Category Archives: Journalism

09.24.07
by

Abusing goodwill

I like to think that the world is based on goodwill. People are, generally speaking, nice and, by default, they will respect and help others. Certainly humans are fundamentally and inescapably social creatures that need each other on a minute-by-minute and day-to-day basis, and I think that being nice is one of the attributes that which fuels the reciprocation that makes helping someone else ultimately worth it for us ourselves.

I also think that the social web is an expression of the niceness that lubricates society. All the mores that have built up around blogging and wikis and sharing and Creative Commons are based on being nice: if you quote someone’s blog, it’s being nice to credit them; Wikipedia encourages everyone to be nice to newbies; sharing anything with strangers is an act of niceness in itself; and Creative Commons licences are predicated on the idea that people will be nice and respect them.

Whilst niceness isn’t universal – there are people who aren’t nice – it is a desirable attribute, so much so that niceness is taught and enforced from birth. I doubt there’s anyone reading this who wasn’t told as a child to “be nice” or to “play nicely”. Nice is good. We need nice.

This might explain why I get so cross when I come across examples of people, or especially businesses, not playing nice. But thanks to the internet, we now get to call out companies who, whilst sticking to the letter of the law (or Creative Commons licence), are flagrantly abusing its spirit.

First up, Virgin Mobile Australia. They found a photo of two American girls on Flickr, and decided to use part of it on billboard and online ads, with the taglines “Dump your pen friend” and “Free text virgin to virgin”. Alison Chang was the girl featured, and her family is now suing, saying that the ad “caused their teenage daughter grief and humiliation”, and listing both Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons as defendants.

The photo in question was shared on Flickr using an attribution licence, meaning that technically, it could be used by any company for commercial purposes without requiring permission from the photographer (although the licence has now been changed to “all rights reserved”). But there are legal issues around this use, because, despite the liberal reuse licence that was used, Australia requires model release forms to be signed before an image can be used in an advert. The original photo is still on Flickr, as is a photo of the billboard ad.

But what really stings about this is that it’s just not nice. Whether or not the CC licence allowed for commercial reuse, what Virgin Mobile and their PR companies – Host and The Glue Society, according to blog, Duncan’s Print – did was really unpleasant. There was absolutely no reason why they couldn’t have used stock photos for any ads that needed to feature people, but instead they whipped free photos off Flickr without giving a moment’s thought to the impact it might have. And Virgin Mobile Pty Ltd.’s response is absolutely disgraceful. The AP quotes them as saying:

Virgin Mobile Pty Ltd., the Australian company, released a statement saying the use of the photo is lawful and fits with Virgin’s image.

“The images have been featured within the positive spirit of the Creative Commons Agreement, a legal framework voluntarily chosen by the photographers,” the statement said. “It allows for their photographs to be used for a variety of purposes, including commercial activities.”

The “positive spirit” of Creative Commons is about constructive reuse, and this cocky attitude that they can take someone’s image and insult them publicly in the name of advertising is repulsive. Virgin and its PR company might not have broken the letter of copyright law, but they certainly showed no thought or consideration for Alison Chang.This sort of behaviour is just not nice, and Virgin should be castigated for it.
Now, on to Jo Jo, whose story is much more straightforward. Jo Jo writes about and photographs food on her blog Eat2Love, the trouble is, journalists keep lifting her ideas – both in terms of the things that she writes about and the way that she styles the food she photographs. Whilst this has been going on, according to her, since January, the straw that broke the camels back for her was seeing photographs that looked very much like hers on the cover of Gourmet magazine. And it’s not just Gourmet. In an email to me a couple of days ago, Jo Jo names another two publications and talks of a “major” website that poached her work.

Again, the journalists, photographers and editors who are lifing ideas from Jo Jo aren’t breaking the law. You cannot copyright ideas, and I think that’s a damn good thing, otherwise nothing would ever progress, but regularly poaching someone’s ideas without ever acknowledging how heavily your work is influenced by them, or without building something original on top of their idea, isn’t a very nice thing to do. Journalists and photographers get paid for their creativity, and nicking someone else’s is a cheap shot.

I know people who would probably respond to this by saying “Well, tough – that’s how it goes when you put your stuff online for free, and you just have to suck it up,” but the sad thing is that it forces a binary decision to be made. Either Jo Jo puts up with being constantly ripped off, or she stops blogging. She decided to at the very least cut back on blogging – she’s written just two posts in the last two months, and has removed much of her archive:

90 % of the articles on this blog have been removed from view. what you are viewing are my write-ups of a few food events, and some restaurants.

I think that’s a real shame.

I have real sympathy for Jo Jo. I remember when I was a budding music journalist trying to get a commission from a very high-profile glossy music magazine. I was asked to fax them five different feature ideas, which I did. I was fobbed off by the editor with some feeble excuse as to why my ideas were no good, only to see a few months later one of them written up by someone else. Could I prove that it was my idea? No, I couldn’t, but it was distinctive enough that it pretty clearly was my idea. And that was really galling – I felt like I’d been played for a fool, and it was this sort of shitty behaviour that, along with the shitty pay, drove me away from music journalism.

Now, I think there’s a different thing going on when people release under Creative Commons, and make the choice to let others reuse their work, or when you can see a professional benefit from seeing your stuff redistributed by other people. But one of the main tenets of Creative Commons is attribution, saying where you got stuff from. When someone poaches ideas and doesn’t admit that they weren’t being original, that’s unacceptable.

The flip side is that it’s easier and easier to find out who is ripping whom off, and who’s not playing nice. Companies are going to have to learn that it’s just not worth their while being the schoolground shark that tricks the other kids out of their pocket money, because they are going to get found out. Even monkeys have a sense of what is fair play, and in the blogosphere, this innate sense is getting honed to a sharp point.

So my advice to any business intending to take advantage of all that lovely free content out there? Play nice.

08.28.07
by

Trying to fit a square ‘news peg’ into a round hole

Today, l received a call from a BBC producer – I’ll leave out which BBC outlet – who wanted to discuss a story on the next generation internet. It was loosely based on an Associated Press story that Japan was going to fund research for new network technology to “replace the Internet to tackle growing quality and security problems”. The producer said that the US Congress had so far not funded such research, and that Japan was the first government to fund the research for what she initially called ‘Internet 2’.

I said, no it isn’t. The Internet 2 project in the United States has been up and running since the mid-90s. She countered that Japan was the first government to fund such a project. No, it isn’t. The NSF in the US and CERN in Europe have been funding similar work for years. And last I looked, the NSF was a US government agency so to say that the US Congress hadn’t allocated specific funding might be true, but to say that no such government funding exists in the US is false.

The AP article itself – at least the one that I found on the International Herald Tribune site – was really poorly written with some basic factual errors, but all it would have taken was a quick Google on ‘internet 2’ or ‘next generation internet’ to uncover a number of such projects, either proposed or already in place. CERN built the first intercontinental 10-Gigabet ethernet WAN in 2005. And really, some would say that the next generation internet is already being deployed in the form of IPv6. The Chinese CERN has been touting their IPv6 project since 2004. And the project that Japan is talking about sounds eerily familiar to the Global Environment for Networking Investigations initiative announced in 2005 and again funded by the NSF.

After a while, the producer admitted that she didn’t know about all of these things and didn’t know much about the story, but just wanted to have a discussion about what the next generation internet might look like for consumers.

This happens in tech news all the time: A story comes up which is not news to anyone in the industry, but is news to a producer with no background in tech. That’s fair enough. It’s a specialist subject and it can take time for stories to acquire interest to the non-tech literate, but what really put me off taking part is that the producer had done so little preparation apart from reading a really brief AP story.

The problem is that this isn’t isolated to technology coverage. I know that as a journalist, we’re mostly generalists and are called on to report on a wide range of topics. But a quick internet search and some basic research can give most journalists what they need, and it would have most likely made this producer aware that there was ‘no there, there’. It was a flimsy ‘news peg’ based on a lot of inaccurate information.

In the end, I declined to take part in the dicussion. It made me really uncomfortable that although her facts were wrong, that she still wanted to run with the segment. I know she’s got 24 hours to fill, but this is a point of ethics. No journalist should be setting up a piece based on a flimsy premise or, worse, false information.

These kind of false discussions happen quite often. As a matter of fact, I am tired of the media being a controversy-creation industry. Suw and I have written about it in terms of technology or science coverage, but this also happens in social and current affairs journalism. But hey, why let the facts stand in the way of a good story?

08.23.07
by

New, new uses, or new to you?

A few weeks ago, I blogged some thoughts about innovation inspired by the close of The Economist’s Project Red Stripe, to which Jeff Jarvis responded. Jeff’s post was interesting, as were the comments, but one in particular from Malcolm Thomson stood out:

John Robinson says rightly “A protected group from within can come up with innovation, but unless they require no money or commitment, then they have to go before some decision-making person or body.”

But ‘unless they require no money…’ is of significance. Now that the tools of video journalism are so incredibly cheap, now that tuition with regard to the essential skills is so accessible (CurrentTV’s tutorials, etc.), the reporting/storytelling innovators must surely already exist in growing numbers.

Many months ago, I collaborated on a project looking at the future of retail. I’d been asked to take part in two discussion sessions by the company writing the report, and four of us sat around a big whiteboard thinking about trends in retail, and what the future might hold 5, 10 and 15 years out.

Our main conclusion was that the final recipients of this report, a global company who wanted to be prepared for the future, were woefully unequipped to even make the most of the present. Many of the most basic things that you’d expect such a company to do online were not being done and it was clear that, given the culture of the organisation, they were not likely to get done any time soon. It wasn’t so much that they weren’t Web 2.0, more than that they hadn’t even made it as far as Web 1.0 yet.

Much of the media – and other sectors too – struggle to understand the developments of the last 5 – 10 years, and find it difficult to work existing technologies into their business, even when there are clear benefits to doing so. But it’s not like things are actually changing that quickly, especially if you stay on top of developments. As Tom Coates said about the broadband vs. TV ‘debate’ last year (his italics):

These changes are happening, they’re definitely happening, but they’re happening at a reasonable, comprehendible pace. There are opportunities, of course, and you have to be fast to be the first mover, but you don’t die if you’re not the first mover – you only die if you don’t adapt.

My sense of these media organisations that use this argument of incredibly rapid technology change is that they’re screaming that they’re being pursued by a snail and yet they cannot get away! ‘The snail! The snail!’, they cry. ‘How can we possibly escape!?. The problem being that the snail’s been moving closer for the last twenty years one way or another and they just weren’t paying attention.

When businesses talk about innovation, they frequently mean “new” in the sense of “brand, spanking, no-one-has-ever-done-this-before new” or “first mover new”. Because they see the landscape as changing at an alarming rate, and they see innovation with the same blank-paper fear as the blocked writer, the whole thing becomes terrifying. Add to that the fact that they do not have a good solid grip on the state of the art as it is now, and you end up with a group of petrified execs standing on the brink of a chasm they fear is too wide and too deep to risk jumping, because the only outcome they can see is crash and burn.

Another type of innovation is the “new use” – taking tools that someone else has created and using them in an innovative way. How do you use all this Web 2.0 stuff that people are creating all the time and work it into your business? How does it bring value to your audience? What symbiotic relationships can you nurture that will enable you to do something different? This is the sort of innovation that I think the media needs to focus on.

Some are trying very hard to do this, some are just paying lip service, but many aren’t trying at all. Comments are a great example of a relatively new technology – it’s only been around for a few years – which the press have embraced en masse, but entirely failed to use effectively. The point of comments is that it allows writers to have a conversation with their readers, and for stories to continue to be developed post-publication, yet in the majority of cases comment functionality is slapped on to the bottom of every article – regardless of whether that article would benefit from comments – and readers are left to fight it out by themselves. Little of worth is added to either the articles, the publisher’s brand, or the commenters’ lives.

Creating a boxing ring online is not an innovative way of using comment technology, it is obvious, old-school, and short-sighted. It’s creating conflict to sell newspapers, increase hits or get more viewers for your TV slug fest.

Equally, using video to replicate television is like using Thrust to do the shopping – it makes no sense and is a massive waste of money. There are plenty of big hitters already doing TV rather well, and in an era of 24 hour rolling news, the last thing that we need is to replicate that online. Rather, the media should be using online video to do things that TV cannot do, to get places TV cannot go, to examine issues with the sort of depth and nuance that 24-hour rolling news couldn’t manage if their very lives depended upon it, to tell the stories that TV has no time for.

Where are these media outlets – newspapers or otherwise – who can honestly say that they are using even just comments and video truly innovatively? In so many cases I see new-school technologies used in old-school ways that transform it from groundbreaking to mundane. One case in point was Ben Hammersley’s BBC project about the Turkish elections. Yes, he was using Del.icio.us, and Flickr and he was blogging and using RSS, but with a distinctly old-school flavour that robbed the tools of their own potential.

A pneumatic nail gun can put nails through steel girders, but if all you do with it is build a garden shed, you might as well have used a hammer.

Finally, technology may not be new, but if it’s “new to you”, it can have real value. It used to be just blogs that provided an RSS feed, but then the tech press started using RSS, and now it has become standard across the majority of major news sites – no one sensible is without it. Other outlets might be using blogs or Del.icio.us or wikis, but that shouldn’t stop you from assessing how best you can use these tools yourselves.

But businesses are inherently neo-phobic, and this has resulted in the Great Race to be Second: the burning desire of companies everywhere to watch what others do and see if it succeeds before they follow suite. Neo-phobia also leads companies into a state of group-think, where they use technology only in the same ways that they’ve seen other people use it. RSS is another fabulous example of this – news outlets will only provide a headline and excerpt news feed, rather than a full feed, because they are scared that if people can read their content in their aggregator, they will not visit the site and if they don’t visit the site then valuable page views and click-throughs are lost.

Every now and again I see an article saying that full feeds increase click-throughs, the most recent being Techdirt, and their argument is compelling (their italics):

[I]n our experience, full text feeds actually does lead to more page views, though understanding why is a little more involved. Full text feeds makes the reading process much easier. It means it’s that much more likely that someone reads the full piece and actually understands what’s being said — which makes it much, much, much more likely that they’ll then forward it on to someone else, or blog about it themselves, or post it to Digg or Reddit or Slashdot or Fark or any other such thing — and that generates more traffic and interest and page views from new readers, who we hope subscribe to the RSS feed and become regular readers as well. The whole idea is that by making it easier and easier for anyone to read and fully grasp our content, the more likely they are to spread it via word of mouth, and that tends to lead to much greater adoption than by limiting what we give to our readers and begging them to come to our site if they want to read more than a sentence or two. So, while many people claim that partial feeds are needed to increase page views where ads are hosted, our experience has shown that full text feeds actually do a great deal to increase actual page views on the site by encouraging more usage.

But even if the assumption that partial feeds drive traffic to ads is correct, there’s still no excuse for having partial feeds, because ads in RSS have been around for ages. I don’t remember when Corante started putting ads in the RSS feed, but they’ve been doing it for ages and I have never had a single complaint about it. I don’t know what the click-through rates are compared to the ads on the site, but I’m sure that it would be possible to experiment and find out. It is undoubtedly possible to design a study that would give you the right sort of data to compare the effectiveness of partial, full, or full with ads feeds, but I’ve yet to hear of one.

And therein, I think, lies the rub. We don’t always know what will happen when we introduce new technology, but instead of experimenting, the majority prefer to go along with group-think and the old-school ways. They want innovation but only as a buzzword to chuck around in meetings – the reality is just too scary. Yes, there are mavericks who get this stuff, but they are frequently hamstrung by the neo-phobes, and have to spend their time pushing through small, bite-sized changes whilst they wait for the dinosaurs to die off.

08.22.07
by

Bring on the noise

Looking through my feeds, I noticed a wonderfully droll post by Steve Yelvington on yet another tedious bloggers versus journalists article, this one by Michael Skube in the LATimes. Mr Skube’s professorial tone befits the news as lecture model that he seems to be defending like a modern day Williams Jennings Bryan. Mr Skube writes: “One gets the uneasy sense that the blogosphere is a potpourri of opinion and little more.” To which Steve responds:

One does? Perhaps one gets such an uneasy sense from not reading the blogs about which one is opining. Or from not writing what actually gets published.

It would appear that Mr Skube’s commentary is “a potpourri of opinion and little more”. You see Mr Skube, as Steve and others points out, hasn’t actually read many blogs. He hasn’t done the reporting that he’s chastising bloggers for not doing. But more than that, Skube refers to Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo as an example of a bloviating blogger. TPM and its sister site, TPM Muckraker, actually do journalism, and more than that, they have some of the more successful examples of crowd-sourced journalism to date. Josh e-mailed him and asked if he was familiar with TPM why had he included it as an example of a “dearth of original reporting in the blogosphere”.

Not long after I wrote I got a reply: “I didn’t put your name into the piece and haven’t spent any time on your site. So to that extent I’m happy to give you benefit of the doubt …”

An editor added the reference and Skube didn’t know enough to ask that it be taken out. Dan Gillmor calls on the LATimes to print at least a correction if not an outright apology.

UPDATE: (Via Jay Rosen at PressThink. Thanks for the link and quote, Jay.) The LATimes editorial page editor Jim Newton has published this note about the editing process:

Note from Editorial Page Editor Jim Newton

August 22, 2007

A number of readers have contacted The Times in recent days regarding an Aug. 19th opinion piece by Michael Skube. In some cases, readers have asked whether Times’ editors improperly inserted material in Michael Skube’s piece without his knowledge or permission. That was not the case, as this note from Skube makes clear:

Before my Aug. 19 Opinion piece on bloggers was printed, an editor asked if it would be helpful to include the names of the bloggers in my piece as active participants in political debate. I agreed.

– Michael Skube

Readers will choose to agree or disagree with Skube’s conclusions, but I hope the above resolves questions about the editing of the article.

Sincerely,

Jim Newton

Editorial Page Editor

This reader doesn’t see a clarification, but a game of pass the buck. What’s even more shocking, is that this is the second poorly researched and reported piece by Skube on the subject, notes Paul Jones, who teaches at the University of North Carolina.

Skube unfortunately seems to fall in the trap of so many commentators who seem to think that style trumps substance and that a finely honed piece of prose somehow obviates the need for research. Dearth of reporting perhaps, Mr Skube?

I share Shane Richmond’s reaction:

What’s exasperating is that every time some journalist notices blogs (where have they been, for goodness sake?) and decides that they herald the end of civilisation as we know it, there’s some editor somewhere who will print their ravings.

These columns keep getting printed because they play to the professional biases of journalists. They play to the uninformed view that passes for conventional wisdom that there is a monolithic blogosphere, and that it is populated by wannabe columnists who try to get a foot in the door of the media by being louder and more irresponsible than the columnists they hope to replace. If you want the model those bloggers are emulating, look to comment pages and the head-to-head battles of cable news networks.

But the problem is that despite a consistent portrayal in the media of the blogosphere as political shouting shout match, this represents a fraction of the blogosphere. In the US, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that only 11% of bloggers focus on politics and government and only 5% focus on general news and current events. My hunch, and I won’t say that it’s a well researched one, is that these commentators only see political blogs because there is a professional selection bias. They comment on politics or current affairs so every blog they are familiar with, or indeed interesting in, is about politics. The blogosphere is a rich world to be explored, not just a political battlefield of the intemperate shock troops of right and left.

I’ve stated my view in the bloggers versus journalists debate frequently. Bloggers don’t want our jobs. Most bloggers write about their personal experiences. Yes, they write about their cats, their sewing, their kids’ footie games. But occasionally, they get caught up in a news event, and then they keep blogging. They commit random acts of journalism. As I just wrote this week for the Australian site, NewMatilda.com, it’s not a threat but an opportunity for those journalists willing and open-minded enough to take it.

08.14.07
by

X|Media|Lab Melbourne: Liz Heller, Buzztone

Sincere apologies to my fellow mentors for not getting some of my notes up sooner, but without WiFi on Friday and the mentoring all weekend, I usually ended up posting late at night. Friday, I stayed up until 130 in the morning. I did as much as I could in between sessions on the weekend, but being a mentor, I wanted to do justice to the groups who came to discuss their projects. As for continuing the late night blogging, exhaustion prevented me from doing more over the weekend.

Liz Heller started out in sociology, and she is fascinated how people travel in ‘groups and loops’. They formed a company called Buzztone, which “creates award-winning lifestyle, pop culture, urban and guerrilla marketing campaigns”. She went on to describe social motivations to keep in mind when thinking about social software and services:

We share a lot in common. We want to be a part of something. We want to share what we love. We all want to be just a little famous. We all want to think that we are the first to find something new. We all want to have friends.

People want to stay in touch with friends they already have. Social networks are seen as ways to deepen existing friendships not supplant them. (Bravo Liz. I couldn’t agree more. Media always cover online social networks as if they supplant not supplement real world social bonds. For most of the people I know, it’s just not so. And Liz added a new word my vocabulary: Frobligations, friends referrals through other friends that you feel obligated to befriend.)

Her work revolves around marketing campaigns that relied on some of these social needs. They used a social club and lots of social outreach to connect women to French wine. They used feedback from the members to feed back into the social club. (Again, I think this is a key thing that most ‘social marketing’ companies forget: Feedback. Most of the time, they focus only on seeding their message in social networks, not using those social networks to make their products better and their companies genuinely more responsive.)

They also developed a student network for Microsoft called Spoke. It was the first social network for tech students. It was global and regionalised. It helped to change student perceptions of Microsoft.

Social networks are a filter. She pointed out MoveOn.org, OurChart (a social network for lesbians from the popular programme The L Word), Block Savvy (a niche urban-focused social network) and a number of others. (When people ask me about how I stay on top of developments in digital media and journalism, and one of the best tools I have is a the dozen or so digital journalism experts who blog in my RSS reader. They are my filter, my radar, my early warning trend watchers. Now, seeing all of these social networks developing, I must say that it reminds me slightly of the late dot.com boom when sites took an e-commerce model and chased increasingly small sales niches. Remember all of those pet e-commerce sites? I think there is value in focused communities online, but that is value to me as an end-user. I’m not so sure about value in terms of a sustainable business model. However, I can see the justification if you’re looking to build a social network around a marketing campaign, even if that isn’t my particular focus.)

Groups and loops for causes. She showed stopglobalwarming.org, a social network following on from Live Earth and Zaadz. Social media encourages face-to-face engagement. Houseparty.com and reunion.com all encourage real world events. (Again, it was really good to hear someone counter the media-driven myth that online social activity creates a world of anti-social people. Whether it’s Twitter, Flickr, Dopplr or my blog, these things reinforce my real world social interaction. They helped jump start my social life when I moved to London a couple of years ago. But as Suw says, Twitter gets her out to the pub to spend time with friends.)

I liked the ideas Liz was presenting. The marketing-sensitive consumer in me was possibly too aware of commercial purpose of some of these projects, but Liz wasn’t just talking about trying to infect social networks with marketing messages, which seems to me the purpose of some viral campaigns. Social marketing campaigns that don’t listen, aren’t social, even if they are targeting social spaces online, and her emphasis on using feedback from the community is often missed by many digital marketing companies.

And I really liked Liz’ emphasis that there is a symbiotic relationship between online and offline community. It’s a myth that online community is a parasitic drain on real world social interaction, and it’s great to hear someone like Liz challenge conventional wisdom.

Technorati Tags: , ,

08.09.07
by

Google News, now with added comments

On Tuesday, Google quietly announced that they have added commenting functionality to Google News (US only), but with, as they put it, “a bit of a twist”:

We’ll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any participant will be able to send in their comments, and we’ll show them next to the articles about the story. Comments will be published in full, without any edits, but marked as “comments” so readers know it’s the individual’s perspective, rather than part of a journalist’s report.

[…] we’re hoping that by adding this feature, we can help enhance the news experience for readers, testing the hypothesis that — whether they’re penguin researchers or presidential candidates– a personal view can sometimes add a whole new dimension to the story.

Google are starting off with the very old-school tactic of asking for comments to be emailed to them, along with:

– A link to the story you are commenting on
– Your contact details: your name, title, and organization
– How we can verify your email address.

Because:

It is important that we are able to verify your identity, so please include clear instructions with your comment. If further information is needed, we will follow-up over email.

You can see a (rather dull) example of the new comments in action on this Google News link, a listing for an Arizona Republic article (syndicated from Bloomberg News), Kids: Food in McDonald’s wrappers taste better. The article says that a Stanford University study found that McDonald’s packaging makes pre-school children think that chicken nuggets, hamburgers and fries taste better.

The first comment is from Walk Riker, VP, McDonalds’s corporate comms, and is the sort of predictable corporate whitewash that you’d expect from McDonald’s. The second comment is from Dr Vic Strasburger, MD, Professor of Pediatrics, University of New Mexico, who discusses the problem with allowing advertising to small children.

Google have said that they’re limiting comments initially to “actual participants in the story in question”, but they seem to mean “anyone quoted or referenced in any of the stories in a cluster”, because Dr Strasburger is not mentioned in the Arizona Republic article, but is mentioned in a related Time article. That’s potentially quite a tangle of “actual participants” to sort out, and it looks like comments that refer to a specific article will end up getting lumped in with all the other comments on all related articles. Hardly the clear, transparent, relevant use of comments that we’ve become used to with blogs.

But I think that rule is deeply flawed, anyway. One of the things that frustrates me most about the media is their propensity to publish industry press releases seemingly in toto, without any balancing views. In these cases, it’s important that people not quoted in the story be able to comment in order to balance out poor or biased journalism. By only allowing the previously quoted to comment, Google News are, as the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart once said about MSM blogs, “giving a voice to the already voiced”.

I also wonder about the feasibility of scaling up full comment moderation. Google News is tracking 4,500 sources and linking to thousands of articles, just one comment on each is going to create a massive workload for the moderators. Even normal moderation of comments on a medium-sized media website is highly onerous, so much so that many news sites prefer the “report abuse” approach, rather than have to moderate each comment as it comes through. The volume of comments can be just huge, and if you add in verification of the commenter’s identity, you open up a whole new can of worms.

For starters, what type of verification are they going to do? Validating that a commenter is actually a human being is the most common sort of verification, and it’s pretty easy. KittenAuth can help you with that. Validating that a person is who they say they are is slightly trickier – people do have this nasty habit of pretending to be other people, and they can be really quite good at it. How far is Google going to go to make people prove that they are who they say they are, just so that they can leave a comment on a news article?

Once your identity has been satisfactorily verified by Google, and they’ve ascertained that you were at some point mentioned by a journalist in one of the articles that’s been clustered together as related, then you get to comment. I can see the logic behind this – Google thinks that if you are commenting under your real name, you’ll somehow be more responsible and provide a higher quality of comments. Sorry Google, it doesn’t work like that. Businesses will simply spin their corporate line, just like McDonald’s did, and individuals will still be capable of showing horrible lapses of judgement over what they think is suitable for public consumption. Putting a name against a comment doesn’t guarantee that that comment will be high-quality, or even factually correct. It just means it’s got a name against it.

I wonder if they are going to moderate the content of the comments too? I should imagine they would have to. If comments are to be “published in full, without any edits”, then they will have to delete anything which could be seen as libellous, defamatory or obscene, because otherwise they are at risk of legal action. What about comments that are just a bit sweary? I guess they’ll go too.

However, I’d bet good money that factually inaccurate, ill-concieved or woo-woo-based comments will get published without a problem, along with all the whitewash, propaganda, hype, disinformation and spin. And because, of course, only “participants” are eligible to comment, no one else will be able to debunk the nonsense that gets published.

Overall, I can’t say that I’m impressed by this – it’s both too messy and too orderly. It’s too messy because comments on different articles will all be bundled up in one heap and attached to the news cluster, thwarting any attempt to understand the real context within which the comment was made. And too orderly because only the incumbents get to take part – they are given the opportunity to make and remake their points, but the wider community doesn’t. Will this breed a good debate? I doubt it very much indeed.

08.09.07
by

X|Media|Lab Melbourne: Jason Roks, the Real News

Real News is a non-corporate, non-government funded news organisation. They rely on a $10 a month donation. I’m just going to link the video on YouTube. There are some pretty heavy hitters behind this project: Gore Vidal, Tom Fenton and Robert McChesney, just to name a few.

Jason is a technical advisor, and instead of talking about the editorial proejct, he wanted to show the technology that makes this possible. RealNews is done by print journalists with video elements added to the stories. Distribution is an important part of the equation. Jason mentioned about the network caps, and there was a knowing laugh from the audience. It sounds as if the models in Australia is similar to the UK in that you can have fast broadband, but many accounts are capped at only a few gigabytes per month.

Flash 9 video and peering help RealNews, and MPEG-4 has become the standard.

He then touched on User-Generated Distribution. The next step beyond user-generated content will be recommenders or as Malcolm Gladwell called them, the connectors. He demonstrated an XML feeds and a service called OnYa. (Jason e-mailed me to let me know that Onya was just an internal code name. A similar service is set to launch soon.) They have built scrapers that go through 200 video sites online. People can search those sites and create a custom channels via XML. They can publish the XML files to Apple TV or Windows Media Player.

He finished with a video about Net Neutrality. SaveTheInternet.com

Technorati Tags: , ,

08.06.07
by

Let’s get ready to rumble

Let’s get ready to rumble

“Religion causes all wars.” Not my words, but only one of a number of provocative statements in a new series of ads Sky News is running to promote its online discussions. After these ‘fighting words‘, they ask: “Looking for an argument?”

My question to Sky News or any news organisation for that matter: Do you want an online community or fight club? Many online community experts use the pub as a metaphor. In this case, if Sky News was a pub, would they advertise: Come to Pub Sky. It’s a great place to fight.

But this seems to the be the strategy of a number of news organisations. They shout fire in a theatre, and then are strangely surprised and shocked as the audience turns into a mob. As news organisations, we bear some responsibility for the conversations we create. We cannot lay the blame solely at the feet of commenters on our sites when the conversation devolves into a shouting match, when we started the argument in the first place.

I’ve spoken with too many editors and online managers asking for technical solutions for crowd control while they never consider modifying their editorial approach. As I’ve said before, shiny tools won’t save you from the trolls, and they won’t save you from chatroom brawls of your own making.

Now, in the binary world of journalistic arguments, I can hear editors saying that I’m advocating bland conversations. No, no my black-and-white-world friends, there is a huge range of possibility between blandness and the type of simplistic provocation that I see in these adverts and in so many shout-y headlines.

Just think of how you would respond if someone came and shouted in your face. What would your likely response be? Most likely it won’t be a pleasant conversation or interesting debate.

08.05.07
by

Where’s your innovation?

This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for ages, but Neil McIntosh’s post about the closure of The Economist‘s skunk works, Project Red Stripe, has finally prodded me into action.

Project Red Stripe was a small team of six Economist employees who were given £100,000 and asked to “develop something that is innovative and web-based and bring it to market” within six months. They brought in outside experts to talk to the group and solicited ideas, from Economist readers and the wider blogosphere, which they then “evaluate[d …] against a set of criteria that the Project Red Stripe team have predetermined”.

Unfortunately, the idea that they came up with wasn’t really one that The Economist could see a way to earn any money out of. Project Lughenjo was described as:

[A] web service that harnesses the collective intelligence of The Economist Group’s community, enabling them to contribute their skills and knowledge to international and local development organisations. These business minds will help find solutions to the world’s most important development problems.

It will be a global platform that helps to offset the brain drain, by making expertise flow back into the developing world. We’ve codenamed the service “Lughenjo”, an Tuvetan word meaning gift.

Announced only four weeks ago, it has now had the plug pulled.

Neil, in his response to this turn of events, rightly questions whether ‘profitable’ is the only definition of success, and points out that innovation isn’t always radical and that a single innovation’s success can be, instead of based on it’s own performance in isolation, a result of its position within a group of innovative components that are profitable only in the aggregate. He says:

The lessons for news organisations? We needn’t make innovation hard by insisting the end product is always huge and/or high-profile. We shouldn’t think that innovation is something that can be outsourced, either to a small team or to a software vendor (the latter being a surprisingly popular choice for many newspaper publishers).

And we needn’t necessarily worry that we’re not having enough ideas. If you ask around, you’ll probably find it’s not ideas we’re lacking. What’s tricky (I know – this is my job) is capturing the best ideas, mapping them to strategic goals, and delivering them in a way that makes them successful.

To do that, you need innovators who understand the importance of baby steps and can deliver them, one after the other, regular as clockwork. And, unlike Red Stripe, you can make their life easier by making sure they’re not locked away from the rest of the business, worrying about a blank sheet of paper and a mighty expectation from the mother ship that, somehow, they’ll be able to see the future from there.

Neil also links to Jeff Jarvis, who says:

[T]hey ended up, I think, not so much with a business but with a way to improve the world. Their idea, “Lughenjo,” was described in PaidContent as “a community connecting Economist with non-governmental organizations needing help – ‘a Facebook for the Economist Group’s audience.’ ” It wasn’t intended to be fully altruistic; they thought there was a business here in advertising to these people, maybe. But still, it was about helping the world. And therein lies the danger.

I saw this same phenomenon in action when, as a dry run for my entrepreneurial course, I asked my students at the end of last term what they would do with a few million dollars to create something new in journalism. Many of them came up with ways to improve the world: giving away PCs to the other side of the digital divide, for example. Fine. But then the money’s gone and there’s not a new journalist product to carry on.

This gives me hope for the essential character of mankind: Give smart people play money and they’ll use it to improve the lots of others. Mind you, I’m all for improving the world. We all should give it a try.

But we also need to improve the lot of journalism. And one crucial way we’re going to do that is to create new, successful, ongoing businesses that maintain and grow journalism. We need profit to do that.

A very good point. Altruism isn’t really what’s needed, and it doesn’t necessarily equate to innovation (although in rare cases, it does – think of the $100 laptop project).

It’s not just newspapers
One thing that’s really important is to remember that the problems that The Economist have with innovation also face many other businesses in many different sectors. I see, for example, the PR industry just storing up trouble, the way that they have segmented themselves in to different agency types such as creative, print, TV, or online. I don’t think that any company can afford to segment its PR and marketing like that, let alone an entire industry. How can the situation where your creative team is separate from your online team – and those teams are run by different companies – be a good way to keep abreast of technology, to understand and grasp the opportunities? If a creative agency has an idea for online, how will they be able to implement it if online is run by someone else who is actually in competition. Now, maybe I’m misunderstanding the way that the PR world works, but that’s how it looks to me on the outside: like built-in failure.

(More…)

Continue reading →

08.03.07
by

Instant visualisation for bridge data in the US

I was looking for a way to map the connections to Strange Attractor, and I stumbled upon this visualisation tool from IBM called Many Eyes. A couple of clicks later, and I found this amazing visualisation looking at the status of bridges in the US, an interesting and dynamic way to look at data in the wake of the Minnesota bridge collapse. I’ve often thought that news organisations are missing a trick by not making greater use of data visualisation and rich information graphics. Give it a click. The graph dynamically changes as you roll over it. I also think it’s an interesting way to have people look for patterns in large sets of information, and I think graphics like this could be a great launching point for discussions. (Only one thing I might suggest to the folks at IBM, another go at their Blog This button. Maybe it’s just Ecto being a bit weird, but the formatting could be a little more straightforward.)