- TwitterMood — using Twitter as a giant mood sensor for the world (see also temporal correlations, via kellan on delicious).
- What Will Remain of Us — The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published; between 1066 and 1086 more than half of Dunwich’s taxable farmland had washed away. Major storms in 1287, 1328, 1347, and 1740 swallowed up more land. By 1844, only 237 people lived in Dunwich. Today, less than half as many reside there in a handful of ruins on dry land. (via blackbeltjones on Delicious)
- The Three Key Parts of Stories You Don’t Usually Get — In reality, these longstanding facts provide the true foundation of journalism. But in practice, they play second-fiddle to the news, condensed beyond all meaning into a paragraph halfway down in a news story, tucked away in a remote corner of our news sites. Take a look at that WaPo page again. Currently, a link sits on the far right side of the page, a third of the way down, labeled “What you need to know.” Click on that link, and you’re taken here: a linkless, five-paragraph blog post from May. This basically captures our approach to providing the necessary background to follow the news.
- Eulogy to _why — a pseudonymous Ruby character, _why the Lucky Stiff, recently vanished from the net: all his sites and accounts were deleted. It’s possible this is because someone tried to identify him, it’s possible that his accounts were hacked. Either way, this is a touching tribute to him from John Resig. I for one would like to see more appreciation while the people are still around. Today, tell two good people that you enjoy what they do. You know you can.
"journalism" entries
Four short links: 21 August 2009
Moody Twitter, Future Geohistory, News Sucks, Whyless in Wonderland
Data Is Journalism: MSNBC.com Acquires Everyblock
Everyblock, Adrian Holovaty’s local data aggregator, has been acquired by MSNBC.com. Many are hailing it as local news acquisition. For 15 major US cities Everyblock aggregates crime data, restaurant reviews, health inspections, local news and more. This is data that is only of interest to people within a certain area. I care much less about crime ten blocks away than I do about crime two blocks away. Everyblock lets me know what is happening within three blocks of my home and filters everything out (on the web and iPhone). So Everyblock is a hyperlocalnews acquisition, but that is only half of the story (maybe less).
Anderson: "It's All About Attention"
Over on Spiegel Online, Chris Anderson does a great job responding to nearly all of the standard old-media responses to new media. Unsurprisingly (I’m sure Wired would have done the same) they pulled one line from a lengthy response to create the provocative title “Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job.” The full passage is much more useful and nuanced:
Content is a Service Business
What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.
"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"
A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example: In conversations with editors I repeatedly encounter the same pattern: "But idea X won't work / shouldn't be allowed / is bad because of Y." Well, okay. So what? If you're…
Four short links: 24 June 2009
Open Source Kids, Crowdsourcing Lessons, Flickr Secrets, Hadoop Spatial Joins
- The Digital Open — The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under. Building a community of young open source hackers.
- Four Crowdsoucing Lessons from the Guardian’s Spectacular Expenses Scandal Experiment — Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. How to lure them? By making it feel like a game. “Any time that you’re trying to get people to give you stuff, to do stuff for you, the most important thing is that people know that what they’re doing is having an effect,” Willison said. “It’s kind of a fundamental tenet of social software. … If you’re not giving people the ‘I rock’ vibe, you’re not getting people to stick around.” (via migurski on delicious)
- 10+ Deploys/Day: Dev & Ops Cooperation at Flickr — John Allspaw and Paul Hammond’s talk from Velocity. You tell any mainstream company in the world “10 deploys/day” and you’ll be met with disbelief.
- Reproducing Spatial Joins using Hadoop and EC2 — bit by bit the techniques for emulating important operations from trad databases are being discovered and shared in the new database scene. (via straup on delicious)
Completing the circle on journalists and public participation
Capital News Connection
has jumped into Web 2.0 full-tilt with
Ask Your Lawmaker.
The opportunity for a virtuous cycle of public input, professional
processing, and listener loyalty–especially in a field whose death
has been predicted by many — puts Ask Your Lawmaker into an intriguing
category of its own.
Hackers wanted! Scholarships available to coders who'll come to journalism and help save democracy
It's not news that journalism is in crisis. CNN turned newspapers into first-day fishwrap and Craigslist killed the business model. Solutions are scarce, and our democracy is at risk. I don't have a chart to guide our way through the darkness to Citizenry 2.0, but there are some who can navigate the singularity. Journalism needs great hackers. Not just nerds, but programmers who care — about the values of journalism and the power of a free press to hold government accountable.
Four short links: 8 May 2009
- Citizen Journalism and Civic Reporting — Gawker rebuts the nonsense that reporters will be the only people at council meetings: as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as “gadflies” — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived. I know my local newspaper only paraphrases council press releases, they rarely actually attend the meetings. (via waxy)
- Keeping Score (Rowan Simpson) — It makes me wonder what other things we dismiss as being too simple to be useful. Inspired by Atul Gawande’s books, which I highly recommend.
- The Extraordinaries — micro-volunteer opportunities on the mobile phone. (Think of it as Mobile Turk) Another way to harness our great cognitive surplus.
- Visualization in Sports — roundup of the use of computer graphics and visualization in sports. Sports is competitive, lucrative, and quite fast-paced. I love to see sport and business learning from each other. (via tomc on delicious)
Four short links: 9 Apr 2009
Scifi, audiences, transparency, and the peril of public life. No links tomorrow, as I’ll be preparing for our village fete:
- The Fantastic That Denies It’s Fantastic: Science Fiction Talk at the Royal Institution — Matt Jones’s fascinating notes from this talk by two academics make thought-provoking reading. “SF is a response to the cultural shock of discovering our marginal place in an alien universe” … “an attempt put the stamp of humanity back on the universe”
- Visualize Your Audience (Rowan Simpson) — If you don’t think it’s a big deal for your site to be broken or off line while you make changes … think of all of the people who happen to be visiting at that point and imagine what it would feel like to have them all in the room with you while you flick the switch. No matter how small the number it would probably feel like a lot of people. And, you might be motivated to get the site back up more quickly if they were all standing behind you impatiently looking over your shoulder.
- Attribution and Affiliation on All Things Digital (Waxy) — this reminds me how rare it is to see someone about an Internet blowup where someone has actually talked to the parties involved.
- We Live in Public (Caterina Fake) — Caterina watched “We Live in Public” by Ondi Timoner and concurs with Jason Calacanis’s musings about the Internet’s ability to promote the worst behaviour: This kind of sociopathic behavior — treating people like things — is one of the most horrifying aspects of online interactions, and something that its very nature promotes.