Virtual worlds proliferating

Sony and Microsoft are poised to do battle in virtual worlds.

The console kids both announced Second Life-style virtual environments at the Tokyo Game Show today. Both games show striking similarities to Linden Lab's creation

PC Authority for more.

At Last: a Great Piece about Why "we" Don't Get Social Media

I don't know if this speaks to a generation gap or an experience gap. But if I belong to a generation that "doesn't get" social media, it is not entirely because we're computer illiterates. Many of my classmates have had rockstar careers in the tech industry. I seem to remember that some 40% of Oracle's new employees in 1989 were recent Stanford grads. If anything, we are a bridge generation: the first to use desktops, but prior to the domestication of the Internet.

The experience gap is not inexperience with machines, but is inexperience with their unique kind of social presence and interaction. We're not used to the practice of posting profiles about ourselves (I exclude myself), and of keeping constant contact (in a discontinuous and partial sort of way) with friends and colleagues. We're phone-based and email-based, and at our stage in life, time simply doesn't afford us the surplus attention with which to attach ourselves to the social web.

Time would be the reason most of us would cite for our online invisibility. But I think that there's something more.

For lack of a better phrase, I'll call it the "alienation" of social media. To integrate social media into your daily life you need to project yourself into it. You need to be able to live in a kind of time that's very different from the time of the everyday. You need to be able to pay attention without bankrupting your focus and concentration, need to be able to sustain high levels of availability to a world that's neither "here" nor "there," again, without dissociating from the here and now.

From /Message. This is a must-read about differing generations of web users. By Adrian Chan.

Wozniak in the Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph launches the IPod is Dead group.

"The iPod has sort of lived a long life at number one," he says. "Things like, that if you look back to transistor radios and Walkmans, they kind of die out after a while.

"It's kind of like everyone has got one or two or three. You get to a point when they are on display everywhere, they get real cheap and they are not selling as much."

Mr Wozniak even speaks out against the iPhone 3G, Apple's latest cult product which caused pandemonium in the West End when it was launched in Apple's Regent Street store this summer.

"Consumers aren't getting all they want when companies are very proprietary and lock their products down," he says when comparing the iPhone's closed operating system to the new Google phone's open source system which allows anyone to modify and adapt the way the phone works. "I would like to write some more powerful apps than what you're allowed," he laments.

Steve Wozniak: Apple co-founder, on the iPod, iPhone, and future for Apple

Why humans link better

That’s why link bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, Josh Marshall, and Matt Drudge have become such a powerful force on the web. They understood, even where traditional news orgs did not, the value of bringing their unique perspectives to filtering the web, of having a “linking voice.” They understood the editorial power of the link.

Here's another semantic web test, surely? Perhaps the new Turing Test should be called something like the Bob Woodward Cup.


Publishing 2.0 asks: Will Algorithms Make Human Editors Obselete?
And answers: Not If Journalists Collaborate

Jazzin' with the Johny McCain Two

Of all the things I thought Tina Brown's Daily Beast might do I didn't think it would remind me that Charles Mingus once wrote a piece named:

All The Things You Could Be By Now If Sigmund Freud's Wife Was Your Mother

Listen here on Last FM. A little free form, more cerebral than maverick, I'd say. Anyway...


...The Daily Beast gets some news shrinks on the candidates. Old-school Tina, old-school.

McCain, meanwhile, is grappling with a subconscious desire to lose the race. “He is essentially shorting the presidency,” said Karasu. If he loses, he brings down the Republican party, and validates his unconscious desire to blow up his own party.

Looking at the mini bar now costs

My wife just called to ask and was told, "If you open the mini bar door, there’s a sensor in there and if you move anything in there... you get billed for it."

The Consumerist gets a tip off about hotel mini bars.


Clue: expensive.

Google searches last night during the Second Debate

Similar to last Thursday, people sought to understand the meaning of several words mentioned in the debate: morass, commodity, junket, cynicism, and cronyism to name a few.

More from the Google blog.

From Slideshare, ITunes for PowerPoint?

I like this, shouldn't but it is fun.

Storytelling 101

From: ethos3, 2 months ago

Storytelling 101

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: rockstar maverick)

Tips and tricks on how to create better stories for your next presentation.

Web: www.ethos3.com
Blog: blog.ethos3.com


SlideShare Link

Multiple personae as a key to online trust?

...to get to know someone or a group of people, you have to lose your own set of beliefs and views and start from scratch as you seek out the functional reasons why things happen.

This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection.

Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable.

LinkFishMedia owner Julie Joyce writing at SearchEngineLand. This is very interesting: the idea of using what Joyce describes as "ethnographic" techniques to understand who it is that is communicating online.

Once you get basic information, start to dream up a few actual people who fit the profiles that you have, and flesh them out as much as you can.

A typical persona should contain as much identifying information as possible without being so unique that it cannot be used to speak to a larger group. That’s the tricky part, but you can overcome it by imagining common characteristics of users (they like punk rock) rather than specifics that will only fit a tiny percentage of your audience (they like early Avail).

LinkFishMedia

Down to Zero

"When we started out two years ago people were holding onto their content and weren't seeing value of link for reward rather than payment for reward", Davies says.

"Paid [for] content will die a death in the mainstream, and we're getting closer. People are [now] starting to realise that.

"That's how we're able to do these kind of [licensing] deals now."

Were they ahead of the curve? "We assumed this is where it was going – it's what the music industry has done," he says.

Idiomag, co-founder, Andrew Davies, tells Journalism.co.uk that in launching two years ago he:

'wanted to apply this concept of personalisation to the consumer [magazine] industry'.

Programmer Journalism, joining Google?

Holovaty gained fame for linking up Google Maps with local crime statistics to create chicagocrime.org, one of the first mapping mashups. And he gained cred in the journalism world by melding programming and reportage at the Washington Post.

Adrian Holovaty helped to create ChicagoCrime.org. Now he has a local news start-up, Everyblock. Here is Chicago.


And this is the FAQ

EveryBlock is a new experiment in journalism, offering a Web "newspaper" for every city block in Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC — with more cities to come. Enter any address, neighborhood or ZIP code in those cities, and the site shows you recent public records, news articles and other Web content that’s geographically relevant to you. To our knowledge, it’s the most granular approach to local news ever attempted.

So will Mr. Holovaty join Google? Valleywag thinks so:

If Holovaty does land at Google, expect him to transform Google News into a site that's more of a database of information than a news archive. He's long been critical of the newspaper industry's focus on stories, rather than information. A police-blotter news report, for example, is not as useful as a website which displays crimes on a map by type and date. If Holovaty's going to save journalism, he may have to do it at a search engine that many believe is killing the newspaper business. They can't say he didn't warn them.

Valleywag.

Post Jobs "heart attack" speaking the obvious becomes the norm

“Citizens” — people who are not professional journalists — can use a platform like iReport to legitimately report news. Remember those eyewitness reports from the Minnesota bridge collapse?

The problem is — and this is something that advocates of citizen journalism typically overlook — that if a platform is open, and anyone can participate, that means not only can well-intentioned citizens participate but so can bad actors, spammers, liars, cheats, and thieves.

That’s the double-edged swords of open systems — you have to take the bad with the good. In fact, you have to EXPECT the bad with the good. The ideology of open participation has revolutionized media, but that same ideology is often quite naive.

Publishing 2.0...


Or ZD Net:

I can’t say that this investigation is unexpected. I came across the story very early on in the day on Friday (via Digg) and after about 10 minutes worth of digging around was certain that it was false...

It is strange that it seems to take shorting on a falling Apple share, huge stock market losses, or a bank being wiped out before issues of trust and authenticity go centre stage?


Here's one good question today though:

"Your company is now bankrupt, our economy is now in a state of crisis, but you get to keep $480 million. I have a very basic question for you. Is this fair?"

Henry Waxman, chairman of the House of Representatives oversight committee, questioning Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld over the bank's collapse last month.

Have cell phone can blather

Second stage (and thus first change) is literacy. The approx 6-7 year old learns to read. And goes to school and discovers friends not selected by the parents or not out of the back yard of the home. New friends, new influences. Now things like brand competitiveness starts to emerge, I want Levis brand jeans, not the ones mother had suggested, etc.. But most importantly for readers of our blog, any digital media will not be powerfully (probably fully) able to be used. Yes, we have lots of videogames and basic computer programmes for even younger kids but after they learn to read, they can go Google and discover the digital world for themselves. If for some reason you don't have the PC and connection for them at home, soon they will find a best friend who has a PC and broadband in their room and suddenly spend a lot of time visiting that friend.

The above and a ton more cellphone aphorisms, can be found here. Tomi T. Ahonen is a "five-time bestselling author and consultant on digital convergence and mobile telecoms", who is based in Hong Kong. Ahonen lectures at Oxford University's short courses on high tech and convergence.

Thankfully not on life.

Search you can trust? (With Added Librarians)

With this latest launch, they’re expanding their focus on relevance by engaging with librarians to manually compile lists of “trusted” sites for particular categories. They say that “Google (and others like Google) don’t make the distinction of what is credible (or quality) what is not.” They note Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s recent comments when launching the World Wide Web Foundation that new systems are needed that give trustworthiness labels to web sites that have been proven to be reliable sources.

SearchEngineLand explains.


Hakia explains its "trusted results scheme".


Hakia itself for a test.

A search engine with librarian backed verification? Sounds good. But can any search engine compete with Google?

Or is that a too era-centric question?

The VP debate and what people searched on Google

Governor Palin's claim that "Israel is in jeopardy of course when we're dealing with Ahmadinejad as a leader of Iran" led viewers to try to learn more about this leader even if they could not spell his name. They searched for [Achmadinijad], [Akmadinijad], [Akmadinajad], and the correct Ahmadinejad. Some did not even try, instead looking for [president Iran] and [Iran leader]. The Governor also referred to General McKiernan, the U.S. military leader in Afghanistan, as "McClellan", sending viewers in search of McClellan, general in Afghanistan, General McClellan Afghanistan, and general Afghanistan surge. Some searchers eventually did find the correct general, but not that many.

Instant checking, slower spelling...? Google as fact checker and trusted source. From Google's blog.

BBC Open City

Without the BBC, universality of news service might dry up, investment in UK programmes and journalism would be substantially damaged and we might find ourselves with total market failure. It would resolve the tensions between preserving an innovative and varied ecology in media and needing a public service champion, but a global representative is going to take some bold and creative thinking.

The Guardian's Emily Bell on the BBC.
The Guardian's Jemima Kiss on the BBC.

The director general Mark Thompson has directed the corporation to think beyond proprietary rights management to a new era of interoperability that offers consumers wider choice, control and benefits from "network effects" - the virality and interconnectedness of the web.

And more...

In regional news, the BBC could make all its video reports, audio, text and comments available to commercial rivals and trigger a renaissance in local journalism. And it could allow people to remix BBC news footage for themselves, perhaps for a "day you were born" birthday present or a significant football match.

Tina Brown & the Daily Beast

There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit.

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall
--

Tina Brown - the ex-queen of the newsstands - is back, this time on the Web.

Her new venture, Daily Beast, which sees itself as a must-read for hipsters in news, politics and pop culture, is set to debut today.

Says the Post.


--
Here it is.


--

The Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere," he said. "Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad."

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop.
--

"I have been here before," I said.

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited.
--

“If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.”

Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies
--

Life in what the Reader's Digest calls These United States has become a Good News/Bad News joke, only minus the Good News. There must be something, other than O.J.'s impending immuration. Isn't Donald Trump's casino operation tanking? That would be good news. And Kim Jong-Il, Dear Leader—God I love that man—didn't he just have a stroke? But before we start clog-dancing for joy, this just in: North Korea is facing another record disastrous harvest. What's more, high level voices caution that Kim Jong-Il may be followed by someone even worse. Worsethan Kim Jong-Il? Is that even scientifically possible?

What Fresh Hell Is This? By Christopher Buckley in today's Daily Beast.


This is a good question.
--

"You don't know how it killed me not to be up during the primaries," she said. "It may be a horrible economic time, but it's a wonderful journalistic time."

Tina Brown to the FT...


--
And the Washington Post explains everything, with Tina Brown.

The name: It's an inside joke for the lit set familiar with Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. Do people get it? Brown: "Some people get it and some people don't but that was the whole point. I realized when I chose it, it was a little bit of an in joke to the few members of the literary circle who would remember that novel ..,. but at the same time, it also has a lot of vigor and energy to it, which is what I liked,"

--

"I am sure it is not your fault & that you are being bothered by some boss in the United States. Take heart; he has forgotten about it already. I was once a journalist for seven weeks & I know about bosses. They are volatile creatures.

Evelyn Waugh letter to John Osborne of Life magazine, 1946.

The Return of News?

Denton tells us Snyder may be taking Gawker in a more newsy direction (Gawker's biggest traffic spikes in the last twelve months have been the result of breaking news stories i.e., The Montauk Monster, the Sarah Palin emails, and the Tom Cruise Scientology video. Says Denton: "In another era, Snyder would have been one of those beloved tyrants who roamed the newsroom." To that end, Gawker has also announced they will be hiring two new reporters.

From Mediabistro.

Stress, control and conspiracy theories

Or why the Da Vinci Code sold so well in an era of war on terror, perhaps?

The researchers say that their experiments, which also tested people’s tendency to detect conspiracies and see superstitious lessons in stories, help explain why conspiracy theories and superstitions flourish when people are feeling out of control. Previous researchers have reported, for instance, that first-year business-school students are more prone to imagine conspiracies than are second-year students, and that deep-sea fishermen have more elaborate rituals and superstitions than ones who fish in more predictable conditions near shore.

From the NYT, there's a great visual experiment as well. It is something to do with the images above.

Kool aid

Put the words Obama and cool into Google, and it will spit out an astonishing 21 million hits. He is black, he is hip, he listens to Jay-Z on his iPod (and Yo-Yo Ma). He plays basketball. He fist-bumps. He is cool, a word that transcends age, race and gender.

Ben Macintyre in the Times.

News Innovation

I've challenged the team to look at improving "conversations around news" - to use digital community-building tools to enhance people's connections to their local communities and to news and information about those communities. If the class is successful, the students will develop new ideas for building these community connections - and a new Web site or service that brings those ideas to life.

Here are the high-level goals for the class:

To understand the ways that journalism has historically helped enable civic engagement and provided a forum for conversations around news.

To understand the nature of people's interactions online and to apply that understanding to local communities and the role of media in a democracy.

To develop recommendations on how to approach news, online conversations and civic engagement.

To develop software prototypes for enhancing online conversations and engagement.

From the MediaShift Idea Lab

Now even Professors of Theology are on the trust case

But if I could only have one question, it would have to be "Why should we trust you?" The crisis of trust in this administration is so severe that it is fraying whatever fabric is left of our national identity.

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite is professor of theology at Chicago Theological Seminary and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. Here she is on trust and the USA.

A tale of two third generations

Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers' powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives' evangelical churches.

In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.

Rolling Stone on the make-believe maverick.

Rise up, you have nothing to lose but your IPhone

The mobile society - is completely different to the industrial society, it requires a new logic and a new way of thinking of how to create business, civil governance, health care and education.

The Mobile Society already exists, dotted across the 4 corners of the globe - yet it does not exist in any one country. This is because we are in transition from one type of economy to another, the collapse of the banking system recently perhaps a painful symbol of that transition.

But also the reason why it is not universally adopted is because there are vested interests that do not want the mobile society to flourish - as it signifies [1] a re-ordering of business models, [2] flows of communication [3] the appearance of new gate keepers in the information distribution wars. This is a natural pattern when society changes structurally.

From Alan Moore.

Monday morning warning - heard before

But newspaper publishers are not so relentlessly stubborn that we can expect them to continue churning out papers until there is only one reader left. The industry would lose critical mass and collapse long before then.

Engame in sight, says Philip Mayer of University of North Carolina.

Trusting pollsters

But the pollster went on to ask Minden, who is Jewish, how she would vote if she knew that Obama was supported by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that runs Gaza and was responsible for most of the suicide bombings against Israel. "It is scare tactics. It is terribly underhand," she said.

The Guardian on polling and dirty tricks in the American election.

Nora Ephron on CNN's debate coverage

Well this graph on CNN affected me, it affected me so much that I could barely focus on the debate, I was so busy watching the graph. I knew it was completely unreliable and irrelevant, and yet my heart sank and rose according to it. I sort of heard what the candidates were saying, but mostly I watched the orange (for women) and green (for men) lines rise and fall as each phrase was uttered. When Sarah Palin spoke and the lines went up, I felt irritable. When Joe Biden spoke and the lines went up, I felt happy.

CNN's tracking of undecideds doesn't please everyone.

Trust, Google, search and blogs - plus newspapers

The arrival of the new Google Blog search throws up a myriad of wonders.

Here's trust versus authority (on Google) from SEO Moves:

Trust means that a site overall is trusted. This will be one of the larger sites, with very high traffic, lots of content, one of the heavy players. This is a site Google trusts as a well established legitimate, respected sites. Amazon. Government sites. Wikipedia. Plenty of reasons to trust them, very few not to trust them. In my mind, I picture doing my own research on any particular topic, what sites do I trust? Trusted sites do rank higher even when less relevant. Trusted sites pass a lot of juice, a link from a trusted site is gold.

An authority would be a page or site that is an authority on a specific topic. This site may not be trusted, but this particular page, section, or site, becomes an authority on a topic. This is gauged by incoming links on the topic; the more links a site has on that topic/keyword, the more of an authority it is on that topic.

And...Trust and newspapers from "That's the Press Baby":

The problem with journalism's stock in trade, semi-omniscent objectivity, is that almost no one views the world with semi-omniscent objectivity. To see the world and see it whole, as a London Times editor once said of his calling (doing so before the Internet and thus having a not easily findable quote), is just not what the typical reader does, for the obvious reason that the typical reader is self-interested.

Advice for those watching "event" TV

And when it's over, don't be spun by the post-debate pundits. "Turn off your television and make up your own decision," said Aaron Zelinsky, Yale University debater and editor of the Presidential Debate Blog. He adds: "Don't listen to the campaigns set false expectations before the debate, either. It's just as bad."

San Francisco Chronicle on tonight's VP debate.


While Hollywood Newsroom goes with:

“A lot of people are anticipating this to be almost a ‘Saturday Night Live’ live,” said Tammy Vigil, an assistant professor of communications at Boston University and a co-author of the upcoming book, “The Third Agenda in U.S. Presidential Debates.” “The entertainment value on this debate is going to be huge.”

A Google US Election Data Mine

An election FAQ from Google's head of research, Peter Norvig. Ugly as hell, but utterly wonderful information. Isn't this what newspapers used to do?

This is an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for the 2008 United States Presidential Election. It is meant to portray factual information, not the author's opinions (except where so stated). Some of the questions inherently require subjective analysis; in these cases I have tried to show a sample of responsible opinions.

One betting site, at 12:24 GMT, Oct 1, has Obama at almost 80:20 with McCain!


How long before the papers link to this?

Lost Worlds

As a young academic economist in the 1980s, Mr. Bernanke largely developed the theory that the loan officers’ lost knowledge was a crucial cause of the Depression. He referred to this lost knowledge as “informational capital.” In plain English, it means that trust vanished from the banking sector.

The same thing is happening now. Financial markets are global, not local, today, so the problem isn’t that the failure of any single bank locks individuals or businesses out of the credit markets. Instead, the nasty surprises of the last 13 months — the sort of turmoil that once would have been unthinkable — have caused an effective breakdown in informational capital. Bankers now look at longtime customers and think of that old refrain from a failed marriage: I feel like I don’t even know you.

David Leonhardt in the New York Times

Topicality

I think the new building block of journalism needs to be the topic.

Another way of conceptualizing the new news.

Instead, I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something... It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.

Buzzmachine & Jeff Jarvis.

School Days

Amherst College, in western Massachusetts, enrolled 438 first year students this fall, for a total student population of 1680+.

Here some findings from the school's head of IT.

By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts.

Average number of emails received per day: 180,000.
Percentage of email that arrives on campus that is spam: 94%.

Full data here - it's interesting. Found by Clive Thompson, and linked by Nicholas Carr - both have comments.

Balance

The Way We Were: trusting

What we are relearning is that without trust and fairness, capitalism risks its own sustainability, even while it unleashes forces that undermine those self-same values. London's money markets froze because of a trust collapse; banks simply don't believe each other when they say their businesses are sound and will not default on their obligations. Trust matters.

William Hutton stepping up to the plate.

An old newsman tells it like it is

For all the millions of dollars and thousands of people employed at the mainstream newspapers, broadcast networks and cable channels, Drudge had assembled the perfect mix of salient links and real-time information...

From Reflections of a Newsosaur.

Dowd of the Day

Who would have dreamed that when socialism finally came to the U.S.A. it would be brought not by Bolsheviks in blue jeans but Wall Street bankers in Gucci loafers?

Maureen Dowd this morning.

Holiday blues

Today you can never really leave. For one thing, most of the world looks alike now anyhow. For another, if anything big happens back home, friends will text you. And not just big things either. They'll tell you who's been fired on The Apprentice. They'll phone you from the toilet for help in their local pub quiz.

Just to make things worse, shortly before leaving I bought a swanky new "smart phone" aimed squarely at absolute cast-iron wankers. Go on, treat yourself, I thought. Be an unashamed cock and buy it. Turns out it does everything. Email, internet, GPS system, Google maps ... there's probably a can opener on it somewhere. If you're standing in the middle of nowhere you can push one button to be told precisely where you are and another to find out where the nearest synagogue is. Or sauna. Or both. Punch in a query and it'll recommend eight local restaurants, give you their phone numbers, and ask if you want to ring them. Then it'll give you directions. Since I'm on a road trip, it's proved incredibly useful...

The usually reliable Charlie Brooker moves close to the new century...

I am the Washington Post and I approve this message

Washington Post goes into links. So not just its own take on politics but other people too on its new site, Political Browser. According to Publishing 2.0:

...Political Browser was born of a determined effort by The Post to get into the news aggregation game. Eric [Pianin, the Politics Editor] told me that interest in news aggregation extends to the highest level of The Post’s senior leadership, including Katherine Weymouth — they have been “fascinated” by the success of aggregation sites like Drudge, Huffington Post, Hotline, and others.

Beyond aggregation - post-google perhaps? - comes the “stamp of approval”, trust and context. Interesting.

Transparent Bail Outs

So here is the bail out bill.


Wired asked:

Doesn't transparency amount to more than just posting a bit of legislation up on a Sunday, giving the public a few hours to wonder what it says, and then rushing to approve it in congress?

In 2002 Dame Onora O'Neill, president of the British Academy, gave the Reith Lectures on "trust".

There has never been more abundant information about the individuals and institutions whose claims we have to judge. Openness and transparency are now possible on a scale of which past ages could barely dream. We are flooded with information about government departments and government policies, about public opinion and public debate, about school, hospital and university league tables. We can read facts and figures that supposedly demonstrate financial and professional accountability, cascades of rebarbative [forbidding] semi-technical detail about products and services on the market, and lavish quantities of information about the companies that produce them. At the click of a mouse those with insatiable appetites for information can find out who runs major institutions, look at the home pages and research records of individual scientists, inspect the grants policies of research councils and major charities, down-load the annual reports and the least thrilling press releases of countless minor public, professional and charitable organisations, not to mention peruse the agenda and the minutes of increasing numbers of public bodies. It seems no information about institutions and professions is too boring or too routine to remain unpublished. So if making more information about more public policies, institutions and professionals more widely and freely available is the key to building trust, we must be well on the high road towards an ever more trusting society.

This high road is built on new technologies that are ideal for achieving transparency and openness. It has become cheap and easy to spread information, indeed extraordinarily hard to prevent its spread. Secrecy was technically feasible in the days of words on paper. But it is undermined by easy, instantaneous, multiple replication-and endless possibilities for subtle or less-than-subtle revision.

These lectures are a key moment in modern definitions of trust.

How Do They Know?

US-led efforts to tackle the al-Qaeda group are not regarded as successful, an opinion poll carried out for the BBC World Service suggests.Some 29% of people said the "war on terror" launched by President George W Bush in 2001 had had no effect on the Islamist militant network. According to 30% of those surveyed, US policies have strengthened al-Qaeda.

An opinion poll carried out for the BBC World Service. But on what is this opinion based? The BBC headline is "Al-Qaeda not weakening - BBC Poll".

Nick Davies writes a letter

Published in the Guardian this morning.

There is a nice irony in Roger Alton's huffing and puffing about my book, Flat Earth News (Interview, September 22). The book tries to track the scale and origin of falsehood, distortion and propaganda in news media. One of its central themes is the ease with which the PR industry now manipulates journalists. One of PR's regular techniques is to try to bury true stories with a "non-denial denial", ie a statement which has no value at all but which serves to mislead.

Roger replies to the revelations about his problems at the Observer by saying: "You can accuse me of incompetence, of being a shitty journalist or a shallow halfwit, but to say I would deliberately lie about stuff and manipulate information - nothing could be further from the truth."

It just so happens that "deliberate lying" is precisely what the book does NOT accuse him of. What the book describes is how, in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, Roger was manipulated directly by Downing Street and indirectly through key reporters by intelligence agencies and Downing Street again. The result was that he published mighty falsehoods because he thought they were true and failed to publish true stories because he thought they were false. Deliberate lying does not come into it.

The manipulation of the Observer in the cause of war happened. It needs an explanation. A lot of Roger's readers might think it needs an apology. What it doesn't need is for the editor of a national newspaper who has been such a spectacular victim of PR to adopt its tactics.
Nick Davies, London

Nick Davies wrote Flat Earth News.
The Original Interview.
An extract:

What advice would he [Alton] have for young pretenders keen on getting to the top of his own profession? Not enter it, he chuckles. "Take up photography ... sell luxury goods. Maybe chocolate, people always want little treats, like the £1 Independent."

On Google and strategy and agency

Search is where Google started, and even though the mission was back then was (and officially still is) to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," no one at Google was really putting many of today's non-search services into a blueprint for success. Many of these products emerged from Google's own internal needs, opportunistic purchases, ideas that curious Googlers with "20% time" suggested and sudden departures into areas not envisioned at first but which made sense as Google evolved.

Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand on the idea of Google's hive mind.

The underlying theme with Google is the user. Google does things in the interest of the user.

And here's John Battelle's muscular response:

I don't agree with this. I think Google has made scores of moves calculated by centralized senior management to benefit the company as a whole, AND, at the same time, has green-lit scores of other projects which, taken as a whole, are in no way centrally planned. Examples of centrally planned moves? The AOL deal. The Dell distribution deal. Chrome. Gmail (I disagree with Danny that this was not a centrally planned move. Same with Checkout.) Book search (Google knew it was in for a legal fight and it engaged because it felt it was in the company's, and culture's, best interest.) YouTube (very much a central decision). Ummmm....going public.

From Battelle's Searchblog


After reading these pieces just think now about Google's scope: it is vast.


Even gay marriage.

More Newman

He was a rogue you could trust.

Chicago Tribune.

ITunes for the blind

...new software - which transforms the written information on an iTunes-linked computer screen into speech or Braille - stemmed from an agreement between Apple, the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer company, the National Federation of the Blind and Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley

From the Boston Herald.

Link missing at moment surprisingly...

Peter Preston, for many years the editor of The Guardian newspaper, and these days a "media" expert on the Observer wrote this yeterday in his Observer page (14):

Crucially, isn't press and broadcasting coverage getting more like blogging and less like conventional journalism? Blogging, after all, whirls on 24/7. Three in the morning, three in the afternoon. It doesn't worry much about fact checks. It exists in a tumult of constant outrage. It doesn't care what 'My View' was yesterday or last year. and to be sure, there is something of a plot there; a plot against ordinary understanding.

His story uses as a news peg of the comments of former Labour Deputy Leader (when Labour was Labour, not New Labour) Roy Hattersley, who claimed recently that political journalism here in the UK was now the "worst in the world."

For some strange reason there is no online version of Preston's article.

Yet.


There we go.

Paul Newman 1925 - 2008

Kid, the next time I say, "Let's go someplace like Bolivia," let's go someplace like Bolivia.

Is this the Twitter Make or Break Night?

Personally, I haven’t been a big Twitter user. Maybe that’s because my close friends aren’t on it. My editors might say I don’t have any ideas that fit in 140 characters.

The New York Times speaking the truth that dare not speak its name (a quote).


In the meantime Twitter Election is here.

And newspapers...more of the below

“The next year to 18 months may be ‘make or break’ for the newspapers,” says David T. Clark of Deutsche Bank in a report summing up the NAA Retail Advertising Forum that just wrapped up in Dallas.

Noting that all signs point to weak retail sales and lean advertising budgets for the balance of this year and much of next, Dave says it is “unclear” whether newspapers “are moving fast enough to secure local market share for when the economy climbs out of its hole.”

From quote:

...perhaps the only CEO in Silicon Valley who knows how to set type one letter at a time, just like his hero, Benjamin Franklin.

From Reflections of a Newsosaur, aka Alan Mutter - a Managing Partner of Tapit Partners.

E-books, beware...perhaps

Thanks to Wired for this.

Peter Sunde, one of the founders of Pirate Bay, wrote a mysterious blog post today asking for someone in the U.S. to send him an Amazon Kindle, and hinted that he might be working on a new project involving eBooks.

“Do [sic] anyone wanna help me out? I’m looking to make an interesting service together with some friends in the New Media Market…,” he writes.

Now...Peter Sunde is:

...Peter Sunde (born September 13, 1978), alias brokep, is a Norwegian-Finnish computer expert,known as the co-founder of the BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay.

Here's the original Sunde post.


Either a good joke, or the start of something fairly significant in the world of books. For this is the Wikipedia/LA Times take on The Pirate Bay:

According to the Los Angeles Times The Pirate Bay is "one of the world's largest facilitators of illegal downloading", and "the most visible member of a burgeoning international anti-copyright — or pro-piracy — movement."

It was only a matter of time.


The Pirate Bay is here.

Everybody's at the trust thing now...

Done gone viral...

The only way we can bring sanity back to the credit and stock markets is by restoring public trust. And to do that, we must improve the quality, accuracy, and relevance of our financial reporting. This means resisting any calls to repeal the current mark-to-market standards. And it also means expanding the requirement to the securities positions and loan commitments of all financial institutions.

From the WSJ. And its co-authors...

..Mr. Levitt was chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission from 1993 to 2001. Mr. Turner was SEC chief accountant from 1998 to 2001.

That's a byline to trust.

But what about Irene Adler?

The field of cognitive expertise has a certain tradition of using case studies of experts, but in a recent article we went one step further: we analysed a famous but fictional expert – Sherlock Holmes (Didierjean & Gobet, 2008).

The use of citations taken from Conan Doyle’s works made it possible not only to present the latest advances in the field of cognitive expertise, but also to suggest avenues of research that we believe should be explored with more attention.

From the Psychologist.

Google on the future

Many of the things on the Internet, whether mobile or fixed, will know where they are, both geographically and logically. As you enter a hotel room, your mobile will be told its precise location including room number. When you turn your laptop on, it will learn this information as well--either from the mobile or from the room itself. It will be normal for devices, when activated, to discover what other devices are in the neighborhood, so your mobile will discover that it has a high resolution display available in what was once called a television set. If you wish, your mobile will remember where you have been and will keep track of RFID-labeled objects such as your briefcase, car keys and glasses. "Where are my glasses?" you will ask. "You were last within RFID reach of them while in the living room," your mobile or laptop will say.

The Internet will transform the video medium as well. From its largely programmed, scheduled and streamed delivery today, video will become an interactive medium in which the choice of content and advertising will be under consumer control. Product placement will become an opportunity for viewers to click on items of interest in the field of view to learn more about them including but not limited to commercial information. Hyperlinks will associate the racing scene in Star Wars I with the chariot race in Ben Hur.

At the moment Google feels like Shakespeare in 1599...


Prolific.

Where Facebook meets the language school

Increasingly, sites are depending on the wisdom of their users to build their businesses, from CrossLoop’s IT support to Trusera and PatientsLikeMe’s health advice and statistics.

Livemocha leverages the “world wide” bit of the web to create a language learning community and the Seattle-based company has just passed the 1m member mark, a year after launching.

From the FT.

I just feel sad about letting you know

It's hard enough trying to write songs, without having to design Chinos as well.

Billy Bragg on paying the Man, via the @Econ conference.

Derek Draper to end the influence of right wing politics blogs, with magic sword 2.0

...the Labour Party is exploring plans for an online rapid rebuttal unit, designed to kill off damaging stories circulating in the blogosphere.

Former lobbyist Derek Draper will oversee the initiative, having recently been called in by Labour’s general secretary to advise on how the party can communicate its message.

Labour strategists are keen to respond to the growing influence of right-wing blogs. The eventual system could resemble a modern-day version of Labour’s famous Excalibur unit, which was successfully used to kill negative stories by Tory-supporting newspapers in the run-up to the 1997 general election.

From PR Week.


Perhaps Derek Draper should start here.

If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief.

Misunderstanding Sarah Palin: the French links...

...the notion that Ethan Winner and his cronies — all of them PR professionals — are just “concerned Americans” who attempted to make the Palin smear video “go viral” out of personal conviction is patently absurd. The obvious question, then, is for whom were Winner and his “associates” working? The most obvious answer is: the Obama campaign. Another and at least equally troubling possibility, however, is that they were working for one of Publicis’s high-powered European clients.

Pajamas media on the "french connection..." This could go all the way.

Foxy

Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population that's actively misinformed presents problems when it comes to participating in the national debate, or the democratic process. If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief.

From Jonathan Gitlin at Ars Technica.

Fold the Front Page

So who sets the news agenda now? One significant influence is a guy with nothing but a page full of links (you know, the kind that “send people away”).

From Publishing 2.0.

News and Drama at the Guardian

I'd like to suggest to you that the term newspaper should be broken into two parts, news and paper. The paper part needs to be put aside for a moment, as it is only one of many potential distribution methods. The news engine is independent of the delivery mechanism, or it should be…. when you move into the online environment you know that deadline is a bit of a funny word, or at least it should be because it can go as soon as it's editorial accepted. The notion that news is continuous as opposed to an episodic thing has a lot of dramatic effects on the consumers of that information.

Vint Cerf tells the Guardian.