The New York Times local online section for Fort Greene/Clinton Hill has a feature called Local Locals, in which Myryah Irby stops people on the street and asks them a few questions. Her husband takes a photo. The questions are superb. She jumps from “why are you raising money for cancer at a sidewalk sale” to “how many times have you been in love” and people go with it, they answer her. And she rolls into another question. I couldn’t stop reading these. (more…)
Ok, so the image is not the snazziest thing you’ve ever seen, but I don’t even have Photoshop on this computer at work, so I made this with a program called Pixelmator, which is free and has all the basic gadgets and gizmos as Photoshop.
For our July newsletter I wanted to create fun, original content, because we’ve really been lacking in that lately. I’ve been so busy with the research and writing of the 2010 books (6! Portland, Seattle, Twin Cities, Berkeley/Oakland…and new this year Silicon Valley and Denver!) that I’ve had little time to write and create new pieces. It was high time for some original editorial content. (more…)
And they say a mobile app is in the near future! Double rejoice! I so enjoy being a nerd.
Murphy’s law application for antigravitatory cats.
It has been a long day! Uncyclopedia, I love you.
I was going to tell you all about the First Amendment lawyerly event I’m headed to, which I’m interested in because the way the First Amendment is defined and used will help shape the future of citizen journalism. Here’s the frontline bit on Mayhill Fowler, who went to a fundraiser (closed to press) for Obama’s campaign and recorded his comment about bitter and gun toting American’s that some worried would skewer his chances and others termed “Bittergate.” Ha.
But we were saved from Sarah Palin, and it’s Friday, TGIF! Fun fun fun! So instead, here’s an article about a bar…where the booze is vaporized into the room, and that’s your drink, better like gin my friend. And yeah, you do have to wear those jumpsuits. Also: Who knew The Atlantic had a food column?
Bang up post Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable by Clay Shirky, sent by a friend on Facebook, complete with a history of the case of The Internet v. Print Publishing. He goes about it the classic way, by looking back—mapping where publishers went wrong, what they tried, and how to proceed based on what they failed to try, kind of. I say kind of because it was more a failure of imagining failure.
His best guess of an answer is a sort of citizen journalism, or something yet unnamed. Which is so exciting. What is the solution? It will take us several decades to figure it out, he says. I love this stuff, I love being in the thick of this. What will journalism look like in 30 years? We get to watch it develop (on Twitter and Facebook and iPhones), and I’m just so glad that I’m living through this time of uncertainty and not the solid, newspaper dominated past. I love the NY Times, but can you imagine a world of information coming only print, with the control and time lag? Gah, terrifying.
While I adore the romantic idea of living in the past and being one of those old fashioned journalists that hunted down and got the story, that brought it out when it wouldn’t have otherwise seen day, one that kicked and scratched and schmoozed stories from people, I abhor the thought of being that reader, putting down my paper and that being that.
But, with so much information from so many people available, without media giants and journalist heroes, will we pool collectively towards a dull median, all watching cat videos?
Shirky teaches at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, which I rediscover and drool over every year or so.
Some big quotes:
“In craigslist’s gradual shift from ‘interesting if minor’ to ‘essential and transformative’, there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.”
And then:
“For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail.”
I saw an ad for Mine Magazine in Real Simple and went to sign up immediately. It’s so, so close to being brilliant. And yet it’s not. Not because they are lacking in potentially cool articles, but because they don’t personalize it enough and it’s made from regurgitating past issues, the latter of which would be ok if the information was highly tailored to me. But, like a bad date, they don’t ask enough questions about me.
If they really wanted me to feel attended to, they would ask for my feedback on each article and continue tailoring my choices for my future magazines. Pandora does this for music, and Netflix does it for suggested movies in your queue. Why can’t publishers do it for our e-magazines? (more…)
Lauren DiCioccio, available on 20×200:
“I make sculptures and paintings about my anticipatory nostalgia for obsolescing paper media objects. The softness of a read newspaper page and the glossy slickness of a fresh magazine page…When these objects disappear from our culture and assume the homogeneous texture of a back-lit screen, I fear that some of our intimacy with the process of reading will fade.
Fashion magazines are the source materials for my series color codification dot drawings. I make each piece on a sheet of frosted mylar laid over a magazine page. After assigning a color to every letter in the alphabet (numbers are in grayscale, 0=white and 9=black), I apply tiny dots of paint over every character on the page. ”
The Bush administration placed a media ban on the returning remains of soldiers from Iraq back in 1991, masking the process from the public. That meant the remains of over 5,000 American soldiers returned to families without a single picture being allowed into the press. That such a ban held for so long terrifies me, but the Obama administration overturned it, with April 5th marking the first time press coverage was allowed. The family has to consent, which makes sense to me, but the government should never be able to block access to these scenes again. Numbers and names only tell us so much, and once again The Big Pictures proves the power of photos with Documenting the return of U.S. war dead.
Wow, I spent the day petting bunnies, and Amazon spent the day getting nailed to the wall by bloggers and Twitter users who took over Google results for “Amazon ranking” within an afternoon. Why? Books categorized as GLBT and Romance were being blocked in Amazon searches and top selling lists. Here’s the quick story from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, a blog I’m excited to start reading. Follow the whole story there on their site.
“Amazon seems to be stripping the sales figures and accompanying rankings from GLBTQ books, erotica, and romance novels, particularly those with what they term “adult content.”
They they got Amazon’s response:
“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.”
Amazon ranking and sales being stripped means these books, as they say, don’t appear in best seller lists and major pages, which is obviously going to be murder on sales. Publishers Weekly cites Brokeback Mountain as one book that is now hidden in searches. Playboy books remain.
Smart Bitches posted at 11:22am this morning calling for readers to Google bomb the term “Amazon Rank.” I had never heard of Google bombing, but the premise is familiar to us all: Use a term enough times, and you’ll become the number one search result for that term. They also added an Urban Dictionary posting.
By 6:15 pm Smart Bitches was number one in results. By 9:13 Amazon had issued a few “we’re not sure, we’ll get back to you” type statements and then declared the whole thing a computer glych.
Twitter users, disemmenating information and links fast and furious like they do, came up with a host of responses, which you can search for with #amazonfail. (Hashes [#] are a way of creating a tag, or keyword, in Twitter. Go to the bottom of your Twitter page, click Search, and enter #amazonfail. You can also search for anything else of interest, such as #iPhone or # any major event.) I like this Amazon Fail logo and Dear Author post on how to contact Amazon.
As a lover of books, I’m always ticked to see censorship of any kind. Huzzah for a strong internet reaction.
If you’ve posted a cry for help at Twitter or Flickr, you’ve encountered Get Satisfaction, a customer support community. It works like this: Become a user, post your question, and other users as well as employees will post answers.
I’ve scanned these communities for answers before, but had never posted my own question until recently, regarding Rememble (more on that cool site later). In addition to a title, photo, and tags, users are asked how their issue makes them feel, and are presented with four face icons and a text box.
How does expressing your feelings outright change the way you’ll interact with a community? Selecting a face with a tongue did make my question (about updating my Rememble account through Twitter and Flickr, incidentally) feel trite, a feeling especially heightened when you notice that all the default user avatars are desserts. The effect can be a bunch of grumpy cupcakes. But I was also pleased just to have been asked about myself. It’s the “how are you” of retail–a question you like being asked just for the asking.
These communities can be helpful, but only if they’re watched over by alert employees and the users are prompted with relevant tags. Otherwise, it can become a bit of a mess of emotions and information.
I scrolled through the Whole Foods profile for examples, trolling for interesting questions in the Recently Active Topics list. This is one of the major flaws of this system–you’re led to look at recent topics, not the most relevant, but they’re often just one person complaining about chicken salad being unavailable. Users also frequently post the same question with different titles and tags, which can make a recurring problem seem isolated. I did find someone asking how and where 365 Soy Milk is made, complete with an illuminating response from an employee. That was interesting information because I drink that product. But I had to thrash around in the weeds to get there.
With 1,253 Whole Foods customers on the account, there’s quality peer information to be had, but you have to know how to get at it. Additionally, the profiles aren’t complete enough to see who you’re dealing with. See for example the post I found a bug in my Anutra, which spun into allegations that the owners of competing companies were slandering each others’ products and posting on the Whole Foods community posing as customers. So many cupcakes! Phew! Who is a reader to trust?
One exit thought: As collaborative storytelling evolves, will expressing your feelings become a way of interacting with the story? This plot twist makes me feel sad, etc. Sounds like an online book club that I’d be happy to try out, as long as my reading community excluded cupcakes.
You know it’s true. (That’s studly Jack, from Pirates of the Caribbean. And have mercy, I made this with free image editing software with very few functions.) Original picture from Huffington Post. Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper says on his Twitter that “Ye Olde Queen’s iPod” contains (most recent first):
And finally, Engadget beat me to this one, by years, back in 2005.
SWSW Interactive 2009, in Sketchnotes on Flickr. The blog is here.
Flickr is one of the most underutilized web 2.0 sites out there. While right now it’s mostly limited to photos, I see it really taking off with written, detailed information like this. Beyond images, it allows for visually interesting ways of relaying information in text. This is bound to be used by marketing soon, but on the creative side what I’m really hoping for is narrative.
Evolving news stories could be told in the form of Flickr sets with images on some slides, notes on the next. Creative stories could be told collectively, with image pools serving as a common source. From there I’d like to see people use image and text from Flickr to create and pass projects, like in an exquisite corpse.
Tags are almost a form of communal storytelling, a way of linking individual information between events and people. But they’re limited by their greatest strength, being user created. There’s too many variations, too many mispellings, to find and follow threads of information between sources. But limiting users to a set number of tags could limit conversation to those topics. What do to?
I’m getting SERIOUS about my future. I’m starting, naturally, by reading a blog: Flip the Media, from the UW school of Masters in Communication in Digital Media. Which sounds like a Masters in the internets 2.0, which sounds like me me me! Thus, welcome the tag “ideas about the future of media.”
Not to be confused with media of the future, which will be, like, seeds that grow into an iPod video in your hand or something.
