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December 29, 2009
9:28
supplying commercial and ...
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supplying commercial and residential lighting including under cabinet lighting and fluorescent ballasts.
December 21, 2009
10:27
providing a large ...
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providing a large selections of superbowl commercials from 1967 to 2009 and see the latest 2010 superbowl commercials.
December 17, 2009
9:24
offering a self ...
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offering a self branded 30% and 50% Glycolic skin peel.
December 10, 2009
7:21
offering a large ...
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offering a large collection of products for the hearth including gas logs and wood burning stoves.
December 08, 2009
8:01
Sending presents to Hong Kong
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Yay! We finally got through and sent Keith and his family in Hong Kong their Christmas presents via ShopInHK.Com's, Hong Kong gift delivery service. They even offered to hold the delivery till the 23rd so that Keith gets his presents delivered on Christmas eve.
7:53
providing a collection that ...
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providing a collection that help you enjoy your backyard including party tents and metal sheds to store your outdoor equipment.
December 02, 2009
8:52
offering a selection of
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offering a selection of pine wholesale furniture including benches, tables, and mudroom furniture.
November 05, 2009
8:06
providing theme ...
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providing theme parties in the form of mystery parties that are packaged in multiple scenarios.
7:58
providing a large ...
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providing a large selection of fun science toys and science kits including microscopes, crystal growing kits and earth science kits.
October 20, 2009
9:56
providing name brand work ...
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providing name brand work boots to police and the military.
9:49
offering a ...
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offering a 100% natural gout control product since 1998.
October 19, 2009
11:44
offering a large ...
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offering a large selection of outdoor playground and accessories landscape timbers and wooden swing sets.
October 16, 2009
8:45
offering a large ...
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offering a large collection of backpacks including the High Sierra rolling backpacks , exercise DVDs, the old sled and also football cleats.
8:44
offering sterling silver ...
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offering sterling silver chains from seven to 24 inches.
October 05, 2009
8:11
10/5/09 ...
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10/5/09

June 05, 2009
14:39
Citizen Media Business Issues: Traffic Rankings, Search Engines, and Search Engine Optimization
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog
(This is the seventeenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

In the previous Citizen Media Business Issues post, we took a look at Web statistics as a means to learn more about your site and the people who visit it. Now that you know how many visitors you have, what they look at, what sites are linking to you, and so on, the question becomes: how can one increase the performance in one or more of those areas?

This post is not about how to falsely inflate one metric or another. Nor is it about how to get traffic unscrupulously. It’s about how to use the tools available on the Web effectively, to accurately reflect the hard work you put in. There is no substitute for high-quality, well-presented content, but people need to be able to find it.

Traffic Rankings

There are several measuring sticks you can place next to your website to compare it with the rest of the Internet. A lot of people choose not to worry about such rankings, and their importance does certainly depend on your own personal goals. However, on this business side of things, which this series concerns, they matter.

First of all, they can provide good tools for goal-setting and motivation, and can sometimes act as a reward for a job well done, thereby facilitating the continued production of good content.

Second, marketers will often use them to gauge how much your advertising real estate is worth. You can have thousands of hits a day, but if, for whatever reason, you’re not popping up in a Google search, the rate you get for advertising won’t reflect its true worth.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, knowing the inner workings of the various rankings will allow you to utilize them to their full potential, thus attracting more traffic.

Social News Sites

Before we take a closer look at individual traffic rankings, it’s worth mentioning how much of an impact social news sites can have on them. Webmasters will often notice a seemingly random spike in traffic over the course of a couple days that ends up being due to incoming links from a site like Digg, Reddit, NewsVine, Fark, Slashdot, and StumbleUpon. And a sharp increase in traffic will, of course, result in improved traffic rankings.

While each of these sites functions differently, they are all based on a community of users who share stories they find on the Web. The submitted links are then augmented with conversational tools and/or some form of voting system, allowing the most popular articles to rise in visibility and accessibility. A lot of people use these sites as news filters, relying on the wisdom of crowds to save browsing time by going first to those sites recommended by the rest of the community.

The way most people promote their content on these sites is by placing one or more of the site-specific icons near each of their headlines or blog posts. The best known example of this is probably the “Digg This” button, which registers a positive vote (known as a Digg) for the article when clicked and displays how many Diggs it has received to-date. It’s tempting to use a lot of these to enable readers to use their social news site-of-choice, but make sure to display them tastefully, avoiding messy icon spam. One way to do this is to use something like the Share This widget you’ll see at the bottom of this post. When clicked, it expands into a neat menu of possible services.

You may also consider getting involved in one or more of these communities. Signing up with one just because it’s the biggest or prettiest isn’t always the best idea. Take a survey first of what’s available (there’s a good list over at Dosh Dosh) to find where content like yours is featured prominently. For example, if you run a technology blog a la Engadget, you would probably fit in better at Slashdot than Newsvine.

As a new member, you may find that the things you submit don’t seem to get as much attention as something similar submitted by another user. This is because, as a community, there are often reputational gauges of member contribution (“karma” on Reddit, for example) as well as personal relationships that develop among the most frequent users. As time goes on and you get more and more involved, you may find a greater number of your submissions doing well for these reasons.

Alexa

Alexa Internet’s rankings are very simple. Every time a page on your site is viewed by someone who has their browser equipped with the Alexa toolbar, a hit is registered. It assigns rankings based on those hits (pageviews) and on “reach” (the percentage of all Internet users who have visited the site in question), averaged over the previous three months.

The website says that there is additional “data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources,” but consensus seems to be that the toolbar is far and away the primary factor. And although there is some amount of data correction for potential biases, this has led to some controversy over how well the self-selected group of people who use the toolbar represents the entirety of Web users. The company’s disclaimers even include a note about data being less accurate for low-traffic sites: “the size of the Web and concentration of users on the most popular sites make it difficult to accurately determine the ranking of sites with fewer than 1,000 monthly visitors. Generally, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as not reliable.”

Despite the controversy, Alexa rankings are important to many advertisers and are at least accurate enough to be meaningful.

In spite of the myriad “## ways to boost your Alexa rank” blog posts around the Web, there is no easy way to improve your standings. Alexa Product Manager Geoffrey Mack dispelled most of the rumors a while ago between a post on the Alexa Web Discovery Machine (an official company blog) and a comment on the Online Money Making blog. All you can really do to increase your performance here—other than attract more traffic via other means—is to encourage your loyal readers to install the toolbar, perhaps displaying a widget as a reminder.

If you’re not listed on Alexa, you can either simply visit your site with the Alexa toolbar installed or submit it here.

A note about privacy: Before you decide to install the Alexa toolbar (or any kind of toolbar like it, for that matter), understand that there is more information gathered about you than simply counting your visit to a site as a hit. Make sure to read the Alexa Internet Privacy Policy, which makes clear that while it will not try to determine your identity, it does keep track of purchases, browsing history, searches, forms you fill out, and so on.

Search Engines

If you’ve looked at the data for how visitors get to your site, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of people find you through search engines. The major engines, led by Google, drive a massive amount of Web traffic these days. Most people have a few favorite sites that they visit regularly by typing the familiar URL into the address bar or clicking a bookmark, but odds are good that search engines are your gateway to most of the rest of the Web.

Search engines work by crawling, indexing, and then using that index to serve Web data in response to users’ search queries.

A “crawler” is a program that periodically visits many millions of pages, gathering data about their text, text location, headings, and so on. It essentially tries to figure out what each page is all about. That data is then “indexed,” or stored in a searchable database. So the first thing to note here is that the search engines have to know about your site in order to crawl it. To inform them of your existence, follow these links: submit to Google, submit to Yahoo!, submit to MSN Live Search, and if you have a blog, submit to Technorati.

When you search for something, the engine will look at its huge index and return a list of results in order of relevance. Through your own common practice you probably know the importance of this search result ordering. In what percentage of searches do you actually get past the first few results? For most people, it’s rare, and even rarer to see more than the first couple pages.

None of the big engines make public exactly how they organize and prioritize search results. Google, for example, uses over 200 factors to determine which sites in its index are most relevant to the search query, and according to the New York Times, “makes about a half-dozen major and minor changes a week to the vast nest of mathematical formulas that power the search engine.” Publicizing all of those factors would make the system too easy to manipulate and duplicate.

Not all of these signals are unknown, though. Some are disclosed by the company, many are common sense to the Web savvy, and a few have been determined via trial and error and data studies. Examples include the weighting of titles and headings over other content, location of search terms on the page, how close the words in the search string are to each other, and so on.

Website Importance

If you perform a Google search for “muffins” you’re going to get millions of hits. To some extent, the results will be based on relevance. But how does Google know if you are looking for recipes, a definition, the name of a restaurant, or a YouTube video with that name? Search engines then have to apply a sort of “importance” factor. The idea is that, with equal relevance, a very popular site will probably satisfy a user’s request more often than an unknown.

These importance rankings tend to be what advertisers care about most. The main reason for this is that performing searches to see where in the results pages a particular site appears for a variety of applicable keywords just isn’t practical. Rankings are quantifiable, more static, and simple values that have a significant enough relationship with traffic and search result priority to merit a direct relationship with advertising dollars.

The simplest algorithm is Technorati’s Authority system. For every blog that has linked to you (and also pings Technorati) in the last six months, your authority increases by one. It doesn’t matter if they link to you once or a hundred times, one blog equals one authority point. When searching with Technorati, users can choose to filter search results based on authority (for example, only including those with high scores). Authority is also displayed in the form of Technorati Rank, which is just a list of blogs arranged by authority (the number 1 ranked blog has the most authority).

PageRank is Google’s way of quantifying the importance of a site within the link structure of the Web. Generally speaking, the more a page is linked to, the higher its “importance,” and thus the higher its position in the search results. On top of that, incoming links from sites that are themselves considered important carry more weight than links from less important sites. A link to you from nytimes.com, for example, will count more than a link from somewhere on Geocities.

The raw PageRank value is equal to the likelihood that someone randomly clicking on links anywhere on the Web will end up on the page (with a 15% chance of a truly random link). But you won’t see this raw value published anywhere; instead you can find a score between 0 and 10 for any site you visit with the Google Toolbar. The higher the number, the more important the site.

A common misconception is that PageRank determines search result order. Actually, it’s just a weight (albeit a seemingly heavy one), acting as just one of the aforementioned 200+ signals.

If you don’t want to install the Google Toolbar, a number of sites have programs that will find a site’s PageRank. One is SEOmoz’s rank checker, part of its SEO Toolbox.

[Note: Yahoo!, Ask, and MSN Live Search all function similarly to Google, with similar processes to PageRank, but don’t seem to come into play as much for marketers. Keep in mind that while this post may reference Google far more often than the others, most anything you do to increase your Google performance will likely yield better results in its competition, too.]

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of trying to improve the amount or quality of search engine traffic. It’s become a big part of Internet marketing as businesses have found that a place at the top of organic search results is far more effective than most any advertising they could buy—and unless you pay an individual or SEO firm to do it for you, it’s free. “Organic search results” means those that aren’t advertisements or otherwise sponsored results.

Some of the main areas of SEO concentration are keywords, code, and design/presentation. After a little explanation of keywords, we’ll give some examples of the other two.

Keywords

Let’s say you run a blog called The Bread Zone that’s all about sandwiches: where to get the best peanut butter and jelly, personal recipes, history, and so on. Now put yourself in the position of a potential reader/customer. What would you search for to find the information on your site? Certainly not “The Bread Zone.” It’s nice if you’re at the top of a search for your blog’s name, but if somebody knows the name of your site and is searching for it, it doesn’t matter all that much where in the listings you are. The idea here is to associate your site with certain words or phrases so that if someone does a search for, say, “best sandwiches Boston” or “Elvis’s sandwich”, you’ll be near the top.

The more your keywords are used, and the more prominent they are (i.e. in titles and headings), the more likely a search engine will be to associate them with your site.

Keyword associations evolve naturally, based on the sorts of things you write about. If you write a lot about the best sandwiches in Boston, you won’t be able to help Google automatically considering you more relevant for searches containing related terms.

The first thing you can do to let search engines know what sorts of words will be relevant to your site is to put them in your meta keywords tag. Unfortunately, while meta keywords used to be vital, their importance been severely weakened in response to rampant abuse by people using misleading information or entering a huge number of keywords (a tactic called “stuffing”).

“Keyword optimization” involves careful use and placement of the chosen keywords, aggressively pushing the associations. If you decide to attempt this, keep your writing organic! Be very careful not to get involved with practices that improve search results at the expense of content quality. It will backfire. Shoehorning “Elvis’s sandwich” into a bunch of titles, headings, text, links, templates, and captions without duplicating the rest of the content may be in line with what the search engines look for, so you might see a temporary boost in traffic, but then it will collapse. First your audience will fade because nobody will want to look at or read such poorly-composed text. Then because all the search engines have some sort of measure to catch this manipulative practice (another form of “keyword stuffing”), they will devalue your URL if not remove it from the index completely.

Even if you’ll be stopping at setting your meta tags, spend a little while really thinking about what words and phrases you anticipate using often anyway. Go as specific as possible, as long as it’s something you can see yourself writing a lot. Remember that crawlers don’t actually read English, so using the keyword “astrophysics,” even if it’s an accurate representation of the site’s content, is meaningless if the word itself doesn’t appear in the text. Also, “sandwich, bread, blog” isn’t going to help you a whole lot either. Even if they pop up often in your articles, those are such generic terms that you’ll be lucky to appear on page 10.

For an easy way to track how often you use potential keywords use the Webconfs Keyword Density Checker. It will display a word cloud, count how many times you use each, and calculate keyword density (keyword occurrence/total words, not including stop words like “the” or “and”). The ideal density for each keyword is somewhere between 1% and 6%.

Once you have some keyword ideas, you can throw them into Google’s Keyword Tool to analyze how often people search using those keywords, as well as some more specific alternatives.

SEOChat has one of the better articles out there about Choosing and Researching Keywords. It’s several years old, but still highly relevant.

Search-friendly coding issues

Title tags

Look at the top of your browser window. Right now it probably says either “Center for Citizen Media: Blog” or “Center for Citizen Media: Blog » Blog Archive » Citizen Media Business Issues: Traffic Rankings, Search Engines, and Optimization:” (perhaps abbreviated), followed by the name of your browser. This is the title, and every single page on the web has one. Titles, because they are by nature relevant to the page’s content, are a big deal to search engines. Try to use a different, appropriate title for each page you create. Many blog hosts will do this automatically. A good format is to use the name of your site for the main page, and then on other pages use something like “[name of your site] – [name of specific page or post]”.

Alt attributes and picture names

Search engines don’t see pictures. Not even Google Image Search sees them in the way humans do. It looks at the surrounding text and page content, the name of the picture file, and the “alt” attribute (see below for an explanation of this), but it has no way to see the graphic and understand its contents. Many blog and web hosts’ uploading programs will rename the files you upload to some random combination of letters and numbers, so you may not have total control over that, but it’s easy to use alt attributes effectively. “Alt” is what would be displayed in place of the image if you were using a text-only browser. It is also what users of screen readers would hear (software for the blind that speaks aloud the words on a page). In some browsers, when the title attribute is missing (not to be confused with the title of the page), it is also what pops up when you hover your cursor over an image.

Some publishing software gives you an “alt attribute” field to fill in when you create a link; if not, it’s just a matter of looking at the link’s code. Find the appropriate line with an “IMG SRC” html tag. You’ll see the IMG SRC is equal to the URL of an image file. All you have to do to is add alt = “the alt text goes here” after the URL and before the close bracket. When you’re done it’ll look like:

<IMG SRC=”http://www.yoursite.com/images/sample.jpg” alt=”your alt text” >

The alt text should act as a substitute for the image’s existence, which doesn’t always mean a description of the picture’s contents. A mailbox icon, for example, is probably better described as “e-mail [your name or site]” than “blue mailbox with a letter sticking out and the red flag raised.”

Also, don’t use alt text that is redundant to adjacent article text. And it’s probably best not to use alt tags for graphics that are purely for decoration (frilly borders and such), as they don’t actually provide anything relevant to the primary content.

Sitemaps

From the Sitemaps website:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

The easiest way to create a sitemap is to use XML-Sitemaps.com. Just enter your URL, wait for it to scan, download the file, and place it in the root folder of your website (so that its address is www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml). If you use a blog that doesn’t let you upload files like this, the next best option is to use your RSS feed as a sitemap (usually www.yoursite.com/rss.xml).

Edit your robots.txt (a file on your website that contains instructions for crawlers and other robots) to include the line

Sitemap: [sitemap_location]

where [sitemap_location] is the complete URL of your sitemap. This is the only way certain search engines, like MSN, will find it. For more information about robots.txt, see the Web Robots Pages.

To add your sitemap to Google, just sign up for Google Webmaster Tools and click “add” under the Sitemap column.

Adding your sitemap to Ask is particularly important, since the Ask crawler isn’t quite as active as the others and there is no way to simply submit a URL to be crawled. To do so, just copy and paste this link, replacing the end with the location of your sitemap: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.the URL of your sitemap here.xml

301 redirects

If your site is located at www.yourdomain.com, a redirect is required to make sure people can get to you when they type yourdomain.com (omitting the www) into their address bar. Your domain registrar has probably already set this up for you, but check with them to make sure this is a “301 redirect.” This tells search engines that the redirect is permanent, not temporary.

A fast way to find out which type of redirect you have is to use the SEOmoz HTTP status code checker.

Search-friendly design and presentation issues

Frames

Search engines are not smart enough to be able to see HTML frames as part of a single page. So when analyzed separately, each is weaker. The main content frame has fewer links and the navigation frame (assuming a cliché frames layout) will more than likely be discounted altogether for consisting only of links.

Frames made with CSS are better, because you can do it without creating separate files.

Java and Flash

Search engines don’t see text embedded in JavaScript or Flash. If you make the design choice to use these to display content, know that it will not be searchable.

Duplicate content

Search engines have duplicate content filters so as not to serve the end user a bunch of identical results, and also to prevent someone from copying and pasting good text from a popular site like Wikipedia onto a dummy page where it is passed off as original content in order to bring in ad money. Therefore don’t repost articles, avoid overusing boilerplates, etc.

Persistent navigation

Avoiding duplicate content doesn’t apply to navigation. In fact, having a good navigation system is very helpful as it creates a dense web of internal links, which makes it easier for the crawler to find all of your files. A crawler might not find something that requires several clicks to access.

Linking issues

Search engines want to serve the highest quality, most relevant results to users. Since links are such a huge factor when determining search results, there are many ways in which yours can help or hurt you.

Fix broken links. If you use DreamWeaver or FrontPage, you can check for them from inside the program. If not, you can use a tool like Webmaster Toolkit’s Link Checker or iWebTool Broken Link Checker to scan for them.

Don’t link to bad neighborhoods (spammers, abusers of search engines, sites that install malware…use common sense). Inbound links from such sites won’t hurt you, though, since you are assumed not to have control over it and they won’t affect a user’s experience on your page.

Watch the number of outbound links on a given page and try to stay under 100. More than that and you may trigger a link spam filter (more on link spam in the Warnings section below).

Consistent and relevant anchor text

When you create a link on your page, you typically don’t display the full URL in your article. A link to the Wikipedia article on frogs, for example, will usually look more like <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog”frog than [en.wikipedia.org]. These words that you show the reader to describe the link, which at the same time hide the unattractive URL, are called anchor text.

Anchor text is very important to search engines because it’s often very relevant to the page it refers to. The more often Wikipedia’s frog page is referred to as “frog,” the more search engines associate that particular page with that word. Knowing that, what do you think happens when someone links to you using nondescript text like “this post,” “here,” “a section,” or “great article”? Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean that when somebody Googles “great article,” your page will come up. These terms are much too widely used, and aren’t informative so the anchor text ends up meaning nothing.

So use relevant anchor text whenever you can, especially for your own content. Be consistent, too. Use exact titles or the same keywords when linking to your other articles. However, going out of your way to shoehorn detailed anchor text for every outbound link isn’t always practical. It can cause some awkward sentences and take up more space than you want, but rewording whenever you can is good practice.

Google Webmaster Tools will allow you to view the most common words in anchor text linking to you.

Directories

Submit your site to the Open Directory Project and the Yahoo! Directory. These are not search engines and optimization isn’t a factor here, but many people use these human-organized and edited databases. Also, the data is used to generate search engine results, especially the Yahoo! Directory, which is drawn from for every Yahoo! search. They don’t accept everybody, but if your content is unique or very good, and if you pick the right category to add it to, you have a good chance.

Warnings

Spamdexing means to manipulate search results in a way that’s not in line with the way the search engine is supposed to work. At the beginning of this post there was a disclaimer that the information contained herein would not be concerned with unscrupulous forms of search engine optimization. Here we’ll detail a few of the most common such tricks. These are not just dishonest; they’re unsound and will backfire.

Google, et al, know about these scams and have been tweaking defenses against them for years. Most of these are now detectable automatically via the crawler, in which case the offending site will be significantly devalued. In more drastic instances, the site will be removed permanently from the index. The few of these that do work still violate the search engines’ terms of service and, if reported or manually caught, will result in similar disciplinary action.

In 2006, head of Google’s webspam group Matt Cutts confirmed on his blog, for the first time, a company’s removal from Google’s index: “Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html.” Companies had been removed before, but this was the first noted by name. The impetus for the disclosure was to support the defendants in a defamation lawsuit filed by Traffic Power against its critics. Banning not just Traffic Power, but also its clients makes it clear that Google has no qualms about squashing sites that use shady SEO practices, intentional or not. According to Google, you are held responsible for SEO violations relating to your site, whether implemented by you or by an SEO professional you’ve hired.

So these warnings are not only for those with flexible ethics. There are many well-meaning webmasters that can accidentally fall into these traps, unaware that they are doing something wrong or raising a red flag.

Note: If you have been wrongly removed from Google, there is a reinclusion process you can go through. However, it can take some time to get your page restored to the search results.

Link spam

As we know, links matter when determining a site’s importance and relevance. Link spamming is creating links without merit.

One form this takes is that of a link farm, a community of web pages that all link to each other in order to boost search engine presence.

Similar is a link train, which acts like a sort of web-based pyramid scheme in which you place your link at the bottom of a list, publish it, and get other people to do the same.

Some people will create multiple websites themselves just to link back and forth and boost the primary site.

Others will place links in the comments of dozens or hundreds of blogs, often irrelevant or without reading the post itself.

A little less common, but still disallowed, is the practice of paying for links at a popular site to be displayed in such a way that they don’t look like advertisements.

Keyword stuffing

Mentioned briefly before, this is when you place a very large number of keywords:
1. in the meta keywords tag
2. together at the bottom of a page
3. in the article text
4. pretty much anywhere else
June 03, 2009
12:59
Citizen Media Business Issues: Web Statistics
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

(This is the sixteenth in a series of postings about citizen media business issues. See the introduction here. All of these entries are considered to be in “beta” and will be revised and refined as they find a home on a more permanent area of the Center for Citizen Media web site. To that end, your comments, additional examples, and criticisms are welcome and will be invaluable contributions to this process.)

How many people are reading what you’re writing? Who are they? How did they find you? If applicable, how likely are they to click an ad or buy a t-shirt? And without negatively affecting the users’ experience, how can you attract more visitors or increase the probability that they’ll click the ad or buy the t-shirt?

For the final three Citizen Media Business Issues posts, we’ll try to answer these questions by exploring Web statistics, traffic rankings, search engines, and optimization (for search engines as well as for other goals).

Web Statistics

Often referred to as analytics, Web statistics are various measures of website activity intended to help the webmaster or marketer. Webmasters use the information to attract more visitors and improve overall user experience. Marketers use it to maximize revenue and determine the value of ad space.

While companies have been providing and/or selling analytics software and services since the mid-90s, the average webmaster without a budget for such things had to, for a long time, settle for the once-ubiquitous odometer-styled hit counter. The simple, public measure of how many times files were accessed since the counter’s creation, aside from being a little tacky, was too unreliable and subject to manipulation by those seeking to misrepresent their traffic data. Counters just didn’t do a good enough job of explaining what really happens on a site. Even if you found a free piece of real analytics software, you needed a good amount of technical savvy and access to you site’s server to get it going and maintain it.

Google Analytics has brought statistics to the Web mainstream, providing a free service that requires no downloads and very little effort. All you have to do is copy and paste a little snippet of code into each of your pages (or just the template, if you’re using one). Google Analytics’s metrics and features with which you can analyze them will likely be more than what you need (like which ISP your visitors are using most), but let’s take a look at how to use it so you can figure out which stats are most important to you.

[Note: The majority of this article deals with Google’s product because it is well-known, comprehensive, easy, and free, but it’s far from the only game in town. Drawbacks and alternatives will be discussed at the end, but almost all of the features and metrics discussed in the context of Google Analytics are applicable to its competitors, as well.]

Using Google Analytics

The default tab, the Dashboard, contains the information you’ll most regularly want to check. It’s customizable, so you can click the little X in the corner of each box to remove it and the sections in other tabs all have an “Add to Dashboard” button at the top. The first two things to note, because they apply to every Analytics page, are the date range and the graph. The date range (top right corner) is, of course, the period of time that the statistics reflect, and you can cover as much or as little time as you want by playing with it. The graph displays a measure of a particular spec over the selected date range (number of visits, by default, on the Dashboard). The drop down in the top-right corner of the graph allows you to change what it is that you’re measuring.

The rest of the data can be roughly explained in four groups: how many visitors you have, who they are, what they do on your site, and where they came from.

How many, which includes stats like the numbers of visits and pageviews, is, of course, the most definitive measure of how popular your site is and often the primary motivator to use this software to begin with. A visit is logged any time someone starts a new session on your site, with pageviews counting all pages loaded within that session. To Google, a “session” times out after 30 minutes of inactivity. If you visit, leave, and come back within 30 minutes, it will likely be counted as a single visit. Likewise, if you idle for 30 minutes and then click a link to another page on the same site, you’ll probably be starting a new visit/session on the new page.

Many webmasters want to know who their visitors are in order to improve user experience. Google tracks geographic data, browser types, operating systems, ISPs, connection speeds, percentage of users with Flash or Java installed, and the number that have been to your site before. If, for example, you find that half of the people looking at your page use Internet Explorer on dial-up connections, you probably wouldn’t want to require use of a FireFox plug-in or use a lot of large files like videos or high-resolution images.

Information relating to what people do on your site includes amount of time spent on site, average pageviews, and bounce rate (a term that refers to the percentage of visitors who left the page they arrived on without checking out any others).

Unfortunately, due to tabbed browsing, idle time, session timeouts, and wildly varying personal browsing habits, it’s hard to get a lot of meaning from the average logged amount of time on site/length of visit, but we’ll talk about some of its possible uses in comparisons later. Also, average pageviews, bounce rate, and depth of visit are really only useful to you if you’re not running a blog or news site. Blogs are almost invariably set up to display many articles on one page and the news sites that don’t use blogs still make use of scannable headlines, placing a good deal of content on the front page. What reason would someone have, then, to explore other pages?

A useful what people do stat is under the Content tab, where you can see a break-down of how popular each of your pages is in terms of pageviews. With this you can assess where your strengths and weaknesses are, perhaps spot a problem if something should be higher or lower (a mistyped link, for example), or figure out what sort of content the search engines most closely associate with your site (more on this in the next post).

If your goal is to get more traffic, then the most valuable data for you here probably has to do with where visitors come from, which can be found under the Traffic Sources tab. “Where” in this case doesn’t refer to geographical location, but how people find you on the Internet. Most people probably don’t type your URL into their address bar, but those that do are counted as “direct traffic,” as are those who have it bookmarked in their browser and access your pages that way. High direct traffic is usually the result of offline marketing (business cards, print ads, etc.), an extremely accessible/memorable URL, or high reader loyalty.

Traffic that isn’t “direct,” then, must have come from some other point on the Web. The Referring Sites section displays not only the names of pages that link to you and how many of your hits came from there, but also the trends of each group of referred users. So you can see how the average pageviews, time on site, or bounce rate differs between users who clicked in from stumbleupon.com and those who found you through your friend’s blogroll. The only search engine you will probably see on the list is Google Images. Search engines have their own section (not sure why Google Images isn’t included there).

By taking a close look at your referring sites, you can tell why people are linking to you (they’re probably linking to particular pages or topics), how relevant the referral was (a visitor from Site A may spend twice as long and look at twice as many pages as Site B), learn your strengths and weaknesses, and gain feedback about what you’re writing (though rarely criticism—that usually just shows up as a lack of hits unless you’re sufficiently polemic).

The last major part of where users come from is your search engine data, including keywords. The next post will cover all things search engine in detail.

FeedBurner for RSS

Google Analytics is a fantastic tool that can really help you improve your site (or at least provide you with some fun trivia about your readers), but the major thing it’s missing is data about RSS subscriptions.

Many if not most regularly-updated sites have RSS feeds these days. If you run a blog via any popular weblog software, in fact, you definitely have one. Unless you’re hiding it, odds are that a significant percentage of your visitors get your content that way. So if you have an RSS feed and want the same kinds of information about it that you now have for regular Web traffic, head over to FeedBurner.

FeedBurner was recently acquired by Google, so may be integrated into Analytics soon, but for now it’s the best place to get statistics and add features to your feed. The service works by replacing your current RSS or Atom feed, directing visitors to subscribe to your FeedBurner feed instead. The end user’s experience doesn’t change unless FB’s compatibility tweaks makes the content more readable or you add features.

The two main RSS stats of note are subscribers and reach. Subscribers are a measure of how many people used their RSS reader to check in to see if you had new content. Reach is the number of people who actually see content either through an RSS reader or otherwise—like on a news aggregating website or an RSS search engine.

Drawbacks to Google Analytics and Privacy Concerns

The major feature-based drawback to Google Analytics has to do with the availability of the data. Google decides when reports are generated, not you, so information you see is usually from at least a few hours ago. But features aside, perhaps the biggest concerns people have about using this software have to do with privacy.

While use of Google Analytics is monetarily free (unless you get more than 5 million pageviews per month), you are paying them in the form of information. All of the data you collect about your site, including the information visitors “give” to you, is collected by Google. Per the Google Privacy Policy and Analytics Terms of Use, the company can/will collect information you provide in user sign-up forms, search histories, emails, information about your browser and computer via cookies (which includes at least that which you can see about your own site’s visitors), what sites you’ve visited (lots of pages use Google AdSense and/or Analytics), and so on. And though they assure us it will not be shared with any third-parties (it’s mainly for making Google AdWords/AdSense advertising more relevant), Google has a massive amount of data about the world’s Internet users, and that makes some people uneasy.

Alternative Statistics Programs

If it’s possible for you to do so, the best options will generally be programs that you host on your own Web server. They’re the most reliable, most customizable, give you total control over your data (and ownership thereof), and won’t limit how many pageviews you can analyze like most of the hosted services. The downside to these is that they require access to your server and the technical knowhow to install, configure, and access the software yourself. If you feel comfortable going down this route, Piwik’s website should be one of your first stops. It’s a very good, free, open-source program with a large base of developers behind it. It positions itself as the “open source alternative to Google Analytics” and it’s about as user friendly as this sort of thing can get. Other free server-based options include AWStats, SlimStat, and Webalizer, but while each of these has its own unique benefits, they are decidedly more difficult to use than Piwik.

Hosted (where a company has the software on their server so you don’t have to worry about installing it on yours) alternatives to Google are generally pay services or limited in the number of pageviews per day/month you can have analyzed. W3Counter, for example, has a good free service, but it’s limited to 5,000 pageviews/day and you’re required to display a small logo of theirs on each of your pages. The upgraded plan, which is currently $9.95/mo, removes the logo obligation and allows up to a million pageviews/month (among other features). As another option, StatCounter’s free plan offers almost all of the features of the premium plans, which range from $9-$29/month, except for the amount of analysis it will perform, which is broken down into two levels. At the no-cost level, basic statistics are viewable for 250,000 pageviews/month, but detailed information is limited to the last 500 visitors. Both W3Counter and StatCounter offer real-time reporting.

Almost all of these services have a demonstration page on its website for you to test drive the program before you sign-up or install it, so check out a few before deciding.

(Ryan McGrady is a new media graduate student at Emerson College where he is studying knowledge, identity, and ideas in the information age.)

May 03, 2009
9:55
Moving [blog] home
» ‎ The Obvious?

This blog has moved here
April 30, 2009
23:26
Teach a man to fish
» ‎ The Obvious?

It occurred to me that what I am doing when I find interesting people who point to interesting stuff, add them to my networks in the various social tools I use, then subscribe to the best of them in FriendFeed - is building a big fishing net with which to catch the good stuff of the web as it floats by.
23:16
Newsletter
» ‎ The Obvious?

I have just started publishing a newsletter and the response to the first one has been very positive. I am probably going to write them once a month and will include stuff that catches my eye relating to social media, particularly in the enterprise, books that are worth reading and tips on how to get the most out of your use of social tools.
Someone commented that this was a slightly Web 1.0 thing to do but I did it in response to comments from people who are not yet into RSS or reading blogs regularly - or who just like email as a way of keeping up.
You can see a copy of the last newsletter here and if want to receive a copy of the next one sign up here - and do pass it on!

April 23, 2009
13:13
Investigative Blogger Raising Funds
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Firedoglake is raising money to pay for investigative blogging.

April 20, 2009
1:47
Great Kids Afternoon Project: Claymation!
» ‎ Sifry's Alerts
I had a great Sunday afternoon with my kids today. We combined three of my favorite activities together to do something unique, fun, and easy-to-do - we used digital cameras, some play-doh, and some pretty simple software to make claymation animations. Here's my daughter's first claymation:

The kids spent about two hours completely absorbed doing the project, and they absolutely loved the results when they were done. I was surprised at how easy it was to make something that looked reasonably competent, and how quickly the kids caught on to the technique, and started to master new ones, even while still making their first movie.

What You Need:
1. A compact digital camera, capable of 640x480 (VGA) resolution ( I used a Canon SD850IS, which is overkill, almost any compact will do)
2. Some play-doh, or other soft clay
3. A tripod or mini-tripod (I used a Manfrotto 709)
4. A mat of some kind (I used 4 sheets of white printer paper taped together, and taped to the table)
5. Some software that does stop-motion animation (I used Quicktime Pro, $29.99 for the Mac or for the PC)
First the kids taped four pieces of paper together to make a mat so that the clay wouldn't stick to the dining room table. We taped those down at their workspaces, so that they could be comfortable, and set up the tripod and camera pointing at the mat.
Next, set up the workspace in a place that isn't directly lit by the sun - it should be evenly lit and relatively low contrast, I'll explain more later. I zoomed the camera a bit so that the mat filled the frame, but you can do whatever you like with focus and zoom, it makes for interesting effects - for example, we kept the camera zoomed out for my son's claymation, and that led to an interesting clay+reality mixture:

Make sure that the camera is locked securely to the tripod, and that the tripod will stay in place as well.
Next, you need to make some changes to the camera settings. First off, you don't need all those megapixels - in fact, you should set the resolution of your camera to its lowest or nearly lowest setting - 640x480 is usually more than enough. Using higher resolutions will actually be a hinderance to you, and won't give you much additional benefit. Of course, if you want to do claymation in HD, you can increase your resolution to something like 1920x1080 if your camera supports that. If you want to improve things a bit, turn the JPG compression to fine or super-fine, which will retain a bit more detail. This is one of those times when you definitely want your camera to be storing in JPGs, the smaller the better!
You'll also want to turn the automatic flash off, as it'll just ruin your exposure. If you can turn off autofocus, that's even better, but my experience is that it doesn't make much of a difference. You'll want to turn off the auto--shutdown feature of your camera as well, as you don't want the camera turning itself off and on between frames.
I put the camera into its manual mode, and also try to compensate the exposure for the whiteness of the mat - generally that means overexposing the built-in meter by about 1 f-stop. If your camera produces a histogram, you can watch the histogram to make sure that it is a smooth bell curve right in the middle of the histogram.
With your camera on the tripod, turned on and set, and your workspace set up, you're ready to do your animation! The trick is that you're going to take a photograph of your scene, then move the clay a small amount, and then take the next photo in sequence. When you stitch all of these photos together at 15 or 30 frames per second, it looks just like one of those flipbooks you probably had when you were a kid. It relies on the phenomenon of persistence of vision, which is how all movies work.
Now go have fun. I found that it took about 10 minutes for my 6 year-old to understand what he needed to do in his workflow, and my 9 year-old understood it immediately once I showed her. You might want to make yourself the cameraman, and let your child do the animation - it makes for great teamwork, and it's fun to do different things with the clay, like roll it into balls, make snakes and caterpillars, and do chase scenes. Moving the clay more means that it will appear faster in the movie. When you've told your story, or you've filled up your memory card, you're ready to do the software magic that brings everything together.
Moving to the computer
Once you've got your masterpiece filmed, it is time to dump the memory card of your camera onto your computer. I prefer to start with a completely empty memory card which means that there's nothing to mess up your movie, but you can usually tell which frame is your first by looking at the dates of the images.
I then fired up Quicktime Pro (unfortunately you can't use the unlicensed Quicktime player for this, you need to be able to create new movies, which means you need to shell out the $29 for Quicktime Pro) and went to File -> Open Image Sequence so that I could stitch all the frames into a single movie. You'll be then asked for the number of frames per second - generally, 15 frames per second works prety well, but if you're really getting expert, you can go for a video look (30 fps) or a cinematic look (24 fps). The higher the frame rate, the more quickly your movie will play.
There is other stop-action software out on the market, but I've found that Quicktime Pro is the easiest and fastest way to go from the camera into a viewable state. don't forget to save your completed movie when it comes up, and you can import the movie into other non-linear editing software, like iMovie, Adobe Premiere, or Final Cut if you want to do further edits, cuts, or ad audio, subtitles, or credits.
The best part is that if you're not a video or computer expert, you can still have a lot of fun with a very low-end camera and computer, and the quality of your end-product is entirely limited by your (or your kid's) imagination!

April 16, 2009
12:11
Berkman Center Talk Next Tuesday
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

I’ll be speaking next Tuesday at lunchtime at the Berkman Center. Topic (and link for RSVP):

Mediactive: Why media consumers, not just creators, need to be active users.
April 15, 2009
16:38
Journalism and Location
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

I’ll be speaking at the Where 2.0 conference next month in San Jose, about journalists are using, and can use, location-related products and services. The talk is called Where Does Journalism Go?

You can get a 25 percent discount by using this code — whr09rdr — when registering.
April 13, 2009
12:01
Summer New Media Program at Arizona State
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

The Cronkite School at Arizona State is offering a summer New Media Academy “for adults who want to understand how communication is changing and how to set up and maintain a fully functional, multimedia-rich Web site.”

April 12, 2009
0:31
Having it both ways
» ‎ The Obvious?

"Yet all forms of industrialism are on one hand attractive to humans and on the other intolerable to them. Partly, that's their revolutionary character. It is in the nature of industrialisation that markets rise up and disappear because new technologies rise up and disappear. So whole industries vanish, with some of the ways of life that are associated with them. People have to move or change their skills, or find other things to do. It's not a transition to a stable state. It's permanent change.

"It's not really about capitalism. Industrial civilisation itself is inherently dynamic and revolutionary. I think Marx got that right. That's partly what human beings like about it. That's what's attractive. What's unattractive is that it is very difficult to reconcile its actual operation with the human needs for security and stability. People do want security and stability. But they also want possibility and thrills. They do want happiness, but they also want excitement, which is quite different. And these are ubiquitous human conflicts."

From a great interview with John Gray in The Independent

April 09, 2009
10:19
ProPublica Invites the Public’s Help
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

ProPublica has launched the citizen-journalism portion of its operation, or at least the first iteration. By posting The Obama Team’s Disclosure Documents and asking readers to help figure out any potential conflicts of interest or other facts that are worth knowing, the site is doing what newspapers could have been doing years ago but haven’t bothered to do. This crowdsourcing follows key early journalistic adopters, notably Josh Marshall and his team at Talking Points Memo.

Amanda Michel is leading ProPublica’s citizen component. This is a great start.

April 06, 2009
10:28
Social by Social
» ‎ The Obvious?

Andy Gibson has pulled together a great list of 45 propositions for those interested in getting involved in social computing. They are all good but my particular favourites are below:

# Empowerment is unconditional. Telling people what they can and can’t do with your platform is like an electricity company restricting what its power can be used for.

# You can’t learn to fly by watching the pilot. If you want to understand new technologies, start using them. Dive in.

# Don’t centralise, aggregate. Do you really need data centralisation? Well do you? Use lots of different, disconnected tools and then pull the content together into a central location.

# Your users own the platform. If they feel own it, they will trust it, help sustain it, and find ways to use and improve the tools; if they aren’t interested, no amount of pushing will help.

7:48
Location, Location
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Combining mobility, time and location is becoming one of the most valuable techniques of media creation. Last week, some students and I did a small experiment that demonstrates how easy this is to do, and suggests all kinds of possibilities for journalistic follow-ups.

This Flickr map has more than 120 photos, taken by me and some Arizona State University journalism students, at last week’s Phoenix “First Friday Art Walk” — a monthly, self-guided tour of a downtown-Phoenix district that contains a number of galleries and craft-oriented shops.

Putting this together was absurdly simple: We combined the capabilities of the Google/T-Mobile G1 smart-phones and services provided by the photo-sharing site Flickr. (Note: Google provided us with the phones and its carrier partner, T-Mobile, gave us airtime.)

The G1s are the first in a line of what Google hopes will be lots of devices using the Android operating system, which is considerably more open than Apple’s iPhone and has, in my view, roughly equal potential. The G1s contain, among many other capabilities, digital cameras and GPS (global satellite positioning radios that tell location within a few meters).

Each of us shot a dozen or so pictures at various places along the Art Walk streets. After snapping each picture, we sent it by email to a special address at Flickr, using the name of the gallery or other location as the subject line and adding some body text to describe what we were looking at.

Embedded in the JPEG photo files created by the G1s is a critically valuable bunch of zeroes and ones: the location as determined by the GPS. Flickr reads that location data as it imports the picture files, and then places the images autormatically on a map.

In other words, the map was being created in real time, as we walked the streets and snapped the photos.

Now, this is not a new idea by any means. And we could have done a much better display of the pictures with a bit more time; Flickr’s mapping display to the general public is very crude compared with what it could do (the image above, much better than the one you’ll see if you click this public link, is available to the account holder of the map, but not to other people) Moreover, sending pictures via email was a crude way to handle the images; there are applications for the iPhone and Nokia’s GPS-equipped phones that upload to Flickr much more efficiently than anything written so far for the G1.

Still, it was trivially simple to set this up and make it work, using tools that already exist and are, for the most part, easy to use. We’ll be doing much more with the G1s over time (including, I hope, creating applications that more fully explore the devices’ potential).

The point is that some events take place over time and space, and are made to order for this kind of treatment. Journalists are actually quite late to the party. Flickr and other sites are displaying crowd-sourced such events via user-created tags.

We’re planning to open up this page to others in the Phoenix community, so that over time people create a rich photo set of First Friday. We’ll help people sort by dates, not just location, so that we can see how the monthly event changes over time, too.

We are planning a series of other experiments with these phones (and others), and would be grateful for ideas on how we might take best advantage of these incredible devices. Our goal is simple: testing ideas that will help create valuable community information resources and services.
March 31, 2009
22:02
Pundit to Critic: Fuck You
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

UPDATED

It’s hardly surprising when someone fires back at a harsh critic of his or her employer’s competence and/or ethics. But when that someone is superstar New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, and the return fire takes the form, in part, of “Fuck you,” it raises a few eyebrows — and makes you wonder about a broader hubris.

The exchange in question came yesterday at the Freedom to Connect conference, a gathering in suburban Washington where people discuss issues related to data networking and the information revolution. Friedman’s keynote talk was all about his latest book and touched on the conference theme only briefly during the Q&A.

He’d already dropped the F-bomb at the start of his talk (in a WTF mode) when he noticed the conference back-channel discussion scrolling by on a stage-monitor screen. Later, during the Q&A, he was asked to comment on a question posted there that challenged the Times’ credibility in a fairly general and nasty way.

He began, appropriately, by saying that yes, the paper makes mistakes. But then he offered what sounded like a more heart-felt response, the above-noted “fuck you,” winning applause from some but certainly not all or (by my estimate) even a majority of the audience.

Friedman had my sympathy in some ways. It’s hard to sit there and take abuse, even though pundits dish it out for a living to people who have thicker skins than all but a tiny minority of journalists. (I’ve fired back at some folks on my various blogs over the years, even ones written as part of newspaper gigs, but always remembered that there were lines I wouldn’t cross in that professional venue or, short of the most extreme provocation, in any situation.)

Yes, the question he’d been asked was shallow and accusatory — and yet absolutely reasonable in several key respects. The Times (I own stock in the company) is a great institution that does absolutely vital work. But it has had to answer, and not always persuasively, for its own grotesque lapses — not least, in recent history, the Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals — and Friedman himself has hardly been a pundit whose pronouncements are infallible or, on some issues, even mostly correct in retrospect. His self-involvement isn’t off the charts, meanwhile, but it’s plainly strong.

So while understandable, his arrogant retort reflected more than merely the self-assurance of a pundit who’s won multiple Pulitzer prizes, has penned best-selling books and gives speeches around the globe promoting his viewpoints. It was entirely illustrative of his newspaper’s famous confidence, which more often than it should bleeds into hubris and outright arrogance.

Saying “Fuck you” didn’t make him more authoritative. It diminished him.

UPDATE: Friedman sent the following (very slightly edited) to a Freedom-to-Connect mail list, and gave me permission to repost it here:

To those who understood where I was coming from, thanks. To those who didn’t, thanks also. We should all learn from our critics.

I believe passionately in the New York Times, a place I have worked at my whole adult life. Lord knows, it has made its mistakes. Which newspaper or blogger hasn’t? But I believe that when it is at its best it plays a vitally important role in our democracy, and flippant, denigrating remarks about it, at a time when it is in economic peril and our country desperately needs serious journalism to sort through this crisis, struck me as deeply unserious.

That said, when I’m trying to make a point, especially a heartfelt one, and my choice of words ends up getting in the way of that point — even if for just one person — then I chose the wrong words. So thanks to all for a great discussion and a learning afternoon.
March 30, 2009
11:46
Reporting on the Phantom Financial Economy
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Accompanying Simon Johnson’s remarkable, must-read Atlantic article, “The Quiet Coup,” is this chart:

What’s not noted here — or in most traditional media coverage of the meltdown — is something that everyone should understand. These profits were an illusion in the end. They existed just long enough, purely on paper but not in any long-term reality, to boost stock prices in these companies and to give executives the excuse to pay themselves extravagant salaries and bonuses and, if they were really smart, to unload their stock at high prices.
9:44
New Investigative Project
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Jay Rosen: Introducing the new Huffington Post Investigative Fund (And My Own Role in It) The announcement of its birth, along with the $1.75 million starter budget, is really the launch of a new Internet-based news organization with a focus on original reporting. You might say the Fund’s operating principle is: report once, run anywhere.

As newspapers fail, the news ecosystem is finding a way forward. This project, like ProPublica and Spot.us and several other projects, will help fill in the gaps.

We need a hundred such experiments, not just a few. Here’s hoping we’ll see more local ones, not just national ones.

A key question, as yet unanswered: What copyright license will be used for the output of this material. If it’s not Creative Commons, then it won’t have nearly as much value as it might.

March 29, 2009
2:13
A Farm For The Future
» ‎ The Obvious?

Thanks to Rob Paterson for pointing to this Natural World documentary from the BBC. What struck me watching this wonderful film was the degree to which arrogance and fixation for imposed order was what got us into trouble in the first place and how much humility and willingness to learn from apparent chaos is what will get us out of it. Any parallels you may draw with organisational life are totally intended.

March 26, 2009
11:43
Watching Walmart Spread Through America
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Flowing Data: Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America

Brilliant. I was working in the Midwest when Walmart’s destructive march across the nation’s heartland was just gaining strength. This visualization looks like the nuclear explosion map in old movies, and the imagery — if over the top — is thought-provoking.

Updated with fixed link….
March 24, 2009
17:36
Google Power
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Google is pointing from its home page today to a page about World Tuberculosis Day and that, in turn, points to the Stop TB Partnership, a nonprofit organization. A worthy cause, and good for Google for pointing to it.

Consider the power of this endorsement. I suspect that with this single link, Google is channeling more money to the organizations that want to end TB than the sum of all their previous campaigns. This is power of a breathtaking kind.

March 23, 2009
18:02
Ada Lovelace Day
» ‎ The Obvious?

Today is Ada Lovelace Day and in celebration of the first computer programmer Suw Charman Anderson has encouraged us to write about women in technology whom we admire.

When choosing who to write about I was disinclined to pick someone famous or high profile as I always worry that women who have gained such heights have often had to do so by becoming like the men they were competing against and in the process compromised some of the different, but often greater, strengths of being a woman.

So with that by way of explanation most of you will, I guess, not have heard of my choice Marni Melrose. Marni, "The Mac Angel", does webinars and podcasts explaining how to get the best out of Daylite the wonderful CRM/time-management software that I now couldn't run my business without. I have bought four of Marni's videos and have watched each of them several times over. Her comprehensive knowledge of the programme, which has a steep learning curve and is highly customizable, means the videos are packed with information but they are also presented in a way that doesn't make the viewer feel stupid.

What impresses me is the depth of Marni's technical knowledge combined with a way of explaining things that makes them easy to understand. I thought that a woman making something very geeky more accessible through her approach and depth of knowledge was an appropriate role model to celebrate on this day.
4:17
Why HR, Comms and IT should be really excited about the social web ....
» ‎ The Obvious?

... but probably aren't.

Many moons ago when I was lost in one of the many twists and turns in my BBC "career" my father suggested asked if there wasn't someone in HR that I could speak to. I am sorry to say that I laughed out loud. Yes there were some notable exceptions but most of my experience of HR departments had been of people who saw themselves as maintainers of order rather than enablers of staff. People who made up rules and made sure I stuck to them, rather than people who had my long term career interests at heart.

Likewise communications departments seem to see themselves more as "managing" communication on behalf of senior management than enabling communication within their organisations. And of course when it to comes to IT they have sadly been the ones who have picked up on the motivations of the other two and come to represent control of risk rather than enabling the business. Of course I have made some sweeping generalisations in the last two paragraphs but I don't believe I am dreadfully wide of the mark in describing many, if not most, organisations.

The sad thing is of course that it doesn't have to be this way. As I said before I have known some very notable exceptions and good people have always found ways to go against the tide and do the right things. But from many processing stuff, conforming to norms and doing what is expected of them is the most that they can aspire to and of course having turned these corporate functions into commodities they are now being offshored or outsourced in their droves.

So why should people in these organisational functions be excited about the social web? Because people are starting to do it for themselves. Increasingly staff are using web-based tools to perform some of the functions that have ostensibly been the responsibility of these departments. They are writing CV's and finding jobs for themselves, even within the existing organisations, using Linkedin; they are using social sites like Facebook or blogs to communicate with each other; and they are increasingly using flexible tools such as Google Documents and calendar to provide basic platforms for working together. They are showing imagination, energy and a willingness to do with it takes to get their jobs done. These are qualities that organisations keep telling us they want their staff to have.

This energy should be seen as something that can be tapped into and enhanced. Use these people as models of how to get things done, learn from them and encourage others to copy them. If necessary bring some of the tools in-house or work out how to make them easily accessible and secure but be prepared to see this change in behaviours as an opportunity and not as a threat. HR, Comms and IT professionals who manage to do this will add real value to their business and the people who work in them. They will be transformed from gate keepers to enablers and they will more likely to have their jobs in three years time!
March 16, 2009
11:04
Social Nervous System
» ‎ The Obvious?

I had a great, long, chat on Skype last night with Joshua-Michele Ross who recently wrote an interesting post, The Rise Of The Social Nervous System, on Forbes. Smart bloke and well worth reading the rest of the article.

Given the complexity and precarious position of the modern world, getting people to genuinely reach out and touch their neighbors is a good thing but it will come at the price of reshaping our identities as part of a larger, interconnected whole.
4:02
Steve Lawson on Twitter
» ‎ The Obvious?

... if you’re the kind of incommunicative academic-to-the-point-of-being-incoherent buffoon who thinks Twitter is narcissistic, I’d say YOU most definitely have a problem with your sense of identity. Either that, of you’re so utterly self-obsessed, that you just don’t have any friends you’re interested in. Either way, I’d rather be where I am than where you are.
More here
March 13, 2009
2:51
Happy Birthday Blog
» ‎ The Obvious?

The Obvious? was born eight years ago in March 2001.
March 11, 2009
14:15
Vander Wal on Sharepoint
» ‎ The Obvious?

If your IT department has not yet deployed Sharepoint get them to read this post from Thomas Vanderwal which includes the following telling quote:

“We went from 5 silos in our organization to hundreds in a month after deploying SharePoint”. They continue, “There is great information being shared and flowing into the system, but we don’t know it exists, nor can we easily share it, nor do much of anything with that information.”

Thomas' post reflects accurately the sort of stories I have been consistently hearing over the last year or so.
2:25
Labour Unions
» ‎ The Obvious?

A client the other day was talking about their "industrial landscape" and I genuinely thought they were talking about victorian architecture! I gradually caught on that they were talking about union relations and - a bit like my post about the words "conservative" and "socialist" the other day - this felt surprisingly anachronistic to me.

Another client told me last year of some great conversations hosted online by the unions during an industrial dispute that became the place to find out what was happening and why and eventually became really popular with managers trying to keep up!

It always seemed to me that there was a familiar and too cosy dance played out between the unions and HR at the BBC and I remember well the point when people started discussing industrial relations issues on our internal forum there. It opened up the possibility of people other than the usual suspects getting into meaty and important issues and a different way of approaching problems.

I found myself wondering how much the people in my client's "industrial landscape" already have conversations online and how easy, or not, it might be for him to join in with them.

I don't see much talk of this sort of thing in the blogosphere or in social media conversations but it must be out there. Does anyone have any good examples?

March 09, 2009
12:29
Guest Blogging Elsewhere Next 2 Weeks
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

I’ll cross-post the media related items here, but for the next 14 days you’ll find me over at BoingBoing.

2:24
Ripping sounds
» ‎ The Obvious?

There is much to be learned from this blog post from Phil Bradley and the excellent comment thread it generated. I reckon CILIP are not alone in struggling with the shift in our expectations of institutions.

March 06, 2009
9:34
Saving Local Journalism, One Step at a Time
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Chris Anderson (Columbia University): What’s So Hard About Local? Where should our foundation dollars go? Perhaps they should go towards assuring that the so-called “lowly” (and yet, so oddly difficult to fund either a peer-produced or market based substitute for!! so much for lowly!) beat reporter, police bureau chief, crime reporter, city hall reporter, can survive.
March 02, 2009
15:58
Tracking Simulus Spending: Hire Some Unemployed Reporters
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

The Obama administration promises it will be accountable in how it spends our (children’s) money in the new stimulus legislation. On the Recovery.Gov site you’ll see, under the heading “Accountability and Transparency,” some strong rhetoric:

This is your money. You have a right to know where it’s going and how it’s being spent.

So far so good, and the bill allocates some $84 million for a Recovery Act Transparency and Accountability Board, the task of which is to follow the money.

That notion — follow the money — is what much of the best journalism has been all about in recent decades. News organizations and freelancers have uncovered all kinds of malfeasance and nonfeasance by watching how money got spent.

Recovery.gov aims, in part, to show where every dollar is going from the stimulus appropriation. In theory, this will enable an army of average folks to look into the data and flag inappropriate (and good) uses of the money.

But that $84 million will pay some professionals who know how to investigate, and they’re going to be a first line of defense in ensuring that the fraud and abuse — guaranteed to occur no matter how well-meaning the management of this enormous pot of money — will be caught.

The inspector general and his team would be smart to reaize that they could be hiring some unemployed (or under-employed or soon-to-be unemployed) people who have some of the skills we need in those positions. I’m talking about journalists, many of whom have been serving as watchdogs for a long time.

They’ll need some updated training. But a lot of them have the temperment we need for this task. Most vital: They are relentless diggers.

We need their skills in lots of ways. This could be one. The journalism business may be imploding, but these journalists still have a great deal to offer.
15:08
NY Times Goes Hyperlocal
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

New York Times: Hey Kids, Let’s Put on a Blog! Starting today, The Local is an online news site for these communities. But if we build it right together, The Local will be something much more: a glorious if cacophonous chorus of your voices singing the song of life itself in these astoundingly varied and vibrant neighborhoods.

With your input, The Local will tell stories that matter: crime and politics and culture and civic life and everything else. Some stories will be snapshots, mere moments. Others will unfold over days or weeks or marking periods — the birth pangs of a food coop or a high school newspaper, the aftermath of a crime, and, as the unstoppable wave of local gentrification crashes into the unstoppable wave of global economic meltdown, an ever-growing tale of loss and struggle.

The Times’ move here is critically important. It’s long overdue, as such a thing would be at any newspaper, but at least it’s finally happening. I’ll be watching closely to see how this develops.

What I don’t see, so far, is any serious indication of the parallel media universe that exists outside the Times’ perception. If this “local” site doesn’t point widely to the community blogs and other media, it will simply reinforce the old-style media view of the past. I’m confident that the paper understands this.

One question, of course, is whether (a) this will make any money for the newspaper, and, if so, (b) whether the Times will share any wealth created by the community in this endeavor. Let’s wait for (a) before we worry too much about (b).
February 25, 2009
11:36
HerdictWeb Collaboratively Tests Website Availability
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

HerdictWeb: “the first collaborative, real-time map of Internet accessibility and it needs your input.”

This is a fabulous new Berkman Center project. Please consider joining the herd.

Congrats to the team that put this together.

4:37
Credit crunch explained
» ‎ The Obvious?

Following on from the popularity of Money As Dept I thought you'd enjoy this great explanation of The Credit Crunch from Jonathan Jarvis via Anthony Mayfield.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

February 24, 2009
15:53
Hearst: Huge New SF Cost Cuts, or We Sell/Close Paper
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Hearst Corporation announced today that its San Francisco Chronicle newspaper is undertaking critical cost-saving measures including a significant reduction in the number of its unionized and nonunion employees. If these savings cannot be accomplished within weeks, Hearst said, the Company will be forced to sell or close the newspaper.

We’re approaching an end-game of the current leveraged newspaper business. It’s going to be seriously more ugly from now on at many big papers.

More on this in a post tomorrow…

4:33
Young folks nowadays
» ‎ The Obvious?

Reading reports of the Lord Carter/NESTA event this morning I was struck again by the gap between the people currently running the world and the world that so many of us now inhabit.

I occasionally get drawn into "the world is going to rack and ruin" type conversations and am invariably accused of being naive and optimistic. The next step is for political labels such as "conservative" or "socialist" to start being thrown around. I struggle to relate to those labels these days and they seem to be me to relate to an old, dying, world.

Yes, I do have an optimism about the future and believe that these are really exciting times to be alive, know what I know and be involved in what I am involved in.

Maybe we just need better words to describe this exciting future.

February 23, 2009
17:56
Philly Boss: Me First
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

UPDATED

Forbes: Boss Got Raise As Philly Papers Tanked. As the parent company of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News slid toward the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing it made over the weekend, one employee did well on the pay front: CEO Brian P. Tierney.

How disgusting is this?

The arrogance of the people like Tierney just compounds the woes of the newspaper business. He and his management team are facing the perfect storm when it comes to the revenue model for newspapers, but they don’t have to add to the damage with their greediness.

These are not small issues. The journalists and truck drivers and printers and salespeople at the Philadelphia have every right to feel betrayed.

UPDATE: The bosses have recognized reality and rolled back the raises. (Given that they did a leveraged buyout of the company, their salaries remain way too high, but that’s another issue.)
February 19, 2009
13:20
Keeping Track of Government Web Page Changes
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Nice: ProPublica is launching ChangeTracker — “an experimental new tool that watches pages on whitehouse.gov, recovery.gov and financialstability.gov so you don’t have to. When the White House adds or deletes anything— say a blog post, or executive order—ChangeTracker will let you know.”

The site leverages Versionista, a service that monitors sites for edits.

This is a much needed project. Let’s see how it works.
9:34
Law Firm’s Utterly Arrogant Trademark Suit
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Consumerist: Lawsuits: Law Firm ‘Jones Day’ Usurps Monster Cable For Stupidest Trademark Lawsuit Ever. Jones Day is a law firm that doesn’t want anyone else to use standard, everyday formatting for links in news stories about its staff, and it succeeded in forcing a small start-up to cave in to its demands.

This is so absurd (and wrong) that you have to wonder how the judge in the case could be so utterly misinformed, not just misguided.

And Jones Day (no links from here, ever) should be ashamed of itself. Stunning arrogance and power-grabbing from people who should (and probably do) know better but probably don’t care.
9:27
Position Announcement: Executive Director | Center for Media and Democracy
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

The Center for Media and Democracy is looking for an executive director. More in this Position Announcement.

February 12, 2009
13:02
Interview with Joshua-Michéle Ross
» ‎ The Obvious?

at FastForward '09 on what was the one sunny day!
February 11, 2009
11:22
Twitter Swag
» ‎ The Obvious?

I just ordered one of these from here
February 10, 2009
5:36
Make sure you are sitting down before you read this.
» ‎ The Obvious?

I know I have been critical of Sharepoint in the past but the highlight so far for me of FASTForward '09 has been getting to know Christian Finn, director for SharePoint product management at Microsoft. Christian is a really nice guy who has been going out of his way to spend time with the bloggers from the FASTForward blog and myself getting his head around the social computing world we all get so excited about.

Who Sharepoint enables, and why, and how are still big, non-tivial issues facing both Microsoft and a lot of the companies I work for but all I know is these conversations have felt good in a way I didn't expect.
February 09, 2009
17:59
Meatware based search
» ‎ The Obvious?

One the most powerful uses of the large forum we had within the BBC was as a way of finding information. Being able to ask tens of thousands of staff where to find the information you needed and say why you needed it and then having people suggest documents which from their perspective met your need and point to them with a URL was very powerful. Contextual colour and human interpretation trump technology based search every time.

Interesting to see people talking of Twitter as a Google killer in this context.
10:56
Doing good
» ‎ The Obvious?

One of the frustrations for many about the Web 2.0 bubble has been how inward looking it has been and how little of its potential was being applied to making the world a better place. Things like Innocentive and Akkvo have been relatively isolated examples so it is nice to see a new initiative from Cancer Research UK which hopes to take advantage of "open innovation" in new and interesting ways.
February 08, 2009
13:24
To boldly go
» ‎ The Obvious?

Following on from my last post, and part of what occasioned it, was a slight feeling of discomfort as I am about to take part in an enterprise search conference sponsored by Microsoft. I confess to identifying most enterprise software with the flawed, and increasingly failed, vision of corporateness in whose image and to further whose ends it was made.

But how do you get something that is seen as the antithesis of enterprise software adopted in the business world without "selling out" and having it assimilated into the same old same old? There is a group of bloggers here at FASTForward '09 recording events and taking part in various sessions and while it is wrong to see things in terms of them and us I have this sense of a bunch of individual idealists let loose in an alien world of suited "grown up" purveyors of corporate mythology which the bizarre setting of Vegas make uncannily like Captain Kirk and his team from Starship Enterprise visiting a star in a far flung galaxy.

The thing is we have to work out how to get these two ends to meet in the middle. I have no doubt the future of software, especially as applied to business capability, is headed somewhere very different from where we have been but am also aware that at the moment it is easier to identify what is it not that what it might be. Replacing the current "grand conception" model of IT with another one wouldn't get us anywhere yet can we bring about organisational change on the scale that would be required to loosen the stranglehold that the corporate mindset has on businesses by adopting a "small pieces loosely joined" approach?
11:50
Thinking big about "small pieces"
» ‎ The Obvious?

I am sitting in here in the madness of Vegas and pondering that it wouldn't be here in no one had imagined it. Nothing happens if no one imagines it. The business and financial world we have now, and which to many of seems so broken, is only the way it is because someone imagined it. Imagining things as big and outrageous as Vegas seems like borderline insanity.

One of the challenges for those of us who believe that we are at the beginning of a very significant period of change in how we see ourselves, our societies and our businesses is how to imagine what the future will be like. Having grand schemes and megalomaniac designs seems out of place with something that is in essence personal and intimate.

Part of me believes that we will get somewhere worthwhile if each of us takes the small steps that seem to make sense to us and that in aggregate these small steps will achieve something significant. The other part of me believes that this will confine us to thinking small and achieving less than we could and that without some inspiring, grander and more comprehensive vision we won't make much difference at all.

This ties in with concerns I have about making things happen in a world where making things happen is associated with old values and ways of thinking. How do you bring about significant change using conversations, influence and sticky ideas rather than command and control and grand plans?
4:11
FASTforward '09
» ‎ The Obvious?

I am in Las Vegas for my second Fast conference, an annual get together to talk aboout enterprise search. I am here to take part in a panel on the last day with Jevon MacDonald, Jon Husband and Linda Moulton. As ever the main pleasure of conferences is the people you get to meet and in addition to my fellow panelists I am also really looking forward to catching up with, and in some cases meeting for the first time, Bill Ives, Jim McGee, Joe McKendrick, Paula Thornton and Rob Paterson

February 07, 2009
18:39
Journalism Education’s Future: Broader, Deeper than its Past
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog
Accepting an award from Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School for Journalism & Mass Communication several months ago, former PBS NewsHour host Robert McNeil called journalism education probably “the best general education that an American citizen can get” today.

Perhaps he was playing to his audience, at least to a degree. Many other kinds of undergraduate degree programs could lay claim to a similar value; a strong liberal arts degree, no matter what the major, has great value. Still, there’s no doubt that a journalism degree, done right, is an excellent foundation for a student’s future.

Even if McNeil overstated the case, however, his words should inspire journalism educators to ponder their role in a world where these programs’ traditional reason for being is increasingly murky.

Our raison d’etre is open to question largely because the employment pipeline of the past, a progression leading from school to jobs in media and related industries, is (at best) in jeopardy. Yet journalism education could and should have a long and even prosperous life ahead — if its practitioners make some fundamental shifts.

Some of the shifts are already under way, especially in how journalism educators do their jobs. The Cronkite School, where I’m teaching, is one of many journalism programs aiming to be part of the 21st Century. The school understands at its core that digital technology has transformed the practice, though we hope not the principles, of the craft. This is welcome, if overdue; if newspapers have adapted fitfully to the collision of technology and media, journalism schools as a group may have been even slower.

But that recognition, while valuable, isn’t nearly enough. Journalism educators should be in the vanguard of an absolutely essential shift for society at large: helping our students, and people in our larger communities, to navigate and manage the myriad information streams of a media-saturated world.

We need to help them understand why they need to become activists as consumers — by taking more responsibility for the quality of what they consume, in large part by becoming more critical thinkers. And they need to understand their emerging role as creators of media.

In both cases, as consumers and creators, we start with principles.

For media consumers:

• Be Skeptical
• Exercise Judgement
• Open Your Mind
• Keep Asking Questions
• Learn Media Techniques

For media creators (after incorporating the above):

• Be Thorough
• Get it Right
• Insist on Fairness
• Think Independently
• Be Transparent, Demand Transparency

(See this recent paper, part of the Media Re:public project at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where I’m a Fellow, for a fairly lengthy description of the principles and an explanation of why I believe they’re important.)

The principles underpin everything I believe about modern media consumption in general — entertainment being the major exception — and journalism in particular. Especially for the creators of media, they add up to being honorable.

If the principles are the foundation, the practices and tactics are an evolving superstructure. Journalism education needs to deal with both.

This applies not just to students studying the practice of journalism. The same issues are roiling public relations and advertising, the teaching of which is often housed in schools of journalism and communications. Not surprisingly, because modern commerce has been so much about selling things, those industries have been considerably more innovative, in the professional ranks, than journalism in recent years. Key leaders in advertising and PR are surely making their needs clear to educators, and one suspects getting results.

As noted above, journalism schools are starting to embrace digital technologies in their work with students who plan to enter traditional media. Too few are helping students understand that they may well have to invent their own jobs, however, much less helping them do so.

Still, the experiments are growing in number, in scope and in potential. What’s more, they’re involving not just newcomers to the journalism education ranks, but faculty members who’ve been on the job for some time. The News21 Initiative, funded by two major foundations, is an example. We’re working on entrepreneurship as a core mission, and so is Jeff Jarvis at City University of New York, among others. Rich Gordon at Northwestern University’s Medill School is helping computer science students understand the value of journalism, and how they can help create tomorrow’s version. And so on.

But I keep coming back to the issue(s) that should trouble anyone who cares about the future of self-governed societies. We’re not turning out the critical thinkers we need in a time when that skill has never been so important, particularly when the avalanche of data — some of it bogus and much of it irrelevant — has never been so difficult to handle.

One experiment, at State University of New York’s Stony Book campus, is notable. Howard Schneider is leading another foundation-funded program (so many of these are, raising an interesting question that I won’t go into here) that aims to make better news consumers and critical thinkers of all students, not just those enrolled in journalism courses. This goes only part of the way to what I’d like to see in journalism education, but it’s a very useful start.

Where would I take it, if I ran a journalism school? I’d start, again, with the principles listed above, and rework the how-to part of the curriculum to be more digital (that is, media-agnostic) and entrepreneurially focused.

I’d also direct the alumni relations director to find out who attended the journalism program and then went onto great things in non-journalistic fields. To the extent that McNeil is correct about our offering such a useful program for students of all kinds, surely we’ll find plenty of accomplished graduates in other professions and crafts. Take a look at the Cronkite School’s “Alumni Hall of Fame” — a listing, begun in 1993, largely comprised of former students who are now employed by traditional media organizations. They are all worthy honorees. Sixteen years from now, I hope, this list will offer a much broader cross-section of affiliations.

Then, tackling the media activism challenge, my colleagues and I would:
- Persuade the president of the university that every student on the campus should learn them before graduating, preferably during freshman year.
- Create a program for people in the community, starting with teachers. We should be seeing every student take a basic media activist course at every level of education — not just college, but also grade, middle, and high school.
- Offer that program to concerned parents who feel overwhelmed by the media deluge themselves. Children especially need to learn to be independent thinkers and not take for granted that what they see, hear, or read is necessarily true or real.
- Provide for-fee training to communicators who work in major local institutions, such as PR and marketing folks from private companies, governmental organizations and others. If they could be persuaded that the principles matter, they might offer the public less BS and more reality, and they’d be better off for the exercise.
- Try to enlist another vital player in this effort: local media. The traditional journalism organizations should be making this a core part of their missions, but haven’t yet realized why, namely that their own trust in the community would almost certainly rise if they helped people understand these principles — not to mention the enormous value of truly engaging the audience in the journalism itself. New media entrants would benefit, too, if they embraced the principles of media activism to produce higher quality work and deepen their own conversations with their communities of geography and interest.
All this suggests a considerably broader mission for journalism schools and programs than the one they’ve had in the past. We’re not the only ones who can do this, but we may be among the best equipped. If we don’t, someone else will.

February 04, 2009
2:26
Women and power
» ‎ The Obvious?

Great post today from Leon Benjamin about women and power all of which I heartily agree with - particularly this last paragraph:
In general, my experience of participating in online communities and social networks in the past few years is that despite their male dominance (in their early stages of development) the posture, attitude and expression of these communities are predominantly female. By this I mean people are genuinely welcoming, offer unsolicited benevolence, guidance and assistance and freely give the most valuable thing that anyone can give; their time. This isn't normal for most of our male dominated organisations and institutions.
February 03, 2009
9:34
Pretty Patterns
» ‎ The Obvious?

I have been enjoying getting to know the new iLife 09 set of applications for my Mac. In particular the new face recognition software built into iPhoto is quite amazing. Firstly it identifies all the photographs which it reckons have a face on them and then, having had me identify one of those faces a particular person, labels all photographs with that face in it with the appropriate name. It is remarkably effective at doing this but the process itself throws up some interesting thoughts.

As part of training the software which face is which you are presented with a screen full of faces which have been extracted from the photographs within which they appear. It is quite disconcerting to see multiple replications of the same face in this way. Patterns in the facial expressions become obvious in a way they would never have otherwise.

I'm currently reading a book about procrastination which talks about some of the deep-seated reasons why we put off doing things and one of the ways of exploring possible past issues is to look at family photographs and interpret them. It struck me, whatever you might think of this process, that considering the otherwise meaningless faces isolated by iPhoto in this way can give them an unexpected significance.

This touches on an aspect of the web, social media, and new technologies that I think is one of the most significant. It's about patterns. About lots and lots of data being available for the first time in volumes that allow patterns to emerge that would otherwise previously have remained unseen. Learning to see and interpret these newly available patterns is going to become a key skill.
January 29, 2009
15:55
John Martyn
» ‎ The Obvious?

Very, very sad to hear today of the death of my favourite musician John Martyn. I have listened to his music for 30 years and it is as fresh now as it was the first time I heard it.

January 28, 2009
16:57
EveryBlock partners with New York Times
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Good news: EveryBlock, the terrific local data site started by Adrian Holovaty, is launching a partnership with the New York Times. More here.

This is part of the future for media entrepreneurs: partnering with established companies to fill in gaps and take advantage of existing clout. Good for both of them.

January 26, 2009
1:29
Clay Shirky Interview
» ‎ The Obvious?

Looks like I am going to have a natter with Clay in a webinar for Fast this Tuesday. Must remember others will be listening!

[Update - you can hear a recording of the webinar here]
January 24, 2009
2:06
Bill Gates really did invent the internet
» ‎ The Obvious?

My daughter and her friends were sitting around the table at school recently and she told them that I had met the people who invented the internet (I met Vint Cerf and Bob Khan a few years ago).

Her friends responded "Oh has he met Bill Gates".

Give me strength .....
1:51
Happy Birthday Macintosh
» ‎ The Obvious?

I have been there from the very start and loved every moment.
[Photo credit j|Wiltshire]

January 23, 2009
9:37
Traditional Journalism’s Failure in Financial Crisis
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Here’s a piece I wrote for Talking Points Memo on a subject I’ve covered here before. It begins:

Our government’s current operating principle seems to be bailing out people who were culpable in the financial meltdown. If so, journalists are surely entitled to billions of dollars.

Why? Journalists were grossly deficient when it came to covering the reckless behavior, sleaze and willful ignorance of fundamental economics, much of which was reasonably obvious to anyone who was paying attention, that inflated the housing and credit bubbles of the past decade. Their frequent cheerleading for bad practices — and near-total failure to warn us, repeatedly and relentlessly, of what was building — made a bad situation worse.
January 22, 2009
9:33
Obama Starts to Follow Through on Transparency
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Washington Post: New Obama Orders on Transparency, FOIA Requests. In a move that pleased good government groups and some journalists, President Obama issued new orders today designed to improve the federal government’s openness and transparency. The first memo instructs all agencies and departments to “adopt a presumption in favor” of Freedom of Information Act requests, while the second memo orders the director of the Office of Management and Budget to issue recommendations on making the federal government more transparent.

This is indeed good news. The Bush administration’s fanatical devotion to secrecy was at least as much about keeping the public from finding out scandalous behavior as protecting information that, if disclosed, might endanger national security.

We all need to hold Obama’s feet to the fire on this. His administration will inevitably fall, at least on occasion, into what afflicts all governments: a wish to keep embarrassing (or worse) information from the public.

As I noted in an item that was part of a series for the Knight Citizen News Network a while back, “A key point about the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and various state “open records” laws: They are not designed solely for journalists, although that is the popular mythology, sometimes encouraged by professional journalists. They are for everyone, not any special profession or group of people.”

Now we’ll have a better chance to use them well.
January 21, 2009
15:29
What Does This Correction Mean?
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

From the Los Angeles Times: Rosa Brooks’ Dec. 11 column described Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich as “newly indicted.” He has only been charged in a federal corruption case.

Huh?
10:32
Obama Goes Around Sound-Bit Media with Complexity
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Gene Koo: Obama’s non-reductive rhetoric. The technology to bypass top-down media is one cornerstone of Obama’s success as a communicator. His nonreductive rhetoric is another.

January 20, 2009
15:32
Keeping it real
» ‎ The Obvious?

It's been fascinating, and at times very moving, watching the events today around the inauguration of Barack Obama.

One thing that has been surprising though has been the speed of the changes to the official Whitehouse site and the way that they seem to be keeping going the Web 2.0 savviness that characterised Obama's election campaign. The site feels "real" in a way that so many institutional and business sites do not and Tim O'Reilly has put his finger of part of the reason for this:
One of the things that excites me the most is the way that the new administration is reaching out to small companies rather than to the normal behemoths who bid on government contracts. Among other things, in an environment where we all need to do more with less, it's fabulous to see how the latest web technology can be deployed by small teams.

http://radar.oreilly.com/

Here's hoping others follow this particular bit of leadership.

14:58
WhiteHouse.gov: Glimmerings of a New Transparency
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Jason Kottke notes the new robots.txt file at whitehouse.gov — down to a single “disallow” from more than 2,400 yesterday.
January 18, 2009
12:03
Newspaper Creates, Discusses Database of Obama Donors, but Hides Full List
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

This is the kind of thing that makes me crazy. The Washington Post runs an interesting story — Obama’s $100,000-Plus Donors Were Able to Give to Several Entities — about “nearly 100″ wealthy families who’ve been giving big bucks to Obama. The story is based on data the paper crunched itself.

But the article names just a few of the donors. We’re free to speculate about the rest, but why should we have to? Why not post all of the names, and amounts so we can see who else is on the list and what they gave? Better yet, why not put the database online so other folks can crunch the numbers to see if they get other interesting results?

The Post gets the Internet better than some newspapers, but obviously it still has a lot to learn.

5:03
Playing to your strengths
» ‎ The Obvious?

I am currently reading Now Discover Your Strengths which includes an online questionnaire intended to surface what your five main characteristics are. My number one is Connectedness and was so spot on I could see me printing it out and carrying it with me all the time!
Things happen for a reason. You are sure of it. You are sure of it because in your soul you know that we are all connected. Yes, we are individuals, responsible for our own judgments and in possession of our own free will, but nonetheless we are part of something larger. Some may call it the collective unconscious. Others may label it spirit or life force. But whatever your word of choice, you gain confidence from knowing that we are not isolated from one another or from the earth and the life on it. This feeling of Connectedness implies certain responsibilities. If we are all part of a larger picture, then we must not harm others because we will be harming ourselves. We must not exploit because we will be exploiting ourselves. Your awareness of these responsibilities creates your value system. You are considerate, caring, and accepting. Certain of the unity of humankind, you are a bridge builder for people of different cultures. Sensitive to the invisible hand, you can give others comfort that there is a purpose beyond our humdrum lives. The exact articles of your faith will depend on your upbringing and your culture, but your faith is strong. It sustains you and your close friends in the face of life’s mysteries.
3:32
The Home Business Network
» ‎ The Obvious?

On the several occasions I have worked with him Dave Sumner-Smith, who runs The Telegraph Business Club, has talked of setting up a social network round home based business people to help them connect with each other, share stories and provide mutual support.

He is now in the process of launching The Home Business Network which aims to do just that. Signing up is free and there will ultimately be a print magazine available as well. I reckon more and more people are, like me, going to work from home for a variety of reasons over the next few years and this seems like a great time to be building this network.
3:13
Going back to my roots
» ‎ The Obvious?

When I first started blogging eight years ago there weren't many of us around. There were much fewer blogs, no Twitter, no RSS, no Facebook and nothing called social media. Life was simpler then!

One of the joys for me of blogging was the ability to form relationships with smart and interesting people but recently those people have begun to get drowned in the noise. Don't get me wrong, I believe we need noise. We need more people saying what they think and don't need tidy managed sanitised but ultimately boring information spaces. But we also need better signal-to-noise, ways of helping the good stuff to surface and then taking the time to understand that good stuff.

So, this is why my blog roll on the right of this blog has been severely hacked back. I will continue to read dozens of blogs through my RSS aggregator, I will continue to pick up on currently interesting stuff on Twitter, and I will continue to save stuff I found interesting on Delicious but I will also return to reading this small group of smart thoughtful bloggers by going to their blogs and reading them properly!
January 16, 2009
22:20
I know they won't listen ....
» ‎ The Obvious?

... and the chances of them hearing this are slim but I reckon journalists like the BBC's Robert Peston should take the time to watch Part 1 and Part 2 of Robert Scoble's FastTV interview with Leo Laporte and consider what it means for them and their relationship to their audience.

14:09
Can We Support Journalism?
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Ethan Zuckerman: Is ad-supported journalism viable in a pay-for-performance age? (I)t’s possible that the way we’ve built media in the United States can’t survive a transition to a more rational market.
January 15, 2009
12:34
Washington Politicians, Journalists Now Protect the Govt. Lawbreakers They Aided and Abetted
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Glenn Greenwald (Salon): Establishment Washington unifies against prosecutions. As confirmed accounts emerged years ago of chronic presidential lawbreaking, warrantless eavesdropping, systematic torture, rendition, “black site” prisons, corruption in every realm, and all sorts of other dark crimes, where were journalists and other opinion-making elites? Very few of them with any significant platform can point to anything they did or said to oppose or stop any of it — and they know that. Many of them, even when much of this became conclusively proven, were still explicitly praising Bush officials. Most of them supported the underlying enabling policies (Guantanamo and the permanent state of war in Iraq and “on terror”), and then cheered on laws — the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act — designed to legalize these activities and retroactively immunize the lawbreakers and war criminals from prosecution. So when these media and political elites are defending Bush officials, mitigating their crimes, and arguing that they shouldn’t be held accountable, they’re actually defending themselves. Just as Nancy Pelosi and Jay Rockefeller can’t possibly demand investigations for crimes in which they were complicit, media stars can’t possibly condemn acts which they supported or, at the very best, towards which they turned a blissfully blind eye. They can’t indict Bush officials for what they did because to do so would be to indict themselves. Bush officials need to be exonerated, or at least have their crimes forgotten (look to the future and ignore the past, they all chime in unison), so that their own involvement in it will also be cleansed and then forgotten.

This is a harsh indictment, but it’s hard to argue with Greenwald. With rare exceptions, Washington journalists have been complicit in the lawbreaking that characterized the Bush administration. Now, even as they admit that the crimes were crimes, they want everyone to forgive and forget — but mostly forget.

This is another chapter in the breakdown of journalism as one of the few institutions that holds power accountable. In this case, it would mean holding journalism accountable, too. Not going to happen.
January 14, 2009
1:40
The Unspoken Peril for “Citizen Journalists” Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax!
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

StinkyJournalism.org: The Unspoken Peril for “Citizen Journalists” Surprise! You Owe the IRS Some Gift Tax! Is the “donation” of a citizen’s content (video, articles, commentaries, images) to for-profit media outlets that exceeds a fair market value of $12,000 in any single year subject to gift tax? Judging from the IRS guidelines, the answer is “yes.”

This is a surprise, and an unwelcome one.

Before people panic, however, we should keep in mind that — given the typical freelance rates paid by media outlets these days — you’d have to spent a lot of time sending stories to large media organizations before you’d be even potentially liable for gift taxes.

The good news is that it won’t affect in any way the occasional contributor, or even a frequent contributor to nonprofit or low-traffic sites, and it has no bearing whatever on your own work on your own blog, period.

More important, it’ll help get people thinking harder about financial implications in general. The business model that says “You do all the work and we’ll collect all the money” has always been a lousy one, not to mention unfair. Now, if that turns into “You do all the work, we’ll take all the money and you’ll pay taxes on what we don’t pay you,” the citizen journalists will look even harder at this unbalanced state of affairs.

January 06, 2009
13:16
More and more true by the day
» ‎ The Obvious?

If change is happening on the outside faster than on the inside the end is in sight. Jack Welch
January 04, 2009
1:14
Inversion
» ‎ The Obvious?

via Doc
January 03, 2009
14:09
Chief Conversation Officer
» ‎ The Obvious?

Over at Duct Tape Marketing John Jantsch Is exploring the idea of having a Chief Conversation Officer. This brought back memories.

Many moons ago when I was still at the BBC I was asked by my boss to come up with a one-liner to describe my job. I came up with the phrase:

To increase the frequency and quality of the conversations that help you get the job done.

I was told that the word conversation wasn't businesslike enough and would cause problems if used in a work context. This was shortly before both the government and the BBC launched major communications initiatives with the word conversation in their titles!

Part of my job at the time was running a thing called DigiLab. This was a small unit charged with keeping across the latest technologies that might be applicable to the broadcast world, working out which were the most interesting, and introducing them to as many people as appropriate within the BBC. The way we did this was through networks. Networks of people who shared interests or issues and who we took responsibility for identifying and pulling together when appropriate. We would run events to bring people together as much as to demonstrate technology and tried to create a welcoming and friendly atmosphere so that people would not only want to come in the first place but would hang around and have a chat and build relationships once the events were over. I guess nowadays these would be called communities of interest although we didn't use that sort of language. Our events were deliberately low key and determined to avoid any hint of hard sell either from us or from manufacturers. The idea was to engage people and get them investing some of their time with each other. It was very much about conversations.

I guess it's a bit like I imagine the best party organisers of the Thirties being - highly connected, arranging the best parties and knowing the best people. Contrary to other people's expectations, including my boss's, it is actually hard work. You have to have your ear to the ground and spot things that really matter before people realise it, manage networks who don't owe you anything or over whom you don't have any power and then keep attracting them and keep them interested. I used to imagine applying the way we worked to all sorts of other aspects of the BBC's business. Why not manage everything through networks, sticky events and common interests?

All I can say is if you ever get offered the opportunity to be a chief conversation officer grab it with both hands. I had a blast!

December 31, 2008
10:10
This moved me today
» ‎ Sifry's Alerts

Maybe it is just thinking about the end of the year and the beginning of a new year, but this moved me:

Birth, sickness, death, falling in love, watching TV, raising families, mowing the lawn, going to the movies, taking your nephew to a ball game, drinking beer, hanging out with your buddies, playing frisbee, painting the house. No matter where your adventure takes you, most of what is truly meaningful is still to be found revolving around the mundane stuff you did before you embarked on your adventure. The stuff that'll be going long after you and I are both dead, long after our contribution to the world is forgotten.

But often, one needs to have that big adventure before really understanding this. Going full circle. Exactly.

That's from How to be creative, From Hugh MacLeod's blog. Worth a read or a reread, especially at this time of year.

Happy new year, everyone! I'm going to remember to be grateful today, and count my blessings.

7:55
A New Year's Eve thought
» ‎ The Obvious?

Our Deepest fear

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
by Marianne Williamson
December 20, 2008
5:51
Considering a life of crime
» ‎ The Obvious?

I have been a very good boy. Apart from one or two very isolated and early downloads using bit torrent I have steered away from downloading copyrighted content. This is probably down to a combination of my Presbyterian upbringing and having worked for the BBC for 21 years. But I'm beginning to crack. Ironically this has partly been brought about by the advent of iPlayer for the Mac.

Being able to download programs with iPlayer but then having them time-limited makes it all the more apparent what you're not being allowed to do. Given that I have paid my licence fee why on earth shouldn't I be allowed, and trusted, to keep a copy for my own purposes for as long as I want?

Another situation made the absurdity of the current DRM rules apparent recently. A friend of mine who is a UK citizen and licence fee payer was in America and wanted to watch the last episode of the last series of Doctor Who. Despite the fact that he had effectively paid for it and is a big Dr. Who fan with no intention to do any harm to the programme - because his IP address was outside the UK he was not allowed to use iPlayer. I, also a licence fee payer and with no intent to do the programme any harm, then effectively broke the law by recording the programme, compressing it, and sending it to him. Both of us had paid for the content, neither of us were making a commercial use of it, effectively all we were doing was timeshifting -- but this is considered illegal.

Another example. I am a big fan of Audible. I have used it for many years since meeting its founder at MIT in Boston. It is a great system and allows me to listen to many books that I wouldn't find time to read. I spend a fortune with Audible but like the BBC its content is also subject to DRM. Each time I want to listen to a book in iTunes or on my iPhone my account has to be authenticated by Audible. This would be fine apart from the fact that because I choose to run my Mac without administrative rights on my account, good safety practice, Audible loses my authentication every time I quit iTunes. As a result I have to remember to re-authenticate with Audible otherwise I walk off with my phone thinking I have my books with me only to find they have been removed.

Like I said, I really want to be honest and do the right thing. I have no intention of "stealing" content and want to pay for stuff. Please, please just make it easy for me to pay and use your content or I might find myself weakening.

December 18, 2008
11:51
Creative Commons Party Tonite, San Francisco
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

If I wasn’t in Phoenix today I’d be at Creative Commons’ Birthday Party 2008 in San Francisco tonight.

Creative Commons deserves your support even if you can’t go to the event. Donate here.
10:45
New Berkman Report: State of Digital Media
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

Over the past year and several months, Persephone Miel has been leading a Berkman Center project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, called Media Re:public:

an assessment of the changes in new media over the past several years and … a sober look at the successes and ongoing challenges.

The goal was to look at journalism in this new era, to figure out where it’s come and where it might be going. The word “sober” is particularly apt given the turmoil that has become standard in the craft and the business.

Today, Persephone and the center released her report overview (PDF), plus a collection of related essays. I wrote one of them, entitled “Principles for a New Media Literacy” — a piece that discusses ways we can and should be more activist as media consumers and creators.

Other contributors — here’s the downloads page (all PDFs) — included Ethan Zuckerman; Pat Aufderheide and Jessica Clark; Ernie Wilson; Tom Stites and John Kelly. You’ll also find case studies of several new-media projects.

There’s a tremendous amount of useful material in these pages. Take a look.

December 12, 2008
3:03
Forget social media.
» ‎ The Obvious?

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse for some. Margaret Attwood The Handmaid's Tale

Some people claim that social media is going to change the world, others that it is a temporary fad. Likewise blogging. Pundits announce that it is this, that, or the next thing - and then that it is dead. But these aren't things that can be raised up or knocked down, they are not things. They are just us collectively and individually playing with a new way of thinking, communicating, and occasionally getting things done.

At the very least what is happening is interesting. Being interested in it is a good thing. Expecting it to make things better is something we all do, and that in itself is interesting.

How do you get something to happen without making something happen. How do you bring about change by attraction and willing engagement of energy, by enthusiasm rather than by coercion?

How do you get something to happen as it isn't a thing? How do you move forwards without an ideology or something concrete to move towards? Is moving away from things enough? Is being able to describe what's wrong and how to avoid it sufficient or do you have to describe what is right?

I reckon what I get paid for is to enthuse people. Not about any particular direction to move in, nor even about any particular philosophy to adopt. What I enthuse them about is an enhanced ability to work out what they think and then communicate what they think to, and with, others. I don't care about business, and I don't care about business effectiveness. I care about people and their ability to be the best they can be both individually and collectively. If this makes businesses better and more effective then so be it.

December 10, 2008
9:57
Reporter Solicits Sources Via Twitter
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

If you work at Yahoo and just got laid off, Om Malik wants to hear from you — and he posted that request on Twitter.
December 09, 2008
8:01
Pulitzer Prizes in the 21st Century
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

The people who run the Pulitzer Prizes, undoubtedly America’s premier journalism awards, have taken some useful steps into the 21st Century with new rules that welcome online-only entries. From the official rules (PDF):

Entries for journalism awards must be based
on material coming from a text-based United
States newspaper or news organization that
publishes—in print or online—at least
weekly during the calendar year; that is
primarily dedicated to original news
reporting and coverage of ongoing stories;
and that adheres to the highest journalistic
principles. Printed magazines and
broadcast media, and their respective Web
sites, are not eligible.

This will open the prizes to such brilliant journalists as Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, among many others who’d been excluded in the past due to the anachronistic system that had ruled. Let’s celebrate that much progress.

But let’s also recognize that these new rules don’t begin to address the more fundamental issues about how journalism is changing. Excluding text-based journalism by magazines and broadcast media, for example, is illogical.

The release of the new rules — which are bound to evolve — frees me from an agreement of confidentiality I made earlier this year when asked by the Pulitzer Prize Board to answer some questions and offer my own suggestions about how the prizes should recognize changes in technology and journalistic practices. Here is what I (presumably among many others the board consulted) suggested:

You asked me to think broadly about the prizes, and asked five questions. Before I respond to each of them directly, let me offer a few general thoughts. None of these will surprise you, but they add up to a challenge unlike any the Pulitzer board has faced in the past.

First, is the central issue: convergence. Media of all kinds are becoming digital. Moreover, media availability and distribution are moving onto networks where the data is broken up into little packets at the source and reassembled at the other end.

Second, the blurring of media forms is accelerating. It will be impossible in the relatively near future to distinguish among them.

Third, the business model for newspapers is failing. It’s not just about the movement of advertising to better online ad operations. It’s also the surging price of doing business as a manufacturing operation, including energy costs.

Under the current rules, these facts are a recipe for making the Pulitzers irrelevant, or at best quaint. I would hate to see that happen, because the Pulitzer Prizes matter. They are a touchstone of excellence. Like many others in the field, I believe they’re flawed in their current incarnation, but I would hate to see them become an artifact.

My bullet-point advice (assumes the board’s ability to interpret the bylaws in the broadest possible way):

1. Embrace reality. This will only seem radical to newspaper people.

2. Celebrate great journalism wherever it comes from. This includes digital-only, and probably should include English-language reporting that didn’t originate in the United States.

3. Create new categories that reflect the way we create and consume media over the long term.

Now to your questions:

Q: In creating the Prizes, Joseph Pulitzer wanted to “elevate” the profession of journalism. In his era, better journalism meant better newspapers. How could we further his goal today, given the makeup of news media and their challenges?

A: Become the top prizes for journalism of any kind. Do away entirely with the distinction between newspapers and other media. There’s no real alternative.

Q: Should the nature of the “newspaper” be redefined as multimedia journalism grows and practices change? If so, how? For example, should we include entirely online newspapers? And what should we do with things like videography and its impact on visual journalism?

A: You can’t define your way out of this dilemma, except in one sense. You can define what you mean by great journalism, and what you mean by elevating the craft. Beyond that, everything should be fair game.

Q: Should we re-examine and possibly revise the Prizes’ journalism categories? If so, how? For example, should we have a separate category for large multimedia packages? Should we reconsider the idea of circulation size as a basis for category definition – at least in some cases?

A: I’d revise the categories in some fairly dramatic ways, but I would not make separate categories for media formats for the reasons I mentioned above.

I would, however, add several areas where the Pulitzers could elevate journalism in a big way. Here are just three:

1. The digital space has many characteristics, but one is that the journalism we create doesn’t disappear into birdcages or pay-per-view databases. Stories and projects can accrete influence, and be timely long beyond the traditional periods. This is especially important when we recognize that the manufacturing process of journalism — create something and send it out, period — becomes obsolete in due course. Some ideas that take this into account:
a. We’d all benefit from a prize celebrating relentless journalism over time that led to long-term solutions of big problems; this would require a rule change to look back more than 12 months.
b. Along those lines, why not recognize reporting that was ahead of its time? Whenever a major national or international crisis becomes obvious, such as the current credit and housing meltdowns, we can always look back and find examples of prescient journalism that was essentially ignored at the time. If you made that single addition to the prizes, you’d be making a huge advance.
c. And what about journalism that has evolved. I’m working on a book that will live and evolve mostly online, and I guarantee it’ll be vastly better in five years than it will be the day it’s officially published for the first time. I can show you things that have been updated over time, and which now are as good as journalism can be, even though they were, early on, shadows of what they’ve become.

2. I’d also find ways to recognize more of the finest work by small entities that do brilliant coverage of small communities of geography or interest. Beat reporting doesn’t fully cover what I’m talking about here, but it’s the closest you have now. (I’m not talking about separate prizes for big and little organizations, however.)

3. I’d create a prize for innovation in journalism, recognizing an advance by someone who used the collision of media and technology to create something new and valuable to the craft.

Put all of this out for public comment, by the way. You’ll be amazed at the great ideas others will have.

Q: Should we re-evaluate the kind of journalism we honor and the entries we encourage? For example, do we sometimes foster journalism projects and packages that lack relevance to everyday lives?

A: Of course you do, but that’s the nature of giving prizes. I don’t have a great antidote for the bigness impulse. I would try to tweak the rules and judging to favor things that genuinely lead to a better world. I don’t have any obvious ways to achieve this, of course…

Q: Should the Board itself be changed? Should we alter the mix of journalists and academics? Should we expand the Board’s total size? (The Board now has 17 voting members, four of whom can be non-journalists. The dean of the journalism school and the Pulitzer administrator are non-voting members of the Board.)

A: Yes change the board, in significant ways if you adopt any of the ideas I’ve suggested. (It seems large enough now.) The current board members are superb representatives of the 20th Century, manufactured-newspaper model of journalism, and people of that stature and accomplishment should remain part of the mix. But I’d include some very different kinds of folks, who may have a wider vision of the craft.

December 08, 2008
15:36
System failure and fuzzy thinking.
» ‎ The Obvious?

I have been looking for an excuse to write about a number of negative call centre and customer service experiences I have had recently. I didn't want to just have a rant, although I felt like it, but to find something more interesting in the stories. And guess what - it's social computing!

What frustrates me the most, is a feeling that no one really cares about any problem I have. The ownership of my problem is is not owned by any particular person, but by the system, by the database. There is no room for imprecision, either my problem fits the precise path, or it doesn't, and if it doesn't I might as well give up. Only on very rare occasions do I get to deal with a grown-up, someone empowered to make decisions, to listen to my problems and do something about them.

Now don't get me wrong, I realise there needs to be some sort of system. It just needs to be a system that can accommodate and tolerate fuzziness. This is where social computing steps in. Giving the people stuck in the system some means of talking to each other, some means of noticing things and passing on that noticing to each other would allow for much more learning to be built into the system and much more subtlety to be available to those working in it. Whether it is a forum on which to discuss things that go wrong, or a wiki on which to discuss the things that go right, it doesn't really matter, just so long as there is a place for people to share what they are learning.

I don't doubt for a moment that there are complex heuristic technologies built into the systems that the helplines deploy but that is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about a much messier, much more human "ooh that's interesting" sort of learning. The sort that humans can remember and apply when talking to other humans!

9:02
Media Stoking Economic Fear, or Reality?
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

David Carr, NY Times: Stoking Fear Everywhere You Look. Every modern recession includes a media séance about how horrible things are and how much worse they will be, but there have never been so many ways for the fear to leak in. The same digital dynamics that drove the irrational exuberance — and marketed the loans to help it happen — are now driving the downside in unprecedented ways.

He’s right (assuming I understand his argument correctly) that the media were complicit in the bubble. I disagree, however, that the media are overly gloomy now.

Our society’s manic-depressive tendencies may well lead us into a steeper recession than is necessary in any economic sense. But people who save their money today are not being irrational, even though this is exactly the time you hope that enough people will spend to keep the economy from an absolute crater.

The media are only doing what they always do eventually: They get it right, way too late to make a difference.
December 04, 2008
13:24
NY Times Continues to Push Old-Media Boundaries
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

UPDATED

Two interesting developments today at the New York Times online:

The first, and most noteworthy, is the paper’s welcome discovery that aggregation of and links to things it didn’t produce in-house improve the audience experience. As the graphic shows, the green-highlighted items below the story summaries are links to coverage in other media — including bloggers and direct competitors. The technology behind this feature comes from Blogrunner, a news aggregator the Times acquired a while back.
No, this is not a new idea. In fact, it’s as old as the Web, and the Times’ own Frank Rich has been doing it liberally for some time in his Sunday column. But to see the Times do it in this way — on the home page (and section homes) is a step forward. It moves the paper much more into the linked world we all now inhabit.

The other interesting item in the online edition is an exchange between U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat who was the subject of a tough investigative piece recently. Rangel replied, and the Times responded right next to his long letter on this page.

The numbers — footnotes, essentially — in the Rangel letter correspond to the newspaper’s responses to his points. Oddly there are no hyperlinks, but that’s a relatively small quibble.

There are even better ways to display these kinds of exchanges. But it’s great to see the paper experimenting with this kind of conversational journalism. I hope these will become more common.

UPDATE: Poynter Online interviewed Times Executive Editor Bill Keller, who said that the paper hadn’t done anything quite like this before. But he added, “I don’t expect it to be the last.”

(Disclosure: I’m own a small amount of New York Times Co. stock, which is worth a lot less than I paid for it…)
December 02, 2008
13:28
Drool…Next Year’s Nokia Phone Flagship: N97
» ‎ Center for Citizen Media: Blog

And the PDF fact sheet.

This devices, which won’t be available until next year (probably spring), is potentially the closest thing yet to the perfect tool for folks who are looking for the ultimate in smart phones with serious text capability. Incredible specs…

I drool.

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