Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 08/17/2008 - 14:28
Yesterday, Kim was out registering voters at the Milford Oyster festival. I stopped by and ran into Tessa Marquis and had an interesting talk about citizen journalism and I’d like to illustrate a few different points of this from recent events.
First, I’m no expert on journalism, so if what I’m suggesting doesn’t make sense, I apologize. However, it seems to me that there are three key aspects to any journalism endeavor. First, there is the gathering of information. Then, there is the ‘sense making’, finding a story line or narrative that is compelling, and then there is the distribution.
This gets to a key problem that live bloggers run into. Too often they are trying to gather information and make sense of what is going on all at the same time. This can draw them out of the moment, and they can miss important information.
So, when I am live blogging, or doing various forms of mobile social media, I try to simply gather information and get it distributed as quickly as possible. Then, when I get back home from an event, I can try to make sense, and write up a longer, more narratively interesting entry. What is nice about this approach is also the collaborative aspect. If people see my comments, photographs or listen to my audio posts, they can grab and do their own sense making out of it, even if the sense they make ends up much different than the sense I eventually make out of it.
My blog post yesterday is a good example of that. Local Politics is a picture that I took with my cellphone, which I added a small amount of text to and sent on to Flickr, which in turn posted it to my blog. Later, Mike Brown posted additional information about the candidates to help with the sense making process. When and if I get time, I hope to write up a more detailed post about the Oyster Festival, but the way things are piling up, that just may not happen.
So, if we break apart the information gathering part of the journalistic process from the sense making part, we may find that we want to apply the distribution to both the information gathering part of the process in addition to the sense making part.
As I have been working to get bloggers, delegates, and others going to Denver to submit their information via cellphones to sites like Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and so on, I’ve also been working on the distribution channels of this raw information. The DemConvention Room on FriendFeed is set up to pull in information from many such sources so people can look at a fairly raw, unedited feed, and then decide what they want to use for their own sense making.
CSpan is getting into this game as well. They have just set up an account on Twitter and have additional plans in place for their website, which will include aggregating messages on Twitter flagged with the #DNC08 and #RNC08 hashtags.
Here in Connecticut, Lon Seidman has set up http://ctgoestodenver.info/, a site that will have various content from the Connecticut Delegation in Denver.
Over the past few days, I’ve been getting into discussions with various conservatives comparing their concern about big government with liberals about their concern about big business. My primary concern is that centralized power, whether it be with big government or big businesses is not the best way of addressing the issues we face.
Some may note that these days the dividing line between big business and big government is becoming blurrier. Others may note that this discuss applies much more broadly and may talk about peer-to-peer networks as opposed to highly centralized networks. These are interesting topics worth exploring. However, today, I want to focus on the conservative response and what I think are some of the flaws.
The conservative response focuses on the free market, and their belief that free markets are the best ways of addressing problems. Some would argue that our markets are not really free, but that government policies particularly benefit big business. They would point to the vast sums that big business spends on lobbying. This argument has a lot of merit, but still, we need to dig deeper.
The free market enthusiasts all recognize the danger of monopolies. Monopolies prevent free markets from doing their magic. Yet they often look at monopolies in terms of whether there is a single corporation controlling the market, and over look the aspects of when several companies are virtually indistinguishable from one another and this group of similar companies controls the market.
This leads us to the key issue. Free markets are good at rewarding short-term profitability, short term profitability may not be the best way to address problems. If one company is very successful, other companies will imitate these companies and the largest companies end up being very similar, and we lose any sort of diversity. Personally, I don’t find a lot of difference between Burger King, Wendy’s or McDonald’s. I don’t see a lot of difference between Verizon and AT&T. I don’t see a lot of difference between ABC, NBC, and CBS. I don’t see a lot of difference between Borders and Barnes and Noble. I don’t see a lot of difference between Budweiser and Miller. I don’t see a lot of difference between Ford, GM and Dodge.
Essentially, free markets tend to create monocultures with minor differences between the brands. So, what is wrong with monocultures? Look at nineteenth century Ireland for the answer. Everyone was growing the same type of potatoes. It was the most profitable crop, at least in the short term, just as SUVs had been the most profitable vehicle in the United States for quite a while. However, when things changed, such as the potato blight in Ireland, or the steep increase in gasoline prices, the profitable crops and products rapidly became unprofitable and massive dislocations were created.
Those interested in longer term stability would do well to look beyond a simplistic view of free markets and think about how we can promote a better diversified economy.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/15/2008 - 14:08
I've been spending a lot of time talking with various bloggers going to Denver to cover the Democratic National Convention. It is expensive to get there, pay for food, housing, and whatever else. Many of the bloggers have set up 'ChipIn pages', so I've gathered several of these.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 08/13/2008 - 18:49
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to get anyone going to Denver to start using mobile social media. I’ve spoken with delegates and bloggers about how to start using Twitter, how to send text, pictures and videos directly from their cellphones. We’ve talked on phones, IM, emails and podcasts. I’ve talked about the importance of getting the raw, unfiltered and unedited stories out there as quickly as possible.
Today, I came across a story that really ties it all together. Noel Hidalgo, Noneck on Twitter and numerous other sites was deported from China for live streaming a pro-Tibet rally. The story is rapidly spreading around Twitter and the blogs. Rahaf Harfoush has this exclusive interview with Noel. Laura Fitton highlights the story, and everyone is talking about it on Twitter.
Years ago, soon after I married my first wife, I dragged her to a polling place for some election in New York City. I went in and voted. When I came out, my wife went into vote, but the machine wasn’t working. She came out and explained the situation to the poll worker, who said that she had lost her vote by coming out of the booth the way she did.
This was soon after Ferdinand Marcos had been removed from power in the Philippines. I started arguing with the poll worker saying he could not disenfranchise my wife. I talked about people dying in the Philippines for the right to vote. A police officer came over, and then the moderator of the polling location. It was early in the day. Six people were listed as having voted. Yet the voting machine only showed five votes. It turned out that the poll worker had forgotten to press some button which would have enabled my wife to vote. The moderator addressed the situation and my wife received her chance to vote.
Yeah, there were differences between New York City and Manila. There will be differences between Beijing and Denver, but there are similarities. In the United States, we hold the right to vote and the freedom of the press as sacrosanct. Yet too often, we take it for granted. Yet one thing that is important about Sen. Obama’s campaign, is that it is reminding all of us about the importance of our vote, that our vote can make a difference.
Likewise, Noel’s experience in Beijing should be a reminder of the importance of a free press. I hope that everyone going to Denver will do their part to support a free press, especially by bringing their cellphones and posting from Denver as events happen.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/29/2008 - 19:51 (Check me out!)
Sunday afternoon, I drove up to a graduation party for Avery Doninger, the young blogger who was disciplined for her criticism of the school administration at Lewis Mills High School in Burlington, CT. On the drive up, my daughter and I saw lightning hit a transformer, and we captured various parts of this trip with pictures, videos and audio messages from my cellphone.
Leaving from Woodbridge, it was a sunny, pleasant day. We drove up Route 8. After passing Waterbury, we saw large storm clouds gathering in the west. I was struck by how picturesque they were, so I took two photographs.
I noted the ominous feeling of the coming storm, without knowing what I was really about to encounter.
As we approached the Harwinton exit, the rain started coming down, hard. After I left the highway, I found an opportunity to put the cellphone on the dashboard and get a brief video of driving through the rain. By then, the rain had slowed down a little, but it was still substantial.
We were driving along Route 4, almost in Burlington when I started seeing lightning. I wondered if I could find a good way to set up the cellphone to capture some of the lightning. All of a sudden, in my rear view mirror, I saw lightning strike a telephone pole. I pulled into the next parking lot and prepared to take another video with my cellphone. Just as I started taking my video, the transformer exploded and the power lines came crashing down, almost hitting the car we were in.
I called 911 to report the explosion and the small fire the downed power lines had started. Then I drove down the road across the street from the downed power lines. I hopped out of the car and took this picture of the smoldering grass and the downed lines.
I also posted a quick update via Twitterfone. Twitterfone transcribed the voice and sent it on to Twitter which in turn sent it to Facebook and FriendFeed. At this point, I continued on to the party.
It was a good party, but we had to leave early for Fiona’s Blog Talk Radio show. Needless to say, we talked a bit about the party and the transformer explosion on the show.
On the way home, I posted one final comment via Utterz:
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/29/2008 - 09:53 (Check me out!)
Lowell, MA – Saturday, the New England News Forum convened a gathering of professional journalists, journalist educators, bloggers, citizen journalists, and others interested in the future of journalism to discuss ‘Sharing the News’. The most important thing I learned from this gathering is that I am not a Citizen Journalist.
There were many ways in which the phrase or idea of Citizen Journalism was challenged. Some wanted to see it broadened. Why ‘Citizen’? What about people who are not citizens? Do not people visiting from other countries also have a say? Should we instead use the word ‘Resident’, instead? Yet others spoke about journalism as a civic duty, similar to being called to serve on a jury. From their perspective Citizen Journalism has everything to do with citizenship. Everyone is likely at one point or another to report about what they have seen in a journalistic manner, and people need to understand that and how best to do it.
The word journalism received even more challenges. Some people recognized that not everyone who writes something online, even if they are writing in a journalistic style, even if they are writing for an organization that provides news created by professional journalists, such as people that participate in CNN’s iReports project, consider themselves journalists. This is compounded by the issue that many journalism professionals seem to think that if you don’t have a journalism degree, aren’t a member of a professional journalism guild, and aren’t getting paid for what you do, then you aren’t a journalist.
Various other names were presented, such as ‘resident correspondent’, which seems to fit much more nicely, especially for those resident correspondents that are corresponding with a traditional news organization.
Doug McGill led a fascinating discussion about discussion about the ‘Journalism in a Day’ workshops that he has been leading. One of the ideas that he presented is that it is unethical to write “I went to a meeting” type reports, listing out what happened in chronological order and expecting the readers to make sense out of it. I’m not sure that I agree with that. There are times that what is needed is simply for someone to document what happened, without trying to make sense out of it or present it in an easy to read, coherent story.
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 06/23/2008 - 15:28 (Check me out!)
Today is the first day of Personal Democracy Forum, #pdf2008, and I am trying to make sense of my feelings about not being there. I don’t think it is sour grapes. I couldn’t justify paying the price of attending, and I just didn’t feel like scrambling to get in as a panelist, volunteer, scholarship, member of the press or so other sort of comp.
No, it feels to me like PDF has lost the personal touch. I spoke a little bit about that last year, and it feels even more so this year. It all feels so predictable, the usual speakers saying the usual things, various attendees complaining about panels led by four white men, and others being too crowded to get into.
Yes, I would have loved to hear Zephyr Teachout speak. I got a sense of what she was saying through Andy Carvin’s Tweets. It sounds like she still gets the personal aspect of it. I suspect that a discussion with her about her ideas in a coffee shop in Burlington would be great, but I suspect the hall at Lincoln Center was a less personal venue.
Yet from other tidbits I’ve picked up on Twitter, I wonder if the growing community of PDF is the growing community of those working, one way or another, in Internet Enabled Electioneering.
Micah Sifry started things off with a comment about how small donor networking has taken big-money politics down a notch. Has it? Sure, there are a lot of smaller donors fattening the campaigns’ coffers, but these coffers are larger than ever. On the spending side, politics is bigger money than ever. It would be interesting to know how much of this is going to media companies, both new and old.
So, what do we see at PDF this year? Wonderful maps of the influence of Internet based media. Presidential Watch 08 gives a map of the political blogosphere. All of the big name media companies are there. The campaigns are there. The DCCC and DNC are there, but what is missing is the long tail.
There was a brief discussion about MoveOn being on the fringe and Tracy Russo noted that this is one of the problems of web-only metrics. I suspect that if you look at the long tail of blogs by unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, you might see a very different picture.
The problem is that it is very hard to quantify the impact of these unknown and unidentified MoveOn supporters, and if you can’t quantify it, it doesn’t really matter, right? After all, what matters most is the quantified results of voting scheduled to take place in November, right?
Well, I think this reflects the myopic perspective of those who focus on electioneering to the exclusion of governance. How do you quantify Learned Hand’s criticism Oliver Wendell Holmes’ opinion of Schenck v United States and the effect that it the criticism had on subsequent First Amendment jurisprudence? How do you quantify the value of some unknown medical professionals who voluntarily provided an operation on James Lowe’s cleft pallet and its effect on the debate in health care in America?
All of this makes me think of this scene when a Cardinal was coming to Assisi in the moving about St. Francis entitled “Brother Sun, Sister Moon”. One of Francesco’s friends urges a mutual friend who has taken up with Francesco to come and speak to the Cardinal. The friend says that he doesn’t have anything to say to the Cardinal, but Francesco says, there are many that you could say, much of it centered around helping the poor. (Note, this is my vague recollection of the movie from many years ago and I may not have the details exact, I couldn’t easily verify them online, but it captures the idea.)
Perhaps this captures my ambivalence about going to PDF. On the one hand, I don’t feel like I have a lot to say to Arianna Huffington or Ana Marie Cox. I doubt they would listen anyway. On the other hand, perhaps Francesco is right. Perhaps we need to remind those focused on Internet Enabled Electioneering on the bigger picture.
Lets work on making our democracy, all aspects of it, a little more personal.
Partly as a result of this, there will be a session Saturday June 28th at Sharing the news: Reaching students, training citizens, being organized by the New England News Forum. There have been some interesting emails about trying to define what Fair Use really should mean for bloggers, how disputes over Fair Use should be approached, and some of the problems with the lack of due process in Digital Millennium Copyright Act Takedown Notices. I look forward to continuing this discussion in Lowell.
Then, today, I saw an article in the Washington Post, AP Says Drudge Retort Excerpt 'Matter' Closed; No Official Policy Announced. It described the results as non-response response following the usual pattern of trying to shut the door after the horses are not only out of the barn but on into the next county
Part of this non-response was:
In addition, the AP has had a constructive exchange of views this week with a number of interested parties in the blogging community about the relationship between news providers and bloggers and that dialogue will continue.
Unfortunately, the AP is not currently planning to join in the dialog in Lowell. Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of the AP, responded to an invitation to speak in Lowell by saying:
Thanks for the invite. I'd love to help, but we won't be in a position to talk about this subject in detail for a little while longer. The latest episode raised some issues that need to be discussed and decided here, and that probably won't happen in the timeframe of the panel.
In the meantime, I can't put us in a position of speaking publicly. Thanks again for thinking of us.
The AP statement quoted in the Washington Post ended on a more hopeful note. The resolution of this matter illustrates that the interests of bloggers can be served while still respecting the intellectual property rights of news providers.
Yes, the interests of bloggers and the interests of other intellectual property right holders can be well served when everyone is willing to sit down and discuss how best to meet everyone’s interests. It is unfortunate that the Associated Press will not be participating in this discussion in Lowell.
Update: Hat Tip to Jay Rosen, for providing the following additional links:
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 06/19/2008 - 15:37 (Check me out!)
The recent DMCA takedown request by the Associated Press and the related issues that have sprung up are being hotly debated in across the blogosphere, but what is mostly being lost in the debate is who should establish best practices guidelines for the Fair Use of Copyrighted Material on Blogs, and how the DMCA should be used in this debate.
Background
For those who haven’t been following, recently the Associated Press filed seven DMCA Takedowns against the Drudge Retort. The posts contained short excerpts of the articles -- ranging in length from 33 to 79 words. In addition, Drudge Retort a community site comparable in function to Digg, Reddit and Mixx where users contribute blog entries of their own authorship and links to interesting news articles on the web. One would think that an organization like the Associated Press would like people to link to their articles as being interesting.
My understanding is that Rogers Cadenhead of The Retort contacted Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen about the best response, and Liza suggested that Rogers should contact the Media Bloggers Association, which has done great work defending bloggers in legal issues. In addition, the MBA has a long-standing relationship with the AP which might be useful in addressing the legal issues around the specific DMCA Takedown request.
Around the same time, Jeff Jarvis posted FU AP. A few days later, the New York Times ran this article. According to Jim Kennedy, vice president and strategy director of the AP “the company was going to meet with representatives of the Media Bloggers Association” and he hoped “that these discussions can all occur this week so that guidelines can be released soon.”
Kos hops in with this blog post about the fiasco by talking about dumbasses at the Media Bloggers Association and stating that The AP doesn't get to negotiate copyright law.
What both Kos and Cory miss are that the MBA is not negotiating copyright with the AP. Instead, the MBA is representing a blogger in a particular legal battle. Robert Cox, current head of the MBA posts his version of the back story on the Media Bloggers Association website.
Mary Hodder explains to Cory Doctorow a little bit about who the Media Bloggers Association is. Founding members included Jeff Jarvis, Jay Rosen, Rebecca MacKinnon and Micah Sifry.
Who is going to create such a statement for bloggers, citizen journalists and other users of online digital media? Perhaps the Associated Press, the Media Bloggers Association, Cory Doctorow, Kos, and members of many other organizations should work together to establish a statement of best practices that all the parties involved could come to basic agreement on.
Of course, this does not mean that there won’t be future conflicts. What is also needed is a way to address these conflicts in a more productive manner than filing DMCA takedown notices. There are lots of complaints about the DMCA, most notably the lack of due process in takedown notices. Many people are calling for revisions or repeal of the DMCA. Whatever happens, we would all be better off if organizations like the Associated Press and those that they are going after had better mechanisms resolving issues about what constitutes Fair Use for those areas not covered by a statement of best practices or where there is some disagreement about the best practices.
So, who is interested in working on addressing the bigger issues?
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