strange attractor: picking out patterns in the chaos
strange attractor: picking out patterns in the chaos
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about this author
suw charman is a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. with a background in journalism, publishing and web design, suw is now one of the uk's best known bloggers, frequently speaking at conferences and seminars.
suw is also founder and board member of the open rights group, a digital rights advocacy group which aims to raise awareness of digital rights issues, to campaign against bad legislation in britain and the eu, and to support grass roots activism.
her personal blog is chocolate and vodka.
email suw
kevin anderson has been an online journalist since 1996, designing, editing and writing websites for both broadcast and print media. in 1998, he joined the bbc and became their first online journalist based outside of the uk, covering the us for its award winning news website. after coming to the uk in 2005, he developed a blogging strategy for bbc news, helped launch a programme on the bbc's 5live covering weblogs and podcasts and was on the team that launched the interactive radio programme world have your say on the bbc world service.
kevin is now the blogs editor for the guardian, where he is responsible for management, strategy and 'leading by doing' for guardian unlimited blogs. e-mail kevin.
dark blogs case study
case study 01 - a european pharmaceutical group
find out how a large pharma company uses dark blogs (behind the firewall) to gather and disseminate competitive intelligence material.
also take a shufti at:
join these new facebook groups on: mobile messaging 2.0, marketing 2.0, and enterprise 2.0
november 12, 2007
links for 2007-11-12
posted by kevin anderson
pressthink: out in the great wide open
kevin: jay rosen gives some advice to the cleveland plain dealer following the meltdown of their blogging experiment wide open. jay called p-d’s reader rep’s explanation: ‘almost a primer in legacy media sludge think’
(tags: ethics journalism controversy blogs)
mcclatchy’s meltdown
kevin: frightening graph showing mcclatchy’s $4bn loss in market value in two years after it purchased knight-ridder. mcclatchy is a hard-driving, focused company. pretty unsettling.
(tags: journalism business meltdown)
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breaking news: fire east of london
posted by kevin anderson
photo: fire east of london, by kevin anderson
six fire engines to the scene east of london as huge plume of smoke billows over london.
within minutes of the fire being reported, pictures were posted on flickr and one blogger even posted a video. i'm following the news via flickr and blogs through technorati on the guardian's news blog.
journalism.co.uk has a good roundup of the breaking news coverage of the fire via twitter and blogs.
technorati tags: londonfire smoke, londonfire smoke
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november 10, 2007
links for 2007-11-10
posted by kevin anderson
the scoop » fixing journalism
kevin: i just re-discovered this roundup of excellent posts from derek willis he titles: fixing journalism. this is a must read grouping of posts. derek makes the case for better collaboration, for more structured information and for innovation.
(tags: future ideas innovation newspapers technology)
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november 9, 2007
links for 2007-11-09
posted by kevin anderson
edublogs: media literacy summit, channel 4
kevin: ewan mcintosh has a great post about digital literacy in education, but put your industry in when he says education and see if it it’s relevant to your industry.
(tags: education media socialmedia digitalliteracy)
mpr: mainstream journalists launch online news site
kevin: new news site launches in minnesota trying to create ‘an online news site that’s committed to in-depth high-quality journalism - and is financially viable for the long term’.
(tags: news investigative businessmodels)
minnpost launches; does minneapolis care?
kevin: steve yelvington reviews the new minnpost launch, unfavourably. “minnpost is a mid-20th century product in a strange 21st century world, and i found it needlessly dull.”
(tags: news launch)
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november 8, 2007
links for 2007-11-08
posted by kevin anderson
moving into new arenas
kevin: dan gillmor has a new project: founding director of the new knight center for digital media entrepreneurship at the walter cronkite school of journalism and mass communication, arizona state university. can’t wait to hear more.
(tags: journalism entrepreneurship dangillmor)
press gazette blogs - fleet street 2.0 » @society of editors - football economics coming to online journalism salaries?
kevin: anne speckman of times online looking to recruit: “the people who are by far the most valuable are those who combine journalism skills with real technical skill.”
(tags: journalism jobs skillset)
ap urges news industry to embrace online - seth sutel, ap
kevin: tom curley of ap says that newspapers should “quit thinking like gatekeepers of information and reach out to people who are accustomed to receiving news in real time online” (via techno-news)
(tags: realtime journalism)
the public service future in an online world
kevin: charlie beckett has a great line-up including friend richard sambrook of the bbc and emily bell of the guardian talking about the future of public service journalism.
(tags: future publicservice journalism)
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a digitally literate uk?
posted by kevin anderson
young digital journalists covering a digital literacy conference, photo by kevin anderson
i'm a conference about media literacy today, which i wanted to come and cover for guardian blogs (the day job), but i also think that media literacy is increasingly important in our media-saturated landscape.
the questions they hope to answer (in public sector speak):
• how can people be empowered with the skills, competencies and confidence to get the most out of web 2.0 media in the ways they relate, interact, work and create today?
• how can 'critical thinking' and awareness about media - sources, editing and ownership - best be 'taught' or encouraged? and by whom?
• is the charter for media literacy still fit for purpose?
• what collaborations between government, the media industries, education and cultural organisations - as well as with parents and users - are needed to develop a media literate uk?
• what new opportunities for creativity and participation do web 2.0 capabilities offer people as citizens or as consumers, and in their various communities?
now, there is a lot about web 2.0 in there. this is one of those terms that means everything and nothing to most people. dale dougherty of o'reilly came up with this definition, which i'll paraphrase:
the sites and services that succeed are the ones that are of greater value to their users the greater the level of participation.
how to navigate a media-saturated world
i think of how i evaluate the flood of information that i am inundated by daily - both as a both a professional journalist and as a citizen of a democratic society (some might say societies). it's a really important skill that i think is critical to people even if they don't work in the media or journalism. as the sources of information explode, how do we sift through all of it and consider the point of view and motivations of those producing those messages?
it's slightly odd that the conference kicks off with a discussion about digital television. i do think of this as part of my digital life. suw and i use an old laptop as our tv, and when i can get it working, we watch via mythtv, which has a built in web browser and rss reader.
it's refreshing to hear the secretary of state for culture, media and sport, the rt. hon. james purnell, mp, say that the response to this explosion of information is not to curtail the freedom of speech.
but now, he's talking about a 'kitemark' to flag up products that parents can use to block 'harmful material' and 'inappropriate content' for their children. this isn't about censorship but identifying the risk and helping parents, he said. some of this concern comes from parents being concerned that their children know more about the internet than they do.
why everyone should blog
the next speaker is yemisi blake, a 20-year-old, who gave an overview of his digital life, saying that he can't believe his parents when they say that there was a world before e-mail and that he's into blogging, youtube and facebook. twitter, not so much. it was a great first person case for why social media is important to him.
last year, he discovered wordpress when he wasn't writing about race and ethnicity. he blew his entire student loan on a macbook pro and spent a month eating fish fingers to save up all the money.
he wanted to find out what his computer could really do. he had a paper to do on deadline, but he couldn't find any books on what he wanted to write about about race and advertising. he found the books in the library dry and dusty and not relevant to his studies, or more importantly relevant to him. but he found a blog called racialicious. he quickly found himself part of an online anti-racism community. he also was introduced to the woman bloggers behind blogher. it took him out of his world in north london, and completely changed his life.
he also discovered the entrepreneurial thought leaders podcast. stanford offered up q&a podcasts from the founders of some of the biggest companies in silicon valley.
this was something that school couldn't give me.
he said that his blog gave him a profile that he couldn't have had as a student otherwise. it's helped him find a voice, a community and confidence.
interesting quote of the day
jon gisby, former md of yahoo! uk and ireland and vice president of media europe, said:
you connect with people like you, no longer who the media say you should connect to.
most media execs who i've spoken to don't really grok that one. they still are obsessed with their brands and the power of agenda setting. he then discussed the issues and consequences of greater participation online.
what are people's motivations? personal, professional, commercial?
we need greater transparency.
what are the ethics? those carrying out journalism might not be trained as journalists. piracy?
how can we prevent crowds that we love when they are wise, from becoming mobs? how do we prevent anonymity from becoming a shield for bullies?
atomisation? what are the consequences of the crumbling of mass media?
banned in uk schools
ewan mcintosh is doing a great presentation about the digital divide. it's not about access to technology. it's about digital literacy. that's powerful.
he gave a few examples of how students had learned through technology, much of it which is banned in uk schools.
one student learned about chess strategies through playing world of warcraft
another student learned about geography by seeing where his facebook friends were on a map
i found ewan's talk really refreshing. there are a lot of people still talking about digital divide in terms of access to computers and access to the internet. computers are everywhere. mobile phones are now computers, even basic ones. africa is often touted as on the other side of the digital divide, but mobile phone technology has allowed them to cut out an entire step of digital development.
inspiring exploration instead of instilling fear
recently, i was in a training session. suw and i are such digital natives that sometimes it's easy for us to forget technical knowledge and digital awareness that we take for granted. just yesterday, i was trying to show a colleague how easy it was to create a google gadget. i went to check whether i had the correct rss feed. it kicked up an unstructured xml page, and i say, yeah, that's right. but it reminded me of the scene in real genius when the "mysterious laslo hollyfeld" watches a computer screen display a flood of colours. it scared the bejeezus out of everyone else but somehow was comforting to laslo. i think my demo scared my colleague instead of inspiring her.
suw and i both learned what we know largely through exploration and clueful friends, not through formal training. how we encourage exploration and purposeful play? purposeful play is largely how i've learned what i know. ewan talked about play.
i remember when my parents got over their fear of breaking the computer and got on with using it. i have worked with people who worried about 'breaking the internet'.
i'm not going to laugh or sneer at people who are overwhelmed by technology. it can be very intimidating. but how we inspire people with our passion, and infect them with enthusiasm and not overwhelm them?
update: ewan left a comment to a couple of his posts below. this is a great post and worth the full read, but here's a teaser:
the fact is, that most of those working in education, in politics, in the civil service are the equivalent of modern day illiterates. without understanding how to read and write on the web, there is no other way, really, to describe this state of being.
ouch. the truth hurts. i couldn't possibly comment on the digital literacy of my own industry, journalism, or rather i've probably done a bit much of it lately.
technorati tags: digital literacy, web2.0
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november 7, 2007
links for 2007-11-07
posted by kevin anderson
media sites using drupal | groups.drupal.org
kevin: steve yelvington pointed out this drupal group of news and media organisations using the open-source content and community management software.
(tags: drupal media newspaper)
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november 6, 2007
links for 2007-11-06
posted by kevin anderson
snitter: snook’s twitter - snook.ca
suw: neat little twitter app, based on adobe air.
(tags: twitter application app adobeair adobe tools socialnetworks microblogging)
mippin - faq
suw: neat little mobile aggregator. yet to try it out, but looks lovely.
(tags: mippin applications mobile aggregator)
eu cracks down on fake blogger astroturfing | the register
suw: fake blogs are going to become not just annoying, but also illegal. pr companies, beware - your astroturfing days are totally over.
(tags: fakeblogs blogging astrotufing eu directives flogs pr publicrelations)
nuj: forget the customers, and they’ll forget you - one man & his blog
kevin: adam tinworth posts an excellent response to the nuj new media flap. i wrote from outside the union, but adam writes as an nuj member. it’s thoughtful and balanced and explores the issues. it also speaks volumes to journalists’ thinking.
(tags: journalism nuj newmedia future)
greenslade: society of editors: gavin o’reilly sounds off
kevin: stephen brook liveblogging from the society of editors’ conference gives a round up of gavin o’reilly’s (no relation to tim either by blood or thinking) talk about the future of ‘newspapers’. check out the line about ‘someone with attitude sitting
(tags: journalism technology advertising newspapers media)
free and open source games
kevin: the gotham gazette is launching their first knight-funded news games. they used openlaszlo instead of flash. more details at the mediashift idea lab.
(tags: news games opensource openlaszlo)
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november 3, 2007
links for 2007-11-03
posted by kevin anderson
the long tail: sorry pr people: you’re blocked
suw: chris anderson pulls no punches, and publishes a list of the email addresses flacks have used to send him inappropriate press releases. flacks must learn to be more careful. especially, it seems, people from weber shandwick and edelman.
(tags: chrisanderson flacks pr pressreleases fuckwittery spam wired marketing publicrelations privacy journalism)
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november 1, 2007
links for 2007-11-01
posted by kevin anderson
nuj is wrong « joanna geary
kevin: joanna geary, “a twenty-something regional newspaper journalist”, has some thoughts on the recent nuj web 2.0 debate. a pragmatic view, saying “i think small teams aggregating and checking the facts of blog posts and forums may well be something we
(tags: journalism nuj regional newspaper)
web 2.0 is ‘rubbish’, claims nuj new media rep | internet marketing news and blog | e-consultancy.com
kevin: chris lake makes some good points from a perspective outside of journalism about the web, participation and authority. “authority is earned by experts, whereas it is donated to most journalists by association with a top newspaper brand.”
(tags: journalism authority web2.0)
lifehacker top 10: top 10 free video rippers, encoders, and converters
kevin: if you’re working with video formats or taking in contributions from the public, here are some free video encoders and converters. thanks to the folks at lifehacker.
(tags: video encoders converters free)
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october 31, 2007
links for 2007-10-31
posted by kevin anderson
details revealed: google opensocial to launch thursday
suw: this is a very interesting move by google. i look forward to seeing how this plays out.
(tags: google opensocial socialnetworks facebook web2.0 socialnetworking api development networking networks)
mediashift idea lab . reader comments, oh comments - send me your success stories | pbs
kevin: steven clift at us public broadcaster’s new mediashift idealab asks for success stories on comments. watch this space, both the idealab and the comments on this post. chip in with your success stories.
(tags: comments successstories innovation tips participation)
we interrupt this career
kevin: matt waite of the st. petersburg times announces his new job: news technologist. “it’s technology. it’s r&d. it’s databases. it’s local, national, mobile. … and then, really, it’s all journalism.”
(tags: newspapers innovation change titles)
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it's halloween, and the nuj are coming as trolls
posted by kevin anderson
there should be a footnote to this national union of journalists recruitment poster. join the union unless you are one of those
“self-serving bloggers who don’t really want to be in a union ‘cos it doesn’t have that ‘i’m a digital revolutionary and i’m out there, doing it’ vibe”
this is a line from gary herman on nuj new media industrial council site. i’d leave a comment, but alas, there are none. have they ever heard the old adage, when you’re in a hole stop digging? hey guys, if you want to create an ‘us versus them’ line in the sand, congratulations, you’ve succeeded. and the ‘them’ isn’t the man in management. there is obviously no room in your union for a “brain dead digital enthusiast” like me. (just to be fair, lest i’m accused of taking the quote out of context. the full sentence is: “redundancies at aol should give the most brain dead digital enthusiast pause for thought.”) and right before that, herman takes a most unprofessional jab at roy greenslade:
at the very best, people like roy greenslade who huff and puff and storm out of the union are behaving precipitately. at worst, they’re trying to put the boot in. probably, they’re just a bit dim.
i’m not anti-union. but how am i supposed to interpret such statements? it doesn’t fill me with the warm feelings of union solidarity. “sorry, but you’re a bit dim comrade?” is that the message you really wish to convey? herman rails away against pr and blogs in his piece, but i’m going to give a piece of advice that i never thought i’d suggest to anyone: the nuj really needs to work on its pr in terms of courting new media journalists.
emotive and irresponsible attacks such as those in herman’s piece have muddled the nuj’s core argument of maintaining journalistic quality and integrity under challenges not from the internet but from economic pressures of changing business models. we all agree that journalists should be ethical, our journalism of the highest possible quality and that our journalism should serve the public good. i have forgone lucrative opportunities in for-profit journalism and consulting because i believe in the mission of public service journalism and its place in a democratic society. we agree that journalists should be compensated for their work. we are not in disagreement over these points, and i - as a digital enthusiast - am not the enemy.
as for the nuj, i’m moving on. jeff jarvis is right:
it’s a mistake, i think, to let the curmudgeons set the agenda and, for that matter, get the attention. it doesn’t move us forward.
i’ve got plenty of colleagues and collaborators to work with to create the future of journalism. i’m part of the new collective and have been for a long time. online journalist since 1996 and damn proud of it.
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october 30, 2007
links for 2007-10-30
posted by kevin anderson
how are visitors using comments?
kevin: from the international herald tribune’s developer blog, a good discussion not only about how visitors use comments but also tips on how to stimulate discussion.
(tags: development comments commenting blog)
bbc news: the editors: some thoughts on bbc.com
kevin: richard sambrook responds to questions about bbc.com. richard, the head of the bbc’s global news division, shows how to be responsive, answering questions from his original post. he talks about ads on bbc.com.
(tags: bbc advertising bbc.com paywall free)
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october 29, 2007
links for 2007-10-29
posted by kevin anderson
medill goes multimedia
kevin: wbez in chicago reports how the medill journalism school at northwestern university is going multimedia, and not all of the students are happy about it. understanding the audience is not about undercutting journalism.
(tags: journalism education medill multimedia)
the nuj and me: a considered response
kevin: roy greenslade gives his considered response on why he is leaving the nuj. “i cannot, in all conscience, remain within a union i now regard, albeit reluctantly, as reactionary. the digital revolution is here and i am digital revolutionary.” go roy!
(tags: nuj digital change resistance)
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let's have a real debate about web 2.0
posted by suw and kevin
both of us feel so strongly about the national union of journalists’ recent statements about web 2.0 and new media that we felt we had to challenge them. although we’re breaking the ‘don’t feed the trolls’ rule, we felt these issues are too important to the future of journalism to be left unexamined.
in this post, we want to challenge donnacha delong’s piece web 2.0 is rubbish in the journalist, the union’s magazine. the article is a one-sided polemic which not only mischaracterises web 2.0 but also misrepresents the way that journalists and editors think about collaborating with their readers.
the article begins with the subhead: “webfolk call the burgeoning interactive use of the internet ‘web 2.0’.” “webfolk”? that’s as dismissive and belittling as “boffins” or “nerds”, but at least it sets one’s expectations pretty accurately for the rest of the article. whilst delong mentions in passing the fact that the web is “full of opportunities”, he chooses to focus only on what he sees as the “dangers”. this is unsurprising. between us, we’ve come across this the peril! the peril!” attitude from many and various sources, online and in person, but it’s not a constructive attitude for the nuj - or delong as its representative - to take.
delong’s first error is to oversimplistically equate web 2.0 with “participation and feedback from our ‘users’.” as the telegreph’s shane richmond says in the comments on a jeff jarvis post, this is no more than a convenient strawman to attack. as we have long argued here at strange attractor, web 2.0 is far more than asking people “tell us what you reckon”. rather, it creates an opportunity for journalists to find not just eyewitnesses, but also expertise from what jay rosen calls “the people formerly known as the audience”. any journalist worth his or her salt should be interested in talking to people that witnessed or who can shed real light on news events, and should be willing to go beyond the limits of their own address book - web 2.0 enables that in a way we’ve never seen before.
web 2.0 is also about mass collaboration, such as sifting through documents or carrying out research. after another church of journalism troll wrote a poorly researched and argued piece in the los angeles times recently, jay rosen wrote a piece about the journalism that bloggers actually do. this is about networked investigation and research, not just soliciting feedback and opinion. in the uk, ben goldacre who writes the blog bad science and a column in the guardian of the same name, asked his readers to file foia requests with durham council to get information about fish oil “trials”.
then there are the database-driven online projects that these new technologies enable. take a look at the washington post’s election coverage. you can see all of the candidates campaign appearances in a google maps mashup and even download their calendar. both are great resources not only for the public but also internally for the post’s own journalists.
and, of course, the journalistic benefits of web 2.0 are not just about reader-facing stuff. tools such as rss, google alerts and social bookmarking help journalists efficiently gather and organise lots of sources of information when doing research. we often hear about how as a society we are overloaded with information, but these tools provide a way to sift through a mass of data to find what we need. any journalist not using rss and social bookmarking on a day-to-day basis is making life unnecessarily hard for themselves.
having thus mischaracterised web 2.0, delong then goes on to claim that it is “seen as replacing traditional media.” by who, exactly? now, a good blogger would give examples, but we’re expected to take delong’s word for it. obviously it’s difficult to include links in a magazine article, which delong’s piece originally was, but there is no reason not to provide sources on his blog post. the irony, of course, is that this is the exact sort of cut-and-paste from print to web behaviour that the nuj complains about in its report on mulitmedia working. (note: we haven’t seen the original report yet, so we will comment fully on that later, when we have.)
but neither of us can think of any traditional news organisation with a strategy - stated or otherwise - of replacing all their journalists with content sourced from the internet and/or their readers. and the discussion about the dissolution of the mainstream media in favour of 100% citizen journalism was had in (and outside, but mainly in) the blogosphere at least three years ago.
then delong digs up the old chestnut that journalists alone can produce “truly authoritative content”, a claim that is patently untrue. suffice it to say that long before we were even talking about web 2.0, dan gillmor understood that his readers in silicon valley had expert knowledge that he could tap into to make his journalism better. there are thousands of experts out there - lawyers, professors, professionals - who are writing about their field in an accessible and interesting manner.
delong then says:
they have the ability to produce content that informs and fulfil an essential part of democracy – the widespread dissemination of information that allows the public to question those in charge.
this is over-egging the pudding somewhat. the good journalist does this, but many who should, don’t. we too often see press releases and wire copy republished with nary a challenge to the party line. sometimes it’s only the dogged persistence of activists and experts - some of whom are bloggers, many of whom are not - who fact check, challenge and publicise inaccuracies that results in a more accurate story being told.
and the training that delong puts such stock in is rather a red herring too. many excellent journalists come from non-journalism backgrounds, but bring expertise in specialist areas such as science, business, technology and the arts, to name a few. and many poor journalists went to j-school. setting up journalists, collectively, as some sort of bastion of democracy and truth is rather an exaggeration.
journalists aren’t the only people who can contribute to democracy. where would journalists have been without pictures from “witness contributors” - to use the nuj’s phrase - when covering the recent crackdown in burma?
much of this unnecessary angst about the threat of citizen journalism and web 2.0 - and the deification of journalists that accompanies it - comes from the misperception that everyone wants to be a journalist. only a tiny percentage of bloggers have any desire to go into journalism, and they would have made moves to enter their chosen profession with or without web 2.0. but the vast majority of people who provide eyewitness reports of an event are there only through luck (good or bad), and expert bloggers are expert because they have years of experience behind them. neither groups has any interest in changing careers.
delong goes on:
the media are not perfect. more often than not, they focus on issues the public is interested in rather than those that are truly in the public interest. but those who argue that web 2.0 is the future want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
the imperfections and exemplars of the media are entirely irrelevant to whether or not web 2.0 has a part to play in the media’s future. more importantly, the media has to realise that it has no choice: it must embrace the internet, including web 2.0, because the audience is already there and advertisers are moving there quickly.
the mainstream media is not leading the charge to the internet, it is following along behind its audience, laggardly, sullenly and defensively. many journalists have spent ten years dismissing the internet as a fad and an inferior medium. they are equally dismissive of web 2.0 without even knowing what it means. delong says on the nuj new media’s blog, “so there we go - a nice big debate about the issues”, but he has done nothing to move the debate forward and nothing to help of inform nuj members. instead, he has engaged in more scare-mongering about the threat of the internet and simplistically focused on perceived, but illusory, dangers to journalism.
both of us embraced the internet because of the opportunities it presents. it’s the world’s greatest story-telling medium, bringing together the strengths of text, audio, video and interaction. the internet as a communications tool can help journalists tap sources like never before, making their stories richer and more balanced. why wouldn’t journalists take advantage of the internet?
yes, the job is changing, and we as journalists need to change with it. the internet may be posing a threat to the business model that support journalism, and it’s understandable that this causes anxiety. but misrepresenting the reality of that change won’t make it go away.
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october 27, 2007
links for 2007-10-27
posted by kevin anderson
open source content management systems - downloadpedia
kevin: a good roundup of open source content management systems. i’m a bit baffled why more news organisations don’t go the open source route and instead invest a lot into bespoke behemoths. is it simply scalability and resiliency?
(tags: cms open tools)
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october 25, 2007
links for 2007-10-25
posted by kevin anderson
subtraction: if it looks like a cow, swims like a dolphin and quacks like a duck, it must be enterprise software
suw: khoi vinh on lotus notes and its recent ad campaign: “as if frightening, cross-species aberrations of nature are what we’ve all been looking for in an email and calendaring solution.” enterprise social software vendors, take note.
(tags: software design enterprise usability business interface userinterface userexperience lotusnotes)
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creative business in the digital era
posted by suw charman
i'm really excited to be able to announce a new project that i'm working on with the open rights group, in partnership with 01zero-one and funded by the london development agency. creative business in the digital era is a research project examining the different ways in which artists and businesses are innovating around open intellectual property.
increasingly, we are seeing publishers releasing books simultaneously under creative commons license and in print. authors such as cory doctorow and lawrence lessig, who blazed this particular trail, are now being followed by many other people willing to experiment.
but it's not just authors and publishers who are innovating around open ip. musicians are also seeing the value of getting their music in front of their fans immediately upon release. record labels such as magnatune been letting fans download music for free for a long time, but now it's spreading to the mainstream: radiohead are giving away their album in rainbows, and letting the fans decide how much to pay, if anything.
and software companies are also realising just how powerful it is for them to release data via an api, google maps being an excellent example of how giving away data enables third-party applications to be developed, with commercial operations licensing the data and non-commercial mash-ups using it for free.
i must admit i'm very excited by this project. so often we talk about how creative commons licensing can help businesses and artists alike to flourish, but it's sometimes difficult to come up with good solid examples. this project is focused on finding and documenting examples of real world innovation, and will culminate in a day-long course and two evening courses to be held in march 2008. in the finest collaborative tradition, we're doing all the work out in the open so anyone can join up on the wiki and contribute. we really need the help too: the timescale for getting this done is alarmingly short as we need to have all of the material written by february 2008. if you want to help please just jump in!
if you want to keep abreast of what we are doing then there we have a blog and a twitter stream. and if you see any articles that you think might be relevant, please tag them with 'org-cbde' in del.icio.us.
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turning off email won't help
posted by suw charman
earlier in the week, the bbc ran a package on its breakfast programme about how intel has become "the latest in an increasingly long line of companies to launch a so-called 'no e-mail day'."
on fridays, 150 of its engineers revert to more old-fashioned means of communication.
in actual fact e-mail isn't strictly forbidden but engineers are encouraged to talk to each other face to face or pick up the phone rather than rely on e-mail.
in intel's case the push to look again at the culture of e-mail followed a comment from chief executive paul otellini criticising engineers "who sit two cubicles apart sending an e-mail rather than get up and talk".as the bbc says, this isn't new - other companies have been doing this for some time. but i don't think that intel's initiative is going to have that much of an impact, and i don't think that 'no email days' are going to help.
for starters, intel's initiative is only aimed at 150 engineers so it's no more than a tiny pilot affecting only 0.16% of its total staff of over 94,000. engineers are not a representative sample, either, even for an organisation as tech-oriented as intel. and in my experience, initiatives that start in engineering or it do not naturally spread through the rest of the company. programmers speak a different language to, say, sales or hr, and there aren't natural migration pathways for viral behaviours to spread from one set of employees to the other.
that's assuming, of course, that turning off email for a day is the sort of behaviour that goes viral. i'm pretty sure it's not - it's actually harder to not look at email than it is to check it compulsively all day. email overuse works on the same principle as slot machines: repetitive behaviour that results in intermittent rewards is creates the perfect conditions for dependence. as mindhacks says:
[i]f you want to train an animal to do something, consistently rewarding that behaviour isn't the best way. the most effective training regime is one where you give the animal a reward only sometimes, and then only at random intervals. animals trained like this, with what's called a 'variable interval reinforcement schedule', work harder for their rewards, and take longer to give up once all rewards for the behaviour is removed.
[...] checking email is a behaviour that has variable interval reinforcement. sometimes, but not everytime, the behaviour produces a reward. everyone loves to get an email from a friend, or some good news, or even an amusing web link. sometimes checking your email will get you one of these rewards. and because you can never tell which time you check will produce the reward, checking all the time is reinforced, even if most of the time checking your email turns out to have been pointless. you still check because you never know when the reward will come.email overuse (i'm trying to steer clear of the word "addiction" because it's just too loaded) is not a simple behaviour, and simple solutions such as telling people to turn it off for a day will not work in the long term. attempting to change people's behaviour - getting them to check email less often, or turning email off for a day - is likely to be futile, even if you understand the psychology of it, because behavioural change very difficult to achieve. frequently, those who use email in a sub-optimal manner are entirely unaware that they have a problem and see no reason why they should put any effort into changing.
another reason why days off won't work is because the main problem with email, apart from the obsessive checking, is overload. turning it off for a day doesn't significantly change the amount of email that you actually receive, it just means that it piles up in your inbox whilst you're off doing other things. if your whole team turns email off for a day, then some communications that may have happened by email will instead be carried out by phone or in person, whilst others issues will remain mentally queued for sending when email is allowed again. communications from people who aren't turning email off will continue to come in and, not only will they be waiting for you when you finally do turn email back on, you'll know that they are there, lurking. this is why it's hard to turn email off: it's too trivial to turn it back on again just in case something fun/important has arrived.
a more effective way to tackle business email is to look for specific tasks that are being done on a regular basis and move them to another, more suitable tool. collaborating on documents, for example, is a really bad use of email. creating a spreadsheet, word document or powerpoint slide deck and then emailing it round to people for comment is a very clumsy process. not only do you have to collate and hand-merge the comments from the various people involved, you are also duplicating the files in multiple inboxes and (possibly) hard drives across the network, clogging up the infrastructure with unnecessary data. and, of course, one go round is never enough - these emails can fly back and forth and back again for days or even weeks.
instead, using a wiki or something like google documents to collaborate on a document is a simpler and much more efficient way to work. everyone can see everyone else's changes, so there's no duplication of effort; discussions don't get split across inboxes; sign-off is easily co-ordinated; and you can see who has edited and (depending on software) who has viewed the pages so can nag anyone who needs to be involved but who isn't. collaboration done in collaborative tools is significantly easier than doing it over email. and "collaboration" doesn't have to mean something big - it can be as trivial as asking someone to proof read an email.
equally, moving regular newsletters that are being sent out by email - and i don't believe there can be a single big organisation that doesn't regularly send out newsletters, updates, and other gubbins to everyone by email - onto a blog and letting people receive them via rss reduces the occupational spam load by allowing people to subscribe to to just those feed that are interesting or pertinent.
the problem is, of course, that it's easy to proclaim a no email day and look like you're doing something big and important. it's harder to actually look at what your employees are doing on a day to day basis and figure out how you can help them permanently reduce their email output whilst simultaneously allowing them to do their work more efficiently. that's not a simple nor quick solution, because the use case differs from group to group, or even person to person, but it's one that works.
of course, most companies have no idea how their employees are really using email, and most employees aren't concerned about how to improve the way they use it. one client of mine did some work to find out how people used their computers, and the results would make your toes curl. people using email as a 'to do' list manager, sending themselves emails with the to do item in the subject line; people with 50,000 unread emails in their inboxes; people using their email drafts folder as a file repository by attaching files to emails and saving them as drafts... the list went on.
if intel really wants to reduce email load, it's going to have to do a lot more than just ask 150 engineers to turn it off on fridays. i wonder if it has the smarts - or the guts - to go for a real email reduction strategy.
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october 24, 2007
links for 2007-10-24
posted by kevin anderson
google reader stats are bullshit (with proof)
suw: there’s a lot more i’d like to say about stats, but til then, here’s a good look at the problem with google reader’s stats.
(tags: stats statistics aggregator google rss feeds web2.0 googlereader feedburner analytics)
kaltura - creating together
suw: ought to look at this collaborative video editing platform, as well as jumpcut, in more detail. haven’t had time though.
(tags: video collaboration web2.0 editing social kaltura)
youtube - a vision of students today
suw: amazing video by michael wesch. again, have more to say about this, but just not enoguh time. great stuff, go watch it.
(tags: education video youtube students web2.0 culture collaboration change michaelwesch)
no shirts at improv everywhere
suw: 111 men go shirtless at abercrombie and fitch in ny, mimicing a&f’s shirtless branding. lesson: be careful what you wish for, lest it come true.
(tags: improveverywhere nyc shopping art culture advertising smartmobs social marketing branding)
how to irritate and annoy people in the name of blogging
suw: anyone with a business blog should read this, and take very careful notes. scalzi nails it.
(tags: blogs blogging networking popularity commenting comments)
crazy egg – visualize your visitors
suw: interesting use of visualisation to help you understand how your website is performing
(tags: visualisation visualization stats statistics websites metrics monitoring)
shane richmond : the nuj’s blinkered approach to online
suw: the attitude of the nuj towards online is shameful. they are not helping their members progress into the digital era, they are hobbling them, doing more damage than good. disgraceful.
(tags: journalism newspapers online nuj nationalunionofjournalists fuckwittery unions future newmedia)
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october 23, 2007
when trusted guides don't guide
posted by kevin anderson
canyon county fire by respres on flickr, creative commons, some rights reserved
i was looking through my feeds and found this on mashable: this disaster will be twitterized. mark hopkins recalls how more than 10 years ago, he aggregated all of the coverage of the oklahoma city bombing on his angelfire page. his page was listed prominently on the yahoo page showing coverage of the tragedy.
mark fast-forwarded to the present day and watched the california wildfires unfold in flickr, twitter and a number of other web 2.0 sites. and he makes this observation:
any news channel or show on the tv is prominently featuring this disaster in varying degrees of detail, but if you reside outside of southern california, what exactly are you going to learn from the national news reports that will be useful to you in a situation like this? cnn isn’t going to point you to the ten mile long google map mashup that shows where the fires are. msnbc isn’t going to aggregate the links for you.
the question for any news organisation is why not? this isn’t rocket science. there are no technical hurdles to doing this if you have even a half-way decent cms, and it’s dead easy if you’ve got some blogging software. if part of news organisations’ job is to be a trusted guide, why are so many blind to the aggregating this content and helping their audience navigate it?
chris vallance and rhod sharp had a couple of great interviews on the bbc’s pods and blogs last night. (note: i used to help chris and rhod with the programme, and chris will be the best man at my wedding.) but i’m still baffled why web aggregation during breaking news with follow up interviews still are the exception not the norm. there are all of these people living through a news event making themselves known through blog posts, photo sharing sites, social networking sites and more, and yet we’re still telling the story through wire copy, agency video and stills. it’s yet another missed opportunity by doing what we do the same way we’ve always done it. editorial innovation can happen while meeting the demands of breaking news.
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links for 2007-10-23
posted by kevin anderson
apml: the next big thing or the next foaf?
kevin: attention profiling markup language. it allows you to take your interests and your attention profile with you. but mark hopkins wonders whether this is good for consumers as much as marketers. also interesting views on media.
(tags: criticism programming apml social web2.0)
this disaster will be twitterized
kevin: a good roundup of how twitter and the net is being used to post news about the wildfires in california. micro-blogged, rapid fire updates on twitter. pictures on flickr. read the lines about cnn and msnbc not aggregating. missed opportunity.
(tags: community news media twitter msm)
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october 22, 2007
links for 2007-10-22
posted by kevin anderson
does what happens in the facebook stay in the facebook?
suw: interesting, concerning, or paranoid conspiracy theory?
(tags: facebook privacy intelligence)
comments (0)
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october 19, 2007
links for 2007-10-19
posted by kevin anderson
10 questions for presidential candidates
kevin: really interesting project showing how you can leverage web 2.0 services to build an engaging site and editorial project without worrying about doing it all on your own. the idea is so simple. post your questions to presidential candidates on video
(tags: aggregation elections politics socialmedia video ugc)
mediashift idea lab . ready? here’s my own formula for success with an online news site | pbs
kevin: check out the new mediashift idea lab blog, and definitely check out this post from jay rosen with lots of simple but effective tips on how to create a successful online news site.
(tags: aggregation blogging journalism news)
bbc news | the editors adverts on bbc.com
kevin: richard sambrook explains why the bbc is going to have ads on its international facing site. hopefully they can put some of that money back into the online operation.
(tags: advertising global bbc)
digging deeper::bbc trains iranian journalists through zigzag online magazine
kevin: good review of zigzag from the bbc world trust. zigzag is an online magazine that helps train iranian journalists. i met with some of the journalists a few weeks ago. they have such passion for online journalism.
(tags: zigzag bbctrust iran journalism training)
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october 17, 2007
links for 2007-10-17
posted by kevin anderson
totally wired
suw: post from anastasia goodstein on the new pew report about what teens are really doing online. intersting figures, too.
(tags: teens onlinebehaviour)
predator panic: reality check on sex offenders | livescience
suw: benjamin radford debunks a few myths.
(tags: sexualpredators debunking teens children onlinesafety privacy online internet safety youth)
ancestry.com launches social networking features for your dna
suw: i can’t decide if this is exciting or creepy.
(tags: dna ancestry familytrees privacy genetics genealogy social networks)
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october 16, 2007
the passing of bbc news interactive and integration
posted by kevin anderson
this week, staff and managers of the bbc news website will gather in what friends and former colleagues have described as both a birthday party and a wake. the bbc news website will celebrate its 10th anniversary just as it is about to cease as a separate news operation.
i won't pretend that this post isn't personal. i joined the guardian a year ago, but for eight years before that, i worked for the bbc. i joined bbc news online in october 1998 as the first online reporter outside of the uk. for most of that eight years, i worked for the bbc news website, or bbc news online as it was called before management felt that it could use a rebranding.
a few weeks ago, i read "bbc news interactive will be 'an empty shell' in two years" by jemima kiss on guardian blogs with a heavy heart (disclaimer: i'm now the blogs editor at the guardian).
she quoted bbc news interactive chief pete clifton, who said:
if you come up to the seventh floor in two years, it will just be an empty shell, hopefully.
hopefully? i can't see my former online colleagues being filled with hope. despite his talk about the online staff joining the radio and tv staff to "make the best platform for our journalism", it's hard to see this as anything but happy talk. while pete was at aop, i was having dinner with a friend and former colleague, and he confirmed that pete was basically managing himself out of a job. he's not the first manager at the bbc to do this over the last few years, but jemima put it well when she said:
it sounded like news interactive is about to evaporate, to disappear into the ether like it never existed - as if online news does not deserve, demand or need its own dedicated department. surely integration isn't as brutal or as straightforward that?
this isn't integration. this is the systematic dismantling and destruction of a site and a staff that has helped lead the way in online and interactive journalism.
yes, the site will survive, and i'm sure that remaining staff will soldier on. but the online managers and editors, who have built up so much experience over the last decade, face an uncertain future. the problem is that, inside the bbc, the news website simply does not have the political capital to withstand the powerful managers in tv. everyone inside television centre knows the pecking order. radio is the poor cousin to tv, and online is the poorer cousin to radio.
case in point, i was told by another former bbc employee that she recently asked someone still there what would happen for the news site and its staff. the response?
they will do what they're told.
the arrogance, the shear arrogance. and it's all too believable.
integration
integration should be greater than the sum of its parts, bringing together the combined audio, video and interactive talents of the bbc. when i was there, i knew that to achieve the kind of multimedia storytelling that i wanted, i could learn much from my radio and television colleagues. and through the camaraderie and shared sense of purpose, we achieved great things in washington and at the bbc news website.
nick newman came up with the great idea to turn over the election coverage agenda to our users back in 2000, and tom carver and i flew, both literally and figuratively, across the us in an election challenge. we covered 6,500 miles in 6 days using web conferencing gear, a mini-dv cam and a portable sat dish to webcast once a day, answering questions posed by visitors to the website. in the wake of the 11 september 2001 attacks, i travelled to new york three months, six months and one year after, marking the dates with text and video storytelling with correspondent peter gould and simon oldfield, sarah dale and nick buckley from the news website. and on the suggestion (and later great encouragement) of steve herrmann, i blogged during the last us presidential election, again taking interactive journalism a step further. and the news website has done so much more in pioneering multimedia newsgathering, including their laptop link-ups, joseph winter's great work in africa, just to mention a few projects.
at the bbc's washington bureau, we did feel almost like greg dyke's "one bbc", although we would get the most ridiculous duplication-of-effort requests from london. at the time i left washington, we had more than 30 requests for president bush and his cabinet from the various 'flagship' programmes at the bbc. one senior aide on capitol hill once quipped to a bbc producer that with so many flagships there mustn't be any room for other ships in the bbc armada. but we did do integrated journalism in washington. i covered the microsoft anti-trust trial for online, radio and tv as i did the millennium bug, although i spent much of the night doing two-ways and finding new ways to say "nothing much to report". but it was this that made the bbc both a great place and a great place to work.
the bbc news website washington job was one of the best jobs at the site, and i look back fondly on those days. but when i tried to take my new media skills to other areas of the bbc, they were neither used nor rewarded, rather i was criticised for my lack of tv or radio skills.
in the year before i left, many of my colleagues both inside and outside the bbc tried to talk me out of it. why would i want to leave the bbc? i told them simply that in four of the last 5 years, 2003-2007, the budget for the news website had been cut. in 2003, bbc management tried to cut the site's budget by 25%, but only managed 18%. i took a year off to do a video journalism attachment in washington, not knowing if i would have a job to come back to. the cuts in 2003, reportedly at the suggestion of the highest levels of bbc new media management, came because "friends reunited runs on 6 people, why does the news website need a few hundred?" with budget cuts for the foreseeable future at bbc news, how could i stay? my pay wasn't keeping up with housing inflation in washington and there were no opportunities for me. the pioneering work that we had once done was no longer possible with the budget cuts.
i would love to think that, under an integrated news operation, the bbc news presence would flourish online, but knowing the way the bbc works, i can't realistically see that happening. the bbc's internal politics are so poisonous that some of its flagship programmes are at open warfare with one another, calling up sky to offer their guests instead of sharing them with their bbc colleagues. that was why greg dyke's "one bbc" was the punch-line of a joke in the washington bureau. i can't see how this will suddenly change overnight, especially in light of the scrabble over resources as these cuts bite deep. politics is the allocation of resources, and one surefire way to ratchet up the political battles at the bbc is to make the pie that everyone fights over just that much smaller.
real leadership at the corporation, which it does have, should put a stop to the petty battles of managers and remind them that the real competition is at sky or cnn, not down the hall. but that is not the atmosphere at the pit of vipers, as one friend and former colleague refers to television centre. i'm not sure that anyone could pull the bbc together. as anyone who has worked there knows, it's not one corporation but rather a thousand fiefdoms.
brain drain
now, i fear, through this arrogance and so many missteps, big and small, the bbc will see what started as a trickle become a flood. in february 2006, i told a bbc executive who i count as a good friend that i was seeing a brain drain. the number of digital natives leaving the bbc, not only in news but across the organisation, i feared would leave the bbc incapable of realising its digital ambitions. he had seen it before he said, as had i. during the dot.com boom, many of my colleagues the news website left for lucrative (albeit often short-lived) jobs in the booming sites of the late 1990s. but this more recent brain drain was different. i saw people leaving not because there was silly money to be made but because they were frustrated. they felt throttled and hemmed in by bureaucracy, infighting, regulation and technical bottlenecks, especially after the forced sale of bbc technology to siemens. (for those not familiar with the sale, the bbc had reached its borrowing limits. the government wouldn't increase the limit so the bbc needed to sell something, fast. when i left, the annual service contract for an ipaq handheld computer was three times the high street value of the device itself, and if i recall correctly, that didn't even include the data charges.)
now with this forced integration of radio, tv and online news, i fear that they will lose - or, at best, relegate to the sidelines - the online management, editors and journalists who have built a world class online news service. done wrong, this could be a huge step backward for the bbc, back to the bad old days of 'shovelware' and simple re-purposing.
i worked side by side with so many respected journalists there, and i really felt pride in what we were doing. as i said, i know that they will meet this challenge as best they can. they have spent five years miraculously finding ways to do more with less. now, they will have no choice but to do less with less.
comments (4)
| category: journalism | media 2.0
links for 2007-10-16
posted by kevin anderson
group plans to provide investigative journalism
kevin: $10 a year to go to non-profit investigative journalism projects: pro publica. the team of 24 journalists based in new york will give their work away.
(tags: future journalism businessmodels nonprofit)
what’s your facebook strategy?
kevin: steve outing, who suw and i met in boulder, has a good overview of news organisations and facebook for editor & publisher. steve also asks people in the industry what their plans are.
(tags: facebook journalism socialmedia newspapers community)
yale climate media forum - giving objectivity a bad name
kevin: philip meyer’s very thoughtful article about objectivity, types of it and the limits of it in terms of reporting about climate change. “in the age of the internet, mere transmission no longer adds value to information.”
(tags: climatechange objectivity journalism criticism)
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october 15, 2007
it's not just newspapers
posted by suw charman
last week, kevin wrote about alan mutter's brain drain post on how the journalists who most get this new digital era are the people least likely to be able to effect change within their organisations, and how many of them are looking to get out of the media because they can't see a future for themselves there. many voices from the journalist blogging community chimed in, and kevin does a good job of linking to some of the most prominent posts. but i have something really very, very important to say to everyone who reads strange attractor who isn't in the newspaper business.
it's not just newspapers losing their brightest talent.
i have a lot of conversations with a lot of different people from a lot of different places, and recently a theme has started to emerge. the people who most clearly understand the way that the internet and web 2.0 is transforming business are leaving jobs that frustrate them with companies that don't get it, and are either finding other jobs with companies that do get it or are cutting loose completely and going freelance. and i'm not alone in this observation - dennis howlett blogs about a conversation he had with a barclaycard developer who was profoundly unhappy with his job because there was no opportunity to innovate:
i was struck by the profound sense of frustration experienced by this person. geeks invent stuff. they solve problems. they love puzzles. stifling the ability to engage in those activities is anathema. it’s like sucking out the oxygen they need with which to thrive. any time organizations do that to anyone, productivity plummets.it's not just geeks, either. on more than one occasion i have been brought in to talk to a company by someone who sits in the room with me and nods vigourously (but often silently) as i speak. when they do talk, i find myself nodding vigourously as well and it becomes clear that they are on the right track, that they understand social software and the changes currently being wrought. one day, i asked one of my contacts, "why did you bring me in when you so obviously know what you're talking about?" the response came, "because they won't listen to me - maybe they will listen to you."
these people aren't journalists or developers; this isn't about a particular industry or job title. these are people who have a passion for the internet, who see how useful social tools can be, who just want to make small changes that might have a big impact, but they can't, because management won't let them. whether that's via direct commandments or through an anti-change, anti-innovation, anti-technology culture that's been fostered by them doesn't matter - the fact is that smart, innovative people aren't being allowed to experiment, and they're getting so frustrated by it that they are leaving to go elsewhere.
it's not just newspapers that need to wake up to the fact that their middle managers and cxos just might not have the right skillset and mindset to help them survive the digital era. as far as i can tell, that problem is rife in all industries. and any business that refuses to take notice of its own talent, (or even the knowledge of digital experts - who, it has to be said, may turn out not be white, male and middle-aged, and may even come from outside your sector), is going to find itself very much at the bottom of the heap as their brightest people go off to help more open and aware companies.
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links for 2007-10-15
posted by kevin anderson
facebook, the quant fund meltdown, and the techmeme leaderboard
kevin: tim o’reilly gives a cautionary tale about everyone chasing the same strategy. the post is a bit dense in places, but his argument holds together moving from facebook, apps and the long tail to quant funds formulae.
(tags: facebook longtail socialmedia contratrian)
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october 14, 2007
duty to buy a newspaper?
posted by kevin anderson
roy peter clark at poynter certainly has kicked off an interesting discussion with a column on the journalism centre's website in a call to journalists to dig into their pockets and buy the newspaper. his full argument is worth a read, but the essence is:
i owe it to hard-working journalists everywhere -- and to the future of journalism -- to read them. it's no longer a choice. it's a duty.
and here's why: there is one overriding question about the future of journalism that no one can yet answer: how will we pay for it? who will pay for good reporters and editors? who will pay to station them in statehouses, or send them to cover wars and disasters? who will finance important investigations in support of the public's health and safety?
poynter has done a great service in collecting some of the blog posts that comment on the column. i'm not going to take aim at the original column. there are plenty of people who have done that.
my information diet
i'll be honest. i can't remember the last time i actually bought a physical newspaper. i get them from time to time on flights and at hotels, but the last time i put down money and bought a newspaper. i'd have to think hard about that. i think i bought a guardian right before i joined the newspaper.
but i'm drowning in information. if this diet were food, i'd be the size of a small block of flats. super-size me. i actually have to do a lot just to filter and sift the massive amount of information available. i'm constantly looking for signal in the noise. no one news source does it for me, and i compare a lot of news sources because they all have a point of view.
before i leave the door, i have sky news and bbc breakfast on the laptop tv, more for background noise than information to be honest, although it's good to know what the domestic (read british) media and press are exercised about today. i can't filter tv news so i don't 'use' it much. it's too time consuming for what i get out of it. to be brutally honest, sometimes i get so pissed off at tv news for wasting my time i flip the channel to everybody loves raymond. the bbc tv news podcast isn't updated until i'm at work or else i'd just watch that and skip the fluff. if there is a good piece of video, i'll see it. if a politician or presenter says something of note, i'll see it repeated a million times during the day or in the papers.
now, on my half hour commute in the morning before i hit the tube, i listen to the nytimes front page podcast and the hourly npr news update downloaded to my ipod via itunes. i just can't find a good top of the hour headlines podcast in the uk. i haven't checked the bbc lately. i wish they would produce a world service headlines podcast. if i have time, i also listen to podcasts from on the media, the economist, the bbc's pods and blogs (which i used to contribute to) and this american life (although suw and i usually listen to that together over breakfast on the weekend).
on the tube, i usually skim stories from four newspapers: the new york times, the washington post, the international herald-tribune and the guardian. if i see something i need to read, i'll mentally bookmark it for when i get to work. i also check on the headlines the bbc news website and do a quick check on cnet and wired. i've been doing this for years on my palm handheld using a service called avantgo. the screen is great, and i don't really have this fetish about paper. it's just information, and it's easier to organise this way. and it's much easier to deal with on the tube. i also have an rss reader on my palm, quicknews, which i wish was better. that gives me headlines from marketwatch and a half dozen blogs.
most everyone else on the tube reads the metro free-sheet. i don't. it's just a rehash of what i've already seen on sky and the bbc, and unlike most everyone else, i'm not interested in celebrity news. besides, i never have to go looking for celebrity gossip. it's everywhere. i also have an environmental issue with all of those free-sheets. what a waste.
when i get to work, i fire up my rss reader, netnewswire, and look through the blogs and traditional news sources. i check popurls.com to get a quick filter of social news sites, video sites and aggregators. i usually have npr on in the background and give a quick check to nbc's evening news via itunes. i get e-mail newsletters from the washington post - my old hometown paper - and the nytimes. i also get an e-mail from newstrust and simplyheadlines.com, aggregators of different sorts. i also get a morning e-mail from global voices giving a great roundup of global blog buzz. friends are always sending me links via del.icio.us, mostly to do with new media journalism, and i get things passed along directly via im.
a former colleague at the bbc said that someday everyone will consume their news like me. i'm not so sure. very few people actively seek out as much information as i do. i don't extrapolate my own behaviour too much. i am a very wired news junkie. it's my job to know what's going on. but there are a lot of people doing one or more of the above.
but as some people in the poynter discussion have pointed out, lack of information is not my problem. lack of time and a limit to the amount of attention i have is more of a problem. i still don't think this is an issue that most journalists have grokked. there's who, what, where, when and why, but too many journalists don't seem to think they need to explain to readers, viewers, listeners: why should i care?
relevance
again, this is one of the posts where the comments are worth reading. steve yelvington in his post, a troll in scholar's clothing, echoes one of the sentiments in the post which is that news has to be relevant to consumers, the audience in order for them to buy it. steve says:
quit blaming the internet. there's nothing wrong with paper. it's your journalism that isn't relevant. ... we're not going to get meaningful content and services from journalists who spend their time reading each other and sniffing around each other's scents like a pack of dogs.
don't compare your journalism with that of another newspaper. compare it with the needs of the community.
amen brother. as steve has often pointed out, newspaper audiences (in the us), have been declining since the 1970s, when the internet was still in the lab.
i love the depth of the style of journalism that newspapers have traditionally done. that's not to say that television is not capable of it. tv documentary units in britain and long ago (and long since dead) in the us have produced some excellent journalism. but now, what is the business model for this content? what pays for this relatively expensive work? that's the crux of the original post.
for a number of reasons, most people aren't like me. they don't see the reason in their busy lives to seek out news and information like i do. i grew up with newspapers and watching the evening news every night with my parents. i knew that to make economic, political and any of a number of other everyday decisions, i needed quality information. but i am in the minority, and as long as i am in the minority, newspapers and the kind of journalism that they represent will be in decline in the developed world.
i think the issue of relevance is at the heart of newspapers decline. why should most people care about news? journalists take it for granted, but i fear that it's only occasionally obvious for our audiences.
when i was back in washington this march, i struck up a conversation about world affairs with an imf employee on the metro. she got off a couple of stops before me, and an african-american man had overheard us and came up to me after she got off. it was after the wobble in chinese markets had sent stocks swooning the world over. he wondered how something in china could affect the us economy because suddenly it had affected him. i had to get off at the next stop and didn't have time to say that the chinese and japanese held a majority of the united states' foreign debt. anything that impacted the appetite for the debt would hit the us, possibly hard. and that's just one link between the two countries. china and the us need each other economically for a myriad of reasons. china has its own finely tuned balancing act in terms of growth, inflation, internal stability, resources and the environment.
the man on the metro represents, to me, a failure of journalism. it was a failure by journalists to explain to everyone in our communities why the story was important. until our journalism really is essential to people's lives and we make that case, newspapers will get crowded out by a dizzying array of information and, yes, entertainment choices.
technorati tags: business model, newspapers
comments (2)
| category: economics | journalism | media 2.0
october 13, 2007
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knight news challenge
monday is the closing date for the the knight news challenge, wherein the john s. and james l. knight foundation gives away $5 million to anyone with an innovative idea to change journalism. lots of info on their site, but if you haven't already started on your idea, you'd better get a move on!
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october 12, 2007
links for 2007-10-12
posted by kevin anderson
30+ free three-column website templates
kevin: three column templates are very popular, especially for sites that are monetized with banner or text ads. here are 30+ …
(tags: blog design templates)
change management: what’s the divorce rate in your company?
kevin: a little off topic, but it’s a good post about employee turnover and making sure you get all your needs met. i’m a maslow junkie as well.
(tags: maslow hierarchyofneeds jobs turnover)
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october 11, 2007
links for 2007-10-11
posted by kevin anderson
pressthink: what i learned from assignment zero
kevin: jay rosen takes a look back at lessons learned from assignment zero. start with clear, simple tasks. consider participants motivations. get the division of labour right between pros and ams. plan for co-ordination costs and more.
(tags: networkedjournalism assignmentzero collaboration crowdsourcing)
san francicsco chronicle: how china clamps down on the internet
kevin: reporters without borders report on how china controls the internet with input from a chinese it worker.
(tags: china censorship rsf)
loose wire blog: when old media buys a community
kevin: wsj columnist jeremy wagstaff asks who gets the windfall when old media buys a community in the wake of microsoft’s purchase of social news site newsvine. via martin stabe
(tags: microsoft newsvine acquisition community)
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october 10, 2007
'a nerve has been hit'
posted by kevin anderson
jack lail said former newspaper editor and silicon valley ceo alan mutter definitely hit an 'organisational nerve' with his post about the 'brain drain' happening in journalism. the post was hard hitting, quoting from a number of anonymous digital savvy journalists in their 20s and 30s looking for their exit at their newspapers and possibly out of the media full stop. alan writes:
but the young net natives, for the most part, rank too low in the organizations that employ them to be invited to the pivotal discussions determining the stratgeic initiatives that could help their employers sustain their franchises.
this is one post where you need to read the comments, like this one:
the large msm paper i work for has had virtually 100% turnover in it's online operations in the last 18 months. i'm not talking about the podunk daily news either, you'd know the name. ... i just don't understand it, there are people in the mix who really are trying to save this industry but who are battling of all things, this industry.
this comment pained me:
i have reporting experience and two journalism degrees, but i frequently have dinosaur reporters and editors treat me like it support staff and dismiss my ideas because i'm not "one of them".
for many journalists, 'real' journalism is still about the format, not the content. it's as if their words, which they wrote on a computer, were somehow less important because they never quite made it off of a computer. hopefully, when confronted by their own argument, these journalists will see how paper thin it is. somehow i doubt it because they've held to this line for most of the 10 years i've been an online journalist, but one can hope for some sort of poetic justice. if they learn some html, maybe they'll find work in the future.
and this isn't necessarily about age or experience. this isn't just fresh out of college grads with, as one blogger said some outsized sense of entitlement. one commenter is leaving a major newspaper's online wing after seven years. that's a lot of experience lost.
patrick beeson, a web project manager for the e.w. scripps interactive newspaper group in knoxville, tennessee, called the post "among the most revealing portrayals of what’s wrong in most newspapers. namely, legacy newsfolk not allowing for often-younger journo-technologists to play a guiding role in that paper’s strategy going forward." this isn't about turning your newsroom over to your youngest staff, but it is about having the humility and the vision to know what you don't know.
as alan says, some of this is about territory and turf, short-sighted management more concerned about owning the change than achieving change. and i've spoken to a lot of online news veterans who also struggle with the transition as the flat, collaborative environments of their newsroom meets the rigid hierarchies in traditional newsrooms. integration isn't the problem. it's the terms of that integration. as jack said, "this may be just a part of the difficult transition of organizations cemented in their ways." this is an organisational issue as much, if not more, than a generational one.
journalism professor mindy mcadams points to a great post by young journalist, meranda watling, who gives her experience of being involved in discussions about new products "that there is no way in hell would float with my peers." (great blog meranda. nice design, and i do hope you do that education tumblog.)
mindy's post is titled "we need a tourniquet", and she said alan is:
...talking about a legion of merandas who are giving up and leaving because it’s so obvious to them that management has no clue what readers want or respect. the comments back him up, again and again. (that persistent sound you hear is our lifeblood leaking out.)
this post has kicked off a great conversation in the online journalism community, a community i'm proud to be a part of. it's worth looking through the trackbacks to alan's post.
but to quote rob curley, this isn't about skillset, it's about mindset. it's not about age or experience. i've spoken to some journalism school grads who talk as if it's the 1940s, not the 21st century, and i've worked with seasoned journalists who humble me with their digital knowledge and foresight and remind me that i have a lot to learn, like steve yelvington.
steve and i shared dinner and drinks in kuala lumpur earlier this summer after we finished three days of workshops on citizen journalism with peter ong and robb montgomery, and he told me about coding a usenet news reader for the atari st in the mid-1980s. steve's a pioneer. steve knows his technology and his journalism. he had this to say about alan's post:
we are at a critical turning point for american newspapers. we can't afford to drive away our smartest and most creative voices. the internet not a publishing system, a web site is not just another channel, and digitizing the thing we've been doing for the last century is not going to work. we need to think new thoughts, and pushing new thinkers out the door is a fatal mistake.
most of us are just impatient for the future that we know is there to be grasped. but we won't wait forever. if the industry can't or won't do it, we'll do it on our own.
technorati tags: change, digital native
comments (2)
| category: journalism | media 2.0
links for 2007-10-10
posted by kevin anderson
new minimalist tv epg. opportunities for news navigation?
kevin: ian forrester sent this to the bbc backstage list from o’reilly radar. i wonder if there aren’t opportunities for news navigation based on time.
(tags: design tv interface media news time)
the journal of joe the peacock. yay.: an unordered list of thoughts i had during a conference call with a potential client today
kevin: fellow geeks, have a read of this post and let the humour dull the pain of how many times we’ve been in this conference call or felt like saying this during meetings. (thanks to wayne ma for the link)
(tags: humour technology illiteracy)
the dilbert blog: the future of newspapers
kevin: scott adams speculates about the future of newspapers (or the lack of a future) with the arrival of the iphone and a web browser in (not quite) every pocket. but there are ideas there that news execs should look at.
(tags: blog dilbert iphone journalism mobile)
big brands & facebook
kevin: from the social graphing conference in san jose. charlene li of forrester research says: facebook marketing requires communication not advertising. i think that this is true for social media in general, not just facebook.
(tags: facebook advertising socialmedia)
barclaycard: an innovation wasteland : accman
suw: the innovation landscape should not be marked with “here be dragons” all over the place… but it seems that it is.
(tags: innovation culture enterprise2.0 business)
future of web apps : accman
suw: slightly depressing to think i might be reinventing the wheel, but on the other hand, what with blogs and stuff, maybe that reinvention might stick this time round.
(tags: softwareadoption business enterprise software implementation)
ongoing · the intimate internet
suw: go tim! “twitter hits that 80/20 point, bringing me that news without all the facebook bullshit and lame groups and dorky apps and stupid ads and data lock-in”
(tags: ambientintimacy business culture innovation internet social web2.0 socialsoftware intimacy technology)
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october 9, 2007
links for 2007-10-09
posted by kevin anderson
parking lot » blog archive » a tricky spot
suw: sometimes the instinct to solve someone’s problem isn’t the right way forward, and saying “i don’t know the solution” is.
(tags: chriscorrigan facilitation collaboration participation relationships)
the fastforward blog » social software - unintended consequences at university: enterprise 2.0 blog: news, coverage, and commentary
suw: are social networks undermining the making of new friends at university? maybe more emphasis needs to be placed on deliberately bringing people together offline so they can share experiences in order to build relationships.
(tags: socialnetworks socialnetworking offline relationships university)
embrace digital or die, emi told - telegraph
suw: about time the music industry woke up to the fact that cds are just one potential source of income.
(tags: emi music musicindustry business distribution online radiohead thecharlatans)
forensic dna tests ‘reveal traces of madeleine’s body on resort beach’ | uk news | the observer
suw: disgraceful piece of misreporting from the observer, presenting hokum as if it were forensic evidence, thus willfully misleading the reader. it’s disgusting that this crap gets published as if scientific fact.
(tags: theobserver misreporting hokum disgrace marktownsend nedtemko woo msm press journalism)
bad science » madeleine mccann, the observer, and their special magic quantum dna box (with secret energy source)
suw: ben goldacre effectively debunks the observer’s hokum piece about danie krugel’s claims to have found madeleine mccann’s body on a portuguese beach.
(tags: ethics journalism science badscience observer debunking media bengoldacre)
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