Terrific piece, out of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, by Dan Kennedy on getting news within the embrace of one’s community. It won’t settle the hash about the danger of only talking with like-minded people (a danger I’m less worried about than others), but it puts the positive well.

Here’s the final paragraph:

Critics of blogs have been looking at the wrong thing. While traditionalists disparage bloggers for their indulgence of opinion and hyperbole, they overlook the sense of community and conversation that blogs have fostered around the news. What bloggers do well, and what news organizations do poorly or not at all, is give their readers someone to sit with. News consumers — the public, citizens, us — still want the truth. But we also want to share it and talk about it with our like-minded neighbors and friends. The challenge for journalism is not that we’ll lose our objectivity; it’s that we won’t find a way to rebuild a sense of community.

[Tags: journalism media blogging objectivity echo_chambers dan_kennedy nieman ]

2 Comments »

I’m reading a pretty bad serial killer book by a well-known writer in the genre.

The first chapter describes a brutal killing by an unnamed gent.

The second chapter beings with a description of the hero doing something illustrative of her character. In this case, she’s jogging, pushing her physical limits, reminiscing about her time as an Olympic rower, yada yada.

The first words of that second chapter are our hero’s name.

I’m wondering how many other books begin exactly and precisely this way, right down to the hero’s name showing up as the very first words.

[Tags: cliches crowdsourcing bad_books serial_killers ]

5 Comments »

From an interview with Gonzalo Munévar by Paul Newall about Paul Feyerabend:

PN: How would you describe the relevance of Feyerabend’s thinking today and his legacy for the future?

GM: The big philosophical problem about science was that the scientific method worked but we could not prove so: classical skepticism, Popper’s efforts notwithstanding. Feyerabend came in and cleaned house: the so-called “scientific method” did not work; it actually got in the way of scientific progress (as defined by the empiricists themselves). I think this is a finding of the greatest importance, although not his only contribution. Philosophy cannot – should not – be the same after that, even though professional philosophers will keep on doing pretty much the same things for as long as they can get away with it. I am reminded of Romero’s film “The Dawn of the Dead”, in which the zombies go to the shopping mall to walk around and window-shop as they used to do when they were alive. Analytic philosophy no longer makes sense, in great part thanks to Feyerabend, but there you have it: a philosophy for zombies. But the zombies are still in charge, so who knows how Feyerabend’s legacy will play in the years to come.

Based on Gonzalo’s recommendation, I have ordered a copy of Feyerabend’s posthumous book, The Conquest of Abundance.

[Tags: feyerabend gonzalo_munevar philosophy science ]

Be the first to comment »

Rebecca MacMKinnon has an important and discomforting post that aims to shake us out of our complacency about handing the Net and our liberty to ventures that do not have that liberty as their primary value.

[Tags: rebecca_mackinnon ]

Be the first to comment »

A current Twitter conversation topic: Is the daily comic F Minus the rightful heir to the Far Side?

[Tags: far_side f_minus comics ]

2 Comments »

Matt Stoller reports that every major Democratic candidate for Senate supports Net neutrality. Need I add that Obama’s tech policy is way closer to what we need to save the Internet than what we’ve gotten so far from McCain?

And Tim Wu (the coiner of the phrase “Net neutrality”) has another frame-bender in a NY Times op-ed. He says Americans spend about as much on broadband as on energy, and calls for liberation from the Soviet-style control of spectrum (which he also compares to OPEC) to encourage entrepreneuristic advances.

And now the WSJ has attacked FCC chairman Kevin Martin for supporting Net neutrality. It remains to be seen, however, whether Martin’s ruling against Comcast’s blocking of BitTorrent has any teeth. Poor Kevin! Incoming from all sides.

[Tags: net_neutrality matt_stoller tim_wu broadband ]

Be the first to comment »

Saw it last night. It was that or its polar opposite: That ABBA movie.

It left me oddly unsatisfied — odd given its virtues — the way professional wrestling does. The plot has no natural momentum, which is disappointing given that it was written by the folks who brought us Memento and The Prestige, two movies driven by strong plot ideas and ornate, wonderful plotting. Instead, it seems to be a movie written by The Joker, the principle of chaos. So, you’re left with booms, beatings, and a dark mood. It kept my attention without actually being entertaining, and I came out feeling worse than when I went in.

I also came out with two questions:

1. I found the car chase (ok, so now I spoiled it; there’s a car chase) hard to follow. It wasn’t the worse of the shaky-cam extravaganzas we’ve seen in the past few years, but it was bad enough. Shaky-cam editing has become so common that I’m beginning to think it’s my problem, not the director’s. Maybe I’m just too old to keep up with the rapid, blurry editing. Is it just me?

2. If you saw The Dark Knight, were you also bothered by the implicit endorsement of torture as a morally acceptable (i.e., Batman’s) way of getting information when dealing with terrorists?

NOTE: There are some spoilers in the comments …

[Tags: dark_knight entertainment movies reviews ]

21 Comments »

I’m a-lovin’ Marijn Haverbeke’s Eloquent Javascript, an interactive javascript tutorial. It’s clear, nicely written, nice looking, handy (what with its embedded console for trying scripts out), free, and Creative Commons licensed. It’s easily downloadable so you can run/read it even when you don’t have any of that newfangled “broadband” the kids are so excited about.

Thank you, Marijn. [Tags: javascript javascript_tutorial marijn_haverbeke ]

Be the first to comment »

The Readership Institute of Northwestern U has a new study out that shows that, compared to its 2006 study, those 45 years and older continue to read newspapers, while the 18-24 year olds continue to drift away from their daily exercise in origami.

Further, people continue to spend 27 minutes a day reading the paper, except on Sundays when the new average of 57 minutes continues its decline since 2002. Maybe we’re just getting better at doing the sudokus. People say they complete 60% of the paper on weekdays and 62% on Sunday.

By the way, Google tells me that the average reading speed is 230 words per minute. That means people on average read 6,200 words of their paper on weekdays. According to a person at Metafilter, if you read all the articles on the front page of the NY Times (including their continuation inside), you would have read 12,900 words.

Therefore, people are reading 60% of the newspaper only if by that you mean that they read half the articles on the front page and then stop.

[Tags: http://ask.metafilter.com/18970/How-many-words-on-the-front-page ]

7 Comments »

The Guardian’s satire of citizen media has some biting lines, but it’ll be interesting to see how funny — that is, truthful — it seems in, say, five years.

[Tags: satire media journalism citizen_journalism ]

Be the first to comment »

I’m on a working vacation for the next few days — who’s counting? — in the lovely but rain torn Berkshires, in my family’s ramshack (is that the noun form of ramshackle?). My wife is away for the day, returning tomorrow, so I’m alone.

I spend a lot of time alone. I’m an introvert, so I like it, perhaps too much. But, like you, I’ve gotten used to being alone in a sea of clicks. Click and I can browse. Click and I can see what my friends are doing. Click and I can respond to what’s being written. But here we have no Internet. I am alone and clickless. And feeling it more than I would have thought.

Relax? I’m not tense. Take it easy? I’ve been reading all day. If I’m going to be alone, I’d at least like some reading that I can talk back to…

[Tags: vacation ]

6 Comments »

The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age, edited by Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui, is now available in full online. It’s an anthology of essays about hyperlinks and society by a great collection of folks. (And then there’s my contribution, which argues that the Internet is good — what a surprise! — because the hyperlinked architecture of the Web mirrors the architecture of morality itself.)

[Tags: hyperlinks morality philosophy ]

5 Comments »

[SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't seen last night's So You Think You Can Dance, stop reading now]

Hint to SYTYCD contestants: Apparently America’s favorite dance move is: mugging to the camera.

Well, now that the finest dancer by far has been voted off the island, we can at least be comforted that he’s bound to find all the attention and adulation he deserves when he gets a contract from … um … to play arenas like … er … and appear on shows that feature fine dancers, such as …. ummm…..

Isn’t it odd that America’s #1 TV show features an art form that it otherwise largely ignores?

I hope that Nigel and Screamin’ Mary stage a palace coup and next season disenfranchise the audience.

1 Comment »

Kevin Werbach has posted a terrific open letter to John McCain - on the news that Colin [d'oh] Michael Powell is drafting a tech policy for him - saying that technology is not a bunch of bits and bytes that are beneath the attention of a president. Nicely done. [Obvious disclosure: Go Obama!]

2 Comments »

A group of folks, led by Wendy Seltzer, Geoff Goodell and Steve Schultze, has filed a comment on the FCC’s proposal that it give away some public spectrum to be used for national Internet access, with the requirement that the provider censor it down to what’s safe for a five year old. Wendy and her friends produced what I think is an outstanding, thorough, and legally-based criticism of this plan. (I’m proud to be one of the many signatories.) [Tags: fcc censorship wendy_seltzer ]

Be the first to comment »

I choked up merely reading a transcript of it on my cellphone on a bus.

[Tags: obama berlin ]

Must-see photo, shared by Dave Winer. Click on the largest size your bandwidth allows…

5 Comments »

HuffingtonPost today announced that, in addition to its usual front-page layout, it’s aggregating its content around 75 (so far) top-level topics. For example, here’s the Barack Obama page. This takes a page (so to speak) from the NY Times Topic pages, which pull together the NYT’s topic on something like 3,000 topics. The NYT Topic pages not only give a centralized place to read about something, they also give people a place to link to, which apparently happens a lot given the strength of those pages in Google rankings. Likewise, the Huffpo “Big News” pages can be linked to and are widgetized.

I’m not sure how the new HuffPo pages differ from the old pages you’d see when you clicked on a tag. Presumably, there’s been some level of hand editing, but I’m not sure

[Tags: huffington_post huffpo ny_times media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

1 Comment »

More links that have come up at the Berkman discussion about keeping hard journalism sustainable:

snagfilms.com

reelchanges.org

glam.com

1 Comment »

Some sites that have come up at a confab in progress at the Berkman Center about sustainable models for journalism:

Spot.us for public support of particular stories

Jay Rosen’sKiyoshi Martinez’s journalism.me

Dan Gillmor on helping the almost-journalists

The “iTunes of journalism”: Mochila

[Tags: berkman journalism media ]

6 Comments »

The first in a series of three short videos from the Digital Natives project of U of St. Gallen and the Berkman Center that tells the story of Zack McCune, a Brown student (and Berkman intern) who “won the DMCA lottery” and was sued by the RIAA. It’s nicely done product by summer interns Nikki Leon and John Randall, and it’s a cliff-hanger…

[Tags: berkman st_gallen riaa dmca digital_nativescopyright zack_mccune ]

Be the first to comment »

Jon Udell talks about his interview of Dan Bricklin in which about Dan talks about his experience entering the world of audio. Jon says:

When I embarked on my personal audio adventure a few years ago, I naively thought that our fancy new digital technologies would make the whole process very simple. Boy, was I wrong about that.

As a coda, Jon uses the story of the production of of that very interview as an example of the routine complexities of audio.

Too true. I’m often tempted to record an interview but then I remember just what a pain in the butt it would be to edit it, even with my very low standards for audio quality.

So, is there something wrong with the idea of writing software that:

1. Converts spoken audio into text (presumably using existing tools)

2. Lets you use an editor to delete pieces of the text and move other pieces around, as you would with a low-end word processor

3. Uses the edited text to edit and output the audio

Even if Step 1 worked only moderately well, this application would turn editing spoken audio into a trivial task, no harder than (in fact, exactly the same as) editing a text file.

Does this software exist? Is there a good reason why it doesn’t, shouldn’t or couldn’t?

[Tags: jon_udell dan_bricklin podcasting ]

10 Comments »

When I read something like today’s news that only 10% of American newspaper editors consider foreign news to be “very essential” to their coverage, I instinctively turn to the bloggers who I know will have something enlightening, thoughtful and sometimes profound to say. And that by itself says a lot about how news is changing.

Of course, I did read that particular news in a newspaper, although I was referred there by a blog aggregator. So, I’m not saying that professional news media are unnecessary or add nothing. Not at all. But the news ecology in just a few years has become 100% mixed.

Tags: news media participatory_media ethan_zuckerman

3 Comments »

Mygazines.com is an interesting idea. Currently in beta, it’s designed to let anyone upload any magazine or magazine article, and then share the content, using the familiar elements of content-based social networking sites (or, more accurately, the social networking elements of content-based sites).

The site unfortunately has little information about itself, so I don’t know what they think they’re going to do about the obvious copyright issues. The existing content includes the magazines’ ads, so maybe the site hopes publishers will see some benefit in being scanned ‘n’ read. (As an example, here’s a link to the complete contents of the current issue of The New Yorker.)

While the tool for reading is pretty slick, the process of posting to enable said slickness seems pretty onerous.

I’m interested to see what becomes of it… [Tags: copyright magazines publishing media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

3 Comments »

We often buy “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” despite its awful name and soul-withering chemical composition. Even the product’s faux-entertaining site refers to it as a “nutritious blend of oils.” Mmm. But, I like it, so shut up.

In fact, we just bought the “light” version of it, which is therefore some sort of simulacrum of the original. I can’t figure out whether its name should therefore be:

1. “I Can’t Believe I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter”

2. “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Not Butter”

or

3. _______________________ (fill in the blank)

[Tags: puzzle ]

29 Comments »

I find I’m not watching The Daily Show nearly as much as I used to, I think because Bush has dropped out of the scene so much that I don’t need the emotional release Jon Stewart was providing for me.

I bet I wouldn’t be as fanatically devoted to The West Wing now if it were still on.

The Bush Departure: Taking the comedy, leaving the tragedy.

[Tags: jon_stewart daily_show bush ]

4 Comments »

This was passed along by Jacob Kramer-Duffield, a summer intern at the Berkman Center, for no reason other than that its a summer Friday.

Tags: bunnies pancakes

5 Comments »

Here are David “End to End” Reed’s comments to Congress on Net neutrality. They were apparently well-received.

Be the first to comment »

I am an admirer of Marco’s. His new project is trying to explain what’s important and real about the Internet. Its page is here,. It’s in Italian, but I am confident in recommending it without having read it. (I’m still on the road, and only have 3 minutes left on the free hotel wifi before its 15 mins are up.)

Be the first to comment »

Spending an interesting day in Milan in conversation about whether Web-based social networking sites/services are going to continue to shape our expections about SNSes (and sociality), or whether the ubiquity of mobiles will wag this dog. The social roles of SNS on the two platforms are so different. One creates my presence, the other announces my temporality.

(Hint: Don’t try blogging on ytour blackberry on a bus.)

8 Comments »

Not only that, I am famous for being unknown.

This video is just weird, and pretty funny, although being the butt of the joke undoubtedly affects my judgment. That is, being skewered skews…

Apparently, I’ve been punked ut good.. Good one!

1 Comment »

I’m in Milan for an afternoon, and then in Madrid for some part of a day, and then home. Blogging may be lighter than usual.

I’ve been in Milan several times before. Every time I see it, it seems like a different city. I’m not sure if it’s seasonal, because of the accidents of the parts of town I see, or one of the great pleasures of a failing memory. But, my, what a beautiful city it was this afternoon! [Tags: travel milan ]

2 Comments »

Before paper, what did the wings of moths look like?

[Tags: puzzle ]

3 Comments »

My friend Hanan Cohen in Israel reports that because of the pettiness of the prime minister’s fraud, he’s now known as LOLmert.

[Tags: israel olmert ]

1 Comment »

Tim Spalding, founder of the estimable LibraryThing, is calling on us all to create an open shelves classification project to replace Dewey and his pals. LibraryThing is a brilliant implementation of a what a library built on a social network of readers can be, so I’m excited about Tim’s new idea.

[Tags: library taxonomies tim_spalding librarything everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Be the first to comment »

Im reading Julian Warners “From Writing to Computers,” published in 1994. In a wonderful chapter he looks at the senses in which the Western tradition thought documents contained or were intelligent — written documents “appear to understand what they are saying,” Plato says. Warner looks carefully at Platos Phaedrus, a seminal text for those concerned with the transition from oral to written cultures. Thats the one where Plato worries that the onset of written documents will ruin human memory: Those who acquire the skill of writing “will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of on their own internal resources.”

Plato has another complaint: Writings cant respond to questions: “writing involves a similar disadvantage to painting. The productions of paintings look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence.” Ive taken these quotes from Plato from Warner pp. 58-59.

Makes you wonder what Plato would have made of chat, IM, and SMS.

Tags: plato julian_warner chat sms im

2 Comments »

:”Wall-e” is such an amazing movie that it left me unsatisfied.

It’s totally enjoyable. The graphic realism is phenomenal. The creativity of the details is staggering. The directorial vision is superb. The editing is one confusing scene short of perfect.

But “Wall-e” is yet another damn kids story. Oh, adults will completely enjoy it. Scene for scene, it carries you through. You care about the characters and each segment has plenty for everyone. But ultimately the story is predictable, simple, and safe for the kiddies.

At this point in Pixar’s amazing career, it’s proven it can do anything. It can imbue a trash compactor with personality and zip it across a world subject to any rules Pixar imagines. Pixar has the technical skill to show us anything it can imagine. It has the movie-making craft to tell a story with a thousand moving parts.

Now it’s time to stop playing it safe and to and make some art. Now it’s time to stop dazzling us with what it can do, and to do it.

IMO.

[Tags: pixar movies wall-e animation entertainment reviews ]

8 Comments »

I’d like to throw a hat into Obama’s VP ring: Elizabeth Edwards.

She is so right for an administration that is promising fundamental change in the politics of governing. Edwards hears past differences to what is shared. She hears past anger to what is worth defending. She hears past fear to what is worth cherishing. If — as a defining phrase of Obama’s puts it — we are the ones we are waiting for, Elizabeth Edwards models who we need to become if we are to enable change to happen.

And is there a better model of the hope Obama stands for? With Elizabeth Edwards, no one can confuse hope with mere wishful thinking or weakness. Edwards faces her mortality with clarity, and seems strengthened by it. I’m sure she hopes that she will survive for many, many years. But she seems to embody a larger type of hope as well: The notion that our future doesn’t have to be like our present. That every moment is an opportunity to move that future closer to us. That we bring that future closer by relentlessly finding what is best in those we encounter. That we can change our world by giving in to our urge to connect with others, our urge to be better people than we are.

There are obvious negatives to an Edwards vice-presidency. She is not ready to step into the presidency if, G-d forbid, something should happen to Obama. True. We would have to rely on the machinery of the administration to carry us forward. And, of course, she has untreatable, fatal cancer. John Edwards could be prevailed upon to be, in effect, her co-VP.

She has political strengths. She’s a woman, a southerner, a speaker who connects with her audience, a military brat. Those strengths could help.

But most of all, Elizabeth Edwards is hope walking on two legs. [Tags: politics elizabeth_edwards obama vp ]

2 Comments »