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""We had all the advantages and let it slip away"

By Andrew Savikas
October 1, 2009

Among the most honest assessments of the failure of newspapers to adapt to the Web comes from John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain...

Four short links: 1 October 2009

By Nat Torkington
October 1, 2009

The End of Objectivity, Web2.0 Version -- Our behaviour as journalists is now measurable. And measurability gives the lie to the pretence that journalists behave like scientists, impartially observing the petri dish of society. (via Pia Waugh) Screens in Context -- ideas for the video screens spring up in place of billboards. Whilst the advertising industry has one of...

Review of Guobin Yang's "Power of the Internet in China"

By Andy Oram
September 30, 2009

My review of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online, a combination of research and sociological analysis,

Stop Giving the Newspapers Your Advice - They Don’t Need It

By Joshua-Michele Ross
September 15, 2009

Speculation about the demise of the news business and advice about what they should do about it is everywhere. It makes for great, self-congratulatory sport but it won’t help the news industry. Why? Because the news industry doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas or possible revenue models, it suffers from a different but more acute malady: being an institution...

Four short links: 15 September 2009

By Nat Torkington
September 15, 2009

Why You Shouldn't Do It All Yourself -- this resonated with where I am in a few projects. One of the hardest things to learn in management is how not to do it all yourself. People often call this a problem with "delegation". But the problem isn't with telling others what to do. The problem is learning how not...

Four short links: 21 August 2009

By Nat Torkington
August 20, 2009

TwitterMood -- using Twitter as a giant mood sensor for the world (see also temporal correlations, via kellan on delicious). What Will Remain of Us -- The sea that brought trade to Dunwich was not entirely benevolent. The town was losing ground as early as 1086 when the Domesday Book, a survey of all holdings in England, was published;...

Anderson: "It's All About Attention"

By Andrew Savikas
July 29, 2009

Over on Spiegel Online, Chris Anderson does a great job responding to nearly all of the standard old-media responses to new media. Unsurprisingly (I'm sure Wired would have done...

Content is a Service Business

By Andrew Savikas
July 12, 2009

What you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying. Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business.

"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"

By Andrew Savikas
July 1, 2009

A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example: In...

Four short links: 24 June 2009

By Nat Torkington
June 24, 2009

The Digital Open -- The Digital Open is an online technology community and competition for youth around the world, age 17 and under. Building a community of young open source hackers. Four Crowdsoucing Lessons from the Guardian's Spectacular Expenses Scandal Experiment -- Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. How to lure them? By making it feel like...

Completing the circle on journalists and public participation

By Andy Oram
May 20, 2009

Capital News Connection has jumped into Web 2.0 full-tilt with Ask Your Lawmaker. The opportunity for a virtuous cycle of public input, professional processing, and listener loyalty--especially in a field whose death has been predicted by many--puts Ask Your Lawmaker into an intriguing category of its own.

Hackers wanted! Scholarships available to coders who'll come to journalism and help save democracy

By Brian Boyer
May 8, 2009

Guest blogger Brian Boyer is a hacker journalist who writes about the intersection of technology and journalism. He's worked at public-interest journalism site ProPublica and is now at the Chicago Tribune, building their new News Applications team. It's not news that journalism is in crisis. CNN turned newspapers into first-day fishwrap and Craigslist killed the business model. Solutions are...

Four short links: 8 May 2009

By Nat Torkington
May 8, 2009

Citizen Journalism and Civic Reporting -- Gawker rebuts the nonsense that reporters will be the only people at council meetings: as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and...

Replacing Journalism: New Foundations for Expertise, Diversity, and Debate

By Andy Oram
May 3, 2009

In this new article, I've isolated three key traits we seek in journalism--expertise, diversity, and debate--and suggest how we might elicit them from the general public without mediation by journalists. The exercise is an example of the kind of practice that could emerge from a combination of new technologies and new habits.

Four short links: 9 Apr 2009

By Nat Torkington
April 9, 2009

Scifi, audiences, transparency, and the peril of public life. No links tomorrow, as I'll be preparing for our village fete: The Fantastic That Denies It's Fantastic: Science Fiction Talk at the Royal Institution -- Matt Jones's fascinating notes from this talk by two academics make thought-provoking reading. “SF is a response to the cultural shock of discovering our marginal place...

From Open Source Software to Open Culture: Three Misunderstandings

By Andy Oram
March 22, 2009

The original practice and promise of open source software is unique. The software experience cannot be ported whole-hog into other areas such as sharing songs or organizing public forums.

Coming to Grips with the "Unthinkable" in Publishing

By Andrew Savikas
March 18, 2009

While much of the Twitter chatter this past weekend was about the annual South by Southwest festival and conference, there was quite a bit of "retweeting" of links to a...

Four short links: 27 Feb 2009

By Nat Torkington
February 27, 2009

The Economist in Chinese, online news, concurrency, and community. Have a great weekend! Translating the Economist -- Andy Baio reports on a Chinese electronic community that, each week, splits up and translates The Economist articles into Chinese. The DIY ethos here, "we want this, it's not here yet, let's make it happen", is tremendous. Business Models of News -- excellent...

Four short links: 26 Feb 2009

By Nat Torkington
February 26, 2009

Three stories about old-media in new-media age, and some patent goblins to leave a bad taste in your mouth: The Kindle Swindle -- the Authors Guild president argues that the robot voice of the Kindle does away with audiobook royalty streams, lucrative for some titles. Doesn't mention the vast majority of books for which there is no audiobook. Creators have...

Free

By Kurt Cagle
February 17, 2009

The paradox of contemporary life is upon us. I paid $2,000 for the laptop upon which I type these words, in addition to a hundred dollars a month paying for online access, yet the editor I'm using is a web page within a free web browser, connected to a server that is running either Linux or Open Solaris, which was downloaded for free from a distribution disk that no doubt someone paid for, albeit at a cost of pennies. Yet the time and energy to creating these operating systems were non-negligible, representing thousands of man years in total dedicated to writing this free system.

Radar Interview with Clay Shirky

By Joshua-Michele Ross
February 16, 2009

Clay Shirky is one of the most incisive thinkers on technology and its effects on business and society. I had the pleasure to sit down with him after his keynote at the FASTForward '09 conference last week in Las Vegas. In this interview Clay talks about The effects of low cost coordination and group action. Where to find the next...

Four short links: 11.5 Feb 2009

By Nat Torkington
February 11, 2009

This second Feb 11 post was brought to you by the intersection of timezones and technology. If there's a third Feb 11 post, I'm changing my name to Bill Murray. Hacking the Earth -- an environmental futurist looks at "geoengineering", deliberately interfering with the Earth's systems to terraform the planet. Radical solution to global warming, unwise hubris and immoral act...

Four short links: 30 Jan 2009

By Nat Torkington
January 30, 2009

Two serious links and two fun today, thanks to Waxy and BoingBoing: EveryBlock Business Model Brainstorming -- Adrian Holovaty's project was funded by a Knight Foundation grant that's about to run out. The software will be open sourced but he's inviting suggestions of business models that would enable the project team to continue working on it full-time. Having used and...

Four short links: 27 Jan 2009

By Nat Torkington
January 27, 2009

Fantasy, feedback, facts, and flies, all will be revealed in today's links of loops and life: Blueful - a story told in text, but delivered through the medium of web sites. It's like an xkcd cartoon embodied in the web. Interesting, artistic, and makes you look at web sites in a new way. From Aaron A. Reed. The Case Against...

Four short links: 21 Jan 2009

By Nat Torkington
January 21, 2009

In today's edition: the spread of fake news, keeping track of your real power use, a Javascript library and a less-than-impressed take on mobile location apps. Echo Chamber - the British tabloid The Sun posted a story that turned out to be fabricated. This site tracked that story's spread and uncritical acceptance by other news outlets and web sites. Real...

Four short links: 14 Jan 2009

By Nat Torkington
January 14, 2009

Something beautiful, something informative, something mindblowing, something revealing: something for everyone in today's link set. Trees and Forests on Old Russian Maps - old maps, like old books, are works of art. I loved this collection of symbols; it reminded me how much creativity and beauty we've lost (temporarily, I hope) in modern maps. Distinguishing Decorative from Meaningful Elements in...

Four short links: 9 Jan 2009

By Nat Torkington
January 9, 2009

Four questions, one per link: what next, can it solve a big problem, what's the final boss for Python programming, and why on earth would anyone want yogurt that glows in the dark? End Times - gloomy piece on the future of journalism, to be added to the large pile of other gloomy pieces on the future of journalism. The...

Why Are Newspapers Dying?

By Kurt Cagle
December 9, 2008

While newspapers are likely on their way to the recycle bin, editorial journalism isn't. We are moving to an era where journalistic integrity and personal prestige of the individual journalist is becoming more important than the prestige of the newspaper or other media that the journalist writes for. Journalism is becoming decentralized, and there are many indications that this is, just perhaps, a good thing.

Knight Foundation Scholarship: Bringing Developers to the Newsroom

By Timothy M. O'Brien
December 7, 2008

Rich Gordon, Associate Professor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, discusses the Knight Foundation Scholarship for working developers to attend a one-year Master's program in Journalism. Gordon discusses the current trends in news and technology, and how developers will play an important role in the continued evolution of "news".

The Barack SlideShow

By Peter Brantley
November 9, 2008

President-elect Obama has been very vocal about supporting an open government policy, and so far the signs are quite promising. See for example this page linked off Obama's transition website,...

Validators: Asking for donations to pay for the news

By Andy Oram
August 29, 2008

The New York times has a short article on community-funded journalism, in which the public pays a journalist in advance to cover a topic. I'm blogging this because, in the first place, it suggests a way technical information could be developed, and in the second place I anticipated the idea a year ago in my short story Validators.

Lessons on Blogging from Jon Stewart

By Tim O'Reilly
August 27, 2008

Why the NY Times profile of Jon Stewart holds lessons for bloggers and journalists about the future (and heart) of their medium.

Validators: Asking for donations to pay for the news

By Andy Oram
August 24, 2008

The New York times has a short article on community-funded journalism, in which the public pays a journalist in advance to cover a topic. I'm blogging this because, in the first place, it suggests a way many types of information could be developed, and in the second place I anticipated the idea a year ago in my short story Validators.