connecting*the*dots

(shot by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

So the world has woken up and discovered Twitter.

I’m not gonna front, I’ve only been Twittering for a few months now. I sat on the sidelines for the last year or so and watched Tara and Chris pimp it, but I just couldn’t figure out how it fit into my world.

Well, I think I’ve finally got it… and then some.

While a bunch of people out west have large numbers of close friends that use Twitter incessantly, I don’t. Most of my peeps from the NYC and Greensboro area don’t view communicative technology through quite the same lens as left coasters (we’re all a step or two behind on that front). So my friend list — while filled with people I consider to be friends — aren’t folk that I know extremely well or interact with on a daily basis.

So I’m now getting a chance to familiarize myself with colleagues from both across the country and the other side of the world.

That’s actually quite cool.

Sure, sometimes their Twitters are as dumb as mine, but that just gives me more insight into their varied personalities. Those Twitts about eating PB&J or screaming at a cabbie only confirms that we’re more alike than different. And when they do drop science and briefly enlighten the world as to what they’re working on, well, that’s the gold mine of Twitter.

Chris Messina stuck that nugget of a thought in my head the last time we hung out at Citizen Summit. He implored me to use Twitter and keep him (and anyone else following me) in the know with what I was doing with The People, Yes.

The conversation got even deeper once we all started discussing ways to bridge the digital divide locally, and before I knew it, I was thinking about Twitter implementation within the TPY interface.

So check this out:

That’s a John Ford special for you.

He took Alex King’s Twitter Tools beta plug-in, tweaked the partially functional plug-in code to post Twitters to my Wordpress blog with an appended category and styled the category with a CSS class.

So now every time I SMS to 40404, not only do I add to the stream of consciousness on Twitter, I’m documenting those fleeting thoughts straight to my blog.

The term “live blogging” just evolved big time overnight, as did “citizen journalism” (and if they’re smart, so will the “mainstream media“).

Now imagine how this could impact folk on the other side of the digital divide — people without moment to moment access to laptops or desktop computers, but armed to the teeth with cell phones.

Did I mention that John Ford is the man?

Thanks, Chris & Tara.

Wired News
Gannett to Crowdsource News
By Jeff Howe

[…]

According to internal documents provided to Wired News and interviews with key executives, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today as well as 90 other American daily newspapers, will begin crowdsourcing many of its newsgathering functions. Starting Friday, Gannett newsrooms were rechristened “information centers,” and instead of being organized into separate metro, state or sports departments, staff will now work within one of seven desks with names like “data,” “digital” and “community conversation.”

The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.

“This is a huge restructuring for us,” said Michael Maness, the VP for strategic planning of news and one of the chief architects of the project. According to an e-mail sent Thursday to Gannett news staff by CEO Craig Dubow, the restructuring has been tested in 11 locations throughout the United States, but will be in place throughout all of Gannett’s newspapers by May. “Implementing the (Information) Center quickly is essential. Our industry is changing in ways that create great opportunity for Gannett.”

[…]

Well, it looks like Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.net isn’t as much R&D as he and many others have thought.

Sure, Jay will have tons more room to explore the creation of a collaborative news model with value for the reader, the participants and the domain alike, but with this news from Gannett, it’s obvious that the owners of these newspapers are finally getting that change is an eventuality.

My question: Is their approach to CrowdSourcing as pure as Jay’s?

As Jay tells it, NewAssignment will evolve over time (without the pressures of a bottom line, as it’s root is based in academia), discovering and iterating different methods of collaboration with citizens who are willing to put time and effort into a story because it absolutely concerns them from either a personal or community perspective.

No matter how much Gannett, the organization, talks that talk, their institutional and primary shareholders will not allow them to walk that exact walk. This is not an egalitarian shift in operating procedures; this is a shift based purely on industry competition and the potential loss of capital.

The motivations of editors and journalists within these organizations align much more with the drivers behind NewAssignment, but the bottom line for their careers is that they are at the mercy of the business drivers of the Gannetts of the world. So when an organization decides to run in this direction, I can only imagine the types of conversations to be found at the water-cooler.

The Future Of CrowdSourcing

My net takeaway of this announcement from Gannett is positive, but only in as much as their organizational methodology doesn’t attempt to leverage the free output of people as a mechanism for reaching a bottom-line. For if people’s creativity, perspectives and thesis’ are tapped into — beyond the aforementioned proactive participation of watchdogging, whistle-blowing and researching — then we’re heading down a path that isn’t progressive; it’s a reversion to the underpinnings of the industrial revolution and techniques of mass production, only now within the information age.

This isn’t an easy subject to take a position because technology isn’t a static delivery platform. Take the search industry as an example:

When a search engine (corporation) indexes billions of web pages (other people’s work) and returns search results with advertising affixed, that search engine is essentially CrowdSourcing to establish their bottom-line. Now, because the vast majority of people and organizations whose web sites, blogs, services, applications, etc. receive a huge benefit of consistent exposure from such an arrangement, the search industry is considered to be a benefit rather than exploitation.

But a particular news organization does not fall into the same sphere as a search engine.

A search engine indexes everything, from the base domain to the most granular content found within. If/when news organizations venture beyond working the wisdom of the crowd in a participatory fashion, and begin to algorithmically tap into the meta-data of external amateur output — whether it be blog posts, video, photography, podcasts, etc. — the fine line between collaboration and exploitation will be crossed in order to impact a bottom-line.

Other people, afar and local, are thinking about these issues as well:

• Chris Messina is a tireless advocate for community and open-source, so his perspective on CrowdSourcing goes even deeper into the fundamental drivers of our capitalistic society. This interview is an interesting conversation along these lines.
• Local blogger, The Shu, posted his meandering thoughts along the lines of this very same issue early last year — particular to the announcement that the Greensboro News & Record planned on creating a “Town Square” with the participation of local bloggers — and was painted by journalists and many local bloggers in the comment thread as being everything but a conspiracy theorist.

In numerous circles, the term information age is considered synonymous with the term information revolution, but that association is tenuous at best in my mind.

Are we going to let the revolutionary aspects of technology explicitly serve the capital masters of the world, turning our personal expertise, opinions and creativity into the equivalent of a virtual assembly line of mass media production?

I truly hope not.

(photo snapped by Яick Harris and photoshopped by miss_rogue)

Let me fan out my geek cards on the table, face up, before I begin this post…

I’m all about open source, open content, open collaboration, etc., but I’m also East Coast, so please, FOC’s on the West Coast, help me out with this whole FooCamp debate.

Why do some consider Tim O’Reilly’s annual invite-only event of a few hundred friends, employees and people he thinks are interesting to collaborate and have some fun with, such a bad idea?

Dave makes an argument that the closed aspects of FooCamp sync up with the mindset of investors financing a narrow set of “proven” technology, which, he argues, leads to the formation of a bubble culture.

But couldn’t that be said about any closed event? I mean, Yahoo! has “Hack Days” for Yahoo! employees. Isn’t this the ultimate example of a closed event? (thanks to Chris for letting me know in the comments about the open Yahoo! Hack Day coming soon)

At least O’Reilly sends out invites to people outside of his staff… right? Or am I missing something here? Tim O’Reilly’s words:

…”You have to understand the objectives of the event. Its primary purpose is to make sure that O’Reilly’s editors, conference planners, and technical strategists are exposed to new thinking from people who are on our radar but haven’t necessarily been part of our community. Second, it’s to make sure that our individual contacts become collective contacts. Third, it’s to create a great mix of old friends and new, so that it doesn’t become “same old, same oldâ€?, and there’s always new blood.”…

That actually sounds progressive, especially from a business management perspective.

I mean, I dig what Dave’s saying on a philosophical level regarding closed-mindedness, but O’Reilly’s explanation seems to put that puppy to bed pretty quickly. Also, while I’m completely supportive of Chris and Tara’s BarCamp explosion as an alternate, open collaboration vehicle, even Tara accepted her FooCamp invite… so how can it be so bad for the industry?

If we could wipe out closed-events from the face of the planet, maybe open events-only would dent a VC-driven path to another bubble. But back on Earth, in this capitalist society of ours, people go after the short-term buck with the most tested approach available. Absolute conference “openness” can’t compete with the corporate investment mindset of my fellow East Coast money-men (I’m not a money man, I just lived next to them in a past life ;)

And seriously though, doesn’t this noise kinda give the influence factor of Foo a uranium supercharge?

Along those lines, does anyone know O’Reilly’s position on Israel’s right to exist? (heh)

BarCampRDU came and went this past weekend and I completely missed out. With the stress of moving into the new house, completing my proposal work and working on the number of scattered projects I’m on, I just couldn’t find time to make the trip. But truth be told, as much as I wanted to check out the BarCamp experience, I was much more amped about spending some quality time with the Bonnie and Clyde of Web 2.0 themselves: Chris Messina and Tara Hunt.

We stumbled into connecting last year through one of my posts, followed up by chatting a bit via email and Skype and eventually met in person in a group lunch at SXSW in March. Since I couldn’t make it to Raleigh, I pinged Chris late last week with an offer to crash at my spot if they needed a place to stay. Low and behold, they did.

(shot at Finnegans, before we realized they didn’t serve breakfast and split to Jimmy’s Corner Cafe)

So… what do you do with a couple of uber-progressive, multi-tasking, San Fran geeks in Greensboro, NC with 18 hours on your hands? Keep it simple, stupid; beer, grub and talk shop.

Once they arrived and got settled in, we ended up walking downtown, settling in on MCouls rooftop and chatting about our latest geek ventures over Fish ‘n Chips and pints of Guinness (Tara, you’ve got to get the Guinness tolerance up).

Even though we all share a bunch of the same philosophies regarding business, marketing and technology, it’s still kinda amazing how much overlap our latest ventures have with one another. Both Citizen Agency and dotmatrixproject are efforts to:

• support our passionate desires to consult, design and build technology independent of a full-time gig
• work smarter (not necessarily harder) with great clients and interesting projects
• network with loosely connected, brilliant talent instead of building a salaried bench
• using collaborative blogging to generate credibility, trust and thinktank-like conversations — across our own teams and with the community of folks that participate in the resulting discourse

I’d like to say something grand, like, it’s the sign of how we can all work in the future, but I know that’s not true… at least not yet. Major props to Chris and Tara on that front though, as they believe 1000% in documenting their every success, failure and step along the way with the hope that their efforts can provide building blocks for others on a similar journey.

I completely share that philosophy and enthusiasm, but aside from transparent blogging, I’ve yet to implement it in tangible ways across my everyday (note to self: do that).

We ended the evening with a pretty intense conversation about geo-specific social networking, the digital divide and citizen media, or to be more specific, The People, Yes.

In a nutshell, Chris and I started off with slightly different perspectives of community. The concept of a geo-specific network didn’t seem to register with his quixotic stare, but I think we both nudged a bit closer to each other’s thinking by the end of the conversation. I’m all about working with people who’ve been there and done that, but I’d like for the majority of the grass-roots work and business and technology development to run through the people in this community.

Tara seemed to get my desire to work specifically with the people of Greensboro to build out a Greensboro-specific social network — as the more we work together as a community, the more we’ll come together as a community. Essentially, I want to start local and focus on the needs and strengths of the entire community of Greensboro to flesh the project out.

I mean, who knows what nuggets we’ll find in these fields and streams and underpasses and buildings?

In any event, I’m sure it wasn’t the last conversation we’ll have on the project. Both Tara and Chris are revolutionary thinkers, with their heads constantly spinning about with progressive ways to use technology to help us work, play and function better with one another. I’m only in the embryonic stage with The People, Yes, so I’m looking forward to many more chances to imbibe and share knowledge and perspective.

This weekend came and went way too fast.

Photo by Colin Gregory Palmer

I usually tend to keep announcements under wraps until I’ve made enough progress to warrent them, but in the spirit of Tantek Çelik’s building blocks presentation, Kent Bye’s Echo Chamber Project and Chris Messina’s barcamp escapades, well, here goes nothing:

thepeopleyes.org

Tompkins and Adamson at the Austin airport

Well, it took me until today to be able to write my goodbye to Austin. Man, that town and conference kicks some serious ass. Some of my favorite moments from this past week:

• Bruce Sterling’s closing remarks on the state of the world. I’ve never been moved to tears by a public speaker before… I’ve a new favorite author.
• Running into Doc Searls after the Sterling presentation, and chatting with him for an hour about everything from our shared past in Jersey and Greensboro (my current residence) to our love of basketball to our vastly different experiences with the KKK (mine is through my brother’s documentary, you gotta ask Doc about his) and then hitting up a BBQ joint with Doc, Marc Canter, Nancy White and Jerry Michalski.
• Experiencing Kirby Dick’s This Film Is Not Yet Rated and Alan Berlinger’s Wide Awake at the greatest theatre experience I’ve ever come across, the Alamo Drafthouse.
• Adam Greenfield’s ubiquitous computing presentation. (Adam is so very articulate and cultured, I can only hope that experience design is taken more seriously within the world of ubicomp than it is within the web) and Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability presentation. Two very similar topics, yet two very different presentations.
• Finally meeting Tish Grier, Will Giese, Thomas Vander Wal, Peter Merholtz, Tara Hunt and Chris Messina in person after months of blogging, commenting, plazing and flickring each other (did I say flickring?). And yes, I can confirm without a doubt that missrogue and factoryjoe are the web 2.0 version of Bonnie and Clyde.
• Hitting up the town with Khoi, Chris, Ralph and Jeff. We were robbed of the SXSW Web Award for Best Green / Non-Profit site (mediamatters.org) damnit! So we drank more.
• I only ran into one former collegue/friend at the conference — Dan Saffer — but I think I made a handful of new ones along the way.

I had a blast. And I’m looking forward to next year already.

Moderated and kicked-off by Tantek:

Microformats Process:

• Pick a simple problem and define it. No frameworks.
• Document what existing web pages are doing and find patterns for a specific microformat
• Trying not to create standards or formats.
• Brainstorm a set of fields to define microformats
• Post findings, get feedback and iterate.

A Microformats Exercise

• Create your own hCard
• Publish it to your site
• Add a link to hCard examples

Mark Norman Francis, Yahoo! Sr. Developer London, wants to create semantic meaning without the delay of us building the Semantic Web. hReviews will return 7 figures of results in local European searches (for restaurants, films, etc.), while the current Yahoo! film reviews have 4 or 5 figures of results.

Jeremy Keith, web developer, wanted to get his SXSW plans up on his page and add geo-coordinates, so he created a microformat page and mixed it up with the Google map API. I think I speak for all non-developers when I say “holy fuck.”

I copy and pasted my plans into a blog post and manually linked them up from my iCal feeds. Anything more that that would’ve made me nutso. But the point here is the microformats themselves, not this particularly geeky application (Jeremy, you soo outrank my geek factor).

Chris Messina, flock, sees the web as an event stream, a social space and an actual data-storage space. When you build in microformats to search, flock (and outside developers) can leverage “round-trip attention:”

• Blog posts with links to people
• Lists of people and their blogs
• Your contact info and favorites
• Concerts and movies reviews
• Upcoming events

flock can use these semantic information to create relational experiences in results. The more times a flock user comes across markup information about specific people, places, things, etc., flock can capture and present back to the searcher a filtered picture of that person, place, thing, etc.

Q&A

- claimID is gathering individuals publishing service spots and generating centralized hCards.

- Structured Blogging has a Wordpress plugin that supports a ton of microformats

- “Roach Motels are so 1.0″