Coming to San Francisco

I’m going to be in San Francisco between 15th and 23rd April, although up in Sebastopol for the weekend. I have two projects running at the moment that I’d like to explore with anyone who’s interested.

The future of the social web
What might the future of the social web look like? What trends and developments in technology, demographics, etc. might influence how things could change? If you had to ask “What if…?”, which “if” would you ask?

Books and publishing
How do you write? What are the challenges to finishing a long-form piece? If you’re an agent or a publisher, what are the missing pieces in your publishing puzzle? What tasks or processes are clunky and awkward?

If you want to meet up with me to talk about either the social web or books, let me know.

And if you just want to meet up for a chinwag, then I’m holding a bit of a do on the evening of Tuesday 21st. I’ve tried to do an event thingy on Facebook, but again, ping me by email or @suw me on Twitter if you fancy coming. The location is to be decided – please leave a comment if you have any suggestions for somewhere nice and relatively quiet (big noisy venues aren’t my style; I like to be able to hold a conversation without shouting).

links for 2009-04-08

links for 2009-04-07

Complexity and news: The Financial Crisis

One of my biggest criticisms of my profession, journalism, is that we don’t do complexity or nuance very well. My friend and colleague Bobbie Johnson once referred to this as ‘binary journalism’. I always found it odd that many media commentators criticised George Bush’s Manichean world view (a view that is in itself simplistic) when the media delights in over-simplified stories of good versus evil that seem have more of a place in comic strips than journalism. However, whether it’s climate change or the global financial crisis, journalism needs to deal with complexity. We need to explain it to our audience in ways that engages and adds to their understanding.

Unfortunately, I fear that journalists are leaving this job to GAB – the Global Association of Bloviators, well-paid commentators who make a helluva lot of money not explaining a complex world but rather engaging in polarised shouting matches on talk radio, cable television and comment sites. It can be greatly entertaining and distracting, but it’s the information equivalent of professional wrestling while Rome burns. We can’t have binary journalism in an analogue world where often things exist not only on a continuum but in complex, multi-dimensional inter-relationships.

But therein lies the challenge. How do you Jedi mind trick people who might prefer the theatre of cable news or the simple morality tales of tabloid newspapers into caring about something that in the end is really complex but have a real impact on their lives as the global financial crisis has? I think that engaging readers using social media and creatively telling stories is the way forward, and we’re starting to see some great examples of this.

During the financial crisis, the collaboration between US National Public Radio’s Planet Money and This American Life have produced some of the most enlightening and entertaining programs on the subject. One of the programs, The Giant Pool of Money, has rightly won a Peabody Award. Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab has interviewed one of the creators, Adam Davidson, about a model for complex news.

NPR’s Adam Davidson on “The Giant Pool of Money” from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

Adam says that journalists need to acknowledge their own ignorance in covering complex stories, and he talks about other lessons he learned in creating what has become a series of some of the best journalism on the financial crisis in any medium. The full transcript is on Nieman’s site if you’d prefer to scan it.

More than this, I think that Adam hits on why I prefer to blogging, in particular, and digital news in general to traditional print or broadcast media, which is that news can be a process of learning that the journalist shares with the audience. Also, as Rob Paterson points out, digital media can be much better than traditional linear media in dealing with complexity, although Adam has done a wonderful job dealing with complexity during a long-form radio program. I appreciate this in Rob’s explanation:

The POV was always going to be – EXPLAIN! The presenters of the show would be representing us. They would start from a position of NOT KNOWING and not understanding the jargon. The irony is that even the so called experts have told Adam that they too have learned from the show.

They got rid of the voice of authority and took their listeners on their own journey of discovery.

I understand all too well the illusion of the ‘VOICE’ that Rob is talking about. The deep bass voices of presenters are meant to represent authority, but the presentation cannot overcome the fundamental superficiality of sound bites, the same interview aired in heavy rotation and minute-thirty packages. Why not just dispense with the theatrics and focus on finding out what we all wanted to know? How the hell did this mess happen? What led us to here?

The global financial crisis is now being packaged into media theatre complete with two-dimensional villains and victims that do a disservice to the real story: The West has maxed out our personal and collective credit cards. Politicians and commentators on the right point to irresponsible borrowers while those on the left point to irrresponsible greedy lenders and financiers. The crisis is here, and while the media retreats into a comfortable narrative that places responsibility on some other segment of society, it will only put off a little longer the hard choices that all segments of society will have to make. This is a moment when journalism can shine, even during this time of industry and individual anxiety. The global financial crisis cries out for great intelligent story-telling. Let’s do the story justice, and hopefully in doing so, we’ll find solutions to the crisis sooner rather than simply putting off the hard choices.

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links for 2009-04-04

links for 2009-04-03

Saving Newspapers: The Musical

A tip of the hat to Harvard University’s Neiman Journalism Lab (a must follow for journalists on Twitter) for this gem.

Let’s all sing along: “In the name of name of digital ubiquity, where you can get the news anytime for free, is there any room for dinosaurs like us, journalists who are already extinct.” New business models: Offer businesses good reviews on Yelp? Sell Marijuana when it’s legalised?

Well, it looks like their solution is a little behind the British tabloids in their plan to save newspapers. But I’ll leave you to watch it. I may have already ahem…revealed too much.

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Proofreading the Public Domain

This is cross-posted from Chocolate and Vodka, but I’ve included different invite codes in this post.

For the last few months I’ve been working with Book Oven, a Canadian start-up whose aim is to make it easier to prepare long texts for publishing by making it a simple, collaborative process.

The first thing we’ve focused on is how to proofread a manuscript for typos. The problem with reading a whole book all at once and looking for typos is that you can get so caught up in reading that your brain starts to skip the mistakes, seeing what it thinks should be there instead of what actually is. But what if you were presented with just one sentence at a time? You’d lack some context, it’s true, but you don’t really need a lot of context to know if “teh” is a misspelling of “the” or that “their” should be “there”.

That’s what we’ve built at Book Oven, and we’ve called it “Bite-Size Edits”. It presents you with a random snippet of text, with a sentence above and below for limited context, and if you spot a typo you can suggest a correction by editing the sentence and clicking “Suggest changes” (click on the images for a closer look or visit our complete How To).

You can also tell us that the snippet is OK as it is by clicking “No changes”, or that there’s something confusing about it by clicking “Skip”.

If our calculations are correct, it will take 100 people just 10 minutes to proofread a 100,000 word book, and we want to bring that collaborative power to bear on on the public domain. Thousands of texts have been uploaded to Project Gutenberg, but although they have been very carefully proofread some still have a small number of errors. Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg’s founder, called for help in removing these errors, so we’ve set up a version of Bite-Size Edits, which we’ve called the Gutenberg Rally, to focus just on texts from Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders (Gutenberg’s proofreading site).

If you’d like to pitch in, all you need to do is pick an invitation code from the list below and visit the Book Oven Gutenberg Rally site to create a new account. When you’ve successfully signed up, please leave a comment with the code you used and I’ll cross it off the list.
Now, just a little word of warning. The site is in alpha, which means that you will almost certainly find things that are broken! We have a feedback form that you can use to let us know and a forum to discuss things (which, is itself something that’s not entirely finished, as it’s not yet fully integrated – just sign in with the same username and password that you create when you join the main site). We’d love your feedback, so don’t spare the horses!

If you explore the site, you’ll find that you can start your own projects, upload your own text (.txt files only at the moment) and can send it to Bite-Size for the community to proof. Please feel free to experiment, but be aware we’re still ironing out bugs and that we have a lot more social functionality still to unveil!

So, for the love proof-reading, get cracking! Oh, but be warned. Bite-Size Edits has been described by one usability tester as “evilly addictive”. Don’t say we didn’t tell you…

(Obviously I can’t update the list whilst I’m asleep, so if you pick a code that doesn’t work, list it in the comments and try another!)

Invite Codes
64sBhU00
9cmRd303
2SZWT4VN
CMIMAPxN
DnZ8idpk
2wAcreZV
INuDo0QJ
Ea4Cx9G3
XHLEILQl
O6yuVrkM
pRZXtN20
t9FQdS3F
o9B2I7T4
eOGMdeK7
gBj9Aqad
bApjyzOw
dZ2OzmLD
dIAgKFHH
MBr9KcfD
amc60MoK
8Mq2UzGd
WiK1TR3U
rCvYJ23b
ysSRF0ig
ZUiOzf5l

Street View in the UK

There’s been a bit of a furore recently about Google’s Street View, which has now come to selected cities in the UK. When it was launched a number of images had to be removed because they showed people in situations that could be potentially embarrassing or which people said invaded their privacy. There was the ambulance crew; the man coming out of a sex shop; the rock star enjoying a pint at his local. Complaints ensued and Google took down the images.

I am slightly perplexed as to why this kerfuffle happened at all. Google had a similar reaction when it launched in the US in May last year, and its face-blurring policy is a result of that pushback. Surely it was ready for a fuss to be made here? Especially as Privacy International pre-emptively threatened them with legal action last July. (PI kept its word and complained to the Information Commissioner’s Office.)

I think Google could have prevented a lot of this bad press by removing suspect images prior to launching the tool. Computers are really bad at figuring out what’s in an image, and even though face recognition software improves every year, a computer cannot make a judgement on whether that face is in a compromising position or not. But humans can, and there are millions of humans online who are not only capable of spotting an obviously unsuitable photo at a glance, but also willing to do so if it’s made easy enough for them.

Google could have put together a Galaxy Zoo-like tool to allow volunteers to assess each photo, after the face-blurring, but before it was accepted into their database. If Galaxy Zoo can find a few tens of thousands of people to check pictures of galaxies, Google can find a couple of million to check Street View photos.

I suppose some people would complain that even if you showed a compromising photo to just three people – which is all it takes to pass reliable judgement on an image – that’s three people too many. But I don’t believe that’s a reasonable stance to take. If you are in a public place then why should you have an expectation of privacy? My dad was once filmed getting off a train at Reading station, and for years afterwards his face showed up on every news story about trains. We have to accept that when we are in public places our image may be captured and may sometimes turn up online, or even on TV.

In my opinion, Google should have assessed the photos prior to publication because it’s good customer care. Google isn’t perfect, but if it has a fault, it’s that it often seems to lack a human dimension, using computer engineering to try and solve what are often human problems. The question of Street View isn’t, to my mind, a privacy question as much as it is a simple issue of empathy. Even the PR angle, really, is secondary, a side-effect to caring/not caring about the people around you. Would there have been as much bad press about Street View if Google had cleaned out any potentially embarrassing photos prior to launch?