North Korea’s Digital Underground. What journalism looks like in North Korea. Fascinating read about how information slips and moves through the margins.
Tag: information flow
Internet kill switch bill gets a makeover
Internet kill switch bill gets a makeover. Just one more shining example of how our representatives don’t know jack about how the web works or why it’s important. (via @matro)
Does journalism work?
Journalism without effect does not deserve the special place in democracy that it tries to claim.
But rather than the headlines reflecting the most important events, perhaps they should reflect the most pernicious misconceptions. Good journalists already have some sense of this, and every so often we learn of an alarming gap in public knowledge.
Jonathan Stray’s latest masterpiece. As he notes, journalism must be about improving the day-to-day functioning of a society.
Alex Payne & The Very Last Thing He Will Write About Twitter
Alex Payne on Twitter’s need to decentralize:
Some time ago, I circulated a document internally with a straightforward thesis: Twitter needs to decentralize or it will die. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even in a decade, but it was (and, I think, remains) my belief that all communications media will inevitably be decentralized, and that all businesses who build walled gardens will eventually see them torn down.
The entire post, which Alex says are his last words concerning Twitter, is well worth the read.
Function Vs. Form
Finding happiness in a world teeming with information and products:
Happiness is easier to find when you don’t fill your life with all that clutter and that is the reason I have been thinking about all of this lately. It feels all too daunting to live a life so crammed full with information and constantly changing standards to keep track of. I search for ways to find a balancing point, a calm among the madness of life spinning around me. Its strange to think that the products we create and consume are becoming as much a part of us as the real world experiences they were built to aid us in.
Quote from Function Vs. Form by John Carey.
Talking Tools: Shawn Blanc
Excerpted from an interview with Shawn Blanc on Bridging the Nerd Gap. Pretty cool anecdotes throughout.
I hate to just waste away an hour especially as a daily habit just vegging out for no reason. Writing is entertainment for me, although sometimes it takes on the shape of grueling and frustrating entertainment. So if I can’t get myself to focus on writing then I am likely to read or just go to bed.
Paperworks / Padworks
Difficult to pull just one quote from the recent Mark Pesce article but this is my favorite:
we need to think of every educator in Australia as a contributor of value. More than that, we need to think of every student in Australia as a contributor of value. That’s the vital gap that must be crossed.
The article is one of the clearer statements of what we can do in education by incrementally changing ourselves.
Slow reading and poor content design
The Guardian published an article a few days ago discussing the concerns of some academics over modern reading habits. It centers around the idea that, for some, reading online is an inherently shallower process that leaves a person less educated than reading traditional print texts.
This misplaced concern does not account for the animated ads, commercial content, and constantly growing hodgepodge of buttons surrounding standard content online. Put this same interface garbage on a printed page and I would not be able to focus on a text either.
For a traditional media outlet to decry the perils of reading online it ought to at least place blame in the right space. The Guardian, and other media outlets, that plaster ads and irrelevant content around their articles are not innocent bystanders to this loss of attention span.
Mark Pesce at Webstock
http://www.r2.co.nz/clientbin/player-licensed-viral.swf
Mark Pesce’s blog the human network is a must read and he just published the full video of his talk at Webstock. The transcript was posted back in February but the video is well worth watching.
Here are some scattered annotations on what Pesce discusses:
- The arrival of the web as appliance (14:00)
- The depth of a universally connected world is the individual (~18:00)
- Once meaning is exposed it can be manipulated (20:00)
- Books are standing on a threshold (23:30)
- Personal health and medication management (or, the concept of a device as an interface to ourselves) (28:00)
Why “The Content Graph” Is Not The Next Generation of News
A couple weeks ago Scott Karp, founder of Publish2, began a blog post titled “The Content Graph and the Future of Brands” with:
Yesterday, two stories from Aol’s DailyFinance appeared in the Sunday print edition of the Daily Telegram, a newspaper in southern Michigan…Now I’m going to tell you why what you see on this page of the Daily Telegram could play a decisive role in the race between Aol, Demand Media, and Yahoo to win the prize of big brand advertising on the web, and why it is also pivotal to the future of news.
He goes on to detail the context for mutually beneficial interactions between large-scale content producers and traditional media institutions. The idea that this is the future of news is distressing.
The emphasis throughout the article is on large-scale content production. It focuses on the roles brand-names play in the construction of news. This is misplaced and, in my mind, ignores the lessons of the past decade.
How “The Content Graph” Sets Up Another Failed System
What Karp describes differs little from the type of one-size-fits-all news production that created organizations running large amounts of syndicated content. This traditional model of syndication has no close connection to the individual context and reality of readers. This is unchanged in Karp’s description. A newspaper in southern Michigan running stories that appeared on Aol’s finance page is no different than that same paper running a story off the Associated Press wire about finance. What relevance does content produced for Aol have to do with southern Michigan? Those are separate audiences and they deserve separate content.
Furthermore, what’s the pitch for news organizations here? There is not value in a news organization saying, “We take news stories you already ignore online and put them in print.” That does not sound like a winning proposition or a way to build a healthy foundation for journalism.
If the best hope for news organizations is to take content from a struggling internet company like Aol and republish it in print we are in worse shape then previously imagined. Reinventing journalism should be about new ideas and new models for content. It should not be about tired, failed methods of content syndication.
Losing Sight of the Individual
Lost among this collection of high-profile brands is the individual. Throughout “The Content Graph,” Karp never once mentions the role of a strong individual writer in this. All the focus is placed on impersonal brands.
Aol, Demand Media, and Yahoo are not even close to the top of my list of inspiring content producers. Instead, I think of John Gruber, Dan Benjamin, Gina Trapani, and Jason Kottke. These are individuals who have leveraged the power of today’s tools to create strong personal publishing powerhouses.
The tools we have at our disposal these days allow for an individual level of empowerment that provides a strong foundation for any news organization. From a news perspective this should be invigorating. It should drive us to think of innovative solutions to content that do not revolve around corporate brand names.
Dan Benjamin, for example, produces a series of podcasts that individually provide more value to me than any traditional news organization. What if news organizations syndicated this quality content that dealt with specific contexts instead of relying upon vague, bland stories? That would certainly give the news organization more value to pitch to readers.
To power the future of news, I would put my money behind a collection of these linchpins. Individuals who understand their audience and speak directly to experiences are far more worthy of my attention then a news organization republishing worthless content that nobody reads on Aol anyway.