Ian Bogost on Newsgames. What most forms of traditional media aren’t good at are showing how things work, and that’s exactly what video games are great for. Must listen.
Ian Bogost on Newsgames
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Tag Archives: podcasts
Stormy Peters – Is Your Data Free?
Stormy Peters – Is Your Data Free? Exactly.
What I read, December 2010
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.
Fundamentally rebooting J school
Journalism education needs much more of a fundamental reboot than just adding courses to teach “social media,” and the world has room for one more podcast full of pundits to guide the transformation. We give you:
This Week in Rebooting the Ecosystem for Reinventing J school
Writer’s note (because there ain’t no editor): In all seriousness, the three of us love, like serious humanly love, This Week in Tech, Rebooting the News, and all people, podcasts, and/or cities we tease at in this episode. It’s only out of love that we jest. We have better technical difficulties too.
To frame the solutions to the problem, we begin by establishing some of the ways in which J school is a broken model for the 21st century. In most other fields, Joey Baker points out, academia is the research space. If that’s not the case, then it’s the military. The news industry is the only one where the industry leads and academia is behind.
Greg Linch points out another issue in that J schools, as institutions, are really slow to change. They have a critical inability to adapt quickly. This is a bigger issue in the 21st century because some of the tools journalists need to know how to use are changing at an exponential rate. As both Joey Baker and I point out, many of the tools taught in a four year undergraduate program are obsolete or nearing such a stage by graduation. J schools aren’t going to get back ahead by teaching “social media.” The problem isn’t with what they’re teaching, but rather how they’re teaching it. Another fundamental that needs to change.
Public Media Collaborative != Portland Media Lab
Both, however, are highly complementary projects to increase media fluency that will be able to build off each other in many ways.
On Friday afternoon, I had the chance to connect with Susan Mernit of Many Hats, Inc. for the very first time and Cornelius Swart of the Portland Sentinel and Portland Media Lab. I’ve been invited to work with Cornelius on the Portland Media Lab; our very first meeting is tomorrow, Monday the 15th, and I thought it would be worthwhile to talk with Susan about what they’ve learned in the several months the Public Media Collaborative has been developing in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The goal of the Public Media Collaborative is to educate local communities, non-profits, and grassroots movements on how to use a lot of the social media and publishing tools that are now available to empower people and build democracy. In Susan’s opinion, this is a bit different than the mission of the Portland Media Lab, but both Cornelius and I agree that tools training is at least a half of what we’d like the media incubator to be.
Our conversation with Susan about both projects is the first thirty minutes or so of the audio. We cover the origins of the Public Media Collaborative, what type of training it has accomplished thus far, and Susan’s community news startup of the very new future, Oakland Local. After she leaves, Cornelius and I talk a bit about ideas for the Portland Media Lab and what the future of journalism might hold in general.
As a note, I started editing the first fifteen minutes of audio before I realised how much I want to be a production engineer. If you find any major kerfuffles, let me know and I’ll update the production value.
Coral reefs for local information
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.
Podcasts for the ride home
In the interest of sharing my favorite podcasts of the previous year with my friend Shane, I thought I might open the recommendations to all. While on the drive home to turkey day, these are three “world changing” conversations you should consider listening to:
Howard Bloom on “The Global Brain” – IT Conversations
Howard talks with Jon Udell about collective consciousness and self-organizing species, and why the mass collaboration we think is emerging right now isn’t really all that unique. Shane, DJ, and I did discuss the episode on a Fertile Ambition call a month or so ago, but we ran into a headlock about the multi-tasking theory Howard presents.
“Is Aid to Africa Doing More Harm Than Good?” – Intelligence Squared U.S.
Brilliant arguments both for and against, and listening to the entire debate lends a better understanding of what the difficulties are in helping to bring basic needs to Africa.
Daniel Suarez on bot-mediated reality – Long Now Foundation/ FORA.tv
So thought-provoking I’ve listened to it twice. The first time put me in a trance for part of a train ride back down from Seattle. In short, the premise is this: we’re creating untold numbers of automated bots, or narrow artificial intelligence, on the web for specific purposes. When left unchecked, as many are, these bots have the potential to cause very messy situations which could have negative real world implications. One of the author’s proposals is to build a second, secure network of only verifiably human entities.
