connecting*the*dots

Red state / blue state political maps now have a behavioral map to further support the simplistic notions of a two-party system!

Don’t get me wrong, I find the visceral imprint of this study from the school of information at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor fascinating, but I’m hoping that as we further our attempts to understand one another through similar human behavior studies using our interactions on the web, we’ll look to use less obvious attributes than political party affiliations as a control.

(click for entire .pdf)

Current independent broadcasting channels, production houses, distribution centers, etc. all sweat to compete with the Big 6 for advertising dollars and market reach. If they are struggling, imagine what would happen to the still-developing ecosystem of independent bloggers if net neutrality isn’t supported in the next phase of legislation on the senate floor.

Bill Readings introduced me to linguistics back in my undergraduate days at Syracuse University. It was a low-level Critical Theory class, not enough knowledge to rest a proper degree upon, but that wasn’t Bills concern. He just wanted us to listen and think.

Bill had a wonderful way of illustrating his teachings — placing our 19 year-old minds into comfortable arenas where we could casually move towards comprehension, eventually grasping the core concepts of deconstructionalism and linguistics he tossed about with ease.

After choosing Blade Runner as an explicit assignment for visual deconstruction, and his daily, illustrative call-outs of us numskulls to apply a “bit more apperception to your day-to-day existence,” I’d have to say the strongest, most visceral lesson that stuck with me was his conversation around the English word “tree” and the Spanish word “arbol.”

An Attempt To Share Knowledge

To monolingual, English speaking folk first exposed to the authority of the Spanish translation, the inherent belief is that the two terms (English and Spanish) are perfect representations of the signifier, “tree”… which is wrong.

The signifier of “tree” is more akin to your personal mental model of the physical representation of:

original photos by icathing and Melete

Viewed through the lens of semiology and linguistics, we cannot absolutely assert that tree = arbol, because the signifier of “tree” has a unique representative interface to each of us, as does the percept of the translation of “arbol.”

Our individuality is too explicit to absolutely relate to explicit terminology.

Or put into political terms, in this society of modern constructs — one that consistently nudges us towards silos of absolute knowledge, relationships and definition — we are presupposed to assign relative constructs of our world to get by, based on what, in essence, is an aggregate misunderstanding of our own individual cognitive processing.

Back to the tree example; Roland Barthes on Saussure:

Until he found the words signifier and signified, however, sign remained ambiguous, for it tended to become identified with the signifier only, which Saussure wanted at all costs to avoid; after having hesitated between some and seme, form and idea, image and concept, Saussure settled upon signifier and signified, the union of which forms the sign.

Nowadays, whenever I stumble upon a conversation about knowledge and structure — such as Are trees natural? over at David Weinberger’s blog — the information architect within me rests in a state of nirvana, coaxed into releasing control by his neighbor, the experience designer.

Each day we rely on our own trees of knowledge — branches of immeasurable directions and depth, overlapping and crossing one another to form meshed nests of position. The common faith we tend to hold regarding knowledge, is in the strength to overlap our individual trees with one another; the more the overlap, the more the homogenous culture, driving civil movement within this complex ecosystem and jungle we’ve created for ourselves.

Well, some people seem to prescribe to such theories.

In the midst of this information revolution, when we engage in the practice of tagging our information objects, we’re not only engaging in an activity to increase the discovery of our position via the use of common signifiers, we’re implicitly participating in a form of expression — painting our personal mental model of our signified constructs onto the sign itself.

In turn, the degree of shared context an individual holds on the receiving end, determines the degree to which her reception of the sign becomes explicit communication.

Enabled by technology, we can now easily add descriptive tags to the aggregate objects of words, colors, sounds and movement delivered more directly to the branches of each other’s trees. In this flip scenario of retrieval, we now rapidly stumble across these additions, assigning them as variants of welcome or disruptive bits of information.

In any case, our common trees of knowledge are being affected… they are evolving.

To this day, these particular words of Ferdinad de Saussure cannot escape my purview:

In the lives of individuals and of societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other. For the study of language to remain soley the business of a handful of specialists would be a quite unacceptable state of affairs. In practice, the study of language is of some degree or other the concern of everyone.

photo by heather allison

If Bill hadn’t stepped into the wrong plane at the wrong time in the fall of 1994, he would’ve witnessed rapid advancements of the inner-workings of the web — specifically the participatory meshing of topics, interests, desires and perspectives via individual and social tagging through citizen blogging, vlogging, podcasting, etc.

The post-modern, knowledge craving, subversive side of Bill would be beaming right about now… just about as brightly as the multinational, career for-hire professor.

In the name of knowledge, and a hat-tip to my mentor, I think I’ll be busy late into the evening this October 30th.

Citizen media is an authentic media.

The amateur (Etymology: French, from Latin amator lover, from amare to love) doesn’t create out of a responsibility to a deadline or a paycheck; the amateur creates out of a love for the process, the output, the feedback, the very notion of creativity itself. And in this new world of interconnectivity, the availibility of our tangibly crafted desires and dreams has increased exponentially.

We are connected.

photo by Mexicanwave

And entrepreneurs are taking notice.

We’re quickly moving towards a period where a good chunk of the web will be explicitly designed (or re-designed) to take advantage of such authentic creativity. The old 1.0 slogan “Content is king” didn’t die off — it simply redefined itself through the lens of the passionate, authentic amateur.

YouTube and flickr have captured the very essence of what makes video and photography communities, respectively, thrive.

• Instantaneous feedback and discourse
• The ability to shelve favorites
• Discovery of new objects based on meshed interests with other community members
• Being able to add friends and join/start groups to extend the conversation

Between the commitment to upload massive amounts of media and the amount of time and effort one invests participating in these communities, the “throwaway” gap that previously existed for most web services (think about web analytic services or even a blogging platform) has practically disappeared. These particular domains aren’t ripe for member disengagement anymore based on a single bad experience, as they’ve progressed to becoming a part of our psyche, partially defining us through the connections our authentic media creates with others and vice-versa.

Though, as much as I believe in the potential of interconnected authentic media to inform, inspire, entertain and generate new communities, I equally believe that our media should not be leveraged from afar to pay someone else’s bills without explicit financial returns from the ecosystem. So if this perspective became a reality, would it cause authentic media to cease being authentic? Is this perspective just an excuse for a low entry point into the mainstream media ecosystem? I don’t think so.

From Kevin Kelly and The New York Times, Scan This Book:

[…]

We see this effect most clearly in science. Science is on a long-term campaign to bring all knowledge in the world into one vast, interconnected, footnoted, peer-reviewed web of facts. Independent facts, even those that make sense in their own world, are of little value to science. (The pseudo- and parasciences are nothing less, in fact, than small pools of knowledge that are not connected to the large network of science.) In this way, every new observation or bit of data brought into the web of science enhances the value of all other data points. In science, there is a natural duty to make what is known searchable. No one argues that scientists should be paid when someone finds or duplicates their results. Instead, we have devised other ways to compensate them for their vital work. They are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own. They are financed with extremely short-term (20-year) patent monopolies for their ideas, short enough to truly inspire them to invent more, sooner. To a large degree, they make their living by giving away copies of their intellectual property in one fashion or another.

[…]

Scientists “are rewarded for the degree that their work is cited, shared, linked and connected in their publications, which they do not own.” If we were to view authentic media creations as nodes of input, for which entrepreneurs can generate beyond-hyperlink synapses of interconnectivity, the difference between the goals of science and the intrinsic behavior of the web would be rather slim.

This is where the conversation shifts to the concerns of the elite to the desire of the commons.

What side of the aisle do you sit?

UPDATE: Can we do this together?

Enough of the meta-conversations, already!

While the dignitaries at WeMedia pontificate on the differences of mainstream and citizen journalism (or lack thereof), the Greensboro community just works through it.

I’m proud to live here.

I guess Lance Dutson shouldn’t have challenged the Maine Office of Tourism’s strategy to overbid for the top “Maine” queries in their search optimization campaign, even though it drove up prices for both his and other local businesses attempting to bid on similar keywords. The state’s advertising firm sued him (pdf) for his public display of discontent for how tax-payer’s money was being spent.

Oh yeah, they’re also suing because he took this (taxpayer-paid) ad off their site to make a point about the number provided (hint: call it if you’re lonely).

If the State of Maine had any clue, they’d do themselves a favor and pause to learn about the nature of the web and the power of conversations across state lines before backing an agency over one of their own residents. But then again, this is reality.

So much for Northeast intellectuals.

Back to the campaign at hand; Increasing the visibility of the Maine Office of Tourism to Maine residents must be good for the state, right? Why exclude Maine web browsers from their optimization campaign to help residents find Maine businesses first and foremost? I mean, I don’t know about you, but I’m always looking to come across tourist attractions within my own home state.

Unbelievably dumb. If this was happening in my neck of the woods, I’d be equally upset.

(via BuzzMachine)

World 2.0 seems to have raised it’s periscope within our culture almost 5 years ago, in the immediate post-9/11 world. Who would’ve thunk it possible?

Brad Neuberg on October 21, 2001:

The world seems to be hungry for an ideological alternative to capitalism. I don’t know if this is a rational or simply emotional need for something to challenge what is now the dominant ideology of the age, but I predict that as soon as a semi-credible ideological alternative to capitalism arises that it will spread like wildfire and produce another Cold War type situation. Communism used to be it, but is now defunct and dead, while fundamentalist Islam semi-fills this need in parts of the world. I’ve noticed this need to challenge capitalism while traveling; I can even see it in myself.

I’ve never met Brad — as a matter of fact, I was only introduced to his blog tonight via Messina’s post — yet I dropped a similar perspective on the state of capitalism on the other side of the planet just two weeks later in the fall of 2001.

Coincidence or…?

The collective unconscious has always been a powerful concept, but before blogging, it wasn’t a tangible construct. It took the invention of the permalink and intra-day personal publishing to even begin to generate enough trails of human expression to expose Jung’s concept of unspoken, shared realities and archetypes.

While The Cluetrain gang introduced the concept of a global conversation to netizens back in 1999, what I find so interesting about the blogosphere since that time, is that the very notion of a conversation has the potential to become explicitly amplified and extracted to become findable across new dimensions of length and density.

The web is now chock full of meshed thoughts and dreams, connected explicitly by hyperlinks, loosely by tags and conceptually by discovery. With a shift in search result interface paradigms, the possibilities for more complete, immediate research queries are endless.

Topical themes — or memes — shift intra-day and can last as conversations either as sporadic and finite bunches (Jill Carroll’s abduction and release over a three month period) or prolonged variants (George Bush’s presidency). Imagine what types of conversational connections will become possible when interfaces, such as a Technorati search result, leaves the conservative constraints of separated permalink results based on latest entries or authority, and instead focuses on the clustering of such conversations through visual metaphors across other dimensions.

And no, I’m not talking about a folder paradigm.

I’m talking about dynamic, visual representations of conversations, with the ability to shift in real-time, using attributes such as tags and language co-occurance to drive groupings within oppositional variants such as the length and density of the conversation.

The day our thoughts and dreams stop getting lost in the cracks of time and authority, we’ll be one step closer to the knowledge revolution, leaving information in the dust with data. Then the decolonization of cyberspace can begin with earnest.

How rude of me… What’s up, Brad?

Click to view current proposal

Lex and I have been chatting about the N&R’s Citizen Journalism program over the last few weeks, focusing on exploring possibilities to improve both the quality and quantity of incoming stories by Greensboro residents (and articles about Greensboro itself).

I’m a huge proponent of editorial groups diving directly into the information mechanisms of the web — actively participating by monitoring concept feeds, reviewing authentic media, commenting on blogs in the community, basically, engaging potential news & entertainment sources in a smart and authentic manner.

Quite simply, if the press wants to be considered authentic with their interest in citizen media (read: people), they can’t just launch editorialized blogs; they need to become a part of the conversation itself.

Along these lines, mainstream news organizations must also develop additional revenue sharing programs for citizens that contribute to their bottom lines.

Sites like flickr and YouTube provide free bandwidth to store media clips (which, based on Moore’s Law, will be an obsolete model as well in the next 5 to 10 years), but news sites can’t offer that value proposition in a trade for content.

If sites like the N&R don’t develop fair revenue sharing programs, legacy-free aggregators will… and already have.

Along these lines, Lex asked me to expound on my previous ideas for how N&R editorial could leverage citizen tagging in their daily editorial processes. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far…

+

When Technorati began pimping blogs on articles pages of Newsweek and WaPo, the blogosphere moved one step closer to credibility. This move by Reuters pushes blogging — specifically bridge blogging — into a whole new stratosphere.

Reuters partners in comment blog
Mark Sweney

Reuters has formed a partnership with an international network of bloggers to provide public comment alongside its own news coverage.

The alliance has been struck with Global Voices Online, an international network of bloggers co-ordinated through Harvard University, that will see blog content used when there are large general interest events such as elections.

“We need to open our website to other voices,” said Dean Wright, Reuters’ global managing editor for consumer services. “There are a lot of conversations going on around news these days and we want to tap into that.”

The blog content will be displayed in two ways - either as clearly labelled posts within the company’s own websites, or as a link to a separate website placed at the end of a Reuters story offering readers a broader perspective.

The material will be made available through Reuters.com and Reuters.co.uk.

Global Voices Online will be taking part in the forthcoming London-based We Media event forum that will examine trust in media and citizen journalism.

Congratulations, Ethan.

From PJ Puryear, US House Representative Brad Miller’s campaign manager:

Blogsboro,

Congressman Brad Miller will be coming to Greensboro on April 24th specifically to meet bloggers. We’ve (both the campaign and bloggers in the area) have been wanting to do this for some time; better late than never!

While not having his own blog, Brad keeps a diary at DailyKos and has posted at BlueNC, and is interested in getting to know the blogging community. I would be remiss if I didn’t say that we are there in hopes of finding ways to improve our campaign, both technologically and by continuing to build our network of supporters (which we hope will include the blogging community). We will be meeting from 7pm to 9pm at Green Bean on S. Elm St.

Hope to see you there!

PJ Puryear aka Tarheel Dem

I’m not sure what I plan on asking Brad, but I’m very interested in meeting the man who is campaigning against the uber conservative, bigoted, self-hating Vernon Robinson.

(thanks to Jay Ovittore)

…blogging is now an expected channel of communication with at least some customers, with developers and the press. Amazon has customers, and presumably wants more. And they have a developer pitch too, and they have stories they want to communicate to the press. So if some of the people you want to reach like to receive information via RSS and blogs, why would you not want to provide it? To me, asking why you should use blogs is like asking why you should answer the phone. It might be a customer, a developer who wants to use your services, or a reporter who wants to write about the company. Your competitors answer the phone, so you should too.

Preach on, brother.

Nicholas Carr:
“…The whole reason businesses exist is to control forces that are hard to control.”
(hey Nicholas, try keeping the comment permalinks active so next time I can properly attribute your quote)

Busting out the HOWTO Corporate Blog post over a whole bunch of nothing…

UPDATE: I’m putting where my money where my mouth is and picking up the X-Box 360. I’ve been a PS2 guy forever, with more than 25 games and waiting patiently for the PS3, but you know what? Sony’s DRM / Rootkit stupidity compared to Scoble’s integrity has proved to be the tipping point for me.

And I’m Mac addict! (read = Microsoft hater)

C’mon Locutus, quantify this decision with a corporate metric.

If you’re a blogger that watches TV not only for it’s unbelievably passive entertainment and programmed misinformation (heh), but to find video clips that just might reinforce your thesis in your next post, I’ve found a service that you need to keep on your radar.

My good friend, Jonathan Daniel, has been working diligently for the past few years as the VP of Product Development at Critical Mention. A few weeks ago he gave me a tour of their services, and a beta account to play with. Let me tell you, as a blogger, the functionality they’ve developed to date (and in the wings) completely blew me away.

From their web site:

Broadcast media is the number one force shaping public opinion and driving consumer decisions every day. Every company and organization with public relations, crisis management, investor relations, competitive intelligence and brand management initiatives must track critical mentions on broadcast TV in order to monitor public perception, respond to events and crises, and gather market intelligence.

In contrast to traditional broadcast monitoring services, Critical Mention employs technology to monitor broadcast television in real-time. Using Critical Mention’s CriticalTVSM search platform, customers can view their broadcast clips and transcripts within seconds of airing.

Yeah, you read that correctly: Instantaneous transcripts AND broadcast clips. Drooling yet?

CM’s service uses the practically ubiquitous implementation of closed-captioned satellite feeds as a source for full-text searches. The instant digitizing of each broadcast to their servers allows for instantaneous clipping of video surrounding the term or phrase being searched.

While the interface design is somewhat clunky, the functionality is superb. The above image shows the result of a search for the term “blogging.” As you roll over the results on the right, a vid-cap puppets on the left with the transcript of the one minute clip and the highlighted search query. Found a broadcast that you’d like to use? Simply click on the expand button to expand the clip to display up to seven, one-minute clips that surround the queried term.

Once expanded, the current version allows the user to save the selected clips to a working library, send an email of the video and transcript or order hard copies — very smart and useful services for CM’s current business model.

CM gained financing and grew over the last few years by partnering with broadcasters to enable partnered companies to track mentions of products, services, employees, intellectual property, etc. across the airwaves.

To a number of bloggers, this concept might sound very familiar.

Back in November, Daniel Lyons (Forbes.com) espoused a similar position on media monitoring, except Lyons’ position was steeped in venom, advising corporations to explicitly track posts from bloggers. Once published, he immediately drew the ire of bloggers for his ridiculous and stereotypical assertions of blogging in general and for his positioning of such monitoring as Fighting Back.

The customer conversation isn’t one to fight, it’s one to join.

So how can this proprietary service add to the richness of blogging? The advent of YouTube — with their free, unlimited storage of video and automatic generation of code that enables bloggers to present in-line video — has prepped the web publishing market for Critical Mention to open up their service model outside the walls of partnered corporations.

A few examples of how a professional / public version of CM might be used:

• An analyst site, such as TheStreet.com (disclosure: I’m consulting on the current redesign), could present inline media coverage of companies and news events to fortify the context of their assertions
• Media Matters, a conservative misinformation analyst site, would be able to greatly reduce their investment in tracking staff and hardware
• Blogumentaries, such as The War Tapes and The Echo Chamber Project could gather and post media clips as research and/or extensions to their narrative thesis
• Bloggers in general would go gonzo for such access to media clippings, as the service would replace the time consuming tasks of manually recording programs or scouring the internet for the chance of discovering a timely, linkable/postable file.

The usefulness of the service is practically endless and the various business models are just waiting to be developed.

In the realm of unbundled content, each re-post of video content is actually a form of advertising for both the original broadcast and the broadcasting network. Once a value proposition has been quantified by CM, I’d imagine that forward-thinking broadcasting ownership would be gung-ho to participate in such a far-reaching, viral broadcast model.

CM could then serve as the middle man, establishing both a professional fee-based service level and a free public blogging service level.

This service could truly “2.0″ media in one swooping move.

Jimmy Carter is now a blogger:

There is a desperate need in America to block and reverse the radical departures from the moral and ethical principles that have made ours a great nation.

This is not a conflict between liberals and conservatives or even between Democrats and Republicans. The unprecedented changes in policy are from those of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Dwight Eisenhower, and also, of course, from those of Democratic presidents.

These changes involve the most basic aspects of America’s moral values: peace, human rights, justice, the environment, fiscal responsibility, respects for the civil rights of Americans, the honoring of international commitments, separation of church and state, and the control of nuclear weapons.

[…]

The man may not have been the best politician, but he’s an extraordinary human being.

Blogger gal vs. Newspaper guy!

Well, not quite, but it makes a great lede, eh?

Sue, Lex and I met over lunch yesterday to discuss potential strategies for evolving the News & Record’s citizen journalism efforts. And no, we didn’t have a stare off.

Man… Lex is in a tough position; he’s completely open to forward-thinking ideas (I mean, his title is Citizen Journalism Coordinator), but he also seems to be up against a bottom line business that’s very adverse to risk. Apparently, changing the approach to meeting a historically profitable bottom line is a tough sell, even within an industry that’s on shaky ground.

It’s amazing how palpable sand can become to the heads of industry during innovative times.

That’s not to say that the N&R hasn’t been progressive with their citizen journalism efforts to date — they have — but Lex knows that in just a few years the N&R (both print and online) will have to directly compete with new forms of dynamic, community-based, participatory, online news applications (e.g. Newsvine), which will be free of legacy organizational overhead and be able to react with agility.

And you can’t forget those pesky bloggers.

The N&R needs to step up their game.

So we chatted. And ate. And chatted some more. And by the time our conversation came to a close, we had a number of interesting ideas on the table:

• Personal Relationships - Lex is looking to develop relationships with members of the Greensboro community, offering them the opportunity to use N&R resources (legal, photography, journalist feedback, etc.) to craft substantive citizen journalism. To me, this approach perfectly fits the future of print newspapers, as time-based news is dead on paper. They’ll have to compete as daily magazines (more depth, less coverage).

• Real-time Blogging Input - I suggested promoting a tagging schema that matched the classification structure of both the paper and the site:

  For example, identify and promote a unique set of “greensboro[xxxx]” tags, for anyone to use on blog posts, flickr images, etc. when generating Greensboro specific news, events, opinions, etc.

  Internally, the N&R editorial staff would then set up RSS aggregators with subscriptions of each tag search result.

  The real-time input of potential stories and assets would increase exponentially, while the N&R would continue to have editorial control, as the aggregator would serve as the queue into the publishing process

• Representation Across The Community - Sue focused on the concept of encouraging participation along the lines of community diversity (her connections with Uplifter is right along the lines of my focus with The People, Yes!). We talked about ideas ranging from developing blogging 101 material to share with a non-computer literate demographic to grass roots representation within sub-communities (e.g. school board meetings) to encourage live-blogging with the unique tag identifiers

An interesting start, but there’s still one major component that we’re skirting: Revenue incentives.

Lex made it clear that creating a participatory revenue model doesn’t fall under his charge, but the N&R is open to ideas. My perspective is that without incentive, participation will be lighter, with less quality and dedication. Any revenue generated out of these relationships should be viewed as found money, so share and share alike:

• To tap into the wisdom of the blogosphere by republishing the original post or an edited version, a buisness needs to develop a revenue model that fairly represents such a relationship.
• To partner with individuals from the community to generate community-based journalism, a business needs to develop a revenue model to encourage such a partnership.

It comes down to this: Pony up or we, the citizens, will simply get together and form collaborative blogs, creating relevant identities, gain a better footprint in Google over a 3 month period of time and, eventually, sign up with BlogAds to support our own voice.

That’s not a threat. ;-) I’m looking forward to our next conversation, folks.

UPDATE: Six months after the fact, in the NORG session at ConvergeSouth, Ed Cone backs up my philosophy regarding partnering with local bloggers/writers in a revenue share program.