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Kevin: AP is cutting fees for newspapers and broadcasters, but it is looking to renegotiate its deals with internet giants such as Yahoo, AOL, Google and Microsoft.
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Suw: Fun and quite accurate decision-making tool. It's a bit limited at the moment, but it shows real promise.
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Suw: Fabulous bit of work that it's hard to stop playing with!
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Suw: I know a ton of people who should read this, and make very careful notes.
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Kevin: Craig McGill reports: "Now, here’s an interesting one, passed on to me by someone we shall call CIPRMole where basically the NLA (the Newspaper Licensing Association) want to charge organisations – starting with cuttings services then moving on to others by 2010 – for including links to newspaper stories:"
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Kevin: Beijing will seek to employ at least 10,000 "internet volunteers" before the end of this year to monitor "harmful" websites and content, said an official at the municipal authority's information office.
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Kevin: Joshua Micah Marshall describes Talking Points Memo as a hybrid of collaborative reporting with readers and traditional reporting.
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Kevin: A look at the internet filtering being used in Iran and how technology is being used to organise protests. Ethan Zuckerman "senses that the technology isn't helping opposition supporters as much as are traditional organizing methods like phone calls and word of mouth".
Monthly Archives: June 2009
links for 2009-06-18
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Kevin: A test project from Nokia that allows you to find friends via WiFi location technology and send them a text message to see if they want to meet up. Location-based services like this will move into the mainstream in the next few years, but what will move this out of the realm of early adopters?
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Kevin: Software industry group blasts Digital Britain recommendations as "nothing more than hot air, promises of future action against copyright infringers and a legislative let down".
links for 2009-06-17
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Kevin: Terry Flew, Professor of Media and Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, writes about coverage of the Iranian election protests with what I call social media journalism. It's a hybrid of traditional media and newsgathering process and standards to filter social media and use social media as a source of contacts. There is a lot of opportunity here, and we're just scratching the surface.
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Kevin: Jonathan Zittrain, author of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, tries to answer the question being asked by many in the media of whether Iran could shut down Twitter. He first describes Iran's control over the internet. Iran is "able to treat its Internet-using public the way a school can filter what its kids see on their PCs". But could they shut down Twitter, which is being used to report in real-time the events on Twitter. "So it’d be trivial for the Iranian government to block access to Twitter as it could to any particular Web site, and it could even block access to some Twitter user’s feeds there while leaving others open, by simply configuring its filters to allow some Twitter urls through while filtering others. But Twitter isn’t just any particular Web site. It’s an atom designed to be built into other molecules. "
links for 2009-06-16
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Kevin: Marc Ambinder says that this is how a CIA Analyst would look at the events in Iran, but I suggest that it's also the way that journalists should. "Watch for disinformation. … Don't assume. … Look for sources that disprove your thesis. Go outside the country and outside your comfort zone. See what, say, China's news agency reports about the protests."
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Kevin: Like many projects, I spotted this in the flow of links via Twitter. It's a fascinating look at '12 different voter communities' in the United States. The map is fascinating, but I'm curious about the journalism that the Christian Science Monitor and US public television's News Hour will be doing. I need to investigate how they came up with 12 different voter communities. The political parties and their models often slice the US electorate into often twice as many demographic groups in terms of targeting, but it's interesting to see news outlets do this kind of coverage. I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this project to see how it evolves.
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Kevin: Richard Sambrook, head of the BBC Global News division and a friend from the BBC, compaired Twitter to mainstream media coverage of the outcome of the 2009 Iranian elections. His conclusion:
"Result? Mixed.
If you, as an average news consumer, relied on Twitter you might believe all sorts of things had happened, which simply hadn't, running a high risk of being seriously misled about events on the ground. You might at best, have simply been confused. You probably wouldn't have thought Ahmadinejad enjoys much popular support at all.
But if you had a reasonable understanding of social media, how to set up and assess feeds, how to compare and contrast information, if you had a reasonable understanding of news flows, a developed sense of scepticism, and an above average understanding of the political situation in Iran, you would have emerged much better informed than the lay viewer relying on TV or Radio news." -
Kevin: Vin Crosbie writes: "Ask most people who think of themselves as new media experts what the greatest change in the media has been in the past 35 years, and you'll hear such answers as "the Internet," "social media," "search engines," or "iPhones."
They're wrong.
The greatest change has been that people's access to media has changed from scarcity to surfeit. It's an even bigger change than Gutenberg's invention of a practical printing press, the invention of writing, or even the first Neolithic cave paintings. It's the greatest change in all of media history. And it occurred in only 35 years — half a human lifespan."
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis writes: "The question is whether the legacy press – for the benefit of its staff even more than its audience – can issue enough caveats to enable it to work real-time. Forget blogs in this discussion. Will The New York Times ever be comfortable working on the standards and practices of 24-hour cable news? Can it afford to? Don’t they have to?"
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Kevin: This is a succinct outline of social media journalism from Jeff Jarvis: "I emphasized to a reporter today that Twitter is not the news source. It's a source of tips & temperature & sources. Reporting follows."
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Kevin: Dougald Hine, former BBC journalist and co-founder of the School of Everything writes about why journalists write a lot of ill informed nonsense about Twitter. Like a lot of things, they focus on celebrities that use Twitter, or bands that use MySpace or campaigners who use Facebook. They don't get under the skin of social media. Also with Twitter, they don't spend the time necessary to really understand what is going on. "So unless a reporter has been using the service personally for long enough to get a feel for it, they are very likely to pick up the wrong end of the stick. Or mistake the stick for a snake."
links for 2009-06-13
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Kevin: Ryan Sholin makes the argument for why linking is important to digital journalism. It’s difficult for journalists who base their professional sense of self on authority on to why they should link off to other sites or sources. For me, it’s an issue of transparency and depth. It allows readers to get as much or as little of a story as they want. Ryan has some other good arguments including this one: Linking “is the key gesture to being a citizen of the Web and not just a product on the Web”.
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Kevin: I met Ulrike Langer at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum 2009, and it was great to hear from a journalist who had recently discovered blogging and had really caught the bug. Here she writes up an excellent list of 10 strategies to move journalism forward now. These aren’t speculative projects but projects actually happening now in multimedia, crowdsourcing, data journalism and citizen funding. I wholly endorse her view that we need to be on the watch for new tools that help us improve efficiency and deliver content to where users are instead of forcing them to come to a destination website or choose a platform.
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Kevin: Publishing, Sharing & Content Management, Blogging, Dictionary & Spell Check, Organization, Mind mapping, Communication, Media and other tools. All open source.
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Kevin: Chris Thorpe from the Guardian developer team writes about how he created a hack using Google Wave (a new real time collaboration and communication protocol) and the Guardian Content API.
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Kevin: Graduates of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism are getting jobs. “Of the 306 students who earned degrees from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism last month, 197, or 64 percent, already reported having jobs or other post-school plans (such as internships, fellowships or continuing education) lined up by May 28, according to Elizabeth Weinreb Fishman, the school’s associate dean for communications.” That’s better than last year. And the grads are finding jobs at media companies that have gone through waves of layoffs, such as the New York Times. Jeff Bercovici writes that he believes the companies are simply letting go pricey editors and journalists in their 40s and 50s and hiring younger staff who will work for less.
links for 2009-06-12
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis writes about how Google's new Wave collaboration platform might be used for news.
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Kevin: Mindy McAdams has a great post on journalism and engagement – "one of three legs needed to support successful social media projects". She goes on to write: "as newspapers were bought up by big corporations and clumped into feedlots like so many over-doped beef cattle. Newspapers stopped covering the day-to-day factual matters that concern people — the details about where they work, live, attend schools and churches/mosques/temples. As circulation numbers were pumped up by expanding the supposed “coverage area,” what really happened was that less and less of what matters to people was, in fact, covered." Go Mindy!
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Kevin: Tony Hirst of Open University writes: "By adopting something akin to a data style guide these simple errors can be avoided, and the resulting data resources will be more valuable as a result."
Key drivers of change
Having all this info about the future of social media is great – I get to slice and dice it in multiple ways. Going back to the idea of there being three different types of driver – predetermined, uncertain and wildcard – I’ve split everything into those three types, and then tried to see which are the most relevant when it comes to the development of social technology and how third sector organisations might use it.
Below is my list. What do you think?
Predetermined
Increase in number of interpersonal connections.
Ubiquity of technology and connectivity.
Social software moves into the mainstream.
Increase in surveillance, by government and citizens alike.
Self-organisation.
Ageing population.
Decrease in trust of authority figures.
Green issues become more important.
Cuts in public services spending and access.
Uncertain changes
Split between inwards-looking individualism and outwards-looking collectivism.
Experimentation and failure becomes more acceptable.
Wide availability of information leads to either overload or smart/group filters.
Consolidation of the media; rise of community-sourced news.
Over-regulation of the internet stifles growth.
Multiculturalism leads to either tolerance or increased conflict.
Flexible, portfolio careers becomes more common.
Businesses engage in more “co-opetition”.
Self-organisation leads to greater political engagement, or loss of trust in politicians leads to apathy.
‘Web of things’ leads to realtime monitoring of inanimate objects.
Wildcards
Massive population change, either increase or decrease.
Fragmentation of large political entities, increased localism.
Resources shock as peak oil, water and food passed.
Huge increase in war, insurgencies, and social unrest.
Change in value system from GPD to happiness index.
The Singularity: Advances in biotech, nanotech and genetic engineering usher in the post-human age.
Pestilence and global pandemic.
Same drivers, except Wildcards, but organised by topic
Politics/Authority
Increase in surveillance, by government and citizens alike.
Decrease in trust of authority figures.
Cuts in public services spending and access.
Consolidation of the media; rise of community-sourced news.
Over-regulation of the internet stifles growth.
Self-organisation leads to greater political engagement, or loss of trust in politicians leads to apathy.
Society/Culture
Ageing population.
Multiculturalism leads to either tolerance or increased conflict.
Self-organisation.
Split between inwards-looking individualism and outwards-looking collectivism.
Personal
Increase in number of interpersonal connections.
Green issues become more important.
Technology
Ubiquity of technology and connectivity.
Social software moves into the mainstream.
Wide availability of information leads to either overload or smart/group filters.
‘Web of things’ leads to realtime monitoring of inanimate objects.
Business
Experimentation and failure becomes more acceptable.
Flexible, portfolio careers becomes more common.
Businesses engage in more “co-opetition”.
links for 2009-06-11
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Kevin: Hubspot research finds: "Namely, that many of the accounts on Twitter aren't actually using it all that much." This isn't surprising. The UGC Pyramid or the 1-9-90 'Rule' about user participation shows that almost all participatory sites or services have huge disparities in usage. This and other reports are being held up as reasons why Twitter has been over-hyped. This is actually pretty standard in the media obsession life cycle, which goes from dismissiveness from the media to wonder and astonishment and a growth spurt to claims that a service has been over-hyped to claims that the service or site has jumped the shark.
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Kevin: "In 2008 the total European online advertising market, or at least the 19 markets analyzed by IAB Europe and PwC, was worth €12.9 billion (approx. $18 billion) with a like-for-like growth rate compared to 2007 of 20%. For comparison, online advertising grew 10.6% in the United States in 2008 (outpacing TV) and was worth €16.6 billion ($23.4 billion). However, the 20% growth figure paints a better-looking picture than the harsh reality, which is that it is far below previously stated expectations"
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Kevin: Google has released Google Fusion Tables in Labs. "Fusion Tables allows users to upload more data than they can in Google Spreadsheets. With Google Fusion it is possible to upload tabular data sets of up to 100 MB per data set."
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Kevin: There was a session last week at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum about serious games, and this post looks further into the trend. It starts off highlighting a video from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof from the recent Games for a Change Festival. "The MacArthur Foundation have been putting time, energy and money into this cause — it seems obvious to me that large companies in the gaming space should also be involved as well if they're not already from a "double bottom line" perspective. Perhaps journalism organizations should join them."
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Kevin: "In a piece written for paidContent.org, Richard J. Tofel proposes a new way of "remaking" newspapers and "rethinking the role of the print paper. … Another factor of Tofel's restructuring plan is eliminating columnists and reviewers who don't have a "committed, interested following" as another means to cut costs by cutting down content that may not be of interest to the readers.
Ultimately, Tofel proposes newspapers should strive to be "distinctive" and publish content that sets itself apart from other news sources, such as focusing on local news, effecitvely including graphics, images, games, and puzzles, or by "being new 'scoops' of fact or thought."
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Kevin: Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas.
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Kevin: I realised recently that I feel so comfortable online and the culture of the internet and social web is so much a part of my life that it's sometimes difficult for me to articulate to people who aren't steeped in this culture on how to engage with people online. To me, it's like breathing. But this study unpacks a lot of issues on how to generate, foster and nurture conversations. It's a very useful skill, and it's something that I think that journalists resist because they don't see it as part of their jobs. This is a good read, and although it's focused on education, there are a lot of lessons about building participation and conversation online regardless of the application.
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Kevin: My colleague Charles Arthur thinks out loud very effectively in this piece and comes to the conclusion that we 'need new wrappers for journalism'. I think that this goes to the heart of the matter that. The problem for the business of journalism right now is the unbundling of the commercial package that has supported print journalism for much of the last 150 years. Advertising-based revenue streams that support newspapers have been disrupted by digital competitors such as Craigslists, Monster.com and Google. The difficulty for newspapers is that new advertising providers are more efficient than aggregating eyeballs with content. Charles says: "To repeat: journalism is the process and publishing is the wrapper that you put around journalism in order to make it profitable and sustainable."
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Kevin: The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has wasted no time in sending an open letter to the new culture minister with an ‘economic stimulus plan for local media’, which includes a "tax credit for individuals who buy quality media" and "A levy introduced on commercial operators who benefit from quality public service content – including local news – but do not contribute to its production". Laura Oliver asks how 'quality media' will be defined. That is one of the biggest issues for public support of journalism, outside of established public broadcasters, who decides who gets the money.
links for 2009-06-10
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Kevin: Quick response (QR) bar code was originally created by Japanese company Denso-Wave to keep inventory. They are the square codes often seen on products, but as the post says, because they can store more data than the 10-digit bar code they are popping up in a number of interesting applications. Here are five interesting ones, including a Pet Shop Boys protest against an ID card scheme in the UK.
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Kevin: Brady Forrest at O'Reilly goes through the impact on location-based services of the 2009 iPhone 3GS. Platial and Pelago have some tough thinking ahead about what their business model will be. But the iPhone 3GS open up some real opportunities in terms of augmented reality and real-time location updates. There are still some things that need doing. Safari has no access to the camera. Apps can only send data if they are open. Apps can't send data if they are in the background.
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Kevin: It's another good guide on how journalists can use Twitter, but it's good and comprehensive, exactly what you'd expect on Mashable.
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Kevin: Jeff Jarvis says that members of the union at the Boston Globe shouldn't have rejected the package of pay and benefit cuts that parent company New York Times is offering but rather reject the strategy they have put forward. Jeff says: "The Guild should have demanded a strategy that transforms the Globe into a smaller but profitable venture that concentrates only on news and serving the community and not on printing and distribution, jettisoning huge costs but coming out with a sustainable plan."
links for 2009-06-09
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Suw: "top-down dissemination technologies that supported them are being supplanted by an open, many-to-many networked media environment. What platforms, standards, and practices will replace or transform legacy public media?"
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Suw: Online tools don't increase the number of people we can maintain meaningful relationships with.
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Kevin: "The Oriental Post, a Chinese-language newspaper, was launched in Gaborone, Botswana on Friday, making it the first paper to serve the Southern African Development Community's Chinese population."
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Kevin: Dirk Kirchberg gives an excellent, bi-lingual (German and English) review of Deutsche Welle's Global Media Forum. I wrote several posts on the Guardian's digital media blog, PDA, and also a post on Strange Attractor. Dirk gives an an excellent overview and several video interviews with people from the conference. A couple of highlights form the post are his interview with Brian Storm of multi-media group MediaStorm and also his comments about Thomas Rid and Marc Hecker's book War 2.0, which looks at Web 2.0 and irregular warfare. It's an excellent book and Thomas and Marc are fascinating and engaging scholars. War 2.0 is well worth a read if you're interested in security policy and new communication technology.
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Kevin: Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz talks to former CNN correspondent Miles O'Brien, about his use of a new website True/Slant to allow individual journalists to develop their own brands. Lewis Dvorkin launched the project. "Dvorkin is a media veteran who has worked for the New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, AOL and TMZ.com. He is backed by $3 million in funding from Forbes Media and Fuse Capital." "True/Slant contributors blog, put up video and "follow" each other, while readers can follow them and post comments of their own." I think it's one of the more interesting ideas that I've seen not only in terms of funding but also in terms of how they are trying to build community around their content.
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