All other arts simply obeyed and placed themselves under the discipline of architecture. They were the workmen of the great work. The architect, the poet, the master summed up in his person the sculpture that carved his façades, painting which illuminated his walls and windows, music which set his bells to pealing and breathed into his organs - there was nothing which was not forced in order to make something of itself in that time, to come and frame itself in the edifice.
Got to be something in this for these times.
From Art and Craft of the Machine
by Frank Lloyd Wright
Which I am reading slowly thanks to the Daily Lit.
Google Grabs the Obama Dollars
Cher-ching.
Barack Obama's presidential campaign spent over $16 million on online advertising in 2008. John McCain's camp spent a fraction of that: around $3.6 million.
Google was far and away the winner, taking in an estimated $7.5 million of Obama ad dollars in 2008, about 45 percent of the campaign's digital ad spending, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Some of that money went toward display and text ads in Google's AdSense network, and some was used for ads appearing in search results on Google's site.
From ClickZ.
When the trust in DNS went missing...
We need something else.
...DNSSEC is about creating a "chain of trust," adds Ram Mohan, CTO of Afilias, which has been working to help the Public Interest Registry handle its deployment. There are many places where DNSSEC must be switched on in order for the chain of trust to flow unbroken from the user to a website. Once a top-level domain (such as .org or .com) implements DNSSEC, any website under that domain can choose to turn on DNSSEC as well, which is an important link in the chain. Since Internet service providers such as Comcast have started supporting DNSSEC, Mohan says, it's becoming possible for some website visits to fall largely under the protection of DNSSEC.
More from A New Web of Trust in MIT's Technology Review.
Monday, January 05, 2009
The new economics of book digitisation
Some librarians privately expressed fears that Google might charge high prices for subscriptions to the book database as it grows. Although nonprofit groups like the Open Content Alliance are building their own digital collections, no other significant private-sector competitors are in the business. In May, Microsoft ended its book scanning project, effectively leaving Google as a monopoly corporate player.
David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, said the company wanted to push the book database to as many libraries as possible. “If the price gets too high,” he said, “we are simply not going to have libraries that can afford to purchase it.”
From the NYT.
How Not to Get Fired from Your Own Blog
Or rather, how to make volunteers think of themselves as Brand Me.
You might think that with the economy crashing, the free-labor business model would be crashing, too. Will people continue to invest in their personal brands during hard times? Gould is betting they will. Between investor visits during a late November trip to New York, he sips a soy latte and speculates. During the downturn, he says, firings are sapping loyalty to companies and steering people toward goals of self-sufficiency. In Gould's acerbic phrasing: "The only person I can rely on not to screw me—hopefully—is myself."
Beyond brand-hungry strivers, masses of free laborers continue to toil without ever seeing a payday, or even angling for one. Many find compensation in currencies that predate the market economy. These include winning praise from peers, earning an exalted place within a community, scoring thrills from winning, and finding satisfaction in helping others.
But how to monetize all that energy? From universities to the computer labs of Internet giants, researchers are working to decode motivations, and to perfect the art of enlisting volunteers. Prahbakar Raghavan, chief of Yahoo Research (YHOO), estimates that 4% to 6% of Yahoo's users are drawn to contribute their energies for free, whether it's writing movie reviews or handling questions at Yahoo Answers. If his team could devise incentives to draw upon the knowledge and creativity of a further 5%, it could provide a vital boost. Incentives might range from contests to scoreboards to thank-you notes. "Different types of personalities respond to different point systems," he says. Raghavan has hired microeconomists and sociologists from Harvard and Columbia universities to match different types of personalities with different rewards.
From Business Week.
Ye New Meedia: older news than we thought
If you learn about the world primarily from newspapers, the Folger Shakespeare Library's exhibition documenting the birth of journalism in the Renaissance will be a wistful affair. It's like looking at baby pictures of a distinguished old relative who is now on life support. Look how vibrant, how youthful, how full of vinegar the old man was. Once upon a time, before the plummeting circulation, the shrinking ad revenue and the highly leveraged corporate owners.
But if you get your news primarily from the Internet, there's nothing sad here at all. New media is new media, whether it's scurrilous pamphlets distributed by hand, or partisan Web sites that spread their happy mischief through the wireless ether. The forms, the tone, the types of personalities who gravitated to journalism when it was new seem fantastically familiar in our own anarchic and newly democratized age of the World Wide Web.
From the Washington Post.
Facebook: faced up
The thing is, social media has rarely found its feet in online advertising. The extra data that exposing the social graph was supposed to provide has yet to translate into far more targeted advertising.
And there was a hack last night too.
From Techcrunch.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Creative Commons, six years in
December 13, 20008. Some of the top thinkers on copyright in a digital age come together to celebrate the sixth anniversary of Creative Commons. At the Berkman centre, Harvard. There's a lot here, over an hour.
Creative Commons held a special panel and fundraiser on Friday featuring Board Chairman James Boyle, Stanford professor and CC founder Larry Lessig, CEO Joichi Ito, and former Executive Director Molly S. Van Houweling. The event kicked off with HLS Dean Elena Kagan announcing Lessig’s return to Harvard (in fall 2009) and an introduction by Charlie Nesson. Jonathan Zittrain- moderating the session- then zoomed in with his first question: where did Creative Commons start?
From the Future of the Internet blog, by Yvette Wohn.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Happy New Year
George is wondering if the anaemic fellow playing the Tory candidate in The 39 Steps was meant to be him
Sir David has joined the group So The British Aristocracy Has Not Declined And Fallen After All
Tripp has posted a new picture
Bristol commented on Tripp's new picture
Gordon is now friends with Dunkirk
Barack is now friends with Carla, via the People You May Know tool
Butch wants to know "Who are those guys?"
Guido is writing a list
Kevin is no longer friends with Bernard
Stevie G is Offline
Ulrika is feeling shy
Uma is no longer friends with Bernard
Sundance is in Bolivia
Andy is now on Twitter
Jacqui is about to start watching YOU
Kate is now reading The Reader
Sam posted a new picture
Rachel is feeling catty
David became a fan of Running
Santa is considering suing NASA
Baz can hear the sound of money
Pericles, Prince of Tyre is 400
Sarah is now friends with Katie
Big Brother is bored
Jack is getting ready for post-Bush-Doctrine shoot-outs
Roger, Simon & John have joined the group We Hate Paper
Evan wonders how long it will be before Facebook is the New Christian Science Monitor?
JLo is single
Nigella is now friends with Jose
Zavvi is now offline
Emmanuelle is now in Prequel
Eartha and Harold are now offline
Steve says that nobody will read books with E-Readers
Techcrunch has posted a new link: "Netbooks from Apple"
Bill is still a PC
Tim is still Semantic
Dick liked his Darth Vader mask
Arianna and Jon have joined the group What Do We Do Now?
Derek is now Online
Derek is now friends with Peter and Gordon
Tristram is angry about the Library
Tina is now a blogger
2008 is now 2009
Robin is Offline
History needs a regulator? Like the Web?
David Cannadine is now Sir David. But what about "history" in the era of "zeitgeist history".
...Professor Cannadine has just published a book in which he maintains that the morale of professional historians (whose collective name in AL Rowse’s time was reputedly “a poison”, and is now supposedly “a malice”) is at an all-time low. Andrew Roberts, another Downing Street invitee, agrees. He has called for a regulatory authority for historians and suggests it could be called Ofhist. Its task would be to protect what he designates “proper historians” from incursions by “amateurs” into writing history books, and to restrain literary editors from commissioning “Clist celebs” and the writers of “chick lit” to review such historians’ work.
So, where does the truth lie? Are historians the repository of the nation’s past wisdom, essential policy wonks’ adjuncts? Or an endangered species in need of protection from today’s nasty, dumbed-down world? Let’s attempt a historian’s answer: it depends where you stand. Certainly, if that’s in most parts of Europe, the answer would be that the reputation of British historians has never been higher.
From The Times earlier this year.
A must read on reading
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
- Steve Jobs on eBook readers and the Amazon Kindle
Steve Jobs frequently makes disparaging remarks about markets that Apple later enters (MP3 players, mobile phones, games, etc), so there’s little reason to believe that we won’t all have ‘iBooks’ in three years time. Still, the numbers don’t lie - 40% of people in the US (and 34% in the UK) do not read books any more. They may surf the web, or the read the occasional newspaper, but they do not read more than one book (fiction or non-fiction) in a year.
The closer you look at the statistics, the more depressing it gets. In the US, only 47% of adults read a work of literature - and I don’t mean Shakespeare, I mean any novel, short story, play or poem - in 2006. If that doesn’t sound too bad, consider that it’s declined by 7% in only ten years. It doesn’t matter whether you look at men or women, kids, teenagers, young adults or the middle-aged; everyone is reading less literature, and fewer books.*
Adrian Hon on The Long Decline in Reading.
Logic unbundled: not better but more
News is part of the atmosphere now, as pervasive—and in some ways as invasive—as advertising. It finds us in airport lounges and taxicabs, on our smart phones and PDAs, through e-mail providers and Internet search engines. Much of the time, it arrives unpackaged: headlines, updates, and articles are snatched from their original sources—often as soon as they’re published—and excerpted or aggregated on blogs, portals, social-networking sites, rss readers, and customizable homepages like My MSN, My Yahoo, myAOL, and iGoogle. These days, news comes at us in a flood of unrelated snippets. As Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, explains, “The economic logic of the age is unbundling.” But information without context is meaningless. It is incapable of informing and can make consumers feel lost. As the AP noted in its research report, “The irony in news fatigue is that these consumers felt helpless to change their news consumption at a time when they have more control and choice than ever before. When the news wore them down, participants in the study showed a tendency to passively receive versus actively seek news.”
From "Overload" - a long article in last month's Columbia Journalism Review by Bree Nordenson.
And the trust headline of the day is...
...As Another Memoir Is Faked, Trust Suffers.
“You’d think somebody would say, ‘Hmm, that’s amazing, let’s just spend an hour or a day seeing how plausible that is,’ ” said Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of the public radio program “Studio 360.”
Mr. Andersen compared Mr. Rosenblat to Bernard L. Madoff, the money manager who is accused of defrauding investors of $50 billion.
“The will to believe something that is convenient to believe is strong in all realms,” he said.
The remake can only be moments away
Butch Cassidy: What happened to the old bank? It was beautiful.
Guard: People kept robbing it.
Butch Cassidy: Small price to pay for beauty.
40 years old tomorrow. Still fantastic.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Jeb's the way: new news
Bush doctrine to work?
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush had a good approach to challenging or controversial issues. He would gather the experts and vested parties from both sides of the issue around the table and basically shut the door, telling the group to figure out a workable solution.
If the group came to a stalemate, he’d let them know he had his own ideas on what should be done, and if they didn’t resolve it, he’d make the decision, adding they probably wouldn’t be happy with the outcome. The opposing sides would scurry back to the table and eventually negotiate a compatible solution for most of the parties.
From the Collier Citizen. Here's how.
That is a new path we are going to try to follow at the Collier Citizen in the coming year. We will begin with one community topic at a time and find experts to help initiate the discussion, then watch as community journalists (you and other experts) direct the dialogue with comments, suggestions and solutions.
Think of the possibilities. We can tackle school budgets, county government budgets, fire consolidation, or EMS/Fire consolidation. Of course, those could be just the start. How about if the community were to adopt a school such as Golden Gate High School and create a forum where the community works together to bring that school back from its poor grade showing last year. The possibilities are endless.
More here.
Twitter, YouTube & Gaza
From Wired, but I was alerted via Twitter.
...the Israeli military has started its own YouTube channel to distribute footage of precision airstrikes. And as I type, the Israeli consulate in New York is hosting a press conference on microblogging site Twitter. It's pretty interesting to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reduced to tweets of 140 characters or less ("We hav 2 prtct R ctzens 2, only way fwd through neogtiations, & left Gaza in 05. y Hamas launch missiles not peace?"; "we're not at war with the PAL people. we're at war with a group declared by the EU& US a terrorist org").
By Nathan Hodge.
21st Century starts soon says Washington Post
Barack Obama will have as free a hand as history ever allows to chart a new course and to define a new era. He may or may not succeed, but the country was right to seize the opportunity he offered to put the previous century and its assumptions behind us.
All is explained by E. J. Dionne Jr.
Once in a Media Lifetime
“This was what I say: sui generis,” Zelnick said. “It made its own precedent. It never happened before. It hasn’t happened since, and it probably won’t happen for another hundred or 200 years.”
From the Boston Herald.
Robert Zelnick has enjoyed what many would call a storied career. He’s logged more than 20 years with ABC News, written four books, worked as the Supreme Court reporter for National Public Radio and been portrayed onstage in a hit Broadway play.
The real Frost-Nixon thing.
...sometimes you're saying things that are really in your heart...
Up the Research Budget, now
The most memorable crucible in modern history is, of course, the Great Depression. During that era, several firms made huge bets that changed their fortunes and those of the country: Du Pont told one of its star scientists, Wallace Carothers, to set aside basic research and pursue potentially profitable innovation. What he came up with was nylon, the first synthetic fabric, revolutionizing the way Americans parachuted, carpeted, and panty-hosed. As IBM's rivals cut R&D, founder Thomas Watson built a new research center. Douglas Aircraft debuted the DC-3, which within four years was carrying 90 percent of commercial airline passengers. A slew of competing inventors created television.
"The wonderful growth of the post-World War II period was due largely to the tremendous backlog of innovation developed in the late years of the Great Depression," says Rick Szostak, an economics and technology historian at the University of Alberta.
From Wired.
Evolution in the digital era and beyond...
...
We tend to think of evolution as something involving structural modification, yet it can and does affect things invisible from the outside—behavior. Many people carry the genes making them susceptible to alcoholism, drug addiction and other problems. Most do not succumb, because genes are not destiny; their effect depends on our environment. But others do succumb, and their problems may affect whether they survive and how many children they have. These changes in fertility are enough for natural selection to act on. Much of humanity’s future evolution may involve new sets of behaviors that spread in response to changing social and environmental conditions. Of course, humans differ from other species in that we do not have to accept this Darwinian logic passively.
What does this mean for us the digital consumer in the information sea?
Quote from a long piece in Scientific American.
Titled: The Future of Man.
An Excellent Defence of "women's magazines"
But does the economics work? I hope so.
In fact, saying "women's magazines" with an implicit eye-roll is, these days, like calling Brooklyn a hip residential "frontier" or using a VCR: transparently passe. As the earnest compliance with the requests for sit-downs with as many women's magazine EICs who requested them by McCain and Obama made clear, "politicians understand that they can't get elected without women," says Cindi Leive. "So they give us access they never would have two decades ago. Anyone who doesn't get that is sort of trailing the boat, anyway."
Sheila Weller in the Huff Po.
Let's Talk, a plea for Common Sense
The balanced BBC view on Andy Burham's Telegraph interview. Rory Cellan-Jones invites the culture minister to talk.
...yes, Andy Burnham's suggestion that Britain and the US could get together and impose some sort of web code does beg all sorts of questions. Who would decide what was permissible? How would trillions of constantly changing websites be policed? How would it work with existing ratings schemes such as PICS, set up by the W3C consortium? And isn't it up to parents, not the state, to watch over the way their children use the web?
Then again perhaps the blogosphere is underestimating the subtlety of Mr Burnham's approach. After all, it was unlikely to have been the primary audience he had in mind when he made his remarks to the Telegraph. He may be betting that millions of parents share his concerns, and sense of helplessness about the web. He is also probably correct in thinking that governments are more able these days to apply pressure on both ISPs and on major web international brands than web libertarians would like to think.
Tolerance and the web, and transparency
The fields of news and knowledge are foundational to vital democratic society. People who enjoy access to free, fair, and high-quality news media per se become more effective citizens: they understand more about how their community works, and they’re more likely to participate in making the decisions that shape their lives.
Confronted by that sort of transparency, government, business, and other institutions necessarily become more accountable for what they do. The free flow of knowledge makes possible other forms of social change—advances in health care, wealth distribution, environmental policy. The upside is incredible.
Keith Hammonds is a member of Ashoka's new Social Entrepreneurs in Journalism program. More of the interview here.
I found this via an excellent piece that interrogates the Pew Internet 2020 scenarios. It includes the following:
Perhaps the new office of the CIO in the Obama administration may influence the development of the Internet in a manner more conducive to better race relations in the US. The technologies used could well be adapted and adopted in other countries and regions. Citizen themselves can inspire and engender political will, holding rulers accountable for their actions in ways, enabled by new media and the Internet, that hark back to the tenets of direct democracy.
Is this possible, I wonder?
Better Knowledge, three
From the last "world views" column in the SFGate by Edward M. Gomez.
News flash: There is no such thing as objectivity in American journalism. Instead, in large part as a result of the formulaic practices that are taught in U.S. journalism schools, what most mass-media news organizations pursue is what might be described as merely the presentation of the appearance of objectivity (or "objectivity") in their reporting about any particular subject. Thus, on television, the same talking heads from the so-called left and the so-called right (American media incorrectly use the terms "liberal" and "conservative" all the time, but that's the subject of another discussion) routinely appear, simplistically representing their host programs' dutiful attempts to appear "objective."
Here's why this is the last "world views" column:
As this long, memorable and costly - in so many ways, to so many people - year winds down, so, too, is this regular, daily feature of S.F. Gate, the website and related, online edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, coming to a close after a run of several years. Numerous other, familiar features of this website will also be disappearing, and a notable number of employees from the S.F.Gate/San Francisco Chronicle editorial team will be leaving the print/electronic newspaper as its editorial-production staff is dramatically downsized.
Edward Gomez will be launching his own site next month. I wonder how long before coalitions of writers/columnists/journalists begin to publish collectively. And if we can find an economic model - and perhaps more importantly - an influencing model that will nourish our information sea. In the coming weeks I'm going to try and concentrate on the positive aspects of the web, its amazing resources, its power of communication, and, not least, the upbeat values of the "democratisation of doubt". Healthy skepticism, enlightened skepticism if you will, allows for informed debate around the issue of "objectivity", let's go back to first principles, as they say.
Better Knowledge, two
NPR marketplace reporter Sean Cole on coming clean with the personal pronoun.
We all have little “shock of recognition” moments when a world of possibility reveals itself. Sandy Tolan asking, “can you believe me?” on the radio was one of mine. I didn’t know you could refer to yourself in a radio news story. I didn’t know you could “break down the fourth wall” like that, that you could be so direct and frank with your listeners; that you could suggest that you were anything but an incorporeal voice. But listen to that moment again. It’s not about Sandy. It’s acknowledging a question that every listener, right then, was surely asking. It’s a crucial point about the inherent dangers of reporting on oneself. He could have said something more benign like, “There are inherent dangers in reporting on oneself,” and the most interesting thing that happened to me that day would have been my sandwich. His choice was so much more elegant, intimate and, above all, arresting. Paradoxically, Sandy asking, “can you believe me?” is what made me believe him. (Plus, he went on to explain the editorial process for the series.) His “me” did that work for him.
Go Sean. Happy hols!
Better Knowledge, first of a long series
The challenge I see for openDemocracy, in our goal to make better knowledge, is that we need to bring argument and content that comes from the domains that carry their own signals of credibility - activism (including corporate and political action), academia, "people like you and me" - while combining them with the virtues of the best outreach and journalism: accuracy, relevance, and narrative. If we succeed, we will create a space in which analysis that is credible, engaged and accessible can be made. This will not be exactly "citizen journalism", with its connotations of the celebration of the amateur and of the undifferentiated citoyen. Instead, in the economy of knowledge, we will seek contributions from each according to their best abilities, balancing the virtues of the insider, of commitment, with the critical qualities of the outsider, of detachment.
Making up minds by
Tony Curzon Price @ openDemocracy.
Happy christmas, war is (almost) over...
...
Quietly, as the United States presidential election and its aftermath have dominated the news, America’s three broadcast network news divisions have stopped sending full-time correspondents to Iraq.
“The war has gone on longer than a lot of news organizations’ ability or appetite to cover it,” said Jane Arraf, a former Baghdad bureau chief for CNN who has remained in Iraq as a contract reporter for The Christian Science Monitor.
From the NYT.
Monday, December 29, 2008
More Memoir Doubt: Angel at the Fence
This is part of a long New Republic post on December 25.
The battle over Angel at the Fence is part of a larger struggle for control over the Holocaust narrative. Scholars like Waltzer and Lipstadt are disturbed by the media blitz pushing Herman's story to the masses. "My hair is standing on edge," Lipstadt told me. "He has instrumentalized the Holocaust. This is the worst possible thing you can do on so many levels." To them, selling the Holocaust as Hollywood kitsch sanitizes its horrors. "It makes it nice," Lipstadt says. "I just wait to hear in the movie for the violins."
Salomon, the movie producer, disagrees. He believes that the mass appeal of Herman's story is precisely what makes it so important to be told. "The strength of Herman's story is in Middle America," Salomon said. "Because of the candy-coated message of this story, it has picked up resonance all over. Herman's story can do more to teach people about the Jewish experience during the Holocaust in a way nothing before has done."
From the New Republic. On Saturday, December 27, Berkley Books announced that it is canceling publication of Angel at the Fence.
And here's today's NYT update:
This latest literary hoax is likely to trigger yet more questions as to why the publishing industry has such a poor track record of fact-checking.
In the latest instance, no one at Berkley questioned the central truth of Mr. Rosenblat’s story until last week, said Andrea Hurst, his agent. Neither Leslie Gelbman, president and publisher of Berkley, nor Natalee Rosenstein, Mr. Rosenblat’s editor at Berkley, returned calls or e-mail messages seeking comment. Craig Burke, director of publicity for Berkley, declined to elaborate beyond the company’s brief statement announcing the cancellation of the book. In an e-mail message, a spokesman for Ms. Winfrey also declined to comment.
One of the many reasons for the problems in Financial Reporting: conflicts of legal interest
Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger in the New York Review of Books. He's writing about a legal case between The Guardian and Tesco, but the wider implications are there for all, bloggers, lawyers and financial reporters. This is a lot closer to a journalistic reality than much of this year's "missed the credit crunch" hand-wringing.
This sort of financial journalism is notoriously difficult, expensive, and time-consuming. Few reporters have the training to disentangle and make coherent sense of the information publicly available from company accounts, annual reports, statutory filings, and corporate structures. The vast majority of reporters and editors—even those who specialize in business—would not know how to begin to unravel extremely complex corporate structures, which rely for their success on tax havens, partnerships, and tiers of associated financing and holding companies. A financial expert may understand public accounts, but be weak on corporate accounting. A corporate accounting specialist may know little or nothing about taxes. Effective analysis is complicated by the apparent legal impossibility—recognized by both academics and judges—of defining in a precise way the difference between tax avoidance and tax planning.
As we were to discover—if belatedly—the only route to total prepublication self-protection in these matters is to spend tens of thousands of dollars on tax, accountancy, and legal advice. Essentially, the only people qualified to produce wholly authoritative libel-proof assurance are the very people involved in constructing the strategies under scrutiny. They do not come cheap—and many of them have conflicts of interest. Some would give advice in private, but would not speak in public or in court.
And look, here's the Ghost of Christmas Future responding without an answer:
In my various scenarios for the future of news that relies more heavily on independent practitioners and networks, libel suits remain a huge question for which I can’t find an answer.
Says Ebenezer Jarvis.
Hopeful update from John Naughton.
There is, however, a chink of light in the gathering darkness. Rusbridger spells out in great detail the huge cost of retaining the specialist accounting and legal expertise needed to understand the Tesco transactions. But one rule of the new ecology is that there is wonderful expertise out there on the Net, and there might be ways of harnessing all that collective knowledge — rather as Linux harnessed the distributed skills of great programmers across the world to build a ferociously complex operating system; or as Larry Lessig and Charlie Nesson have crowdsourced the task of preparing legal briefs for pro bono cases.
Reason not the need: authority v. celebrity on Twitter
... 'authority' relative to a topic - being knowledgeable about chess, the Napoleonic Wars, or nuclear physics - is not the same as celebrity.
More here by Stowe Boyd at /Message.
One person's decline in "belief in the message" is another's "democratisation of doubt"
The new nihilism? Or something more Promethian?
Thanks to Tony Curzon Price for this by Geert Lovink.
We're operating in a post-deconstruction world in which blogs offer a never-ending stream of confessions, a cosmos of micro-opinions attempting to interpret events beyond the well-known twentieth-century categories. The nihilist impulse emerges as a response to the increasing levels of complexity within interconnected topics. There is little to say if all occurrences can be explained through post-colonialism, class analysis, and gender perspectives. However, blogging arises against this kind of political analysis, through which a lot can no longer be said.
Blogs express personal fear, insecurity, and disillusionment, anxieties looking for partners in crime. We seldom find passion (except for the act of blogging itself). Often blogs unveil doubt and insecurity about what to feel, what to think, believe, and like. They carefully compare magazines, and review traffic signs, nightclubs, and t-shirts. This stylized uncertainty circles around the general assumption that blogs ought to be biographical while simultaneously reporting about the world outside. Their emotional scope is much wider than other media due to the informal atmosphere of blogs. Mixing public and private is essential here. What blogs play with is the emotional register, varying from hate to boredom, passionate engagement, sexual outrage, and back to everyday boredom.
There's much here to consider.
So how do blogs relate to independent investigative journalism? At first glance, they look like oppositional, or potentially supplementary practices. Whereas the investigative journalist works months, if not years, to uncover a story, bloggers look more like an army of ants contributing to the great hive called "public opinion". Bloggers rarely add new facts to a news story. They find bugs in products and news reports but rarely "unmask" spin, let alone come up with well-researched reports.
WalMart: real time retailisation
From O'Reilly.
WalMart is a better example of Enterprise 2.0 than any of these more trendy examples of user contribution systems. If Google's key innovation with PageRank was to recognize that a link was a vote, which could be counted and measured to get better search results, so too, WalMart recognized early on that a purchase was a vote. Each company built real-time information systems to capture and respond to that vote. WalMart built a supply chain in which goods are automatically re-ordered as they go out the door, with algorithms based on rate of sale controlling the reorders. Google built a better search engine, in which pages that were "better linked" were given priority over the ones produced by pure keyword matches. They went on to build real-time systems to measure what John Battelle called the database of intentions, as expressed by people's queries and subsequent clickstream data, as well as an ad auction system that prices ads in real-time based on the predicted likelihood of the ad being clicked on.
Retalisation.
Kidnapped: the Twitter account & the Culture secretary
This one has traction? Call for Derek Draper, surely?
Mike Butcher, who blogs about technology and start-up businesses at Techcrunch, has claimed the username “andyburnham” at Twitter, the short-form blogging service, in an attempt to educate him about some “essential truths” of the internet.
Mr Butcher said Mr Burnham’s interview with the Sunday Telegraph this weekend “betrayed the simple fact that he knows nothing at all about the internet”. He argued that the sheer volume of websites, the difficulty in regulating content hosted abroad and the internet’s constantly changing nature makes it near-impossible to impose a rating system, which Mr Burnham said was one option under consideration in his oft-repeated ambition to apply traditional media’s standards of decency to the web.
From the FT.
Here's Mike's take.
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Music is the food of marketing, so play on
And as music becomes a means to an end — pushing a separate product, whether it’s a concert ticket or a clothing line, a movie scene or a Web ad — a tectonic shift is under way. Record sales channeled the taste of the broad, volatile public into a performer’s paycheck. As music sales dwindle, licensers become a far more influential target audience. Unlike nonprofessional music fans who might immerse themselves in a song or album they love, music licensers want a track that’s attractive but not too distracting — just a tease, not a revelation.
But does this model work for any other creative content? I fear this is going to be a bad year for books. From the NYT.
Robin’s, which says it is the oldest bookstore in Philadelphia, will close next month.
More book horror here. In the new year I'm looking for the positives: E-books in particular.
...and it's called "Strictly Come"?
Even the adult films business has suffered, exacerbated by illegal online file-sharing of clips. The Emmanuelle series is being revived with a $50m prequel, partly funded by an X Factor-style international reality show to find the lead actor. Hunting for Emmanuelle might just buck the downward trend.
From today's Observer. So that's the Great Gatsby & Emmanuelle. How about a new version of Chinatown, or a Doobie Brothers revival?
"Mister Gittes, have we ever met?"
Terence Davies to remake "Wall Street"?
No, worse still.
"People will need an explanation of where we are and where we've been, and The Great Gatsby can provide that," he told the Hollywood Reporter. "If you wanted to show a mirror to people that says, 'You've been drunk on money', they're not going to want to see it. But if you reflected that mirror on another time, they'd be willing to."
Baz Luhrmann to remake The Great Gatsby.
"It takes two to make an accident."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 3
Friday, December 26, 2008
Media-Sport-Cookery-Advertising Quote of the Year
Not Gordon either.
"Charles dreamt I had an affair with Steve Coppell. I said to him, 'Thanks a lot! You might have made it Mourinho!'"
Cooking goddess Nigella Lawson reveals who hubby Charles Saatchi thinks is the man of her dreams.
From the BBC.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Monday, December 22, 2008
When the Trust Fund runs out...
...
From The Feinline, the blog of Sempre Management cofounder Michael Feinstein. On that Madoff Madness. (Financial Cliche Warning: there is that Ronald Reagan quote: otherwise it's a balanced account, as they used to say in Q1 2008.)
From The Feinline, the blog of Sempre Management cofounder Michael Feinstein. On that Madoff Madness. (Financial Cliche Warning: there is that Ronald Reagan quote: otherwise it's a balanced account, as they used to say in Q1 2008.)
* Don't just trust your VCs reputation. Verify it through your own diligence, including blind reference checks and discussions with executives of companies that didn't work out.
* Don't trust your VC when she agrees to some additional terms that aren't on the term sheet or promises to 'take care of you' if you are let go. Verify every deal and agreement with terms in writing. You never know if the person you make the agreement with will be the one you have to enforce it with. If the deal is really a deal, no one should object to putting it in writing.
* Don't trust that your VCs will fund your company if you can't raise money elsewhere. VCs will always promise support for your company, but that isn't the same as wiring funds into your account. If the VCs are promising to backstop your company with a bridge financing in the event that you can't raise money, get that agreement in writing, including the terms. Once your company is actually on the brink, the terms may change. But, if you have a prior agreement, hopefully it will be honored.
* Don't trust the commitments that are promised by customers and partners. Follow-up with emails confirming, or formal contracts if appropriate. It may seem overly formal during more friendly relations, but the actual commitment may give you some moral high ground if the going gets tough.
Derek Draper and the Labour new media blitz - minus women
There was an interesting post on Guido Fawkes last week about a new media breakfast being hosted by Derek Draper at which Blue State digital presented how Labour can use the internet to win the next British election. PR Week reported, after the event:
PR Week has learned that [Philip] Gould was present at a ‘new media breakfast’ meeting which took place in London this morning.
Also present was David Lammy, the Labour MP with the best connections to US president-elect Barack Obama.
The meeting was convened by Derek Draper, who is overseeing the party’s blogging initiative. It was attended by an assortment of Labour-supporting bloggers, PR professionals and political campaigners....
PR Week added:
A handpicked selection of 77 individuals were invited to attend the meeting and around 60 are thought to have attended.
Those who were invited but could not make it included Weber Shandwick European CEO Colin Byrne and Google European comms director D-J Collins, but both are understood to be fully behind of the initiative.
Guido kindly added the names of those who were invited:
Tom Watson, Colin Byrne, Sadie Smith, Mark Hanson, Simon Buckby, David Clark, Charlie Whelan, Chuka Umunna, Sue Macmillan, DJ Collins, Sarah Mulholland, Richard Angell, Ed Owen, Simon Alcock, Douglas Alexander, Patrick Diamond, Sunder Katwala, Gavin Hayes, Jessica Asato, Robert Philpot, Richard Huntington, Tristram Hunt, Ben Wegg-Prosser, Damian McBride, Andrew Dodgshon, Theo Blackwell, Tom Miller, Tim Allan, David Bradshaw, Stuart Bruce , Jag Singh, Matt Strong, Paul Simpson, Spencer Livermore, Ed Owen, Chris McShane, Matthew Taylor, Alex Finnegan, John Miles, Adam Dustagheer, Dan Thain, Mark Lucas, Luke Pollard, James Crabtree, Tim Shand, Alex Hilton, Simon Redfern, William Davies, Howard Dawber, Nick Anstead, Richard Lane, Jon Steinberg, Pete Bowyer, Steve Cowan, Hopi Sen, Luke Bozier, Andy Regan, Toby Flux, David Taylor, Chris McShane, Matthew McGregor, Noel Hatch, Sunny Hundal, Greg Jackson, Dave Prescott, Luke Akehurst, Phil Dilks, Jonathan Upton, Simon Fletcher, Tom Price, John Stolliday, Adrian McMenamin, Paul Hilder, Paul Miller, Ben Brandzel, Anthony Painter, Ravi Gurumurthy.
Now I have no idea if this list is accurate, but notice only one fact: there are - I think - four women's names. Perhaps Guido was misinformed about the composition of the Labour leaning digerati?
Or perhaps Muscular technocracy is now the engine of British politics as well?
Those Big Beasts.
UK Parliament and Bloggers: a change is gonna come?
After initial scepticism at Westminster, the view now seems to be that e-journalism is here to stay and these bloggers should have passes, even though the print journalists take a broadly sniffy attitude to the likes of the Mole, while being happy enough to follow his lead.
Back to the green paper. It is likely it will make it easier for people to sue for libel by slashing the disproportionate costs of legal action, possibly by establishing a small claims court for libel.
More on small claims libel cases and a possible "blogger clamp down" here. From The Mole.
Database Hugging Disorder (Google & Africa)
From the Google.org blog.
Why is so much “public” information not accessible (i.e. government budgets, service level indicators, population data) and sitting on servers in London, New York, and Geneva but not accessible to citizens, media, and even planners in Africa countries? This clearly needs to change.
What is less intuitive, however, is that there is so much information, knowledge, and wisdom within Africa that is not making its way to politicians, planners, and policy makers who make decisions about Africa. We often hear that teachers, nurses, and civil servants do not show-up for work across the continent and this is a primary contributor to the poor quality of public services. Do we bother asking why absenteeism is such a problem? Ask teachers, nurses, or administrators and they will tell you.
More here.
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