It’s time to iterate on the product formerly known as the RSS reader. Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr are going in a direction that emphasizes usability and ephemerality over durable value and utility. I want someone to do to the RSS reader what Apple has done to the iPhone. The iPhone is a phone — but it’s also a completely different paradigm.
Half the comments I get on Twitter are part of a “media strategy.”
Which means someone read a book that said if you want to achieve success you have to “engage” with people.
I bet Klout has something to do with it. If they get a reply from me, that counts as a certain number of points toward their score. Which theoretically I guess gets them consulting business, working on other people’s “media strategies.”
So they ask questions a machine could come up with. I recommend an author. They ask if they should read one of his or her books. I don’t know.
People must realize, don’t they, that this is all pointless. It’s a bubble on a bubble on a bubble on a bubble. When you dilute things that much, is there really anything left?
Dave Winer — The idiocracy of social media
Corporate blogging silos. I agree with Dave Winer; it’s quite nice to have access to your history.
How hyperlocal has a future. Dave Winer’s advice for publishers: “be sure you control your own publishing and distribution.” NYU has a hyperlocal conclave this Saturday with a tools discussion that’s sure to be fun.
Rebooting the News with Dave Winer and Jay Rosen, live at #ONA10. They’re reviewing the master narratives for the rebooted system of news. I’d like to highlight the key points.
“Every node in the network is a news node.” The easiest way to see this is in the Twitter network, where every user is a potential source of news.
Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.
“It’s easier trust ‘here’s where I’m coming’ from than the ‘view from nowhere’.” A reason for this is that people have access to a lot more news, as well as background information on that news. Journalists traditionally believe that the “mask of objectivity” is what allows people to trust them. Now, users can see the shallowness of the approach.
It’s dangerous for the news industry to rely on the tech industry for the next generation of publishing tools. Journalists cover tech icons as if they were messiahs. This creates a situation where news organizations passively absorb direction from the voice of God. There is a wish and hope the iPad will deliver a magic solution for newspapers.
The news system was built to deliver a stream of updates about what is new today. It’s been weak on context, or the background information you need to understand the story. A major design challenge in the rebooted system of news is how you can deliver both at the same time.
Question: How would you reboot mid-term election coverage?
Rosen: You’d develop a citizen’s agenda for coverage by polling the citizenry for what they want politicians to talk about. Then, in political debates, you’d look at whether the candidates are actually discuss those issues.
Question: Where should transparency be shown in news coverage?
Rosen: The easiest way would be to just link the byline to a background page on the reporter. It should have a listing of relevant topics and your perspective on them. Instead of saying “here’s the view from nowhere,” you’d say “here’s all of the information I had to write this piece.”
Winer: It’s not always about transparency, either. It’s about being clear about where you’re coming from. A blind man approaching the back of an elephant is going to have a completely different perspective than a blind man approaching the front of the elephant.
Question: Where should news organizations go if they can’t rely on technology companies for the future?
Winer: We’re really, really, really early in the news system of the future. Twitter is a large company now, but it doesn’t have a guaranteed position. For instance, updates on Twitter are limited to 140 characters. Is this the ideal length for a news item? Probably not; there’s room for innovation. Do it yourself.
Question: What is open source, can it be applied to the news industry and, if so, in what ways?
Winer: They’ve actually giving some things away but others aren’t free. Licenses for software use to run hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, certain things are given away but other things are charged for. ”Who cares how you pay the bills?” The news industry insists to make money in a very particular way. Anything else is sacreligious. It’s this inflexibility that’s breaking the business.
Rosen: The motivations of people who contribute to open source projects are usually “if we all contribute, then we can all benefit and others can benefit too.” Just think about what we could do if we applied this to news.
Winer: Others choose to go open source to wipe out their competitors. The analog in the news industry is “open the doors” and let everyone contribute. Otherwise, they’ll fork you. Whomever embraces this model, and does it well, will win.
Inspired by the paragraph-level permalinks on Jay Rosen’s new Pressthink, I quickly whipped up a plugin last Thursday night to bring this functionality to WordPress. The name? WinerLinks, an homage to Dave Winer who is a rather prolific proto-user.
WinerLinks gives you paragraph-level permalinks on your posts or pages. v0.2, released just a moment ago, adds WinerLinks to your RSS feed too, as well as a magical showy-hidey mode if you only want the links to appear on hover.
Download it at WordPress.org, leave feature requests or bugs in the forum, and fork the project on GitHub.
Every so often, I have one of those runs where I listen to a super inspirational podcast and come back with more ideas than I have the time to write them down. Tonight was one of those nights.
Dave Winer and Jay Rosen in the 12th edition of Rebooting the News explore a concept Dave refers to as a “coral reef” for local information. The importance of a coral reef in the sea is that it is a habitat for many other species to prosper. His argument for starting In Berkeley, what he thinks is the first local blog for Berkley, is that it might provide a coral reef for a lot of tremendous local data to grow from. Given the right formats for information storage, it can become a repository for community knowledge that everyone within the community can both contribute to and benefit from. What got me thinking, though, was what these formats might be.
