BookBlog

Citizen journalism is more fun to do than to talk about

At Blogher, I was at a birds-of-a feather session on citizen journalism. It was moderated by Amy Gahran. Jay Rosen was there, along with several others who are doing citizen journalism of various flavors.

The discussion focused on the tired old wordgames -- what is a journalist, what is a citizen journalist. Are bloggers journalists or not? How can citizen journalists be ethical? Is citizen journalism a good term, or is it intimidating for citizens, and exclusive of people who are non-citizens.

The discussion implies a zero-sum game of prestige and reputation between "old" and "new" journalism. I say it's boring, and I say the heck with it.

Citizen journalism is more fun to do than to discuss. In the battle to save municipal wireless projects in Texas, Chip Rosenthal and I set up a weblog and a mailing list. And we covered the ins and outs of the issue through the legislative process. Someone attended the hearing, or watched it on video. We tracked the latest version of the bills.

We were doing "advocacy journalism" -- we have an opinion -- we're not neutral on the question about whether cities and towns should be able to support broadband access. But we were covering the story. We often "broke" the story, simply because we following an issue closely, and the mainstream media has a broad beat and can't cover everything. When we had news, we sent email to the reporters who were covering the issue for the mainstream media. And we became a source for the reporters.

We assembled a community. We found the people who were doing community broadband projects, and we wrote about them. We used the mailing list as a primary means of staying in touch with the community. And the blog did a great job of helping us link with others who were participating and covering the story, through comments and Technorati-discovered cross-links.

We didn't complain that we were a few citizens fighting the phone company. We didn't complain that the issue was undercovered by the mainstream media. We took the resources we had, and we used them. We didn't spend time trying to define what we were doing. We just did it.

By committing acts of citizen journalism, whatever you call it, the new definitions will emerge.

The algorithm of network power

danah boyd just made a striking point at Blogher.

The link algorithms that drive "Top 100" lists at Technorati and other services are based on a broad and shallow pattern of linking. This is characteristic of male patterns of networking. By contrast, characteristically female patterns of networking are smaller and denser.

The "Top 100" pattern recaps the hit-based attention and financial economics of the mass media. It just doesn't measure the sub-communities that should be visible out of the "Long Tail."

Mary Hodder says that she is assembling an algorithm that will highlight the subnetworks and the long tails, using critera like comments and interlinks.

This is needed. Today's algorithms are missing communities of interest. And frankly, it's missing opportunities for power and money.

Does Technorati Top 100 count

The conversation at BlogHer is about how and whether to break into the Technorati 100. This misses the point of the Long tail-- what makes the Blogosphere different from the mainstream media. You can aim to be a top celebrity. Or you can be an authoritative voice on an important topic, and be the media for an important issue. The blogosphere isn't just about celebrity, it's about subcommunities.

Good morning, Blogher

Off to breakfast at the BlogHer conference. I love the blogroll where you can catch up on who's there. Gizmo wanted -- something that lets you pick a number of the people on the conference blogroll and create a FeedShake.

Technorati and the discovery of community

Thanks, Chris Anderson for the kind words. I'll have to repay them by explaining where he is wrong again.

Chris writes:

Technorati is a blog aggregator without a community

This is true when you use Technorati as a pure zeitgeist-check, to find what the blogosphere is dithering about today (Karl Rove and Windows Vista).

But it is false for one of the most interesting and valuable applications of Technorati -- conversation discovery. Bloggers use Technorati to find which other blogs are responding to their posts, so they can continue the conversation.

In an era of comment spam, Technorati has become a primary method of knitting together cross-blog conversation. Technorati helps make conversations and subcommunities visible. The "community" of Technorati is not a feature of the service itself. But Technorati is a key, and hidden component of the blogosphere's long-tail communities.

The "long tail" is social

Chris Anderson writes a refreshing rant about the misuse of the Long Tail. But he's partly wrong.

Anderson writes:

There are many distortions of the term, but the most common one is to use it as a newly-positive synonym for "fringe". Invoking the Long Tail is not a magic wand to explain away the apparent lack of demand for what you've got. The Long Tail is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for poor-selling product. Or weak sectors. Or bad ideas.

Anderson goes on to say that business models that focus only on fringe content are doomed to fail. Effective "long tail business models", like Amazon, combine popular content with niche content, and use the popular content to draw people in.

Anderson's right -- Indy-only online music services draw much less business than providers like Amazon that can use popular content as a draw. A customer might check out a Britney Spears album, and then use the recommendation engine to traverse to related and much less well-known music.

But Anderson is partly wrong. LiveJournal and Flickr disprove his theory. LiveJournal is an online journal community that has historically had a large population of young people. They congregate in social groups, often starting with people who are friends offline. The software gives users tools to control the level of privacy. A user can define which friends can see private content, what content to share with intimate friends, and what to share with the wider world. Similarly, Flicker is an online photo sharing community, where users can share photos with their friends and the world.

Cultural preferences are social. When people like strange music, unusual fashions, or minority religious practices, they most often do so with a subculture of like-minded folk.

This is hard to see in the mainstream commercial economy because of the history of technology. Until now, mainstream marketing has had two main kinds of choices.
* Mass media is used to reach wide audiences. Coarse-grained targeting is used to reach market segments -- viewers of the Cooking Channel, or readers of Parenting Magazine. The audiences for these niches is still quite large, many thousands of people.
* Direct marketing is used to reach individuals. Direct postal mail, telemarketing, and legitimate targeted email is used to reach individuals who are selected by personal history (e.g. bought the product before), or by membership in a targeted demographic group.

Until now, the smaller social networks in which people share culture have been largely private and noncommercial, with a small number of exceptions, like Tupperware parties and Amway.

What's worse, the content industry has done its best to make sure that social content-sharing is illegal. Rather than seeing opportunities in tools that let people share content, the industry sees all sharing as piracy, and tries to stamp it out.

So, the successful examples of social content-sharing are based on non-commercial content, like LiveJournal and Flickr. There are also grassroots networks of cross-linked music blogs where people review and recommend music. And there are networks of cross-linked knitting blogs where people review and recommend patterns. Classic long-tail stuff.

So, Chris Anderson is right that catalog retailers like Netflix and Amazon need to have hits, which help draw users to the niche. Their recommendation engines serve as an automated proxy for the natural social recommendations that people make every day.

But that's true only when you start with the content. When you start with groups of people, then opportunities for "long tail" are abundant, and don't depend quite so much on mainstream content.

Search vs. RSS?

Kevin Hale writes that RSS is becoming more important than search.

I think that gets something not-quite-right. It's true that when you find a superb resource, RSS lets you subscribe to the stream, rather than having to go back and find it again. RSS processors like the clever new Feedshake let you be even more picky about your subscription reading.

But the universe is always going to have more good information than a person can read every day. By an awful lot.

That means that when you're looking for new information, you'll go out and search for it. Sometimes you'll want to subscribe to the good sources you find. Sometimes you'll want to subscribe to the search. And sometimes you're looking for a one-time goodie.

So RSS sources, as a superset of blogs, are important to a search algorithm, because they are well-structured, and selected to be timely. And RSS is a good way to subscribe to a search. Search and RSS are complementary in these ways.

But RSS doesn't displace search. That makes no mathematical sense.

This wants to be an infographic... there's a medium number of resources you want to consume most of regularly, and a vast number of resources you want to tap into occasionally, using really good search.

The Hale article via Jeff Jarvis

Wiki titles vs. blog titles

Blog titles are headlines. They're supposed to be catchy and attention-getting. You're not supposed to need to remember them.

Wiki titles are subjects. They are best as unadorned nouns and noun phrases that are easy to remember and stimulate collisions.

Take the last post, for example. The title is a blog-style headline -- Oishii, a smarter zeitgeist check. If this were a wiki-blog, I'd be tempted to give it a dull, basic title -- just "[Oiishi]". Then I'd link it to a page called "[Zeitgeist]", which would cross-link the various zeitgeist checking services, like Daypop and Blogdex, and the New York Times most-emailed pages.

This way, anytime someone tries to link to [Oishii], they'll find the entry and add their new thoughts and information.

One of the bits of damage done to the wiki paradigm by the addition of the blog feature in Socialtext and the blog nature of our shared intranet wiki is the use of catchy, blog-style headlines that will never generate a link happy accident in a million years.

One healing practice is to create "index pages" that link together the various catchily-phrased pages. When the newsworthiness is gone, the content can be refactored into a page with a duller topic.

The obverse danger can be seen Bill Seitz' blog-wiki, http://webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/FrontPage. Not to pick on Bill, but to show the opposite risk. Bill writes regular, interesting updates, but they often have boring subjects like Jabber and Paul Allen.

The wiki-blog has a valuable pattern, where people have incentive to post and share new content, which can be annealed into longer-term knowledge. But there are also gaps that need to be cleverly bridged in order to get the best of both genres.

Oishii - a smarter zeitgeist check

Oishii "polls the del.icio.us front page every 5 minutes, and returns all sites bookmarked by at least 30 people."

This is cleverer than the typical "highschool popularity" algorithm. The traditional zeitgeist checks, like Daypop and Blogdex, only show the "most popular" stories. Oiishi shows "all sites bookmarked by at least 30 people" -- so it captures a more diverse range of shared content.

Feedshake - easy aggregate feeds

Feedshake lets you create a feed out of several combined feeds, filtered by a keyword.

This is an early beta. You can filter by only one keyword, with no wildcards. And it supports only RSS 2.0 feeds right now. It will be better when it supports more feed variants so you can make combined feeds out of more of the available data.

In the meantime, FeedShake works nicely with Esme Vos' MuniWireless.com site, Glenn Fleischman's , Broadband Reports municipal section, and Free Press broadband section. The feedshake pulls all feeds that contain the word "municipal".

Campaign blogging as jazz and blues

Brilliant piece by Scott Henson comparing the the prose form of campaign blogging to the musical forms of jazz and blues.

Mass media campaigns are fixed compositions, where the same notes are played over and over again. (Scott uses the analogy of classical music, but I'd say Top 40, Clearchannel, focus-group-tested, endlessly-repeated pop.)

Campaigns using bottom-up media are more like blues, where the theme is repeated with enough variation to keep things interesting, enough repetition to be satisfying, and a folk culture transmission in the music community.

Thinking out loud, the cultural parallels may extend to social organization. Group blogs like Daily Kos and RedState are like bands with leading soloists, and background players who occasionally take front stage. The group structure is in flux, with soloists heading off to start their own band, like Billmon from Kos, and the creation of supergroups like Tagsonomy, which can be more or less than the sum of the parts. There are informal but distinct "schools" connected by interlinks -- Texas bloggers, liberal bloggers, conservative bloggers, environmental bloggers.

Like musical traditions, blog communities are about affiliation. Blogs are language, not music, and one of the primary roles of language is persuasion.

Scott's argument is targeted at traditional campaign managers who are antsy at giving up control to the free-wheeling blogosophere. Just as ClearChannel is losing market share to services with greater diversity, like iTunes and satellite radio, Scott argues that campaigns based on fixed repetition will lose out:

Message-makers who resist the change, especially those who stick to the repeat-it-ad-nauseum approach, will increasingly cause their campaigns to lose the message wars. Those who've learned to vary their message and rhythms to accomodate the changing environment along the line of the 12-bar blues model possess greater flexibility to operate in the new era.

Coming from the opposite "emergent democracy" side of the conversation, which celebrates the "bottom-up", improvisatory spirit and scorns the rigorous practices of organization, Scott's focus on campaigns is rather refreshing. Campaigns are unabashedly, er, purposive. Evangelism and persuasion are part of the blogging genre, whether the domain is politics, technology, or something else. Ants get other ants to swarm with pheremones; humans get other humans to swarm with ideas.

Civil liberties schwag

Yesterday, the House decided not consider an amendment to the Patriot Act which removed the secret searches of libraries. The measure that passed by bypartisan majority earlier today. The House bill extends the notorious Section 215 for 10 years, allowing the FBI to search business records, library records, bookstore records, medical records, commercial purchase records without probable cause.

However, you can compensate with civil liberties schwag:

Handy fourth amendment totebag, protected in theory from searches and seizures. Now sold out, but you can ask the seller to make more.

Disappearing civil liberties coffee mug:

Google maps crossed with event database

EVMapper lets you search for an event (like an Elvis Costello concert) and see where it's happening around the world.

Very nifty! The next step is to add an Evite/Meetup type feature so you can invite your friends to the concert / tournament / speaking gig.

When will IM standardize?

What about other communications protocols?

Telephone interconnection is mandated by law. For example, Texas law says:

Sec. 60.204. INTERCONNECTION. A telecommunications provider shall provide interconnection with other telecommunications
providers' networks for the transmission and routing of telephone
exchange service and exchange access.

Internet email standardized back when academic institutions were the primary users of the internet. This is very good -- connectivity became universal. And bad -- the protocols were very trusting, creating a medium for spam.

Fax was born from a standard. In the 1970s, the CCITT (now ITU) created a standard for digital fax that allowed the creation of an industry.

Thinking about these examples, the non-standardization of IM is an artifact of history and business model. IM is a free rider on top of the internet, and is offerered for free. Because the underlying network already exists, IM didn't need the jumpstart of a standard in order to proliferate, unlike fax. Because IM is offered for free, it is only a minor inconvenience for end-users to connect to a contact, using whatever IM service that contact prefers. So far, the business IM market hasn't been large enough to force standardization.

It seems plausible that IM will standardize someday. But the current situation could persist for a long time. Currency is an example of persistent lack of standards. There are well-established methods of currency exchange, so differing currencies don't pose a huge barrier to commerce. And currency providers have a strong interest in controlling their stock of currency, since regional money supply is a tool by central banks used to steer the economy.

Just thinking out loud. It's interesting how the patterns of standardization trace the social structure and power structure of the underlying community.

FBI spies on ACLU

According to this AP story, the FBI has amassed thousands of pages of records about the ACLU, Greenpeace, and other civil rights and advocacy groups.

If nothing else, the FBI is proving the case of critics concerned about expansion of domestic police powers to investigate terrorism. Of course, it's probably easer to investigate the ACLU, which has offices in the phone book and leadership that makes regular media appearances, than to investigate Al Qaeda sleeper cells.

Object-centered sociality

In simpler language, people get together to share stuff and do stuff.

The point's right, the big words are extra.

Hotel free wifi

Lately, I've been choosing less fancy hotels with complementary wifi over nicer hotels with similar discount room rates, but add-on charges of $10 - $20 per day for network access. The algorithm worked splendidly, resulting in a number of quite comfortable, moderately priced stays thanks to the Orbitz search engine.

Until this past week, when I stayed at the Guest House International Inn & Suites in Santa Clara.

The bathroom door had a rather disconcerting fist-sized dent, which seemed like the traces of a highly unpleasant visit for someone.

The in-room menu was for the enticingly named "Last Chance Restaurant." Not kidding.

To be fair, the pizza from this ominously named outfit was more edible than the name suggests.

LinkedIn Spam

Is anyone else seeing an increase in Orkut-like spam contact requests on LinkedIn? In the last few weeks I've gotten a number of requests from people I don't know.

If I don't know the person, and there isn't a personal note, I'm ignoring them.

Concentration

Just spent a few hours migrating email from Mozilla to Thunderbird. There's a handy new mbox import utility that helps move the files. This kind of maintenance task isn't hard but takes attention to avoid messing up. Excellent for holiday weekends.

Life on a Young Planet

The author of "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" cited Life on a Young Planet as a source, and one of his favorite science books.

Harvard paleontologist Andrew Knoll weaves together geology and paleontology to tell the story of life before the Cambrian Explosion. "Life on a Young Planet" explores scientific mysteries that don't yet have clear answers.

In the Proterozoic age, 600 to 800 million years ago, there are clear signs of life, with bacteria and algae with colonial living patterns similar to their descendents in tidal flats today. Rewind to 3.5 billion years ago, and there are much more cryptic signs of life that can't be conclusively distinguished from non-living processes.

Fast forward to 540 million years ago, at the end of the Proterozoic era, and there is a profusion of Vendobiont animal forms, strange and unlike the predecessors of recognizable organisms that proliferated during the "Cambrian Explosion." Scientists still don't know how or whether these alien creatures are related to the generations that followed.

One of my favorite sub-plots of the book is the story of the co-evolution of life and the planet. Early in earth's history, oxygen was scarce. Early bacteria metabolized methane, sulfates, and other chemicals. The proliferation of cyanobacteria helped create the oxygen-rich atmosphere that allowed large and complicated life forms to flourish. Here, also, scientists still have unanswered questions about how the earth's atmosphere evolved.

The book is clearly written, without condescension or the purple prose that affects some scientists freed of the constraints of journal articles. One of the strengths of the book is the way Knoll explains how scientists figure out what they know -- the dating methods, chemical analysis, comparisons with modern life forms, geological mapping, and other techniques used to piece together the stories of ancient life.

I really enjoyed this book -- it left me with a sense of awe about how much scientists have learned about the evolution of life, and how much is still unknown.

Tree canopy shading the house

Endless Forms Most Beautiful

The basic genetic software that drives the development of organisms is very old, and is shared in common across the animal kingdom. The software is modular, with components that govern the development of eyes, limbs, and hearts. The genetic program that builds a multi-faceted fly eye is mostly the same as the program that builds a human eye.

Components are re-used to build different body parts -- the module that makes fingers and toes is re-used to make the spots on a butterfly. The genes are the same; the component architecture is the same, and the detail of the program itself is different.

This is beautiful science -- general laws holding together a vast number of seemingly unrelated facts. And it's new science. Until recently biologists theorized that eyes and limbs had developed independently in different families of organisms. The basic discoveries were made about 20 years ago, and much of the detail has been added in the last decade.

Analysis of the newly sequenced genome in fruit flies, frogs, mice, and humans revealed that organism were more similar than expected -- humans and mice share 97.5% of their genes. Scientists studying developing embryos were able to identify the genes that launch developmental programs, and to discover the similarities between developmental programs in different types of organisms. With a picture of the developmental program in live organisms, paleontologies have been able to look at old forms and build theories of how changes in program drove changes in animal form.

"Endless Forms" is a nicely-written, layman-friendly survey of evolutionary development -- a new synthesis of genetics, embryology, and paleontology -- by one of the field's pioneers. The primary strength of the book is that it summarizes the last 20 years of scientific discoveries, and provides an overview of the core body-building genetic patterns.

The survey is complementary to two more specific books that I've read on the related subjects in the last few years.

Shapes of Time, written by a Kenneth McNamara, a paleontologist in Western Australia, goes into more detail about the the algorithms used in the development of embryos and young organisms. And "Shapes" has an ambitious thesis about how the escalation and de-escalation of the developmental timeclock has guided the creation of new species.

The Symbolic Species, by Terence Deacon, a brain scientist at Harvard Medical school, describes the process by which nerves grow in the developing primate brain.

The primary argument of Deacon's book, about how humans developed symbolic thought, is speculative to the point of fanciful, and is not well-constrained by his science. The science itself is interesting enough. Decond compares the wiring of human brains with the brains of chips and birds. Deacon argues that the distinctive difference between humans and other species with communication skills isn't the size of the brain, or simply the addition of a new, larger, forebrain component, but the rerouting of the nerve wiring from the centers of emotion and motor control, through the newer regions of logic and planning.

The books by Deacon and McNamara are more uneven in editorial quality, but more intellectually savory. I get a real kick out of the exploration of the algorithm -- the detail of how development happens -- and the logical analysis of evolutionary mechanism --the hypothesis about how variations in the algorithm of development affects the form and behavior of the organism.

Endless Forms is a really good way to get a big picture overview of evo devo science, and an entertaining fast-forward through the plot of scientific discovery, without requiring the level of commitment to get through one of the graduate-level survey textbooks in the field.

Carroll ends with a pitch for using evolutionary development as part of the basic teaching of evolution in schools. The history and mechanism of the evolution of form is dramatic and intellectually persuasive. It's ironic that evolution is becoming more politically controversial, even as science makes such progress at understanding how evolution happens.

Turtle at Green Muse water garden

Green Muse turtle

Green Muse turtle
Originally uploaded by alevin.

So, the Flickr blog posting feature does post the picture, but generates an error message on Flickr. Also, the default MT template works better than the default Flickr template.

Home office (with digital camera)

So, I finally got a digital camera, and got it working.

Here's a picture of the blogging office at the Green Muse:

It's a sign of the times that the weekend's home maintenance tasks involve replacing the air conditioner filters and upgrading the weblog comment spam filter.