Clay Johnson, writing about the nature of notifications in software:
Left at the default, we create an economy of sensational notifications, with the brightest minds of our generation trying to figure out how to get us to click on the next command for our attention. Can you imagine what would happen if they were instead focused on providing us content worthy of it?
Do our reading environments encourage active reading? Or do they utterly oppose it? A typical reading tool, such as a book or website, displays the author’s argument, and nothing else. The reader’s line of thought remains internal and invisible, vague and speculative. We form questions, but can’t answer them. We consider alternatives, but can’t explore them. We question assumptions, but can’t verify them. And so, in the end, we blindly trust, or blindly don’t, and we miss the deep understanding that comes from dialogue and exploration.
Explorable Explanations is my umbrella project for ideas that enable and encourage truly active reading. The goal is to change people’s relationship with text. People currently think of text as information to be consumed. I want text to be used as an environment to think in.
Bret Victor – Explorable Explanations.
Information consumption also has a consumption chain, just like food does. Most news, for instance, comes from a set of facts on the ground, that get processed, and processed and processed again before it ends up on your television set boiled down into chunks for you to consume. But it also gets filled with additives— expert opinion, analysis, visualizations, you name it— before it gets to you. If this was food, a vegan would want none of it. They’d head straight to the data, to the source, to the facts, and try and get as much of that additive business out of their way.
Clay Johnson – Why Infovegan. via Daniel.
A while back I moved into a new apartment in Portland. It’s in a great neighborhood and a terrific building. One of the best parts is the top floor view of Lone Fir Cemetery across the street. It’s a cemetery that saw its first burial in 1846 and has quite a bit of history tied to it.
What is interesting to me is that on the edge of this massive, historic cemetery is an empty corner of land. It’s roped off and is mostly gravel. After digging through Wikipedia’s footnotes I found that this lot is tied to some controversy.
The one useful article I could find online states that:
The county would go ahead with plans to tear down its building at the corner of Southeast Morrison Street and 20th Avenue — a squat beige box and parking lot built atop the graves of Chinese immigrants buried there in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
To me that’s fascinating. It’s a corner of land that has roots going back over 100 years but is still empty and unmarked. There’s no reason I should have to dig through Wikipedia and track down an Oregonian article re-posted on another site to find that out.
Dave Winer says that, “Rule #1 of local blogging: If you hear fire trucks in the night, in the morning you should be able to find out where the fire was.” If that’s local blogging then a thriving local news ecosystem should adopt a mindset akin to “If you have a question about something in our city, we’ll answer it for you.”
The Oregonian, or a startup news service, is missing a golden opportunity here. Portland is a town with pretty well-defined neighborhoods that each have their unique histories. Someone who can index those locations as well as the news and history of each has created a solid product which they can deliver to residents as well as visitors.
And a week or so later, when you try to remember what you said at this party, that really terrific thing, you rack your brain, but can’t quite come up with it. That’s Twitter.
The blog, on the other hand, is slow, reliably reference-able, and findable. It’s like a speech, prepared in advance, with the text distributed. Some will hear the speech on the day it’s delivered, but others will be able to reference its text across the years.
Randy Murray – Business Blogging: Tweet For The Moment, Blog For The Ages.
The Information Sage. The Washington Monthly does a wonderful feature profile of Edward Tufte.
Attention Economy. “If everyone has everyone’s attention the value of attention is nullified.” This is why we should save, invest, and be conscientious of the attention we give things.
I spent Sunday evening catching up on my Instapaper list. Through pure serendipity I had two articles back to back that go quite well together.
First on the list was Dan Conover’s post “Standards-based journalism in a semantic economy.” Total brilliance. From the post Dan writes that:
…when journalists cover a beat, they create an implicit system of knowledge, organized almost exclusively by documents. Our job is to make that implicit system explicit, and to organize it by each piece of data involved, regardless of whether the information is contained in a published text document, an unpublished spreadsheet, or a semi-public database.
Dan goes on to outline a DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) method of standardizing journalism. By creating standards in a semantic economy we’re able to parse out which facts are used in a misleading manner. This, in part, gives us a metric by which we can measure how trustworthy a specific news organization or reporter is.
Conover compares this approach to a baseball game box score where a game is broken down into a series of objective numbers. While you might miss some of the drama, every baseball game can, at the minimum, be recreated from a box score.
This led nicely into Jonathan Stray’s post “What is news when the audience is editor?” Here Jonathan includes this bit:
If we ask journalists how they decide what beats to follow, what leads to investigate, and what stories to produce, we typically get answers involving the “newsworthiness” of various events. Yet journalists are at a loss to explain what this actually means. One veteran editor described news judgment to me as “tribal,” i.e. publication dependent and essentially arbitrary — which is of course at odds with theories of “objective” reporting.
Sound familiar? Stray describes a similar non-standards-based approach that Dan illustrated in his post.
A publication dependent and essentially arbitrary approach to news is the antithesis of an explicit system that allows to organize each piece of data involved in a story. If we’re able to analyze the facts contained in a news story and understand how they relate to the corpus of stories from that organization we’ll be better able to comprehend why that story was considered “newsworthy.”
By making journalism something that is standards-based and rooted in tangible facts we can remove a bit of the magic box effect. After all, a new tenant of journalism is to be reproducible right?
Scott Berkun theorizes about information overload:
There is a notion the world is polluted with information. And that reckless publishing or creation is bad. This might be true, but that ship has sailed. We won’t be eliminating information from the world. Therefore:
Hypothesis: It doesn’t make the world any worse to add more information to it, since we can’t be/feel more overloaded than we already do.
That’s why everyone deserves the digital equivalent of a printing press. The more information the better, what I’m overloaded with someone else will cherish.