At PDF, I ask Vint Cerf — who said the FCC should die — to zero-base what government should or must do: regulation, incentive, investment. He launches onto a nice riff on roads and whether we should consider the internet to be a road — on which we chose what vehicles to drive — and so it becomes a government utility. Andrew Rasiej (playing Oprah in the audience) says that in the 1800s, people were dying from bad water in New York and so the city government spent billions buying a government-run aquaduct system and New York became the industrial and financial capital of the world. In the analogy, water trucks bear the logos of Time Warner, Comcast, and Verizon and they stop the pipes from being laid. Andrew wonders what would happen if internet access were declared a civil right.
Archive for June, 2008
F the FCC: The internet as interstate
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Playing Oprah
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Yesterday when I led a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum, I gave props to Dave Winer as I told the room that they were the panel — that’s what Dave told me quite firmly at the first Bloggercon — and so I was taking the microphone to the room — the people formerly known as the audience — to involve everyone in the discussion and to organize the discussion not around people (I’m on the panel, you’re not; it’s my turn in the line…) but around threads of ideas. I now see that two days ago, Dave told the story of that Bloggercon. He taught me how to be Oprah and I have used that ever since and, indeed, his has made me a better moderator/discussion leader.
Today, I’m relieved and happy that the PDF leaders have decided to also come into the audience and play Oprah. Perhaps I should have called it playing Winer. A snippet of his story of the beginning of the format:
We reserved a suite of five classrooms and recruited Discussion Leaders (DLs), and tried to explain the format on the phone. I asked the DLs to think of the entire room as a panel. Two of them, well-intentioned, had recruited a few people they knew and asked them to come to the front. I rotated between the rooms, when I saw this, I asked the people in the front to take seats in the body. I made the DL stand in front, and lead the discussion. I remember the instant Jeff Jarvis, for example, understood what I was looking for — he ran with it, as far as I could tell everyone had a grand time (Jarvis is a fantastic DL). By the time the day was over, the format had been worked out, and get this — the hallways were empty! The conversations that used to happen in the hallway were now happening in the conference.
Thanks, Dave.
Yeah, Vint
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008At PDF, Andrew Rasiej asks Vin Cerf for the one thing we need to do to advance the internet. His answer: Kill the FCC. I applauded.
Do as I do, not as I say
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008Wonderful story in today’s Times on using Google data to show what we’re really interested in: more orgies than apple pie. The peg is an obscenity trial in Florida in which the defense attorney demonstrates through Google Trends data that there are more searches for group sex than for recipes. And so, if you truly want to see the community standards that define obscenity we’ll know when we see it, then don’t listen to our preaching but to our searching.
Marketers have always known this. Back when I was at People, we’d test covers of Diane Sawyer in a suit vs. Brooke Shields in a bathing suit and in person, people would say they’d buy the former but on their own, in the newsstand, they, of course, bought the latter. Behavior trumps opinion.
And now we have so many more ways to know what the market is really doing, what the people are really thinking: Google, Flickr, Amazon…. That is the key value of the internet and companies on it: collected knowledge.
And so yesterday, as the nation mourned George Carlin, it’s a wonderful thing to look at the uses of his seven dirty words on Twitter and in blogs, our views of him saying them on YouTube, and — as I’m sure we’ll see in a few days — our searches on Google and purchases on Amazon. There, FCC, is the best evidence of our community standards. Actions speak more truthfully than words.
CUNY’s grant
Monday, June 23rd, 2008At the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism, we’re proud to announce today that we received a $3 million matching grant from the Tow Foundation to create a Center for Journalistic Innovation. As you can guess, I’ll be very involved in this.
Our idea is to start an incubator to help support new products, businesses, platforms, technologies, and standards from new companies — some that will be started by students out of my entrepreneurial journalism class — and big media as well. We will create a New Business Models for News initiative to gather and share best practices in the industry. Another intitiative will do the same with editorial innovation. We will establish a chair in journailstic innovation and scholarships for entrepreneurial students.
Columbia’s journalism school also received a $5 million Tow matching grant. They will devote their efforts primarily to new journalism education, which is needed across the nation. But because we at CUNY are new and dealt with many of those issues when we started the school from scratch, we decided instead to look outward to the news industry. We believed that the greatest need of the industry is innovation and this was our effort at an answer that we hope will be complementary and collaborative with other efforts in this area from Knight, Poynter, and others. We also will work hard to create international ties for the center’s work so we can learn lessons from around the wrold.
In CUNY’s and my work, there is a continuing theme of innovation in the news industry. The entrepreneurial journalism course received a grant from the McCormick Foundation to provide seed funding for the students’ best proposals for sustainable journalistic enterprises. There were some great plans out of the class but we quickly learned that these llitle shoots need nurturing. We believe there are many similar ideas out there that need such help. Thus, the incubator. Last fall, we held a MacArthur-Foundation-funded conference in networked journalism and David Cohn reported best practices before and after. This October, we will do likewise with another MacArthur-financed conference in New Business Models for News. Those, too, lead right into the work of the Tow Center.
Now we have to raise the other $3 million so we can open the center’s doors. That’s the plug. If you have money, connections to it, or ideas, please do let me know. I’m eager to get going.
George Carlin: Shit
Monday, June 23rd, 2008Twitter was built for tributes to George Carlin. Seven words just fit.
He no longer needs a place for his stuff. Damn.
The crowdsourced life
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008I happened to tweet this morning about two crowdsourcing moments — student tries to crowdsource his tuition; Michael Arrington crowdsources his rats/ship/flee list for Yahoo — when Mark Comerford tweeted back with a link to the crowdsourced job interview:
Joanna Geary, a young journalist trying for a job at the Birmingham Post, told her readers about the task she had to perform for the interview: “I have to outline a training course that would convert traditional print journalists into ‘fully-equipped and knowledgeable multi-media, multi-platform journalists’ in just five days.” So she decided to ask for her readers’ help. I said in the comments that that act alone should get her hired. It shows she thinks in the new way: open, networked, relying on and trusting the gift economy and respecting her readers and what they know.
This is reflex for me now. I come to my friends on the blog — you — to ask help all the time, especially with my book. I’m working on another project that has to stay secret right now — not mine; I’m helping someone else — and it’s killing me that I can’t tap the wisdom of all of you.
What this really means: Your friends are, indeed, your greatest asset and when you can tap them for help you exploit their value to you. The internet now enables you to do that anytime with anyone. If you don’t have friends, you can’t do that. Newspapers, magazines, companies of all sorts need to realize that is why they need friends.
We are in a relationship-based economy. (Which is another way to look at the link economy of media, Associated Press, and why turning friends into enemies is just bad business.)
He changed
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008Whenever you want to show how soft big media are on Barack Obama, refer back to Howard Kurtz’ column on their coverage of the candidate’s hypocritical flip-flop on campaign financing. Chapter and verse. “The question: Are the media going to call Obama on the reversal? Will there be hand-wringing pieces about the corrupting role of money in politics? Or will the story just be covered as the two sides trading charges?” Howard analyzes their leads and how they tucked in mentions of the flip. e.g.,
NYT’s lead graf: “He argued that the system had collapsed, and would put him at a disadvantage running against Senator John McCain, his likely Republican opponent.” Fourth graf: It “represented a turnaround.”
@PDF08
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008Make a last-minute decision and come to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York tomorrow. I had to scour the schedule to find a slot when I could sneak off for a meeting — in any conference, that’s easy to do. But not at this one. They’ve packed it tight with good stuff.
High on Weeds
Saturday, June 21st, 2008I’ve been inhaling the third season of Weeds on my iPod (it’s a crime to watch Mary-Louise Parker that size). On the way back from London last night, I watched four episodes in a row – which is a great way to see it. OK, every once in awhile the plot does take a Dallas-shower-scene route (Andy getting out of the Army). But gawd, I do love the thing. And I can’t get enough of Parker, queen of MILFs. It’s about enough to get me to finally subscribe to Showtime.
(Disclosures: I had an ad from Showtime on the blog when the fourth season started and they sent me third season on DVD — but I was so eager, I’d already bought it on iTunes.)
Heh
Saturday, June 21st, 2008Google Trends new service that allows you to get audience stats through Google’s eyes for any site doesn’t work for … Google.com.
Aggregating – and checking – the pundits
Saturday, June 21st, 2008Hubdub, a news prediction betting marketplace, has started a cool new feature that tracks the pundits’ predictions. Punditwatch takes the predictions of prognosticators from Christ Matthews to Perez Hilton to TechCrunch and enters them into its system as if each of the guesses were a bet. Then it tracks wins and losses and gives each pundit a score.
I’ll spare you the nitpicking: Some predictions are easier than others and so they’re not all valued alike. But it’s a great guide to the crystal-ballers.
There’s a trend springing here. A former student of mine at CUNY just told me that she’s working on WhereIStand, which also aggregates the opinions of public figures and enables citizens to add theirs in a searchable data base. Here’s the page on public figures’ opinions on public financing of campaigns (well, gee that can chance, can’t it?).
This is the web’s ability to act as a check on the prognostication market.
