connecting*the*dots

Chris Anderson and Will Hearst talking shop in May of 2006:

Publisher, Will Hearst, on the evolution of journalism:

[..] In the era of 20 years ago, there was a notion of a professional journalist — I’m not saying let’s race back to that era — what I’m saying is that notion is utterly gone. And what we are seeing as so-called professional journalism is really freelance material, shot in Baghdad, shipped to New York, somebody voice-overs it and that’s supposed to be “live news.”

And we’re covering Israel out of London and we’re covering Nairobi out of Tokyo, you know, we’re kidding ourselves. So in a way, I think the cure is not to go backwards, but to go forwards and to label that stuff and get more of that material and do away with this pseudo-professional news, which it really isn’t.

I mean if we’re gonna have “citizen journalism,” then let’s have it. […]

I completely appreciate the sentiment, but Will Hearst knows better than anybody that isn’t going to occur through the existing mainstream channels.

Mainstream news outlets — television and newspaper alike — are busy attempting to figure out how to keep the best parts of their old revenue model in place while leveraging the independent voices of the information age.

While the conglomerates look for new ways to count the same beans, innovative distribution models with decentralized reporting have already taken hold.

This shouldn’t be the cornerstone of the conversation, though. Even without an organized effort to distribute decentralized reporting, there are already 30 million active blogs in play around the world.

The news is becoming hyper-local and hyper-topical without the steady hand of industry drivers to guide it; traditional journalism is going the way of the stock broker.

Now traditional ethics? Well, that’s another story entirely…

This post is the result of pseudo-live blogging (there was no WiFi access at the N&R). All quotes are paraphrases.

Jay Rosen is a journalism professor at NYU and the driving force behind the Pro-Am journalism experiment, NewAssignment.net. He’s come to Greensboro to meet with the N&R and the active blogging community we have here, to spread the word of his project and hold a discussion regarding its possibilities.

Jay begins by giving a brief history of newspapers/journalism and the internet in three stages:

1. Newspaper ownership began using the web in 1995 by simply re-purposing print content and surrounding it with ads. Why not? The content was already paid for and there wasn’t a need for much development
2. Blogging, citizen journalism hit big from 2004 to 2006; a wake up for people not using the medium to extend conversations and the news.
3. Where we’re heading (and NewAssignment.net is attempting to lead); bringing journalists, web users and citizens together to create dynamic, well-researched and disciplined journalism.

NewAssignment.net will:

• Employ editors to manage resources, the narrative and quality of reporting
• Hire occasional reporters for story development
• Tap into the idea that smart mobs + editors = smart, collaborative, widely-distributed input and richer output

Jay made a point to describe the advantages that a NewAssignment.net has on the traditional world of journalism:

• It’s Not a business; there’s no VC or ownership to demand a particular return
• There’s no production routine to follow; no quota of time to print
• No absolute set of topical coverage; unlike modern news outlets, they can cover anything they feel is relevant
• Local, national, international; there’s no geo-specific coverage
• There are no legacy methods or traditions to change or fight through
• No inertia from old school participants who don’t want change

“Journalism isn’t traditionally innovative; this could be different,� Rosen says.

By operating as a non-profit in academia, NewAssignment becomes R&D for major news operations. Along those lines, Reuters has given a $100k gift for research and Jay is using the gift to hire an editor.

No strings attached, mind you.

Newspapers are aware of citizen journalism, realize that it’s where the future is heading and many from within the industry want to contribute using the enablers of the web and raise the quality of journalism. Or at least that’s what Jay’s hoping for.

As long as salaries can be sustained, I’m thinking it’s a pretty solid bet.

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.

The reviews are in: We, the people, are in the drivers seat.

Newspapers are already hemoraging readership, as the web has created an extremely rich bazaar, allowing us to shop for unbundled content at every turn, while unbundled advertising models begin to sprout up to support this evolution. Well, get ready for the online replicas of the print world to begin to sweat even more. Following on the heals of the mass appeal of social wisdom sites such as slashdot and digg comes a revolutionary hybrid of mainstream media, citizen journalism and participatory editing: Newsvine.

Taking the aggregation features of a Yahoo! News, the collaborative properties of a digg and the citizen media aspects of blogging, Newsvine is staged to completely redefine the news. Why? Because the common man now has stake in the game.

Old School

Top/down delivery of content, beginning with organized knowledge, is a modern construct. Since the advent of television, these organized silos of knowledge have been optimized over the years for advertising to take advantage of explicit media buys — matching business audience demographics, psychographics and geographics to channeled, programed, bundled content. Great for advertisers and the networks/publications, lousy for the “consumer,” as we end up consuming more messaging and less news or interests which match *our* needs and desires.

These constructed, mechanical relationships define false, explicit edges of our culture, which in turn raises the value proposition of media and news organizations simply by standardizing on such lexicon. This standardization of topical interests — unknowingly bought into by the public as what is *real* — enables a sussinct universe of sales and stories, broadcast on television news and pumped through newspapers, serving as the ying to the entertainment media’s yang.

A metaphor: Is it easier to entertain and pacify a child within a theme park or the natural environment of a forest?

Somewhere between the crafted, paced, 4/4 movement of greased industry palms rubbing against one another, lies our percept of reality, consistently bombarded by messaging and it’s representative experience. So while we struggle with this understanding of our surroundings, back in the news room, editors — the field managers of this construct — find themselves under the thumb of the financial steerings and pressures of this propped reality. Their indoctrinated intuition places reactionary constraints on the types of stories generated, the depth of coverage, even the language the writer chooses to employ.

The innovators and early adopters of the web… we’re basically saying, “Fuck that noise.”

New School

Bottom/up constructs, enabled by the personal publishing revolution, delivered with flexible subscription technology such as RSS, have empowered individuals to publish cheaply within our own crafted domains.

• RSS allows us to digest information passively (in a centralized location), instead of actively (surfing the decentalized web), which greatly increases our level of input and conversely, fine tunes our understanding of the world, which is represented by our output (blogging, conversations, actions, etc.)
• Those of us who publish our own information objects, apply meta-data to increase the potential of findability, both now and in future interfaces
• Many of us participate with folksonomies, helping make our POV of all information semantically rich and contextual to our neighbors interests, our future grandchildern’s recollections of us, even the desires of a family on the other side of the planet
• We create multimedia objects to compete with elite vehicles of capital, and fuel them through the same tactical approaches

This participatory environment is one aspect of the Web 2.0 phrase that gets tossed about. It’s enabling us humans to share our creative impulses with others, helping to constantly define and then redefine the world around us through our personal representations of both explicit and implicit lexicon.

This is an open paradigm, a transparent journey, based in accelerated trust and faith in one another.

So when these two worlds meet — old school vs. new school or modernism vs. post-modernism or proprietary vs. open source — the truth of hierarchy and the truth of individual POV’s collide. Guess what remains?

A truthier truth.

Newsvine has taken a position of mixing mainstream feeds with user submitted, tagged and collaboratively greenlit content. Even more revolutionary, they’re mixing the standardized embedded lexicon of our culture — topical categories — with the co-occurance generated wisdom of the people creating relevant content living within such silos (see below)

The secondary navigation points are all dynamic, altering over time as the co-occurance of tagged objects within a topical category shifts. This is how I think — how I search, discover, build my own archive in this blog — so in and of itself, the concept doesn’t blow me away. What does blow me away is that by simply placing this paradigm next to, say, The New York Times, Yahoo! News, my pseudo-innovative hometown Greensboro News & Record and a blog aggregator like Greensboro101 (disclosure: I’m on the advisory panel), none of these domains can compete if Newsvine gains a participatory, critical mass audience.

Think about it: Newsvine provides AP feeds (like a Yahoo! News), yet allows anyone to seed *any* story, from *any* site (like digging or del.icio.us tagging). Let me try to clearly paint how disruptive of a strategy this is.

• With only the AP feed, Newsvine could potentially evolve to become a successful News aggregator
• The addition of the digg and del.icio.us features completely change the game. Newsvine now becomes populated by the very content from the news sites (New York Times, News & Record, etc.) that it’s competing against for advertising
• The better the content, say, a New York Times produces, the more likely it’ll end up in Newsvine, but with more context (meta-data) and a thriving, participatory readership.
• Content will begin to be valued differently at a New York Times — as prices might become reduced at the domain, while new, shared models will be created at sites like Newsvine. Good for the Times, as they have a new market for revenue, but it will effect their organizational structure. The big advantage for Newsvine: they don’t have to completely readjust due to their recent entry into the arena and their nimble stature (compared to large news organizations)
• Community blog aggregators could possibly fall to the wayside, simply due to the fact that people can seed their own local posts, as well as their neighbors, and leverage unbundled advertising services. The very concept of “community” will be redefined on much more granular levels, moving towards a flickr existence, as explicit tags begin to define groups of interest

The Final Touch

Mike Davidson obviously knows what he has here; not only an opportunity to provide a rich, participatory environment for the redefinition of what news means to us as a collective, a community and as individuals, but this service could very well challenge the embedded constructs of media and the contradictions of Adam Smith capitalism.

Heavy.

In the final analysis, if Newswire succeeds, it’ll be because of the participatory nature of people. So if Davidson really wants to make his mark on this planet, he’ll not only decide to share advertising revenue with the organizations and the content creators themselves, but the swarms of participating editors — editors removed from the burden and balancing act of management, reduced simply to individual citizens focused on making our communities that much more aware, educated and inclusive. If an incentive program can be devised along these lines– some type of a micro-payment structure based on Karma points and click-throughs for both editors *and* authors– he’ll be responsible for creating the Mechanical Turk of the media world.

If he heads in this direction, or others evolve his concept down this line, media as we know it could absolutely cease to exist. Reputable journalists will become more enabled by freelance opportunities, as news organizations will need to drastically reduce their overhead because advertising money won’t be channeled into one out of six corporate funnels.

Then we’ll more easily find the opportunities to 2.0 the hell out of government.

———-

(Big ups to Kent Bye over at The Echo Chamber Project for refueling my tank last night on the way home. 5 hours of ECP podcasts will get you into this type of groove. Go check out his amazing project)

It’s nothing new. Plain and simple, Sean Hannity is a tool for Fox News, complicit within the US/Saudi power plan.

I posted an example of his hypocrisies a few months back, covering his opaque speaking fees in Utah last year around voting time and how we, the thinking blogosphere, need to keep him and his ilk in check. Texastentialist corrected me by pointing out that his actions aren’t hypocritical; they’re part of a planned strategy.

Today, Think Progress covered Hannity berating colleges for taking money from Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal for their Islamic studies programs, also calling him a hypocrite. Quotes from Hannity:

"…Now, you may remember this Saudi prince from the days after September 11, when Rudy Giuliani turned down his so-called gift of $10 million, because he said that the U.S. needed to, quote, “reexamine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause,â€? unquote.

“…This is a bad guy. Rudy was right to decline the money. Why would these universities take money from him?"

Think Progress brilliantly exposes Hannity and Fox News with this gem:

"Hannity conveniently forgot to mention that his own employer, Fox News, also accepts money from Talal; he owns 5.5% of Fox News. Not only is Talal “rewarding them [Fox News] financially for views they already have,â€? he’s also changing  their views.”

But where Think Progress ends their coverage, the story of the US/Saudi relationship continues to branch out in unaccountable directions. For those of you that like to read first-hand accounts of how we’ve gotten to the point we find ourselves in the Middle East — specifically, Saudi Arabia — pick-up a copy of Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.

Sean Hannity isn’t just a hypocrite; he’s complicit.

Check out this video segment of a former Navy Seal turned independent journalist, Kaj Larsen, out in Afghanistan, tracing the footsteps of Osama bin Laden’s last know location: the caves of Tora Bora.

If MTV hit big due to the early adoption of cable TV, Al Gore’s Current TV is on the verge of hitting big because of the aligned stars of political backing, the philosophical and tangible aspects of open source, broadband access and the passionate content contributions of everyday citizens. The result is unbundled media, monetized to empower both the individual contributor and entrepreneurial business minds, while capturing the hearts and minds of home viewers currently pacified in their modernist couch potato, veal pens.

Apparently, the revolution will be televised…

By simply enabling blog search results from a search query in the Yahoo! News interface, Yahoo! has moved leaps and bounds into the world of Web 2.0. And they didn’t even have to implement a "shiny" Ajax application.

Yahoo! exposed the common man’s opinion and perspective to the common man. How much more people-centric could this move be? First Technorati gets into the article level of closed environments like Newsweek and bubbles up the voice of bloggers. Now Yahoo! jumps up a level in a person’s mental model for searching and brings blog results back before getting to the article level.

I feel like I’m watching one of those amazing scenes in the Godfather, where a bunch of hits are carried out to a violin solo, while yet another Corleone is being baptized.

Chills down my spine good.

As an aside, I do think I need to call up my friends over in Sunnyvale. I got pretty righteous about the need for this feature while I was conversing with the Yahoo! design and product teams this past June… In any event, I just hope the community keeps this type of forward-thinking user experience design in motion, specifically as it relates to the needs of people (not users).

Man, online discourse is about to get really interesting.

Al Gore is not fucking around.

Gore’s latest venture has him stepping up to the plate with an innovative approach to changing the stagnant nature of civil discourse in America… and he’s doing it by swinging for the fences and at the establishment. Here are a few quotes from his keynote address at The Media Center’s We Media Conference:

"I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America’s fabled ‘marketplace of ideas’ now functions."
…

"The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the World Wide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.

We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy’s future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom."

Did Al "My Wife Wants To Censor Hip-Hop" Gore just come within a few words of quoting Malcolm X, not to mention one of the most revered hip-hop albums of all-time? Take a few moments and dig through his speech. It’s completely laced with philosophical principles espoused by Noam Chomsky (Manufacturing Consent, the propaganda model, etc.). Good old Noam can’t get even get on public access in America. With his political power behind him, Al Gore is coming correct.

What’s going on? Well, Current TV (Gore’s new venture) is going to try to change the way people watch TV; they’re going to make them get off the couch. Take this quote from the Newsweek article, "Do-It-Yourself News" as a glimpse at their approach:

"The network’s broadcasting approach takes heavy cues from the emerging world of Internet news, eschewing traditional half-hour broadcasts in favor of two- to seven-minute "pods"—short-subject features submitted, in many cases, by Current’s own viewers through a screening process on the network’s Web site. Programmers maintain that the jarring subject jumps—from street violence in California one moment to street performers in Colombia the next—allow the network to cover the broad scope of world news. Interspersed amid these features are brief headline roundups from Google News."

Web 2.0 begins to describe the concept, but you have to throw in some Convergence 2.0 for good measure. This goes way beyond my call for Google and Yahoo! News to index blogs alongside traditional news publishers (even though I still think that is an imperative next version).

While the majority of Americans will probably surf this channel like any other, a concentrated group of early adopters will dive into this interaction model and extend the concept even further. Of course, only 20M people have access to the channel and I’m not one of them.

Did I say something about looking at a skyline from afar?

(Gore speech via Hip Hop Blogs)

May Jon Stewart’s reign never cease. All hail the smartass.

Peter Merholz has been on a philosophical bend regarding the continued development of Web 2.0 and the role of business for a few months now, and I’m pretty much in agreement with most of his assertions.

Changing a large, old school domain’s approach to interactive product development — specifically, in the Web 2.0 arena — doesn’t occur solely through the availability of smart engineers armed with APIs, feeds and Ajax alone. Unless the business has evolved its underlying approach and culture to facilitate this paradigm shift, the resulting efforts will be futile, or to quote Peter, “they’ll fuck it up.”

The powers that be must believe in and back the philosophy behind the technology.

So when it comes to business — I mean straight up, hardcore, numbers driven business — philosophy better equate with an explicit road-map to profit, otherwise we’re not talking business, we’re talking charity. More succinctly put, corporations won’t structure their annual and long-term corporate initiatives around Web 2.0 “open” principles and the investment in the underlying technology if they don’t explicitly understand how and why it will positively affect both their brand position in the market and the bottom line — both now and into the foreseeable future.

Now, I don’t hold a MBA from Wharton, so my ability to speak to the nuances of business is somewhat limited, but I did have the opportunity to spend the last three-years of my life within the walls of a conservative corporation. During my time there, it was extremely difficult to espouse any degree of change to their approach to design, development and serving their clients without raising agenda sniffing eyebrows — even when only attempting to sell the basic concept of listening to your own users when designing user experiences.

That concept alone took years to gain traction.

So while change within the Earth’s environment is as natural as a sunrise, within traditional businesses the mechanisms that foster change often signifies a threat to both the corporate strategy and the management team alike. One cannot move into traditional areas of business looking to flip long standing product development paradigms and revenue models overnight.

A recent Economist article ("Yahoo’s personality crisis") suggests that there’s a schism developing in the Yahoo! strategic and brand position, while Google is poised to sprint light years ahead. Peter’s latest post," Yahoo!: Walled Garden or Commons," tacks onto that perspective, suggesting that Yahoo!’s internal tugging between an open and closed  web philosophy, and their imminent plans to open a Hollywood office, could become a mission critical issue if not paid proper attention. The Economist even went as far as comparing present day Yahoo! to AOL from back in the days of the first web revolution.

AOL?

If we were talking about Bob Davis and Lycos, I’d have to agree, but we’re talking about Yahoo!, a company that has always been forward thinking, willing to tackle any attribute of traditional media and turn it on it’s head to make it useful on-line. With their soon-to-be-expansion into the mainstream media bastion of Hollywood, Yahoo!, for better or for worse, continues to operate as a change agent in the information age.

Simultaneous focus on open and closed aspects of the web is a solid business approach

Yahoo! has been at this web thing for more than 154 years now (posthumous math courtesy of Dick Sabot). In that time they’ve established a huge member base around the world, while designing a majority of their domain to be accessible to non-members with zero usage fees. A person can use most of Yahoo! without ever spending a dime until coming across a service with direct, fee-based competition already in the market. This holistic business model may seem passe by today’s standards, but that’s only because Yahoo! set the benchmark years ago; they were the early adopters of such an open business philosophy on the web.

This approach has provided Yahoo! with the means to both create and promote very precise revenue streams, leveraging the continuously growing reach of their membership and platform. Simultaneously, their focus on a variety of forward thinking, open tactical initiatives, such as flickr, 360, News, Music, etc. continues to move their domain forward with the best practices of the medium.

To the naked eye, this overarching strategy hints to be a metaphorical form of iterative change management, but not on the project or Yahoo! domain level, though; it’s more like change management for entering untapped external markets and media industries. In other words, Yahoo! seems to make closed moves (i.e. extending its domain by dealing with old school industries) in order to tap and evolve an established sector into a more open and web-centric format.

So does that make cents, compared to Google’s approach? Let’s see…

Google is also made-up of a brilliant group of people, creating forward-thinking user interfaces and search retrieval algorithms, but where Google’s daily operations differ from Yahoo! is their position in the market.

Their underlying funding relies almost solely on revenue established from their AdSense program and by floating company shares into a market that has provided a whopping market evaluation, based primarily on growth potential. So who really has the edge to last, riding through and continue contributing to the infrastructure of Web 2.0?

They both do.

Yahoo! has a consistent, upwardly moving market cap SMA since the bubble burst, whereas Google is on a meteoric rise post-dotcom crash. How much do you think the assertions of this chart tie directly into the two company’s strategic approaches to extending market reach? What about their commitment to open forms of Web 2.0 development? To the non-economist (that would be me) it would seem that each company has it’s own DNA to deal with and make decisions accordingly.

• Yahoo! took its bruises, but made it through the bust and learned their business lessons
• Google’s people felt the crash, but missed it all together as a company with a bottom line and shareholder’s interests to protect, so they’re more aggressive
• Yahoo! has more than a decades worth of experience, so they operate like a surgeon
• Google swings wildly at product opportunities with brilliant, broad strokes and precise algorithms to quickly iterate change

Basically, there’s room for multiple approaches to paving and extending Web 2.0.

Crafting an interactive world, one industry at a time

Take a moment to think about your life before Yahoo! took off. Ten years ago, the average American received their daily news through a newspaper and/or a TV broadcast. Due to Yahoo!’s revolutionary efforts to establish News aggregation for the public, I can barely remember the last time I read the newspaper during the week. Yahoo! forever altered that paradigm, shifting me and countless others in front of their screen for a news upload each morning.

Since Yahoo! News launched, Google raised the bar by expanding indexed sources to include international and local perspectives, while recent feed services like Rojo have cropped up, pushing the information boundaries into gourmet concept feeds.

Yahoo! set all of this in motion and continues to play a major role in how a large number of people (members or not) receive a variety of news items at their fingertips. By iterating the open, tactical aspects of their holistic user experience (i.e. feed widgets, top mailed articles, reviews of articles, etc.) while adding content (i.e. specific opinion blogs such as the HuffingtonPost.com), Yahoo! innovates by keeping one foot in the tactical realm of Web 2.0, with the other firmly planted in the strategic realm of the business philosophy.

It takes two feet to walk the walk.

As DeWitt Clinton has recognized, Web 2.0 is also about working together to reach a common goal across company lines. Forget the feeds and the tagging and the asynchronous display of data; collaboration between progressively run web firms is the biggest open paradigm shift one can imagine. Could this concept of collaboration and strategic balance be something that Yahoo! — a former Google-type firm which did experience the market correction of all market corrections in the bust of 2001 — has mandated itself to follow? Maybe it’s not schizophrenic to play both sides of the Web 2.0 fence; maybe it’s a solid business model.

With their historical record of successful brand extension — creating and/or acquiring useful, engaging experiences to change actual industries (i.e. News, Finance, Jobs, etc.) — I wouldn’t bet against Yahoo! in convincing Hollywood, through either the front or backdoor, to operate in a fashion that is more open than not.

Will the geek-to-media employee ratio be higher in the Valley than in Santa Monica? Sure. When in Rome, hire Romans, but so what? 154 years of Internet experience isn’t going to be thrown out the window because a handful of media executives are brought on-board. Will the output of this venture be as revolutionary as Yahoo! News or Finance? That’s left to be seen, but with Yahoo!’s track record, why be pessimistic?

Yahoo! espouses the tactical and philosophical pillars of Web 2.0, yet also understands business and how to engage in change. They’re no AOL.

UPDATE: AOL bought Weblogs, Inc. Let’s see how long it takes them to assert full control.

Newsweek and Technorati are in bed together and I’m really hoping it isn’t a monogamous relationship.

I’m not sure when this started, but Newsweek is now citing "Blog Talk," creating a contextual column from the Newsweek article page (first image, click for larger image) that links to a full Blog Talk page (second image) which presents the last 10 blogs posts that have linked to the Newsweek article. This is being done automatically, sans any editorial review.

I’m currently working on a project for which I presented this exact context scenario for our blogger design persona. I couldn’t believe the serendipity. So to ensure the API and execution would support our needs, I ran a quick test and posted a response to the "I’m So Sorry" article, linking back to the story URL. Within 10 minutes of pinging Technorati, my post appeared on the Newsweek page. Okay, that’s very progressive. Sure, it’s only a glorified trackback system, but the underlying philosophy has huge implications.

We’re quickly moving to a sustainable model for presenting the individual perspective on the same level as mainstream media’s editorial-driven journalism. It’s a win-win; a site like Newsweek gets an increased blogger readership and bloggers have the opportunity to share their perspectives with people that tend to stay away from the scattered blogosphere.

From my perspective, this is the first step to truly legitimizing the blogosphere. What’s next? Well, if Google, Yahoo! and other mainstream news aggregators began to index blogs for their search queries, we’d be one step closer to breaking through the mainstream media stranglehold on information for the average American that receives their news on-line. All of this is what the promise of Community TV was supposed to provide twenty years ago, but ran into the obvious production challenges.

This is really good. It’s good for business, good for bloggers, and most importantly, good for bubbling the truth of a story to the surface. This is discourse.

Alright, I admit it. I didn’t get out (or online) much while I worked for Ameritrade. 60 hour work weeks for two straight years while building a design practice and a forward-thinking trading platform will do that to your peripheral vision. Well, I’m making up for lost time, slowing down to explore the web… big time.

• Flickr is sooo good
• My teeth are stuck in del.icio.us
• I’m blown away by the approach and possibilities of Technorati

The IA in me is smiling. No, not for the sheer joy of seeing community indexing, the IA in me is smiling because it’s becoming clear to me where the web is heading, and it’s not following a topical, structured, media-filtered path.

Take Technorati. The approach is like a Bizarro perspective of the mainstream media.

Now, Technorati isn’t dumb, ugly or inhumane as in the illustration below, but it is backwards when looking at it through the typical political/news media lens of corporate America.

I mean, the mainstream media reports news by using explicit filters to ensure that what is published or broadcasted supports the primary objectives of capitalism. In the past, I’ve ranted about the much needed expansion of the Google and Yahoo! news model to place blogs into the mix when drawing from indexed sources. Well, Technorati flipped the model entirely with an approach to sharing information that spits in the eye of mainstream media constructs, creating a communal approach to digesting information. There are no "vanilla" labels of a topical navigation, splitting the world into simplified categories and driving a pre-conceived notion of "valuable" content into the skulls of society.

Technorati leverages tagging to present contextual concepts of information back to the user based on our desires.

Run a tag search on "free speech" and you get a descriptive page of the latest blog entries, Flickr images and a contextual list of social bookmarks which include mainstream media articles (based on del.icio.us and Furl tagging). It took me a few returns to stumble upon the revolutionary aspect of this approach. I mean, three months ago, I would’ve been happy if Google News simply added a column of contextual links of blog post that corresponded to a search query. Technorati has flipped the script and placed the hierarchy crown on the head of bloggers, reducing the "real" media to a column of "see also’s."

I love it.

So where can this go? Can this approach sustain a movement towards fundamentally altering how American society is exposed to, finds and digests information? Man, "it depends" is such an understatement.

• If Technorati can reach a tipping point, similar to Google a few years back, where, say, Tony Soprano is shown "Technorating" waste management on his computer, the impact on society could be huge. People will start to look for information from other people (sans an editorial slant)
• If Technorati partners with a Google or a Yahoo! to provide user-generated content within their results pages, society will begin to experience contextual alternatives to mainstream reporting, entertainment, et al without being forced to have to go search for it through RSS and other technical means.
• If Technorati is bought by a Google or a Yahoo!, all bets are off. Only time would tell if Chomsky’s "propaganda model" proves itself to be a truism or if new media and it’s superstars are exceptions to the rule.

No matter what, it’s obvious that the web’s semantic synapses are continuing to form. This is only the beginning.

A few years ago I ranted about my fear of a society where the media is absolutely controlled by corporate interests.

Now, my head wasn’t in the sand. I obviously realized that we were already living in a particular version of such a world, as money and power drives practically everything in this country. I was just a little concerned with the audacity of the FCC to even consider the type of deregulation it ended up approving. Sure, it happens every day; legislation lobbyed for by people in power turns around to increase the empowerment of those same people. I mean, this is how the free market works. But this legislation goes beyond just making money for the upper class.

If you view media reach as ephemeral noise in the ether, then the concerns of this post won’t bother you. Feel free to hop over to Amazon and consume away.

The fact is that Americans are glued to the tube and this type of conglomerate legislation — spanning all media (television, print, radio and the internet) — has now allowed for a greater possiblity to create a lasting, singular, corporate perspective in the psychology of the moment and beyond. Consume messaging has been given even more proximity to our children’s brains.

They Live shades are looking pretty good right about now.

So without the prospects of landing a pair of magic sunglasses, what exactly can be done to defend ourselves from this destructive approach to creating a consumer culture at all costs? As a contributor to public discourse, I’ve always believed that the ‘net (in 1997), and specifically, blogs (over the last five years) were a key development in the fight to present a perspective to battle corporate or government disinformation. Why?

• With blogging, there’s no managing editor around with advertising pressures to censor (or generate) a particular perspective. (Well, that is until the corporate structure tries to jack the nomenclature of blogging to dilute it’s effectiveness outside the reach of capitalism)
• Blogs are also a time permitting endeavor; you can publish many times a day or once a year. There isn’t a revenue figure to drive towards, which allows for individual perspectives to be expressed at will

This break from the days of publishing via the standard print revenue generation model is something akin to the advent of the printing press, yet with the merchant nation-state taking the place of the previously empowered Church. Okay, maybe that’s a little pre-mature, but the possibilities are there. And what are the possibilities?

Over the past few years, the blogging revolution has become more and more accessible and mainstream with the advent of RSS and aggregate readers. With Yahoo! adding access to RSS feeds to their My Yahoo! content modules, blogs are one step closer to being mainstream. But this last step is a big one, steeped in moral conviction… a belief in the common man. Why?

Until blogs are automatically indexed as viable, alternative feeds when running, say, a news query at Google or Yahoo!, they are going to, at best, sit on the periphery of the conscious of the world’s inhabitants. The average person does not have the time, nor the patience, to sift through the pedagogy of managing RSS. Bookmarks are about as much as they can handle. Blogs do return in general search queries, but this “general return only” pre-supposes a value level to the quality of the information being retrieved. You know, a perspective or opinion or even investigative research presented by a blogger has less value than a feed from the New York Times, The Washington Post, etc.

That’s why this information retrieval concept would have to be one generated out of moral conviction. By keeping news sources limited strictly to incorporated, staffed and vested (in the economic structure of society) newspapers, a Google (or any other news search engine) is basically saying that only these sources can report and editorialize news. Even though Google has gone a long way in presenting perspectives from small and foreign sources, providing the chance opportunity for conflicting perspective, it’s still not enough.

It seems to me that with a search capability, news aggregator and a blogging tool, Google and Yahoo! are best poised to create convergence between the “professional” news organizations and blogging communities, within the boundaries of their individual interfaces. How accessible blogs become in the presentation, will be a litmus test of their commitment to providing contextual channels within the information age, while creating usable interfaces for digesting a world of information overload and disinformation.

It’s completely doable and their historical commitment to data mining and information presentation doesn’t seem to indicate that they’ll shy away from heading in this direction. Well, as long as blogs don’t impact their institutional investors or advertisers in a negative light, that is.

It was around 1989 that I read Six Days of the Condor — a perfect story for an 18 year-old, chock full of deceit, murder, paranoia, sex, intrigue, spies. For some reason — possibly my attention span at the time — the end of the book threw me for a loop. So tonight, I kicked back with my Netflix choice of the week and watched the film adaptation: Three Days of the Condor.

Three words: Rent. it. now.

It was made 28 years ago, yet the plot line has come to life in eerie fashion over the last few years. I don’t want to ruin the movie for you, so if you are going to rent it, don’t read on.

Condor (played by Robert Redford) is a spy, and per chance, misses a hit on his office that leaves the entire office of seven dead. After some brilliant screenwriting, we come to find out that one of his previous reports, sent off to Langley as usual, hit a nerve within a secret faction of the CIA that just happened to be playing war games concerning the overthrow of an unstable regime in the Middle East in order to gain control of oil reserves.

Sure, the US has been meddling with numerous foreign spots over the past 50 years to keep a stranglehold on power, but shivers the size of nine inch nails traveled down my spine just the same.

The rogue CIA unit ordered the execution of the entire office after reading Condor’s spot-on investigative report, so he does the only thing he can and goes on the run to plan his next step. After outwitting numerous suits over the course of the film, he ends up confronting the CIA Director directly in front of the New York Times office in Manhattan.

After a quick verbal sparring over the morality of what our government was doing, Condor tells the Director that the story is out and the Times will be publishing it all. The film ends with the CIA Director asking Condor,

“What if they don’t print it, then where will you go?”

Redford’s face drops a bit as the last frame freezes on him.

Does Our Press Get Squeezed?

Forget the uncanny plot line that syncs up with the recent activity in Iraq (and the wild coincidence of the main NYC CIA office being in the WTC) all together. It’s eerie to see this on film, but I’m more interested with the final jab.

I often wonder how free our press really is. Our government has indoctrinated us to speak so harshly against media practices around the world, especially during the eighties and in the midst the cold war (when I was an impressionable teenager). The old “look, over there!” trick has done the trick to build a sycophantic capitalist society of productive worker bees.

Here’s something to ponder: Did you know that congress is on the verge of passing unprecedented legislation, allowing media entities to merge with minimal limitations? Can you imagine what this could mean in an Orwellian novel? Or in this capitalist society where an individual, like Bill Gates, has more wealth than the bottom 45 percent of American households combined?

Less and less competitive news media = a singular perspective.

• Advertising revenue begins to drive editorial premise and journalistic objectivity.
• Agendas are set and met.
• A top down, targeted media push (via news, marketing, advertising, programming, etc.) becomes the mainstay of communication operations.

Our society has evolved from watching the news on TV at 6 and 11 (1970’s) to digesting news 24 hours a day on TV, radio, and the internet (1990’s) to having access to thousands of individual perspectives blasting on blogs (present). So with all of this newfound access we should feel both informed and empowered, right?

To quote Mel Gibson from Conspiracy Theory, “That’s what they want us to think.”

For even the most advanced netizen, information technology is still a hindrance when trying to decipher noise from news, and fiction from fact. Simple to use, individually operated publishing channels are now available to the masses through blogging, but the reach to the majority is minimal at best as they’re presented in a non-digestible ecosystem.

I can easily imagine the power structure in this country thinking:

Let the kids play with their toys — be it bloggers broadcasting opinions based on theory or fact — no one will be able to tell the difference. No one will ever connect the dots even if they do find “truth.” The sheer amount of posts and opinions projected outwards will make all opinions null and void.

Our organized, top-down messaging is so strong via advertising, marketing, media, etc., that the bottom-up representation of the people will become lost in the noise of the the mainstream media, as well as in it’s own scattered presentation.

We’ll then use their information as data to feed our strategic messaging.

Americans have turned into thought veal over the past twenty-years. We’ve been tenderized perfectly to be devoured oh-so-nicely in an economic system that is set up to succeed only if the masses over-consume everything from food to entertainment to material goods to political punditry.

This is the boogie man that lives under my bed. I step on his throat when getting up each morning.