02.04.09
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Commenting on public documents

I was impressed by the Writetoreply.org idea to post the Digital Britain interim report on a Comment-Press installation to allow people to comment on it. You can read some of the background to the project from Tony Hirst, who flagged this up on the BBC Backstage list. It really ticks a lot of public service boxes for me, and I think this is something that journalism oganisations could and should do. Hats off to Joss Winn for putting this together.

This is just the latest example of posting public documents for public comment. Gavin Bell did this with the European Constitution, and the Free Software Foundation hosted an amazing project that allowed people to comment on the GNU General Public Licence version 3. A heatmap showed down to the word level the parts of the document that were generating the most comment, and it had a very intuitive interface.

Out of the GPL project grew a service called Co-ment. I was able to grab a copy of the report, convert it to RTF and upload it. The basic level of service only allows 20 people to comment on it, and this is just my cut-and-paste coding proof of concept. If you’d like to comment, drop me an e-mail, and I’ll add you to the list, bearing in mind that I only have 20 slots available. But the public service journo-geek in me loves stuff like this.

Have a play. I’d like to see how this works. It’s already got a lot of ideas flowing.

02.03.09
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links for 2009-02-03

01.31.09
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links for 2009-01-31

01.30.09
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links for 2009-01-30

01.29.09
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links for 2009-01-29

  • Op-Ed Contributor – News You Can Endow – NYTimes.com
    Kevin: A plan to save newspapers. "Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities." I'm not sure about this. I think that one of the problems with newspapers is that they aren't connected with communities. Insulating them from profit-loss might make the journalism loftier but also more irrelevant. Having said, having worked for the BBC and now the Guardian, having some insulation from market fluctuations has its benefits.
    (tags: journalism businessmodels nonprofit endowment)
  • Reuters Scoops Itself By Twittering From Davos
    Kevin: Henry Blodget of the Silicon Insider says: "George Soros just predicted that the global economic collapse could end up being worse than the Great Depression. How do we know? Because Reuters' editor in chief, David Schlesinger, Twittered the speech live from Davos. Journalism evolves!"
    (tags: journalism twitter Davos)
  • How to Change the World: Report on Obama's Use of Social Media
    Kevin: You'll have to download a PDF, but it's an interesting look at Barack Obama's use of social media. "Although the Obama campaign was revolutionary in some respects, it ultimately used the same
    tools that many campaigns had previously employed. However, the campaign did everything
    incrementally better than its competitors." Pay special attention to the section on mobile.
    (tags: socialmedia BarackObama organising)
  • What’s happening to our news?
    Kevin: An interesting analysis (much of which I agree with) about the upcoming report by Andrew Currah from the Reuters Institute about journalism. "This report is not without value, but as an analysis of how newspapers are dealing with the transition online it doesn’t really offer an fresh insights."
    (tags: journalism andrewcurrah reutersinstitute research economics)
  • Markmedia: Journalists on the new journalism: Joanna Geary
    Kevin: Joanna Geary talks with Mark Comerford about the 'new journalism' and when she had her aha moment.
    (tags: journalism innovation joannageary)
  • TPMCafe | Talking Points Memo | The Media's Role In The Financial Crisis
    Kevin: Straight shooting from Dan Gillmor who watched and blogged about the housing bubble from one of the centres of the catastrophe, California. He writes: "Our government's current operating principle seems to be bailing out people who were culpable in the financial meltdown. If so, journalists are surely entitled to billions of dollars.

    Why? Journalists were grossly deficient when it came to covering the reckless behavior, sleaze and willful ignorance of fundamental economics, much of which was reasonably obvious to anyone who was paying attention, that inflated the housing and credit bubbles of the past decade."

    (tags: economics financialcrisis journalism accountability)
01.27.09
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links for 2009-01-27

01.24.09
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links for 2009-01-24

01.23.09
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links for 2009-01-23

01.22.09
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links for 2009-01-22