30 Good Minutes: Emerging Media and the News

Posted on | May 19, 2010 | View Comments

Following up on my 5 Good Minutes series from South by Southwest Interactive, I’m now interviewing folks in the news (and related) industries about emerging technology at their organizations. Primarily this is for my students at Ball State University and the AEJMC. But I thought you might find it interesting as well. I’ll be adding to this throughout the next few weeks. Enjoy:

 

 Technology Review: Jason Pontin [32:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (32)

 

 Time Magazine: Caitlin Thompson [45:19m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (28)

 

 Time Magazine: James Poniewozik [28:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (19)

 

 Spot Us: David Cohn [29:37m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (20)

 

 Pegasus News: Mike Orren [31:48m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (30)

 

 PR: Kevin Dugan [29:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (24)

 

 Wired: Eliot Van Buskirk [23:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (18)

 

 Times of London: Joanna Geary [21:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (18)

 

 Author: Dan Gillmor [26:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (18)

How News Orgs Are Turning to Staff, Technology & Users to Improve Comments

Posted on | May 3, 2010 | View Comments

How News Orgs Are Turning to Staff, Technology & Users to Improve Comments.

I’m continually bothered by writers who discuss moderating comments as if this is something revolutionary. We’re more than 20 years into this in the digital landscape and yet writers, editors and reporters continue to act as if they have parsed out some answer to this.

In reality, they are simply un-willing to learn from history and acknowledge that virtual spaces have figured out the answers for many of their issues.

Here’s the latest: Poynter’s piece about the amazing moderation of comments.

Police Raid Gizmodo Journalist’s House

Posted on | April 26, 2010 | View Comments

There’s much to discuss about Gizmodo’s decision to pay $5,000 for an iPhone left in a bar by an Apple engineer. However, when police begin kicking down the front doors of journalists over this incident, things have spun out of control.

What the press is not writing about – as journalist and professor Dan Gillmor rightly points out – are the ramifications of this police action: Here, here, here, and here.

The police issued a search warrant for a freelance journalists home, where he does his work for Gizmodo, a blog-style site. (A blog site is analogous  calling a newspaper a tabloid; those of us in the industry know that tabloid is a paper style. A blog organization is a web style, not something different than journalism). And it’s this idea – that Gizmodo is a blog and somehow not doing journalism – that is the root of this case. There is no way the police – or any government agency – is banging down the door of a New York Times reporter. (Or shit, the door of a Loveland Herald reporter.)

In a distributed world, where offices are less necessary and freelancers and independent contractors thrive, the idea that the police can kick down your door (and make no mistake, these police kicked down the front door of a journalist) and remove your work equipment is more than disturbing. It’s chilling.

One last note: in the late 1990s, the music industry began suing very small companies that were building business models around digital distribution. Some were dubious; others were not. But the recording industry built up case law by going after small, under-funded sites in order to go after bigger fish.

If you think this Gizmodo issue isn’t an issue, I would simply ask that you revisit the last 15 years of technological legal-wrangling. I suspect this will have far-reaching implications about blogs, bloggers, citizen journalists, participatory culture and the media.

Oh, and watch Apple’s media partners (e.g. Wired, the New York Times) cover this story. Let’s see how forthright they are.

In my day (that’s my old man phrase), Wired was an adamant defender of technology, promoting the libertarian ideals of open-ness. I suspect there are different ways afoot there.

Police Seize Jason Chen’s Computers :: Gizmodo

Cops Seize Gizmodo Editor’s Computer After Apple iPhone Leak :: ABC Technology

Police seize Gizmodo editor’s computers :: Cnet News

Authorities Seize Gizmodo Editor’s Computers :: New York Times Technology

Police Raid Reporter’s Home Over iPhone Leak :: Wired News

Why Digital Native Isn’t a Real Idea

Posted on | April 17, 2010 | View Comments

I’ve expanded upon this idea on my personal blog, but since I’ve been discussing it lately, I thought I might go ahead and link this here as well.

The idea of the Digital Native, that oft-talked about terms, is one that people use incorrectly all the time. In fact, there is no proof, no science, no statistical measure that suggests today’s children are any more technologically a-tuned than we are. (The level of technical competence they have, actually, is likely tied to the level of acumen around them.)

Don’t believe me?

Read the essay where the term originated: “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.”

And remember, this wasn’t written about Gen Y (or Millennials for you late comers). It was written about the tail end of Gen X. It’s only a decade later that charlatans use the incorrect term to describe a generation it wasn’t even written about.

But, you know, why let the facts ruin a good consulting business.

On The Future of Technology, Remix Culture and Software Tools

Posted on | April 6, 2010 | View Comments

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Last week, I gave a presentation at the Popular Culture Association that didn’t go very well.

It was the first public presentation of a project that Brian McNely, Matt Mullins and I had worked on for the better part of this school year. The goal of “The Object Remix”: create a story using publicly available footage done people on YouTube, develop a framework for both teaching this remix writing and a technological understanding of what needs to happen to make this more mainstream and examine the impact of public/private lives.

On the whole, the presentation was okay, a learning experience for the three of us. We’re getting a sense of how to tell the story of the story we created. That takes time.

What didn’t go well was the ambush on my particular section (which I won’t go into). But ruminating on my discussions with those in attendance  about what happened has helped me clarify a valuable component to my presentation.

My main thesis, building off Larry Lessig’s work (in particular Remix and Code), is this:

1. that technology companies have taken vague notions of law (e.g. copyright) and make it concrete (e.g. Digital Rights Management), which eliminates not only the ability to use certain “available” media (e.g. Creative Commons work uploaded to YouTube without the ability to download) but also the notion that there is a difference between “free” culture and “controlled” culture; and
2. the Internet (and other networks) allow us to get anything we want, which means an arbitrary notion of control will not only fail but also – as I mentioned – created a disregard for those concrete notions that fly in the face of what we are actually doing; so
3. we must develop software tools – in the vein of Vannevar Bush, JCR Licklider, Robert Taylor, ect – that allow us to parse through all media and find, easily, the “free” culture; otherwise
4. we have pushed all use of work into the realm of piracy, devaluing what it is that is being done anyway.

My goal then, in this project, to is build a framework for building software tools that enable Remix culture within a copyright controlled world (or any mixed system of given rights, such as the Creative Commons, or affirmative rights, such as Copyright law).

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That’s a whole lot of Academic-ese to say this: we’ve got to make finding materials that can be legally used by amateur culture much easier than it is today and then integrate those tools into academic disciplines that teach students how to work within the current culture.

Read more

The Game-Changer: Netbooks v. iPad

Posted on | April 4, 2010 | View Comments

I’m not fan of Apple design (or any technology design that substitutes centralized, corporate control for open systems). I’ve been vocal about this since my days at Wired back in 1999.

This isn’t to say that I think every company should be forced to open-ness, merely that I will fight the wide-spread adoption of such technologies in the public sphere. (You, however, have the right to own whatever you’d like. Just don’t complain when you find out what you can’t do.)

Author Douglass Rushkoff does a great job explaining why these types of systems generally are bad.

This is the best description of heard for why closed systems are problematical for us. But it’s even more instructive considering the absolute fan-boy-dom happening around Apple’s iPad. (Which, I must say, reminds me of the line in Star Wars about democracy ending with applause.)

The Mac-aholics are convinced the iPad will change the way we consume content. But I think they have missed a larger point. That’s already happened.

There were 4.8 million netbooks shipped this quarter and 22 million last year, a figure that BusinessWeek  says is troubling because the 33.6% growth in the market is less than the 876% growth from the year before (when the netbook phenomenon started to take off). Baffling logic.

Of course, Apple reports sales of 700,000 iPads on the first day, an impressive number for a consumer electronic device. A number that may even turn out to be true, although the agency that reported that number didn’t explain where those numbers came from. Still, Apple is about 45 million units away just from equaling netbook sales. And a little more than 2 1/2 million away from Amazon’s Kindle e-Reader. (Even Apple’s iPhone is less than 3 percent of the worldwide mobile phone market.)

Geo-Location Visualizations from SXSW

Posted on | March 27, 2010 | View Comments

I just came across this amazing data visualization from the South by Southwest Interactive conference.

The data is courtesy of SimpleGeo, a Boulder, Colorado company currently in its early stage. I am currently giddy thinking about the possibilities for storytelling.

News 8 Austin: BizSpark Accelerator

Posted on | March 20, 2010 | View Comments

On The Ridiculousness of Viacom + Copyright

Posted on | March 18, 2010 | View Comments

There comes a time when an idea is pushed so far to the extreme that it becomes un-defendable. For years, I thought we’d reached that threshold with copyright. Services like My.Mp3.com, which allowed for virtual music lockers, seemed perfectly legitimate.

Time and again, though, the copyright cartels have used their money and influence to derail legitimate concerns.

But there’s always hope. This time, YouTube (and Google) have the cash to defend themselves against claims of infringement (despite following the law regarding take-downs).

From YouTube’s blog, a legal response to Viacom’s admission that it had 18 companies “illegally” uploading its own videos to the site in order to reach an audience. In other words, it used YouTube to promote its work, it legally uploaded its videos and yet it’s suing YouTube for not knowing which videos were legally uploaded and which weren’t – until Viacom told them (at which point they took them down).

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

SXSW 2010: The Last Five Good Minutes

Posted on | March 16, 2010 | View Comments

Omid Ashtari, Partner, c10: Content Strategy (Los Angeles, CA)

I met Omid two years ago when he was part of a panel on moving talent from the blogosphere to the mainstream media. At the time, he worked with Creative Artist Agency (CAA). Now, he’s out on his own. A partner in a new venture trying to take advantage of the new ways content is created.

Here endith the last of the South by Southwest Interactive video blogs.