Preoccupations

Talks, talks, talks

I get to do a lot of these within the school and I don't post about most. But a couple of weeks ago I talked to a group of some 80 parents of students about social software and I thought it might be worth saying something about this talk here. (I believe there's value in also saying something about a couple of other talks: clips from one follow below; I'll post about another shortly.) The slides are now on Slideshare, here. (Update: some of these slides have been rendered less than clear in the process of uploading and converting them to Slideshare. If you download the slideshow, everything returns to its original PowerPoint glory.)

Parents are worried about social software — and given the sensational way in which it is commonly reported in the traditional media this is no surprise. I was keen to convey how, from the outset, the web was conceived as social and how, in being so, it is fulfilling something fundamental in our nature.

Some of these slides are ones I've used before: they are, for the moment, useful reference points. Some have parts blocked out in the interests of others' privacy. Few need explanation to anyone immersed in Web 2 culture. The 'St Paul's: ICT Group' slide is a snapshot taken from earlier this term when we had just set up this group: the group is not a replacement for our ICT support but a recognition that communities of users have a considerable body of experience and can be their own best resource for help.

A section near the end, 'IV SPS', looks at what we're teaching this term to our first years (13 year-olds) at St Paul's School (SPS). I'll be posting more about this course soon. My job, as this section goes on to say, is very much about having an open office and my guiding star is danah boyd — whose writings are referenced, explicitly and implicitly, in the closing slides. I can't recommend the Congressional Internet Caucus video too highly. 

The social web: a cause for celebration, for thinking again about what we do when we teach and learn … and, as David Weinberger says, for joy.

***** 

During this term I talked to our top two year groups (17 and 18 year-olds) on three occasions. The subject of one talk was, again, the social web — its nature, the need for digital literacy, the implications for work (taking newspapers as an example) and the contrast between how long the technological changes have been coming and the perceived suddenness of it all. I don't think there's much merit in publishing all the slides on the web, but here are my favourites from some of the quotations I used:

David Weinberger: 

Hyperlinks … enrich, rather than reduce. Open-ended, decentralized, messy … Most of all, they are social.

Douglas Wolk: 

Each blogger is a gravitational center, great or small, but there's no sun they're all orbiting around.

Cory Doctorow: 

… there's no solution that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that computers were intended to be used.

Henry Jenkins:

… help young people place Wikipedia in a larger context, developing a deeper understanding of the process by which the its information is being produced & consumed. ... develop a more critical perspective on other, more traditional sources of information.

Clay Shirky: 

Critically, this expansion of freedom has not undermined any of the absolute advantages of expertise; the virtues of mastery remain as they were. What has happened is that the relative advantages of expertise are in precipitous decline. 

Journalism.co.uk, reporting Alan Rusbridger:

For at least 10 years we are going to have to have an act of faith and pump money into digital markets without significant return… [in] the expectation that things will change. 

Roy Greenslade, reporting Rusbridger:

The print-on-paper model [for newspapers] isn't making money and isn't going to make money. It's no longer sustainable. Though the future is unknowable, we are taking an educated guess about what we should be doing and where we should be going.

BuzzMachine:

Yesterday, Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, told the staff of his newspaper that now “all journalists work for the digital platform” and that they should regard “its demands as preeminent.” 

A Deutsche Bank analyst says (from BuzzMachine): 

… newspapers are shrinking while Facebook is growing by 200,000 new users a day. A day. And those users spend an average of 20 minutes each day inside the site vs. 41 minutes a month on newspaper sites …

And on change, Tom Coates: 

'The snail! The snail!', they cry. 'How can we possibly escape!?. … the snail's been moving closer for the last twenty years, one way or another, and they just weren't paying attention.

 

Technorati tags: social web, St Paul's, SPS, change

Freesheets: growing like Topsy

Last August, Bruno Giussani wrote:

The rapid growth of free newspapers in European (and, for now to a lesser extent, American) cities is one of the most interesting phenomena in recent publishing history.

His post is dense with information about this phenomenon, the newspaper and advertising industries and the subversion of both traditional newspaper economics and editorial mix. He concludes:

… many of the freesheets do not shy away from writing about that scarecrow of many traditional newsrooms: products and commerce. It always amazes me how a gigantic pan of our daily life is fenced out of most traditional newspapers because "it would constitute free advertisement": we buy clothes, use cell phones and cameras and tons of other gadgets, go to restaurants, play videogames, want to be informed if a new grocer opens in the neighborhood or a new Apple store opens in town or a new route is opened by a low-cost airline, but most of this stuff never shows up in the editorial pages of most dailies, or only within specific columns. Books and movies and music pass muster because they're "culture", but cell phones apparently aren't, and "serious" newsrooms want Nokia and Samsung to appear only in the ad pages. Free newspapers don't care about this: they know that most of us spend more time using our cell phones than going to movie theatres, and when a new cool model comes out, they deem it newsworthy. In this sense, free dailies are way more modern and in tune with the times than most traditional newspapers.

That's one take on the freesheet phenomenon. Here's another … On 12 February, 2007, the FT published this letter:

Sir, Surely by now every last Londoner has been approached on the street by a distributor of one of London's "free" daily newspapers. These papers may be free to readers, but they also carry real costs for other social groups in the city.

Free dailies externalise their production costs in at least three ways. They clutter and detract from the appearance of our streetscapes and public spaces (costs to all Londoners); they generate great volumes of rubbish which then become the disposal problem of boroughs (costs to borough residents); and they create extra cleaning costs for Transport for London when papers are left behind on trains and in stations (costs to TfL and therefore transport users). 

Given that 400,000 copies of each paper circulate daily (19m pages), these costs are not insignificant. We might be wise to ask whether free London dailies are really free - and if they are not, then who pays? 

David Grover, 

Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics, London

The letter was reprinted by Roy Greenslade who, today, highlighted Justin Canning's Project Freesheet. Firstly, here's Project Freesheet ('We want to see an increase in the number of freesheets being recycled and we want to see the freesheet publishers paying for the waste they are creating'), drawing on and quoting from an article published in The Ecologist by Jon Hughes (linked to below):

In 45 different countries around the world there are 35.8 million freesheet newspapers being printed every day. The environmental impact of a product that has a designed life span of 20 minutes is being seriously overlooked. (what's it all about?) …

The more sinister side of the freesheet phenomenon is its ultimate impact on paid for newspapers. The current crop of freesheets are aimed at those who are too busy to read a newspaper or have no inclination to buy one. Rather than address the reason why the paying public is shunning their products, newspaper publishers are seeking to create revenue by numbers alone. Advertisers will be seduced with the argument that while only half a million editions of say, Metro, are published, readership will be well over a million because it is dumped on the public transport system.

Freesheets such as Metro et al operate on very tight margins. As they become more nationally embedded, whole elements of them will become syndicated, beginning with TV pages and pop gossip through to national and international news. They might tell you the what, but not the why or the how. Investigations and campaigns will become rarer than they are now. Coverage of politics above the tittle-tattle of personality, less and less.

To supply the newsprint on which all this trash is printed, whole swathes of Europe are being turned over to plantation forests, which is wiping out bio-diversity. (the knock on effect)

Roy Greenslade (today):

Canning's major concern is about the environmental impact. He cites an article in The Ecologist magazine that deals with London's 1.5m daily freesheets. That equates to the felling of 400 trees every day after use of recycled pulp. Then, using those figures as a guide, he contends that 8,000 trees are being felled every day "for a product that has the attention span of about 10 minutes. That doesn't seem very good use of valuable resources." 

He continues: "On top of that, the product is not being recycled... [because] papers do not have any retention value. The second reason is the sheer volume that are being circulated. Most end up as street litter and go straight to landfill. Westminster council has said that it will need to spend an extra £500,000 over the next two years just to keep up with the quantities involved." 

Canning writes: "We are living in an age when corporate responsibility is supposed to be being addressed. Is it possible to carry on letting the newspaper publishers of the world churn out a product that serves no real purpose other than to provide opportunity for advertising? Basic economics is one thing. Stupidity and irresponsibility is quite another."

The Ecologist article dates from last November and claimed then that the London freesheet facts were:

… 1.5 million … are being given away in and around the capital’s Tube stations each day. The breakdown is as follows: Associated Newspapers’ Metro 540,000; London Lite (also published by Associated Newspapers) and News International’s thelondonpaper around 400,000 respectively, and City AM 65,000. Soon to be added to this is a free afternoon paper to be distributed, like Metro, on the underground system, rather than outside Tube stations like the other three. And on the last Friday of September, two free sports newspapers were unleashed on an unsuspecting public. This is a problem that is growing like Topsy, which has an unchecked motion all of its own.

 

Technorati tags: freesheets, newspapers, advertising, London, environment

The knowledge

From time to time, there's a flurry of memorable postings or remarks about knowledge, education and contemporary culture …

David Wilcox picked up on something George Siemens wrote:

Content is no longer the value point of education (it never really was...but we built our education models assuming this was the case).

David also noticed Kathy Sierra's 2 November blog post on Creating Passionate Users, Why does engineering/math/science education in the US suck?, and the image she uses there to help visualise her argument (we 'hear more and more teachers, experts, and employers railing against the sorry state of our advanced technical educations today … what do we do to try and improve things? We just do MORE of what's wrong. We redouble our efforts. We drill and test students even harder in facts and rote memorization … The Waterfall Model of education is failing like never before. We need Agile Learning'):

Add to this, David Weinberger:

… there will be a big demand for people who can help us find, understand and reuse information (or, as I like to think of it, create an infrastructure of meaning). We're going to need lots of help thinking through systems that will enable multiple orders to emerge from the behaviors of distributed groups.

When is a librarian not a librarian but a teacher? Is there a difference any more? And what kind of libraries do we need now?

Kathy Sierra winds up with a couple of quotations and a reflection of her own:

From Jason Fried:
"Hire curious people. Even if they don't have the exact skill set you want, curious, passionate people can learn anything."

And from Jacques Hadamard:
" Logic merely sanctions the conquests of the intuition."

If intuition is the heart of what true experts do, then shouldn't we be trying to teach that? Or at the least, stop stifling and dissing it? And yes, I do believe that we can teach and inspire all those fuzzy things including intuition and even curiosity.

I've also been taken by Henry Jenkins' Eight Traits of the New Media Landscape:

The Contemporary Media Landscape is: Innovative … Convergent … Everyday … Appropriative … Networked … Global … Generational … Unequal …

Of these eight traits, the only one which might describe our current educational institutions is "unequal." Otherwise, our schools have not kept pace with the changing environment around them. If we were to start from scratch and design an educational system to meet the needs of the culture we have just described, it would look very little like the current school system. Our schools doubly fail kids -- offering them neither the insights they need to avoid the risks nor the opportunity to exploit the potentials of this new participatory culture. Indeed, the skills kids need to function in the new media landscape are skills which are often read as dysfunctional and disruptive in the context of formal education. Kids are, for the most part, learning these skills on their own, outside of school, with the consequence that they are unevenly distributed across the population.

Finally, some links (partly via headshift's del.icio.us links) — useful for passing to colleagues interested in how we got here/where we're going:

• Stephen Downes on E-learning 2.0 (November, 2005) 
• Solution Watch: Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 1, Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 2, Back to School with the Class of Web 2.0: Part 3

Such challenges. Education is a very exciting place to be right now.

Technorati tags: learning, schools, participation, participatory culture, curiosity, information, teaching, libraries

Journalism and accuracy: Reuters and Adnan Hajj

From Journalism.co.uk:

• Reuters has suspended a photojournalist covering the Israeli assault on Lebanon after an investigation by bloggers revealed an image had been digitally manipulated to increase the apparent severity of a bombing raid. 6 August
  

• Reuters has dropped a long-serving Lebanese photojournalist covering the Israeli assault on the country after an investigation by bloggers revealed an image had been digitally manipulated to increase the apparent severity of a bombing raid. 7 August


• A second allegation of altering war zone photos - made against a photojournalist by bloggers - has led to over 900 of his pictures being removed from Reuters' database. Adnan Hajj, who had contributed to Reuters on a freelance basis since 1993, was axed by the agency after an investigation by bloggers, last week, claimed an image showing bomb damage in Beirut had been digitally manipulated to increase the apparent severity of the raid.

After right wing bloggers made further allegations of alterations to a second image - supposedly showing an Israeli F-16 firing missiles on Lebanon - Reuters withdrew all his photographs from its database. … The two altered photographs were among 43 that Hajj had filed directly to the global pictures desk since the start of the conflict on July 12. Reuters said it had now put in place a tighter editing procedure for images of the Middle East conflict. "There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image," said Tom Szlukovenyi, Reuters global picture editor. 7 August

Mitch Ratcliffe: 'Where Nicholas Lemann's critique of citizen journalism falls down is his lack of critical reflection on journalism itself.'

I've been pondering Nicholas Lemann's New Yorker article. More about that soon.

Technorati tags: journalism, media, citizen journalism, Reuters, Adnan Hajj

UK schools and the net

BBC NEWS:

Pupils in the UK do not get enough access to the internet at school, a study by London University's Institute of Education has suggested.  Its report found pupils thought the internet was over-regulated by teachers, with an emphasis on prohibition rather than encouragement. … Researchers also found youngsters in all countries needed help in tackling more complex issues, such as understanding the legalities involved in downloading music and handling social encounters in e-mails.

The project's UK director, Dr Andrew Burn, said: "While UK schools are getting some things right compared with other European countries, there are still too many children who do not get sufficient opportunity to use the internet in lessons. Schools need to do more to harness the communicative possibilities of this powerful technology, which allows children to communicate, co-operate, play and learn online."

Dr Burn acknowledged there had been much more emphasis on creative uses of information and communication technology (ICT) in the past five years, but he said web use needed even more "freedom, spread and tolerance" in UK schools. And the focus on information retrieval had eclipsed the communication aspect of ICT, he added. "It is alarming that the secondary ICT curriculum contains 16 references to information, and none at all to communication, given that communication is what young people use the internet for," he said. "This suggests a dramatic mismatch between school attitudes to ICT and the internet, and those which students find important and need to learn about. We want to tap into children's and young people's media culture."

IoE press release here.

Technorati tags: ICT, digital natives, digital immigrants

Stephen Colbert, satirist supreme

I remember Ian Hislop once saying how he had tried to take a satirical programme (a version of Spitting Image?) to the States, only to be met there with disbelief: 'You mean you want to make fun of the President?'. Which makes the performance of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner the more remarkable.

Thanks to Tom Coates (del.icio.us) for these links: a clip of some highlights (this may have been taken down; at least, it's not running right now — has CSPAN paid them a YouTube visit?); a BitTorrent link to a movie of the evening; an Editor & Publisher piece about the speech.

Botherer covered it well:

… what wasn’t reported in the UK and elsewhere, disturbingly including the USA, was the main speaker for the evening, Stephen Colbert. Currently riding high with the success of his excellent Daily Show spin-off, The Colbert Report (pronounced “Colbert Report”), the honour of giving the main speech at the dinner, which is intended to poke fun at the president, was his. From the reaction it seems no one was quite expecting what Colbert had to say.

In character, he addressed the audience from the perspective of his programme, ironically adopting a Fox News-like stance in order to make a mockery of it. Throughout, Bush was sat two chairs to his right.

“Now, I know there are some polls out there saying this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in “reality.” And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Salon, too:

Make no mistake, Stephen Colbert is a dangerous man -- a bomb thrower, an assassin, a terrorist with boring hair and rimless glasses. It's a wonder the secret service let him so close to the President of the United States.

But there he was Saturday night, keynoting the year's most fawning celebration of the self-importance of the DC press corps, the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Before he took the podium, the master of ceremonies ominously announced, "Tonight, no one is safe."

To my friends and colleagues teaching satire: teach this! There's a transcript of Colbert's speech at Daily Kos (excerpt below) and, in addition to the Torrent link above, you can download the full video at these links: Part 1, Part 2. It is compelling, very sharp and very funny.

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound -- with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world. …

And I just like the guy. He's a good Joe. Obviously loves his wife, calls her his better half. And polls show America agrees. She's a true lady and a wonderful woman. But I just have one beef, ma'am.

I'm sorry, but this reading initiative. I'm sorry, I've never been a fan of books. I don't trust them. They're all fact, no heart. I mean, they're elitist, telling us what is or isn't true, or what did or didn't happen. Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that's my right as an American! I'm with the President, let history decide what did or did not happen.

The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will. As excited as I am to be here with the President, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the President's side, and the Vice-President's side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on NSA wiretapping or secret prisons in eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason: they're super-depressing. And if that's your goal, well, misery accomplished. Over the last five years you people were so good -- over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. Those were good times, as far as we knew.

But, listen, let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the President makes decisions. He's the decider. The Press Secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the Press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

Because really, what incentive do these people have to answer your questions, after all? I mean, nothing satisfies you. Everybody asks for personnel changes. So the White House has personnel changes. Then you write, "Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic." First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

You can leave a thank-you-Stephen-Colbert message here. There's a good Flickr photo from the evening here. And if you use Firefox and haven't yet got the Video Downloader extension, it's here.

Update! Inside Google reports:

The Google Video blog posts on how they’ve come to an agreement with C-SPAN to show the content, and agreement YouTube apparently failed (or never tried) to make. You have three options: You can watch the entire 1 hour, 35 minute video of the dinner, or stick to an 11 minute excerpt of President Bush and Bush impersonator Steve Bridges, or go for the 25 minute excerpt of Steven Colbert’s speech. Of course, if you want to enjoy Colbert’s biting remarks, make sure you quit about 16:45 in, because the press conference/chase segment is as tragically unfunny as it gets.

Technorati tags: Stephen Colbert, George Bush, White House, journalism

Ridicule, Machiavelli and political life

How much derision can a national political figure take and remain a "viable political entity"? According to Michael Heseltine this morning (Today, Radio 4), John Prescott has gone beyond the point of no return.

The strong media and popular response to Blair letting Prescott keep the perks and salary of office without (most of) the responsibilities was not hard to foresee and the attacks came very soon after the news broke (my last post). Was retaining the pay and perks the price of ensuring Prescott's cooperation? Was there a deeper plot, in effect to put Prescott out to die in the amphitheatre of public opinion? Far too popular and important a figure within the Labour Party for Number 10 to decapitate completely, this halfway house might have seemed attractive yesterday to John Prescott but now (it must have dawned on him) makes him look at best contemptibly absurd, at worst indulged and rewarded beyond what any possible responsibility still remaining to him might justify. Prescott will emerge (at least for the all important short- to mid-term) as an utterly diminished figure.

Last month (30 April), Andrew Rawnsley wrote (Observer):

Even before we were treated to pictures of the Deputy Prime Minister pressing the flesh with his office squeeze, he was widely mocked as an absurd figure. Buffoonish though he might have appeared to many outside government, inside Number 10, he was still taken quite seriously as a potential menace to Tony Blair who could deliver the final, fatal blow to the Prime Minister. His allies were becoming increasingly nervous that Mr Prescott was intent on bringing on the reign of Gordon Brown, especially since he so flagrantly fanned the rebellion against the education reforms. It was in the power of Prescott to pull the trigger on the Prime Minister by making a public declaration demanding an early date from Mr Blair for his departure.

The one solace for the Prime Minister in a sea of troubles is that this threat has evaporated. The debagging of the Deputy Prime Minister contributes to the impression of a government that is simultaneously arrogant, ridiculous and reckless. But it does have this consolation for Number 10. John Prescott is now a much weakened figure whose residual credibility is threatened with more demolition from further revelation. Instead of John Prescott being in a position to tell Tony Blair how long he has left in Number 10, it is now John Prescott who is fighting to save his own job and what shreds remain of his dignity.

Prescott's Parliamentary job has gone in almost all but name. Now he's doomed to be roundly and totally derided.

There's a good BBC piece by Roger Preston on the implications of the Cabinet reshuffle in the context of Blair/Brown ambitions and "relations":

Tony Blair has no desire to quit any time soon. And when he does resign, it will be in his own time and his own way. Those were the conspicuous messages he sent out today in his sweeping reorganisation of the Cabinet.

Technorati tags: John Prescott, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, New Labour, Labour

YouTube

Be it Frank Zappa specials, such as I am the Slime and Mike Nesmith and Frank Zappa on 'The Monkees', or Captain Beefheart — Lick my decals off, baby … or the loftier heights of The Hearts of Age (Orson Welles) and Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren), YouTube is going to become compulsive viewing. (All links via del.icio.us, the first three via Merlin Mann, the last two via Warren Ellis.)

Wikipedia on The Hearts of Age:

The Hearts of Age is the first film made by Orson Welles. The film is a four-minute short, which he co-directed with William Vance in 1934. The film stars Welles' first wife, Virginia Nicholson, as well as Welles himself. He made the film while attending the Todd School for Boys, in Woodstock, Illinois, at the age of 19. The plot is a series of images loosely tied together, and is arguably influenced by surrealism. The film is rarely seen today, but many point to it as an important precursor to Welles' first Hollywood film, Citizen Kane.

Meshes of the Afternoon, to my shame, is a discovery. Better now than never. Wikipedia here. An Uruguayan site here (Spanish). (Both these links via absurdita, who uploaded the film to YouTube.) IMDb entry here.

Technorati tags: Orson Welles, Maya Deren, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, YouTube

Falling out over satire

BBC News:

Newspapers across Europe have reprinted caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to show support for a Danish paper whose cartoons have sparked Muslim outrage. France Soir, Germany's Die Welt, La Stampa in Italy and El Periodico in Spain all carried some of the drawings. Their publication in Denmark has led to protests in Arab nations, diplomatic sanctions and death threats. Islamic tradition bans depictions of the Prophet, but media watchdogs defend press freedom to publish the images. Reporters Without Borders said the reaction in the Arab world "betrays a lack of understanding" of press freedom as "an essential accomplishment of democracy."

In Berlin, the prominent daily Die Welt ran a front-page caricature of the prophet wearing a headdress shaped like a bomb. The paper argued there was a right to blaspheme in the West, and asked whether Islam was capable of coping with satire.  "The protests from Muslims would be taken more seriously if they were less hypocritical," it wrote in an editorial.

Also from the BBC, further details of the Die Welt commentary:

The paper points out that the issue has nothing to do with "a battle between cultures" as there are "thresholds of consideration" which cannot be crossed when it comes to making fun of religion. "But the standards that Muslims require are overtaxing for open societies," the paper believes.

The daily points out that in the West there is no right of exemption from satire. "Christianity itself has become a subject of pitiless criticism, an object of satirical analysis, which marks the triumph of humour over religious worship", it argues.

It points out that there was no protest when a primetime programme on Syrian TV portrayed a rabbi as a cannibal.

And from the same BBC site:

Sweden's Expressen says the front-page letter published in Danish, English and Arabic by Jyllands-Posten in which it apologizes for publishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad "sends out unpleasant signals that threats work".

"How Jyllands-Posten thinks - or rather does not think - plays less of a role after the flag burnings, threats and diplomatic pressure from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries over the last few days", the paper says. Jyllands-Posten's "retreat-like humming and hawing is simply an unpleasant confirmation that fundamentalist threats - against individuals, against economic and political interests - win through", it goes on.

"Defending freedom of expression against fundamentalist threats is a cause. It is a matter of principle, whether it involves Rushdie's 'Satanic Verses', a film about veils and the oppression of women or some clumsy drawings in a Danish newspaper."

Technorati tags: Islam, fundamentalism, press freedom, freedom of expression

Dan Gillmor: lessons from Bayosphere on Citizen Journalism

Dan Gillmor has a fine piece here about the Bayoshpere venture into citizen journalism. There's much to thank him for in the posting: for one thing, his clear outline of the business options they considered before settling on publishing is a useful list for anyone considering doing something similar.

Bayosphere didn't get airborne, and the best of Dan Gillmor's posting lies in the lessons he's drawn from the experience:

… Bayosphere attracted quite a bit of traffic, and some heartening effort on the part of some citizen journalists. I'm grateful to them for trying. But as is obvious to anyone who's paid attention, the site didn't take off -- in large part, no question about it, because of my own miscues and shortcomings. My friend Esther Dyson says, wisely, "Always make new mistakes." Did I ever. But I learned from them, and from what did work. Here are some of the lessons:

• Citizen journalism is, in a significant way, about owning your own words. That implies responsibilities as well as freedom. We asked people to read and agree to a "pledge" that briefly explained what we believed it meant to be a citizen journalist -- including principles such as thoroughness, fairness, accuracy and transparency. Although some cynics hooted that this was at best naive, we're convinced it was at least useful.
• Limiting participation is not necessarily a bad idea. By asking for a valid e-mail address simply in order to post comments, you reduce the pool of commenters considerably, but you increase the quality of the postings. And by asking for real names and contact information, as we did with the citizen journalists, you reduce the pool by several orders of magnitude. Again, however, there appears to be a correlation between willingness to stand behind one's own words and the overall quality of what's said.
• Citizen journalists need and deserve active collaboration and assistance. They want some direction and a framework, including a clear understanding of what the site's purpose is and what tasks are required. (I didn't do nearly a good enough job in this area.)
• A framework doesn't mean a rigid structure, where the citizen journalist is only doing rote work such as filling in boxes.
• The tools available today are interesting and surprisingly robust. But they remain largely aimed at people with serious technical skills -- which means too ornate and frequently incomprehensible to almost everyone else. Our tech expert, Jay Campbell, did a heroic job of trying to wrestle the software into submission to our goals. We still felt frustrated by the missing links.
• Tools matter, but they're no substitute for community building. (This is a special skill that I'm only beginning to understand even now.)
• Though not so much a lesson -- we were very clear on this going in -- it bears repeating that a business model can't say, "You do all the work and we'll take all the money, thank you very much." There must be clear incentives for participation, and genuine incentives require resources.
• On several occasions, PR people offered to brief me on upcoming products or events that they hoped I'd cover in my capacity as a tech journalist, but were happy to give the slot to our citizen journalists. This testifies to a growing recognition among more clued-in PR folks that citizen journalism is here to stay.
• Although the participants -- citizen journalists and commenters -- are essential, it's even more important to remember that publishing is about the audience in the end. Most people who come to the site are not participants. They're looking for the proverbial "clean, well-lighted place" where they can learn or be entertained, or both.
• If you don't already have a thick skin, grow one.

Marc (Canter) has some comments about this here (and see, too, Lloyd Shepherd's posting). As Marc says, 'How many failed CEOs would blog it - and explain what went wrong, their own shortcomings and deliver an honest apology?'.

No surprise, then, that I also take away from Dan Gillmor's posting respect for his honest self-appraisal: 'As an entrepreneur, let's just say I wasn't in my element. The relentless focus on a single, limited project for long periods of time, combined with the inevitable compromises inherent in for-profit decision-making, turned out not to be my best skills'. (A friend of his said, "Well, you've always struck me as more of a dot-org kind of guy than the dot-com kind".)

The experience hasn't shaken Dan Gillmor's faith in citizen journalism: 'As the Bayosphere project was playing out last fall, I concluded that I could do more for the citizen journalism movement by forming a nonprofit enterprise, a "Center for Citizen Media" where I could put my skills and passion for the genre to better use'. His concluding comments are full of hope:

The shift in how we communicate and collaborate, how we learn what's going on in our world, has barely begun. Predicting the future is for other people, but I'm optimistic that we'll collectively figure this out.

Technorati tags: citizen journalism, Bayosphere, start-ups, business models, Dan Gillmor

Copy Rights

James Governor's MonkChips — What about My Copy Rights? Towards a declaration of digital independence:

If anyone out there likes the idea of a call for Copy Rights, then let me know or blog about it or whatever. If the snowball rolls downhill then we can perhaps formalise a declaration of some kind …

I like. Plus, as was said at the inaugural meeting of ORG, we've got to find the language that will catch the imagination of the music-loving public: 'the importance of language in making an argument. Rhetoric and framing require strong simple images to fall back on'.

More about working towards A Declaration of Copy Rights at James Governor's site … towards 'a positive framework for intellectual property protection, rather than a negative complaint'.

Update — from BBC News:

A UK consumer watchdog has called for new laws to protect users' rights to use digital music and movies. The National Consumer Council (NCC) said anti-piracy efforts were eroding established rights to digital media. …

It made its comments to a parliamentary inquiry into technologies that limit what people can do with CDs, DVDs and downloaded media. In its submission to the inquiry, the NCC said many consumers were regularly running up against the restrictions record companies and film makers put on their products. The consumer group said people were finding that they could not make compilations for their own use or easily move digital copies between different devices.

In its statement to the inquiry it said the digital locks put on content were "constraining the legitimate consumer use of digital content". Also being undermined were rights established by consumer protection and data protection laws, it said. "Consumers face security risks to their equipment, limitations on their use of products, poor information when purchasing products and unfair contract terms," said Jill Johnstone, the NCC's director of policy.

She added that the group had little faith that self-regulation by media makers would protect consumer rights.

Technorati tags: DRM, Copy Rights, NCC

What DRM argument?

I enjoy both of Lloyd Shepherd's blogs. His work blog, given that he is Deputy Director of Digital Publishing at Guardian Unlimited, helps me see into the world of commercial publishing and follow the developments at his paper. His most recent post calls on Chris Anderson's question, 'how much DRM is too much?'. He goes on to say:

… let’s face it: we’re going to have to have some DRM. At some level, there has to be an appropriate level of control over content to make it economically feasible for people to produce it at anything like an industrial level. And on the other side of things, it’s clear that the people who make the consumer technology that ordinary people actually use - the Microsoft's and Apples of the world - have already accepted and embraced this. The argument has already moved on.

Hang on a moment! Who's had this argument? Did I blink and miss the great national and international debates? Lloyd asks:

… what are the best implementations of DRM out there, which balance the needs of the provider and the consumer without getting in the way of either? Does such a thing exist?

Ah, if only these kinds of questions were being asked by the DRM-generating industries in frank and open discussion with their customers and artists! That there have been more narrowly conceived commercial decisions and that these arguments have 'moved on' is evident almost everywhere one looks, and, as Lloyd acknowledges fulsomely, copyfighters and those who have a vision for the net (as something other than just another 'content distribution system') have been shouting about developments for a long while now. Here, DRM is of great concern, but it's the very nature of the net that is at the heart of the matter. Some recent examples … Julian Bond (yesterday, writing about Google's plan to open an online video store):

The fly in this ointment is indeed DRM. … Amazon, AOL, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Real and now Google have all jumped the fence and landed on the other side as content intermediaries no different from the old media businesses. So now they're part of the problem not a potential solution. And sitting in the middle of all this is Intel whose close ties with all these players mean that they're more than happy to build in the hardware controls to support it.

Doc Searls (November, '05):

All the big boys: the PC makers, the chip makers, the mobile equipment providers, the "consumer experience" deliverers (including Virgin, its many holdings and the rest of the entertainment industry), the patent, copyright and IP (Intellectual Property) absolutists, the parochial national interests, and — most of all — the carriers by the grace of whose fiber and wiring the Net is made available — all want to control you: what you can do with their services and devices, what you can buy, who you can buy it from, and how you can use it. The free and open Internet, a World of Ends built on an end-to-end, peer-to-peer architecture, is slowly being privatized and nationalized, one DRM file, one blocked port, one platform silo, one walled data garden, one legislative action, one regulatory decree, one Supreme Court decision and one national cyberwall after another.

This is what we are fighting, folks. The open and free marketplace the Internet provides is shortly going to look like the best darn mess of few-to-many distribution systems for "content" the world has ever known. It will not be the free and open marketplace it was in the first place, and should remain. The end-state will [be] a vast matrix of national and private silos and walled gardens, each a contained or filtered distribution environment. And most of us won't know what we missed, because it never quite happened.

Rafael Behr, editor, Observer online, concluding his article 'Access Denied' (Observer, September, '05):

Not everyone is pessimistic. In fact, a lot of long-term web users are utopian about the future. All the hyperbole that was first draped around the web has proved inadequate. In the way it transforms and accelerates the communication of ideas between individuals and societies, it is about as big as the invention of the alphabet. And it is free. But for how long? The machinery of government and big business is only just beginning to understand the scale of the web. The culture of common purpose that prevails today is a product of neglect as much as design. The real gold rush has barely begun. To experience the sharing culture of the blogosphere today is like living in a commune built on an oil field. One day, the diggers will move in.

Ours is the last generation that will remember the analogue world and feel the difference between the two realms. For the next generation of digital natives, the web will be a slick, commercial machine. It will be just as big as the world we currently live in and it will be just as ruthless and as corrupt.

I hope I am wrong. I listen to today's web gurus, the people who preach freedom, and am fired with enthusiasm for the new digital society of the future. But I fear the odds are against them. An excess of idealism only seems to prove that the golden age of the web is, in fact, right now.

And, finally, David Weinberger at the OII last November: 'This could be the bright, shiny period of the internet, of openness'.

What's missing is precisely the public debate — about DRM, about the net. (See Lee's comment to Lloyd's post: 'People don’t actually know much about DRM and therefore cannot be expected to make a reasoned judgement about its side effects'.) ORG has been created to help address this here in the UK (further links via this posting), but the challenge ahead is huge.

Meantime, DRM is developing apace and the latest news I've come across concerning it again justifies the kinds of concerns being voiced — David Berlind (writing two days ago):

I've been warning about the unprecedented levarage that the DRM patent holders will be able to apply to content distribution channels such as the telecommunication networks. Having multiple incompatible DRM schemes out there is bad enough.  All these devices that are incompatible with each other (some from the same manufacturer like Motorola)? Being forced to match devices to content sources on the basis of DRM compatibility?  It's ridiculous.  But disabling MP3? If it's true, this crosses the line …

I don't know the answers to the questions Lloyd poses, but I know what I value in the net and I know that DRM absurdities (some choice ones from the walled garden of iTunes/iPod) are undermining the very customer bases they were created to protect. In that self-inflicted damage, there lies some hope, at least.

Technorati tags: DRM, copyfight, ORG

Bloggers as analysts

Via Wirearchy :: 2006 - A Year of More Practice:

… bloggers serve the function of analysts. Or re-analyzers, more aptly, who attempt to contextualize as they sort through available data and look for patterns, inconsistencies and greater truths. For my money if I was trying to marry a blog with a newsroom that's where I'd start -- I'm constantly amazed that with all the access to information now available the big news bureaus don't have a deeper pool of researchers to be the adjunct memories of people who spend their time in the development of external news sources. Firedoglake: 'Dirty Rotten Bloggers'

Reminds me of bloggers-as-editors.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blogs, bloggers, news, journalism, memory

Rupert Murdoch: the end of an era

Emily Bell in today's Media Guardian (free registration required):

… what we once took from Murdoch, as an industry and as media journalists, was his ability to provide a shockingly radical lead: he was the disruptive technology which now is itself being disrupted. … the next wave of thinking will inevitably come from elsewhere. … these next thinkers will be unpopular already - their ideas may well have been laughed at or rejected within successful organisations. They may be social misfits who are not comfortable in organisations and societies which regard their thinking as unworkable and eccentric. In other words they will be classic entrepreneurs who can remake businesses far quicker than a Microsoft or a News Corp can.

Who are these people? Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google now have a more profound daily impact on how the world communicates and what it consumes than either Murdoch or Gates. Their search engine software is forcing the mainstream media to rethink what they do with their content and threatens revenue streams we once regarded as untouchable. Craig Newmark, founder of Craig's List, who was in Britain last Monday to talk at an Oxford seminar, received far fewer column inches than Murdoch; yet his scruffy startup, offering free classified listings, has brought the local newspaper market in North America to its knees and threatens to do the same - or at least inspire the same - here. Meanwhile Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who were behind the powerful Kazaa file-sharing site, are now threatening the world's big telecoms companies with Skype, the internet telephony service bought by eBay.

The rise of this new generation of accidental entrepreneurs has been breathtaking in its speed, and the world they created through programming code is astonishing. Where will these developments lead us? Hard to say, but it is certain that the fog of the future will lift on a changed landscape, and in many ways it is sad but exciting that the old certainties - such as the value of Murdoch's instincts to the wider industry - have become outdated.

Bloggers as editors

With the coming of cheap, mass publication and consumption of "information" (blogging), the reading patterns of many must be changing quite radically, if they haven't done so already. For some time now, I've been using a large-ish number of blogs, and a smaller number of del.icio.us users, as, in effect, an editorial team. (I do get to see the Guardian, but can't catch up with it daily: it accumulates and then there's a helluva backlog to get through.) I have 206 feeds (gulp) in my aggregator and 51 in my del.icio.us inbox. As with other habits, I keep intending to cut down …

Numbers of feeds apart, I was taken with this post from Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail:

    Aside from a few purely information feeds, such as new Netflix releases, most of what I read online is blogs. (You can see my current subscriptions here.) I don't visit any mainstream media sites directly (and in print, I only read the Sunday New York Times and a load of magazines). If there's something relevant to my interests in the Wall Street Journal, the daily NYT or some other news site, I assume one of the blogs I read will point me to it.

    This is not to say that I don't value mainstream media; I do. It's just that I'd rather choose my own editor to select the articles of highest importance to me (including those the mainstream media choose not to cover at all, or just not well). In this case that "editor" is a network of bloggers, not whomever decides what makes it to the front page of the newspaper. This works so well that I suspect I'm actually reading more articles from mainstream media, and from a broader range of it, than ever before. It's just all via blogs, which microchunk and remix the information in ways that make it more useful to me. …

    What all these blogs that have earned their way to my feed list are doing is adding value to commodity information. The ones I'm reading do this in at least one of three main ways:

1. Add value with a unique perspective or analysis.
2. Add value with unique information.
3. Add value by providing a unique filter/lens on content available elsewhere.

    This is not just a smart strategy for blogs; it's a smart strategy for any content creator in an era where the tools of production and distribution are fully democratized and the marketplace is flooded with commodity competition.

Apple of your Eye

Tomorrow's Private Eye. There are two iPods in our family, and they've both given a lot of trouble. My students have similar tales. Is this unusual experience?

Robert points to this Apple front page:

I have to say, to me this seems at the very least cheesy, but probably in poor taste.

No axe to grind here — I'm sorely tempted to buy a Mac PowerBook before long. But how come the problems with iPods don't make more waves? And I can't believe I'm alone in finding this kind of advertising … shallow (because tastelessly parasitic — what's owning a Mac got to do with fighting racial segregation)? (One of those leaving comments on Robert's posting asks what the reaction would be if Microsoft had used the Rosa Parks image: 'Where do you want to go today?'.)

Getting it

Doc Searls:

It's interesting to think about the container transport concepts behind "getting" as a synonym for understanding. When you "get" what somebody says, you're saying a sum of knowledge has been delivered to you, in a form you can use. "I gather..." makes a similar assumption, through the same deep unconscious metaphor: knowledge is a substance, a commodity: something you can harvest and ship.

Doc quotes Terry Heaton's The Matter of "Getting It":

… one no longer needs to own the infrastructure in order to publish, distribute or broadcast content. This is turning the media world upside-down, and most of the traditional media response, I'm sorry, falls under the category of &quo