Cool stuff with tags

Check the tag "10placesofmycity" at Technorati. People from around the world are tagging URLS, posts and photos showing off where they live. Technorati is automatically assembling them into a mini city pride portal. Cool! [Technorati tag: taxonomy] [Disclosure: I'm on technorati's board of advisors.]

Best D'oh! of the year so far

Matt Biddulf has an animated screen capture of what del.icio.us would look like embedded in the BBC 3's page. It's an eye-popper all right: So elegant it seems obvious. Brilliant. (Thanks to The Obvious for the link.) [Technorati tag: taxonomy]

danah responds to Clay's enthusiasm (which I generally share) for tags.

There’s a problematic feature to crowds - they like to homogenize...

Folksonomy isn’t asking the questions about the implications of collective action classification. Who benefits? Who becomes marginalized? What priorities bubble up? How does pressure to homogenize affect the schema and the people involved? How are some people hurt or offended by decisions that are made? Should moderation of classifications occur? If so, what are the consequences?

These are great questions, and leave it to danah to ask them! We'll address them as they occur...but only if (as danah suggests) we keep raising them. Otherwise, we'd have to design a system ahead of time that we would undoubtedly get wrong.

Tags, labels and piles of leaves

[This is the conclusion of the article on tagging I published a few days ago in my newsletter.]

You label a jar of preserves "Strawberry - Aug. 2005" so you can tell what's in it and whether the green stuff on top is supposed to be there. At Flickr, you tag a digital photo of your jar of preserves "strawberry jam" so other people can find it. The label has a context: the thing that it's attached to. The tag's context is invisible and detached: It's how you think other people are going to search for it. (As Joshua Schachter, creator of del.icio.us, says, tagging is the inverse of searching.)

So, we're creating this context-free realm of free-floating metadata, like word magnets on a refrigerator door, that we will paw through and assemble, and, most important, do things we haven't yet thought of.

The fact that we are inventing this way of classifying is important. It announces that we are skeptical at a whole new level: Not just about the content of knowledge but about how it's divvied up in the first place.

This explicitly pries yet another layer off the real and pulls it into the human, for in a tagged world, it's hard to maintain that topics exist independent of us. Or disciplines. Instead, we cluster our world around our interests. New interest? Shuffle and deal again.

The project of knowledge goes from filling up containers with information to making everything public by tagging it and throwing it into the leaf pile. We're doing that together, without waiting for a plan or permission. Then we're rolling around in the leaves.

This is a knowledge economy of wild excess. It would make no sense if we were still scratching for information under rocks.

We are meaning our world together. We can't do it if we have to do it perfectly or even well. It's better just to do it.

We can sort it out later. [Technorati tag: taxonomy]

BBN rips lid off my seamy relationship with EthanZ

I ignored Ethan's blogging of a comment about my after-dinner speech last week because it was way too embarrassing. Unfortunately, the bastards at Better Bad News have a 15 minute video (also available as a podcast) that begins there, figures out I'm a schmuck, and moves onto the important issues of blogging and credibility. (Hint: It's very funny and they're right.)

Ethan responds with appropriate outrage here.

Yay for democracy

Hooray for the elections in Iraq! The accounts are moving. For example, from the Boston Globe:

Wamidh Imad al-Zubaidi, an engineer, almost decided not to vote after death threats against would-be voters circulated in his mixed Sunni and Shi'ite neighborhood, Zayouna. Then, he said, he remembered his brother, who was executed for opposing Saddam Hussein's regime.

''I feel a power inside myself, and there is a voice telling me, this should not happen to my son or to any Iraqi. I have to prevent this dictatorship from returning to Iraq," he said, adding that he braved the polls with his pregnant wife. ''We put it in God's hands."

But declarations the elections have been are "resounding success" are obviously premature. Did Iraq just vote or did it just establish the fault lines of a civil war?

So, I find myself torn. I am thrilled Saddam is gone and people are voting. But it's still not how I'd choose to spend the money and lives this war we were lied into cost.

Michael Prothero has a nice piece at Salon reporting from the scene.

The street where journalism ends

Bernard Weinraub, former entertainment reporter for The New York Times, writes about what it's like to be a journalist at Hollywood and Vine. The basic lesson seems to be that you can't fully stand apart from the world about which you're reporting. Hollywood, despite its excesses, does not seem to be a special case: Reporters embedded in the financial world, DC or in a foreign capital must face the same situation, albeit with fewer Hummers and tiaras in view. Access is the currency and humans remain human.

Too bad Weinraub wasn't writing a blog during all those years. We would have gotten a sense of the winds buffeting him as he tried to stand tall. Plus, the dishing have been fabulous.

Right brainer

Daniel "Free Agent Nation" Pink (who was also a speechwriter for Gore, by the way), has published a terrific piece in the new Wired on why we need to commit to the right halves of our brains. Best of all, it's from his upcoming book.

Wikipedia has no articles

I have been corrected by the estimable SJ Klein for referring to Wikipedia as "the Wikipedia." I stand corrected and will attempt to avoid mistake next time. I hope I have not caused Wikipedia any the distress.

Shafer's mischaracterization

Jack Shafer's piece in Slate misrepresents what went on at the WebCred conference. The piece says the bloggers in attendance "declared blogs the destroyers of mainstream media." (Notice Jack's use of the term "declared" instead of "said" or, say, "ruminated," btw.) That's a long way from what I thought happened. I thought we had a useful, interesting, and many-sided discussion about how blogs are already changing journalism and how they might in the future. Yes, the bloggers thought the change is going to be more radical, inevitable and unpredictable than the mainstream media folks did. (Note: I'm generalizing.) And, sure, there were moments of conflict. But Jack presents his insight — "the alleged divide between the old media and this new whippersnapper media of blogs has never seemed real to me" — as a corrective to the conference when in fact it was the subject of the very first (and very excellent) presentation at the conference by Jay Rosen, which then served as the premise of the discussion.

Shafer's piece, which contains good thoughts, irks me because he is letting himself play the hard-headed realist at the cost of making others look foolish. Ed Cone in his column today, IMO not only presents the conference more accurately, but also learns from the conversation.

Two notes:

1. Jay Rosen, who was among those singled out by Shafer's article, responds personally here.

2. There's such a thing as premature realism.

Digital hockey season

G4techTV, a cable network that shows people playing video games, has simulated the entire missing National Hockey League season using NHL 2005 from Electronic Arts. According to an article by Hiawatha Bray in the Boston Globe, the network has played all 1,230 games on the NHL schedule using the computer-plays-computer option. (The game has a large set of stats for each player.) The network is releasing the results according to the hockey schedule, so although the computers know who won the Stanley Cup, we don't.

The response has been anemic. The network stopped showing its nightly "highlights" show in November. The network's sr. vp of programming says it's because people don't care about hockey. "''I think it would have been better if the NBA had been locked out instead of the NHL," he said.

I doubt it. But if we knew why we don't care about sport simulations but care absurdly about actual sports, we'd be a long way toward understanding our implicit metaphysics: free will, agency, the contingent, personhood, virtue...the whole shooting match, so to speak.

Favorite phone call so far this morning

[Ring ring]

Me: Hello.

Her: Hello!

Me: Hello!

Her: How are you this morning?

Me: I'm fine. Who is this, please?

Her: It's your mother-in-law.

Me: (Sputtering) Oh. Sorry! I didn't recognize your voice. How are you?

Her: (Laughing) That's ok...

Me: Wait, you're calling on my business line.

Her: Is this John?

Me: Nope. (laughing) Now you feel the fool!

Her: (laughing) I'm sorry!

Me: No problem. And give John my best.

Category guilt and more

In response to AKMA's confession, Dave writes about feeling guilty about not using categories: When he failed to use them a few times, he felt so guilty about it that he stopped using them entirely.

Best of all, now those of us who do use tags can engage in Taggenfreude. (Sign of a meme catching on: Bad bad puns. Why? Because they're as easy as falling off a blog.)

Jay at iCite has some trenchant comments on the article on tagging in the new issue of my newsletter. (I've replied in a comment.)

Dan Bricklin reflects on this and decides that software needs to take guiltlessness as a desideratum.

New issue of my newsletter

I just published a new issue of my (free) newsletter:

January 28, 2005

Pi: Order of magnitude quiz

Hiroyuki Goto holds the record for reciting the value of pi. How many digits did he memorize? To win, you have to come within an order of magnitude. Prize: The satisfaction of know you guessed good.

Drag-select between the X's to see the answer.

X ————In 1995, he recited over 42,000 digits. It took him 9 hours. ———— X

Burningbird on why tagging can't violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Burningbird pulls together a whole bunch of excellent posts about tags, and marshalls them into a discussion dead center on the main point:

I believe that ultimately interest in folksonomies will go the way of most memes, in that they're fun to play with, but eventually we want something that won’t splinter, crack, and stumble the very first day it’s released.

...no matter how many tricks you play with something like tags, you can only pull out as much 'meaning' as you put into them.

...the semantic web is going to be built 'by the people', but it won’t be built on chaos. In other words, 100 monkeys typing long enough will NOT write Shakespeare; nor will a 100 million people randomly forming associations create the semantic web.

(This snippet doesn't do justice to the piece. It's a must-read.)

Shelley understands this stuff better than I do, but I'm not convinced she's right. My initial concern about the hype is whether we're going to get more apps that get us tagging. If we don't, then tags won't have much effect. If we do, then I simply don't know whether we're going to be able to solve the problems inherent in scaling tags: Tags work because they're so simple and because they are so connected to the human semantic context, but having billions of tags won't work because they're so simple and connected to the human semantic context. Will we be able to triangulate tags with other data - especially social data - so that we can get more out of them than we put in? It doesn't seem impossible to me - simply knowing who created a tag lets you get more out of the tag than the person put in - but it's not up to me to invent the stuff.

So, I think you can get more out of a tag than someone put in. But I don't know how and I don't know if we will.

Exley on how to fix the Democratic Party

Zack Exley, ex of MoveOn and ex Internet guy for the ex Kerry campaign, kicks off his new blog with a Rosen-length piece — and it's just part 1 of 4 — on what the Democratic Party ought to do to get itself back together.

Zack is not as much of a soft-headed, touchy-feely Web guy as I am. And that's a good thing. We need people like Zack if we're going to win elections, although, IMO, we have to do the touchy-feely stuff if we're going to transform democracy. But let's make damn sure we win some freaking elections already.

Zack's ten-point proposal for "building a permanent field program with the New Grassroots" suggests a way to quickly build up a field organization that does the hard work of traditional politics. He says it combines the benefits of democracy and hierarchy. Conclusion:

Using the online assets that Democrats built in 2004, we should be able to jump light years ahead of the Republican field organization. If we do, it will not be thanks to Internet Magic, but rather thanks to mixing new online tools and resources with good old-fashioned grassroots organizing, focusing on results.

I don't know enough about how politics actually works to be able to evaluate his plan, but I have a lot of respect for Zack. And, yes, his proposal is all about reinventing how the Democrats can do the work of traditional politics — building a clean database of vote information, organizing phone banks, raising money, etc. — and not about building communities and enabling lateral conversation. But, this is not an either/or. And if what Zack proposes can help us change our government's current direction, I'm all in favor of it.

Besides, he has another 3 parts coming.

Congressman Barney Frank blogs from Davos

My Congressperson, Barney Frank, is blogging live from the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. For example, here's a post on the conference blog in which you can feel him trying to process the gap in values and even cognition between him and those he thought he agreed with. Barney's not exactly a hep cat when it comes to technology (and he's not exactly great on tech issues), so it's especially good to see him bloggin' away. [Technorati tag: davos]

Bogus Contest: Truth in Britannicas

From the TimesOnLine, by Alexandra Blair:

A SCHOOLBOY with a fascination for Poland and wildlife has uncovered several significant errors in the latest — the fifteenth — edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Lucian George, 12, a pupil at Highgate Junior School in North London, was delving into the volumes on Poland and wildlife in Central Europe when he noted the mistakes.

The first was the assertion by the internationally acclaimed reference book that the small town of Chochim, in which two battles were fought between the Poles and the Ottoman Empire, now lies in Moldova.

“Wrong,” said Lucian, who attends the former hall of learning of Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary. “Chochim is in Ukraine.”...

Bogus contest: Write your own tag line for the Britannica, preferably containing the word "Wikipedia." For instance:

"Encyclopaedia Britannica...It's like Wikipedia, but slower!"

Jay aggregates WebCred

Jay Rosen asked the attendees at the WebCred conference to send him an email describing something the conference change changed their mind about. He has stitched the replies into three posts: 1 2 3.

He also points to Dan Gillmor's excellent Reagan-esque call for newspapers to tear down the walls around their archives. Jay calls it a "must read." I agree. [Technorati tag: webcred]

Gunner Palace

Gunner Palace looks like it might be good. It's a non-political documentary about the life of our soldiers in Baghdad. (Yeah yeah, I know everything is political.) The trailer maybe has a couple too many ironic shots, and the rock 'n' roll soundtrack of the second trailer is too expected, but those seem like trailer artifacts. They're sending me a "screener" - I feel so Hollywood! - so I'll let you know...

P2P fashion

The Annenberg School of Communication is holding a conference called "Ready to Share" (not "ready to wear" ...get it?) to explore the way the fashion industry remixes styles without anyone getting their ultra-glamorous knickers in a twist.

We have something to learn from the fashion industry. If it were like the music industry, someone would have claimed a copyright on wearing your cap backwards.

Postponing Berkman session tonight

It's crappy out and getting crappier. Um, I mean, Boston is being blanketed with innocence made crystalline. So, I'm postponing tonight's Web of Ideas session until Feb. 2.

Damn snow.

Watermark art

Rageboy discovers some found art (finds some discovered art?) on a site that sells stock images cheap.

Web of Ideas: Everything is miscellaneous

Tonight I'm going to lead another session in the semi-regular series at the Berkman Center. This time, I'm going to try out a presentation I'm giving in a couple of weeks at a conference. The topic has something to do with taxonomies and tagging. (Yes, it will repeat some material in the dinner talk I gave last week, and a bunch of stuff from the Library of Congress speech. But it will have new stuff on tagging.)

It's 6-7:30pm at the Baker House (map). It's open to the public and pizza will be served.

Phonoe photos of big-time art

Bill Koslowsky has posted some remarkably good photos taken with his Treo at the Museum of Modern Art.

Wacky Wiki Wemix

Joi has posted a remix of Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales talking at the WebCred conference. Its 41 seconds of audio delight. (Hint: "NPOV" = neutral point of view.)

Technorati tags: webcred joi

Canadian broadband irony

I readily acknowledge that with this screen capture I'm indulging in cheap irony and that the real question is — as Dewayne Hendricks said in forwarding the link — why the US doesn't have an initiative like this Canadian one. Nevertheless, you don't turn down a chance to blog cheap irony, do you, especially when that's our only way of maintaining our sense of national superiority...?

Taxonomy Tales

It's not that we need more proof of the point, but James Carroll, columnist for the Boston Globe, today gives a particularly good example of the politics of categorization. He writes that the first New York Times story about Auschwitz, on May 8, 1945, is surprisingly detailed and blunt about what happened in the death camp where 2 million people were murdered. There's only one major omission: "...in defining the identities of those victims, the story never used the word 'Jew.'" He adds:

The New York Times index did not cite stories about concentration camps under the category "Jews" until 1950. It was not until 1975 that the index category "Nazi Policies Toward Jews" appeared.

By the way, the Times story was written by C. L. Sulzberger and appeared on page 12.

Technorati tag: taxonomy

My dinner speech

Benjamen "Theory of Everything" Walker has moved the mp3 of my after-dinner speech to a new home.

Download

Stream

Thanks, Benjamen, for recording it and posting it.

ZDNet's podcasting starts here

David Berlind posts a photo of what could be the start of ZDNet's podcasting empire. You saw it here (uh, there) first!

No, I don't find the snow charming

Three hours later...

Big Bri has posted an eerie Boston snow-at-midnight photo. FreckleGirl shows what it means to dig out a car. And Trevor and his pals are just nuts :) (Thanks to Boston Online for the links.)

Condensed philosophical soup

Squashed Philosophers boils 'em down for you. None of that bothersome reading or thinking required! (Thanks, Staci.)

[bjc] Wrap-ups

Here are some people reflecting on the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference:

Rebecca Mackinnon. Snippet:

...the interests of the people communicating on the web will drive the evolution. But if this "interest" largely represents the interest of middle-class, white, affluent, early adopters, we are in danger of creating a feedback loop that would become less and less inclusive of people who were not in on the conversation at the beginning. Some of us are looking at ways to broaden the global conversation with such projects as Global Voices and the Digital Divide Network.

John Palfrey. Snippet:

We started this event — and an associated little firestorm — by broaching the topic of credibility on the web. It was something, we thought, that both journalists and bloggers ought to have a role in working on. Over the past two days (January 21 and 22, 2005), we made some progress in that direction. But not frankly all that much progress. We're certainly a long way from a shared set of principles, or a code of ethics, or even an understanding of how they could come about. (Personally, I think that there are already norms in the blogosphere that result in credibility, that such norms will continue to come from the bottom up, that those norms will be undergirded by accountability to one another, and that that will work, but I might be wrong. And this notion did not come up at the event.)

Jay Rosen. Snippet:

“The forces of denial are in retreat.” Which is simply my impression–an educated guess, really–about where the mainstream journalism world is, right now, on matters of blogging, journalism, Internet, and trust. For a very long time, the mainstream press has denied that it needs to change any of its ideas about journalism in order to survive and prosper on the new platform. Adapt what you’re doing now? Sure. Journalists knew they had to do that. Transfer it to the new platform? You bet; lots of transferring would be needed. Preserve “traditional” values? Yes, journalists thought it was important to conserve what was valuable about journalism. Re-purpose content online? Of course. But…

Dave Winer. Snippet:

...the real accomplishment may be that now we better understand who we are, having had a chance to take the same side, even though we're so different. For example, I came to admire John Hinderaker, of Power Line, even though our politics are opposite. We have deeper values that bind us. Same with Jimmy Wales, the Wikipedia guy. Again, we're opposites in the way we create text but we're both advocates for the same idea, people doing it for themselves.

Zephyr. Snippet:

One model of journalism ... says that the journalists are good reporters because they are not from the community. A stranger makes a better journalist than a friend; the best journalist is detached. When people get excited about citizen journalism (people including myself), we get excited about news – information and framing – coming from a much wider group of storytellers, but also a group that reflects and is the community – the jury of the 1500s.

But I can't fit this into a box — truth seeking mechanisms are not only about truth, they are also...about the act of witnessing itself.

Jon Bonne. This is what the conference looks like filtered through the eyes of a food blogger. Snippet:

No dis to the Harvard Faculty Club, but I was finding it pretty hard to drink their wine last night – a Chilean cab sauv that was pretty much all oak and blackberry, with that vegetal underripe thing lurking in the background and nothing else. Even one of their servers acknowledged, sotto voce, that it was kinda nasty.

(Jon blogs about the substance of the conference here.)

Sources:
Transcripts and audio
Dave's conference blog aggregator
Bloglines aggregator
del.icio.us feed
Wikinews page
Technorati tag
Bloglines aggregator
del.icio.us feed
Wikinews page
Transcript and audio of my dinner talk

Technorati tag: bjc

Ahnuld's first kill

So, Gov. Schwarzenegger has killed his first real person. To me, that makes the case that if we're going to have actors as leaders, they at least ought to be good actors.

Why? Empathy.

Transparency demonstrated

David Berlind posts the raw material behind his journalism. Cool!

[bjc] My dinner talk

I gave the after dinner speech to the conference. The incredible SJ has posted a rough, unedited transcript. (I haven't read it yet.) I talked about three separate topics: tags, philosophical ethics, and blogging. Now Ben Walker has posted an mp3 of it. (Thanks Ben and SJ.) [Note: The link to the mp3 is the new one. There is also now a RealAudio streaming version.) [Technorati tags: webcred tags]

[bjc] Morning

We began with excellent session, led by Brendan Greeley, on podcasting. Very informative and good at the conceptual level as well. It seemed to be well received by the media folks. (Q: Why was this session about podcasting accepted so well while text blogging stuff yesterday met hostility?)

Next, Ethan Zuckerman is leading a session about tools. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia starts off by talking about why it has a neutral point of view (NPOV) policy. Without it, he says, he'd lose tons of contributors.

I ask Jimmy: You have an operational view of neutrality: It's neutral when we stop arguing about it. But who is the "we"?

Jimmy responded that he's concerned to make the community that supports Wikipedia as diverse as possible, in part by encouraging a culture of openness and niceness. Once you join the community, you gain some civil rights. E.g., you can't be banned just for disagreeing with someone politicallly.

I ask about the demographics of the community that does the bulk of the support of the Wikipedia. He says for the English version, it's definitely white, male, and a slim majority are US citizens. "We're in over 50 languages by 8 or 9 have over 10,000 articles. There's a certain kind of diversity that's hard to achieve just because of where pepole live." He points out that USB article in the US version is a "fantastic, clear article, but the article about Emily Dickinson is Ok but not fantastic." He says they're trying to reach out to people. "I'm very interested in reaching out to the Arabic community. We're trying to reach out but it's difficult."

Jimmy says that the quality of the encyclopedia takes precedence over almost everything else, including being open to anyone to edit.

Jane Singer asks Dan Gillmor what he wants citizen journalists to learn from established journalism. Dan says that, for example, most people don't know that the Freedom of Information Act applies to them, not just to professionals.

Jonathan Zittrain worries that when Wikipedia gets noticed by the mainstream, its norms will be swamped by its catastropic success. "How do you batten down the hatches against that?" Jimmy says: We try to think of problems ahead of time but not try to solve them until they happen. "The community's already scaled much larger than I ever imagined."

Jimmy says that wikipedia does not do original research but wikinews will have some original reporting. It's going to have to be high-quality, he says, and he has no prediction about how much of wikinews will be original.

Dan points out that the Emily Dickinson article that Jimmy uses as an example of an ok-but-not-great article quotes her poem "Tell all the Truth but tell it slant," and suggests that that's a good motto for this conference.

Dan asks how the various constituencies would handle seeing a charge about a government official posted on an anonymous blog.

Jim Kennedy says the AP wouldn't publish it without checking it out. E.g., the wife of a Navy Seal posted photos on oFoto (maybe) that looked like it was Abu Ghraib-style abuse. The reporter checked it out and ran the photos, and now the family is suing the AP. No matter how it comes to you, you follow the same rules.

Jay Rosen says he wouldn't run it.

Dave Winer does run items he hasn't checked out. He asks himself if he thinks it's true, and asks himself what he's basing it on. He also tells his readers the degree of confidence he has in it.

Jill Abramson says that in the old journalism craft, verification isn't enough. Even if you confirmed the story, you'd have to get comments.

John Hinderaker. Powerline doesn't go with anything that's anonymous.

Me: This is right where this conference hits the shoals we were warned about. This discussion assumes that blogging is continuous with journalism and ought to be judged by the same criteria. And it isn't. The change to the institution of journalism will come, I think, not from bloggers who think they're sort of journalists but from the 99.999999% of us who don't think we're journalists at all.

Jane: Bloggers have an ethical obligation to their readers. Saying untrue things cause harm.

Ethan says that I'm being disingenous when I say that my blog is like a talk over the water cooler because it gets read by more than two buddies and it gets indexed. [Yes. It's not identical to water cooler talk, but it's more like that than it is like journalism. So, the blogging form of rhetoric has a set of responsibilities that water cooler talk doesn't. But those responsibilities aren't the same as journalists...although we can learn a lot from the ethics and practices journalists have developed. E.g., disclosure.]

Jay: I'm trying to increase informational certainty but decrease conceptual certainty.

Jimmy: Free licensing does the media no harm if they're revenues are based on advertising. Release your work under a license that requires attribution back to you. People say "Gee I wish we had your Google power." We got that power because people are copying our content.

Jim Kennedy: In concept, it's kind of neat. I'm worried about what sort of abuses would occur and how the brand might be hijacked by people who thought they had a right to it. And it's more of a problem for images and video.

Jimmy: Take a look at the spectrum of licenses...Your model doesn't depend on people coming to your web site so maybe it doesn't apply to you. But it does to newspapers.

Dave: How do you point to something that disappears after a couple of weeks.

Jim: It's an archive issue. We sell access to the archive.

Jay: In five years you'll change.

Dave: How can we judge the credibility of an author if we can check what he's written?

Jim: I don't disagree with you. We just don't have a mechanism for it.

Dan puts in a plug for Creative Commons. "I don't know if it hurt sales, but I do know it helped bring attention to the topic."

Dave Sifry: The elephant in the room is about business models. Until we ask how people still make money doing it, we can't talk well together. (Dave says that every page of Technorati is Creative Commons licensed.)

Jay points to the damage done by locking up the archives. He says journalists don't recognize the damage because they can always get at the content via Lexis/Nexis. But for the rest of it, the content is simply gone. This is critical to the development of the Web and the future of journalism. the place to watch is Greensboro North Carolina. Jay calls upon journalists to demand this.

Bill Mitchell of Poynter says this discussion is changing his mind. He came in thinking that archives were one of the reliable sources of revs, but now he's thinking about the social impact of locking up the archives and about alternative business models.

Jay points to an article about The Guardian's reasons for making the archives permanently available.

Alex Jones of the Shorenstein says that it would bring people to the pages, and they could sell advertising.

Jim (AP): Our management is enlightened. We're just stuck between models for a while. [Technorati tags: bjc]

GoAwayDaddy

Here is a policy from GoDaddy, a domain registrar:

QUESTION: Why is GoDaddy.com blocking people in certain countries from accessing its site?

ANSWER: GoDaddy.com actively blocks the following countries from using our services due to U.S. government policies:

Cuba
Iran
Iraq
Libya
North Korea
Sudan
Syria

The U.S. Department of State has declared the governments of these states to be sponsors of international terrorism

How screwed up is this? Bush's inaugural address told us we are the purveyors of liberty. That must mean that we want these oppressive governments to fail so that their people can be free. Yet, according to GoDaddy's interpretation, we are to deny those citizens the instruments of their liberty. As Hoder says:

I wonder whether this is what president Bush considers standing with a nation for their freedom. Who else is using these websites other than mostly secular, freedom-loving Iranian youth?

By the way, in a press release on Jan. 12 GoDaddy boasts: "Go Daddy has found its SSL Certificates reaching into virtually every corner of the globe, with new orders coming daily from Europe, Australia, the MidEast, South America and Japan." Well, not every corner.

[The link is from the irc for webcred: webcred at irc.freenode.net. See Hoder's bloggage.]

[bjc] Friday: The things I want to say

On Friday, the pivotal moment for me was when Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia replied to Jill Abramson of the NY Times. Jill was reminding us how expensive it is to maintain overseas reporters, an expense bloggers can't bear. There were a number of replies about how bloggers could reduce that expense, but Jimmy took a different tack. The Encyclopedia Britannica is a $350M operation, he said, but Wikipedia is kicking its butt without having a single employee.

Some of the media folks jumped on this, saying that the Jimmy is underestimating the value of their operations. Jimmy replied that of course the existing media couldn't be replaced except by something that offers more value. Jimmy wasn't crowing and he certainly wasn't threatening. He was pointing to the success of the Wikipedia as a cautionary tale.

I don't blame the media folks who reacted negatively. First, it's a human reaction. But more important, I think it's a sign of the cognitive gap between us; we've made progress in understanding one another, but we're now at the point where the misunderstandings are so deep that they're easier to ignore than to confront.

So, here's the cognitive gap that I see: The media folks (generalizing) still think that the important effect that blogging is having on them — and they do believe it's having an effect — comes from bloggers who are sorta kinda journalists. But that's a tiny percentage of the blogosphere. The truly disruptive effect of bloggers comes from the rest of the blogosphere that doesn't think of itself as journalistic at all. We're not the farm team for Big Media. We're a different ballpark entirely.

In fact, we're not a ballpark at all, of course. The other big gap between us is easy to state but hard to explain: The media is owned. The blogosphere isn't. We together are building it. The media have to try to get us interested in what they do, but the blogosphere is constructed out of our interests. It's ours not (just) in the sense of ownership but in the sense of what we care about and what we are.

Something like that. [Technorati tags: bjc blogs]

[bjc] Friday afternoon session 2

Jeff Jarvis leads a spirited discussion.

[bjc] Friday afternoon - First ten minutes

[Links to the participants] [Conference blog aggregator] [IRC channel: #webcred at freenode.net]

Topic: How can institutional journalists adopt what's good about blogging? And what happens to bloggers?

Bill Mitchell of Poynter Online was commissioned to write a paper about transparency. He raises three questions for discussion: 1) What kinds of promises might be made to create the relationships we want between readers and writers. 2) If transparency isn't enough to create trust, what will? 3) What's the coolest tool we could create that would help us get at better representations of reality. [My answer to #3 is simple: Weblogs.]

Karen Schneider says she represents the end of the info transaction. In her professoin (librarian), the code of ethics says that users should do less of the work, despite Dan Gillmor's saying that we're going to have to do more work.

[And then I stopped trying to keep up. Things got good 'n' heated. Sorry. But it's being transcribed at #webcredtrans at irc.freenode.net]

Wikipedia breaks news

Jimmy Wales, at the BJC conference's backchannel, has pointed out that Wikipedia has broken news that has not yet been picked up by the media: Unrest in Belize. Fascinating.

Degrees of belief

One of the differences between the journalists and the rest of us: Journalists have a tiny vocabulary for expressing incredulity: "alleged," "reportedly," "claimed," "suspected." The rest of us have a rich rhetoric of semi-belief, starting with a simple "I think that..." and going all the way to "I find it really hard to believe anything that lying fathead says, but..."

Part of the value of traditional journalists is that they only tell us what they know. But that's a more fragile credibility. And it forces uncertainty out of stories, or, worse, allows it only in what isn't said.

[bjc] Judith Donath

Judith Donath

Look at credibility in terms of signals that occur even among animals where if the signal is costly, it's more likely to be honest. E.g., a moose with big antlers actually is strong. There's also reputation among animals. Sparrows have pecking orders based on having a black mark on their chest that doesn't signal any real property. A scientist painted a black mark on one. It gained in status. When the sparrows figured out that it was painted on [how?], the other sparrows pecked it to death.

What do the webs of links among bloggers mean? How do they build a reputation system and credibility? What are the reprecussions of lying about them? And will readers care enough to put energy into discerning the credibility of what and who they read? There's a cost to that evaluation. People will look for cheaper shortcuts. E.g., they might look to the journalistic elite: Newspapers check the reps of their writers on behalf of their readers. We can't rely on the audience to do that vetting. At what point will bloggers set up collectives and risk their reputation for one another, vouching for their reputations?

Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia speculates that it'd be interesting to have a group blog where the contributors group edit their work and the work is published as a group product.

Jane Singer says with regard to credibility the relevant signal is what I do, not what I say about myself.

Jonathan Zittrain: What you say, what you do and perhaps how you live? The journalists at the conference have been less active participants in this discussion. How much of telling truth to others means standing apart from life? [Technorati tags: bjc donath

Halley interviews Dan

Dan Gillmor, who I think we ought to start calling The Dan, is interviewed by Halley at IT Conversations. (I haven't heard it yet because I'm at a conference, but how could it be bad?)

[bjc] Friday morning

[Links to the participants] Conference blog aggregator IRC channel: #webcred at freenode.net]

Jan Schaffer, Jimmy Wales, Faye Anderson

jon Bonne, Kathy Im, Alex Jones

Jay Rosen leads off with a brief talk about the paper commissioned for this conference, "Bloggers cs. Journalists Is Over." [I like the idea of conferences commissioning papers. Also maybe next time: music.] He sees the paper as a "peace-making" document that's also "trouble-making." Peace: The war and the cartoon dialogue should be over. It doesn't mean that the discussion is over. The tension is inevitable. But look at how independent citizens were able to contribute to the tsunami story.

Jay says there's a powershift from producers to "consumers." This has led to a loss of sovereignty, a loss of exclusive control. As Rebecca Blood says, blogging and journalism exist in a shared media space. [I actually don't think blogging is a type of medium. [Note: In the comments to this post, Rebecca Blood clarifies and corrects my statement. Thanks and sorry, Rebecca!] The people pushing it forward are in general not the professional journalists but people on the Web. He says the majority of readers of the NY Times read it on line, but the reporters at the NY Times generally feel they're writing for a traditional paper that happens to have an online supplement.

Dave Winer responds. He says what's great about Jay is that he came from the world of ink and really understood what we're doing. It's not about blogging replacing and destroying journalism. It's really hard to find the boundaries. One way to get there would be for the journalists to look at some of the practices of blogging. E.g., full transcripts of every interview.

Bob giles of the Nierman Foundation says he's never thought about it as adversarial. Corporate news organizations ingest ideas very slowly. Ed Cone is doing very interesting work in Greensboro.

Open discussion:

Jon Garfunkel responds to Jay's points, saying (overall) that Jay gives too much credit to bloggers.

Dorothy Zinberg: What is the psychological gap? How would an ink person think differently if she were writing for a blog?

Jay: Every reader is a writer. Every reader is connected horizontally to all the other readers. In Web publishing, the editing occurs after publication.

Jeff Jarvis: Yes, there isn't a war. At some point we won't be able to tell the difference between journalism and citizen journalism, but now they are distinct and there's a tensions.

Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet project says that it's recognized now that trust and credibility are social processes: The process of deciding what to believe in and act on is a conversational process. In his research, he sees this happening in the health community where the omnipotent doctor is giving way to online support groups of various sorts.

Chris Lydon argues against the reconciliation. As Dave Winer says, bloggers are evangelists. The blogosphere is a better metaphor for God than the NY Times. "I used to think of the NY Times as God's memo on the day." The new metaphor is technorati: You can scan the home page and see a million bloggers...

Ed Clone: I'm a journalist and I didn't understand blogging until I got one. He points to Greensboro101.com and the fact that there's plenty of space for citizen journalists. "I'm a writer and reporter and I feel tremendously empowered by these tools."

Jan Schaffer says the question is: What will news look like in the future?

Rebecca Mackinnon asks if participatory journalism will result in feedback loops where people only hear wht they want ot hear and not what they don't want to hear?

Dan Gillmor, in response to Chris Lydon, says that the NY Times of the rich and powerful and the blogosphere is the trade journal of us and how we live our daily lives. And we need ways to track the conversations better.

Hoder (via IRC): Blogs have more credibility in closed societies.

John Hinderaker: I want to put in a good word for objectivity. I define it as neutrality, fairness, accuracy, and it should remain an important goal for people doing primary news reporting. Objectivity is never perfect; all journalists know that.

Jeff Jarvis: John, who do you think is doing a good job of it?

John: Many reporters do an excellent job. The problem with the NY Times, Washington Post and CBS is they lack diversity: Almost all the editors are liberals.

Dave W: Objectivity leads to you not disclosing your point of view and to a lack of transparency. Newspapers ought to provide a dossier of all previous articles, what school they went to, etc.

Alex Jones: Winer is onto something important. Objectivity is important to traditional journalism. Accountability and transparency may be the greatest things the blogosphere can bring to journalism. I don't think the question of who you are is important to mainstream journalism gaining credibility, but it ought to be responsible for how they made the choices they did. The "who" issue gets in the way: A Democratic can write about a Republican. The "who" would be used mainly to discredit people.

Faye Anderson: Bloggers are more easily transparent because we have links and more context.

Jeff: Objectivity is a sink hole. What we really want to do is be honest and tell the truth.

Me: Objectivity is a methodology and a rhetoric. (And newspapers in their objectivity also tell us what we should find interesting.) The rise of blogs tells us that we're interested in other forms of rhetoric and are taking over the question of what we found interesting.

Me: Three possible dimensions of tension between j and b: Economics, truth and reputation.

Xiang Qiang: We should focus on the collective effect of the blogosphere.

Bill Buzenberg: We've created a big data of people in our audience who are willing to give us info. It's a revolution in sourcing.

Dan: We need to expect more of what used to be alled "the audience." They have more work to do.

David Sifry: I care a lot about objectivity, but what's most important to me when I read the media is trust. Do I trust the person I'm listening to. Knowing that there are fact checkers and an attempt to be objective helps me to trust a newspaper. But I can lso check what the bloggers are saying and watch what they do over time and what other people are saying about them...that gives me a huge amount of info about whether I can trust them. And that's were the common ground is.

Jane Singer: How do we get people to go read people they don't agree with?

Susan Tifft: The younger generation generally doesn't know what blogs are and is confused about what journalism is.

Jeff: More voices are good and we link to lots of voices.

Lee: Our research shows that the most fervent information seekers (about 15-20% of the general population of adult Americans) are aware of many more political arguments than those who do not. They are not only going to sites that reinforce their views.

Chris: The conflict is between the blogosphere and the media powers that be. The crisis is that we're not well-informed. The goal of journalism is popular wisdom [= making the populace wise] and we're in deep trouble.

Jay: Bill Buzenberg's comment represents a big change in American journalism. The old idea is that the audience lacks knowledge and that's why they need the journalists. Bill's idea is really different. WRT objectivity, of course we want people to step outside their own beliefs. That's integrity, not objectivty. We used to be able to believe that the quality of info comes from professionalism, having a strong organization, having good intentions. Now we're realizing that it's deeply related to the quality of your connection to the people you're trying to inform. Without good conection, there won't be good information. Bloggers have that connection.

Jonathan Zittrain: This conference started out with a lot of excitement and buzz. Journalism is ill right now. What's at stake is how we frame our view of the world. We need to find ways to frame the world in less than a 1:1 ratio.

[bjc] First (and last?) photos

I'm at the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility conference, sponsored by Berkman, Shorenstein and the ALA.

Here are the first two photos I've taken, and quite possibly the last just because the conf looks like it will be pretty intense.

Lovely meeting room. The South Vietnamese will be on the left, the North Vietnamese on the right, and Henry Kissinger will be in the middle

Dan Gillmor, chief citizen journalist, and John Hinderaker of Powerline