Tag Archives: Kommons

What I read, December 2010

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On Kommons, Andrew Spittle asked what I’m reading now that I’m no longer on Twitter or Facebook. For now, I mostly consume content with Reeder (on the iPhone and desktop, and synced with Google Reader), Instapaper, or as podcasts. My Economist print subscription lapsed about a month ago but I’m thinking about picking it up again.

There’s a balance to my RSS consumption. I subscribe to sites like Techmeme and Mediagazer to keep tabs on the zeitgeist. Nieman Lab and Romenesko are requirements to keep up with the industry. When they publish, Ethan Zuckerman, Jonathan Stray, Paul Graham, Mark Pesce, and Stijn Debrouwere always offer unexpected insight. I also subscribe to a dozen or so people’s personal Twitter accounts, partly because they share good links and partly to keep up with what my friends are up to.

My Instapaper is mostly fed by longer items I come across by RSS, the Instapaper homepage, or Give Me Something to Read.

As far as podcasts go, there’s another dozen or so I listen to on a regular basis. These include Spark from CBC Radio, BBC Digital Planet, Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, a few from FORA.tv, IT Conversations, NPR’s Planet Money, WNYC’s On The Media, Peter Day’s World of Business, Rebooting the News, Seminars about Long-Term Thinking, and This Week in Tech. Podcasts are likely my favorite form of media. They’re good fodder for daydreaming during long runs or workouts.

If you’d like, you can also download my whole OPML file.

Challenges in quitting Twitter and Facebook

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On Kommons, Tal asks:

You recently quit both Twitter and Facebook. As someone who works in Internet and media, what challenges have you faced? Will you come back?

Quitting Twitter has been a mixed bag. The most significant challenge is not being able to influence the news innovation zeitgeist as directly or as visibly. This isn’t to say I was all that influential to begin with; rather Twitter has better mechanisms for understanding how what you’re mindthinking resonates with others. Retweets or click-throughs indicate whether you’re on point, @replies show whether people want to engage in conversation on a given subject, and who’s following you is a sign of your reputation within that community. It isn’t quite the same publishing on a personal website where the subscription mechanism is RSS, interactivity is limited to longer-form commenting and trackbacks, and there’s no way of presenting who reads you.

I suppose the second most difficult challenge is tracking conversations. There were 100 or so people whom I’d pay the most attention. The real-time nature of the platform, coupled with people being logged in all the time, creates a space like a large ballroom where you can go ask someone a question at any time. I can still hear snippets of conversation by subscribing to a limited number of people by RSS, or paying more attention to roundups like Nieman Lab’s, but the experience is only 50% as engaging as it used to be.

On the flip side, there are two things I’ve been fortunate to escape: the increasingly loud echo chamber any time a bit of news breaks is artfully manufactured and the circular, inward obsession with “social media” on “social media”.

Quitting Facebook was easy, except for a bit of hate from the girlfriend. The only use I’ve been missing people for is looking people up; that Facebook is a structured people database is quite nice. There should be an open equivalent based on microformatted websites.

The honest truth is the first few weeks weren’t tough at all; not spending all my time on (mostly) Twitter and (less so) Facebook meant I’ve had a lot more time to work on new releases for side projects, read long-form, and hang out with my girlfriend. The last week or so has been difficult, I feel disconnected from the hive mind, but I won’t be back until there’s an open, interoperable protocol for real-time publishing I can run on my own server. It’s pretty awesome to be able to look up and reference your content from a few years back.

The river must flow. You can build a dam but the water will find an alternate path.

Two pieces, loosely joined

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explainthis.org

Part one. Late last night, Jay Rosen published a small peek at an idea for a new type of news site. ExplainThis.org would be a platform to connect users with questions to journalists with research and communication skills. Jay’s perspective on this idea has a few notable features: users would be able to coalesce around questions by voting up the ones they have in common, the questions would be more complex that what could be answered through a simple search, and the answers would require “real journalism” to be marked off as complete. It’s also distinguished from Cody Brown’s next big idea in that it would limit the answering participation to “journalists”, although it’s not clear how Jay would define this term, and that the questions would focus more on issues of national interest.

Part two. Through a post by Charlie Stross, I learned from The Observer today that drug money is actually what saved banks in the liquidity crisis, according to the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime:

Speaking from his office in Vienna, [Antonio Maria] Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.

Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.

British bankers want to see the evidence he has to back up those claims and, as a reader, I was left completely perplexed and boggled as to whether this is a significant story or not.

These two parts don’t need to be mutually exclusive. The starting point could be zero, “What questions do you have?” in Jay’s case, but the starting point can also be further along the continuum of discovering the truth for a particular topic. Adding the ability for the user to ask follow-up questions, with the expectation that the journalist will continue researching the most important of them, would be a powerful approach for more quickly getting at what the community needs to know. Pragmatically, this functionality could mimic work NewsMixer has already done: one type of user comment is a question. In the context of the drug money story, I’d like to ask what the implications are if the facts are true.

The story shouldn’t attempt to be a definitive account of what happened, but rather an entry point for deeper learning.