The murmur of the snarkmatrix…

Jennifer § Two songs from The Muppet Movie / 2021-02-12 15:53:34
A few notes on daily blogging § Stock and flow / 2017-11-20 19:52:47
El Stock y Flujo de nuestro negocio. – redmasiva § Stock and flow / 2017-03-27 17:35:13
Meet the Attendees – edcampoc § The generative web event / 2017-02-27 10:18:17
Does Your Digital Business Support a Lifestyle You Love? § Stock and flow / 2017-02-09 18:15:22
Daniel § Stock and flow / 2017-02-06 23:47:51
Kanye West, media cyborg – MacDara Conroy § Kanye West, media cyborg / 2017-01-18 10:53:08
Inventing a game – MacDara Conroy § Inventing a game / 2017-01-18 10:52:33
Losing my religion | Mathew Lowry § Stock and flow / 2016-07-11 08:26:59
Facebook is wrong, text is deathless – Sitegreek !nfotech § Towards A Theory of Secondary Literacy / 2016-06-20 16:42:52

A hypothetical path to the Speakularity
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Yesterday NiemanLab published some of my musings on the coming “Speakularity” – the moment when automatic speech transcription becomes fast, free and decent.

I probably should have underscored the fact that I don’t see this moment happening in 2011, given the fact that these musings were solicited as part of a NiemanLab series called “Predictions for Journalism 2011.” Instead, I think several things possibly could converge next year that would bring the Speakularity a lot closer. This is pure hypothesis and conjecture, but I’m putting this out there because I think there’s a small chance that talking about these possibilities publicly might actually make them more likely.

First, let’s take a clear-eyed look at where we are, in the most optimistic scenario. Watch the first minute-and-a-half or so of this video interview with Clay Shirky. Make sure you turn closed-captioning on, and set it to transcribe the audio. Here’s my best rendering of some of Shirky’s comments alongside my best rendering of the auto-caption:

Manual transcript: Auto transcript:
Well, they offered this penalty-free checking account to college students for the obvious reason students could run up an overdraft and not suffer. And so they got thousands of customers. And then when the students were spread around during the summer, they reneged on the deal. And so HSBC assumed they could change this policy and have the students not react because the students were just hopelessly disperse. So a guy named Wes Streeting (sp?) puts up a page on Facebook, which HSBC had not been counting on. And the Facebook site became the source of such a large and prolonged protest among thousands and thousands of people that within a few weeks, HSBC had to back down again. So that was one of the early examples of a managed organization like a bank running into the fact that its users and its customers are not just atomized, disconnected people. They can actually come together and act as a group now, because we’ve got these platforms that allow us to coordinate with one another. will they offer the penalty-free technique at the college students pretty obvious resistance could could %uh run a program not suffer as they got thousands of customers and then when the students were spread around during the summer they were spread over the summer the reneged on the day and to hsbc assumed that they could change this policy and have the students not react because the students were just hopeless experts so again in western parts of the page on face book which hsbc had not been counting on the face book site became the source of such a large and prolonged protest among thousands and thousands of people that within a few weeks hsbc had to back down again so that was one of the early examples are female issue organization like a bank running into the fact that it’s users are not just after its customers are not just adam eyes turned disconnected people they get actually come together and act as a group mail because we’ve got these platforms to laos to coordinate

Cringe-inducing, right? What little punctuation exists is in error (“it’s users”), there’s no capitalization, “atomized” has become “adam eyes,” “platforms that allow us” are now “platforms to laos,” and HSBC is suddenly an example of a “female issue organization,” whatever that means.

Now imagine, for a moment, that you’re a journalist. You click a button to send this video to Google Transcribe, where it appears in an interface somewhat resembling the New York Times’ DebateViewer. Highlight a passage in the text, and it will instantly loop the corresponding section of video, while you type in a more accurate transcription of the passage.

That advancement alone – quite achievable with existing technology – would speed our ability to transcribe a clip like this quite a bit. And it wouldn’t be much more of an encroachment than Google has already made into the field of automatic transcription. All of this, I suspect, could happen in 2011.

Now allow me a brief tangent. One of the predictions I considered submitting for NiemanLab’s series was that Facebook would unveil a dramatically enhanced Facebook Videos in 2011, integrating video into the core functionality of the site the way Photos have been, instead of making it an application. I suspect this would increase adoption, and we’d see more people getting tagged in videos. And Google might counter by adding social tagging capabilities to YouTube, the way they have with Picasa. This would mean that in some cases, Google would know who appeared in a video, and possibly know who was speaking.

Back to Google. This week, the Google Mobile team announced that they’veĀ built personalized voice recognition into Android. If you turn it on for your Android device, it’ll learn your voice, improving the accuracy of the software the way dictation programs such as Dragon do now.

Pair these ideas and fast-forward a bit. Google asks YouTube users whether they want to enable personalized voice recognition on videos they’re tagged in. If Google knows you’re speaking in a video, it uses what it knows about your voice to make your part of the transcription more accurate. (And hey, let’s throw in that they’ve enabled social tagging at the transcript level, so it can make educated guesses about who’s saying what in a video.)

A bit further on: Footage for most national news shows is regularly uploaded to YouTube, and this footage tends to feature a familiar blend of voices. If they were somewhat reliably tagged, and Google could begin learning their voices, automatic transcriptions for these shows could become decently accurate out of the box. That gets us to the democratized Daily Show scenario.

This is a bucketload of hypotheticals, and I’m highly pessimistic Google could make its various software layers work together this seamlessly anytime soon, but are you starting to see the path I’m drawing here?

And at this point, I’m talking about fairly mainstream applications. The launch of Google Transcribe alone would be a big step forward for journalists, driving down the costs of transcription for news applications a good amount.

Commenter Patrick at NiemanLab mentioned that the speech recognition industry will do everything in its power to prevent Google from releasing anything like Transcribe anytime soon. I agree, but I think speech transcription might be a smaller industry economically than GPS navigation,* and that didn’t prevent Google from solidly disrupting that universe with Google Navigate.

I’m stepping way out on a limb in all of this, it should be emphasized. I know very little about the technological or market realities of speech recognition. I think I know the news world well enough to know how valuable these things would be, and I think I have a sense of what might be feasible soon. But as Tim said on Twitter, “the Speakularity is a lot like the Singularity in that it’s a kind of ever-retreating target.”

The thing I’m surprised not many people have made hay with is the dystopian part of this vision. The Singularity has its gray goo, and the Speakularity has some pretty sinister implications as well. Does the vision I paint above up the creep factor for anyone?

* To make that guess, I’m extrapolating from the size of the call center recording systems market, which is projected to hit $1.24 billion by 2015. It’s only one segment of the industry, but I suspect it’s a hefty piece (15%? 20%?) of that pie. GPS, on the other hand, is slated to be a $70 billion market by 2013.

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I have mixed feelings about Facebook.
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I’m not going to recount the long insomniac thought trail that led me here, but suffice it to say I ended up thinking about mission statements early this morning. Google’s came immediately to mind: To organize the world’s information, and make it universally accessible and searchable. I’m not sure what Twitter’s mission statement might be, but a benign one didn’t take too long to present itself: To enable a layer of concise observations on top of the world. (Wordsmiths, have at that one.)

I got completely stuck trying to think of a mission for Facebook that didn’t sound like vaguely malevolent marketing b.s. To make everything about you public? To connect you with everyone you know?

When I read Zadie Smith’s essay as an indictment of Facebook – its values, its defaults, and its tendencies – rather than the “generation” it defines, her criticisms suddenly seem a lot more cogent to me. I realized that I actually am quite ambivalent about Facebook. I thought it was worth exploring why.

I was thinking about the ways social software has changed my experience of the world. The first world-altering technology my mind summoned was Google Maps (especially its mobile manifestation), and at the thought of it, all the pleasure centers of my brain instantly lit up. Google Maps, of course, has its problems, errors, frustrating defaults, troubling implications – but these seem so far outweighed by the delights and advantages it’s delivered over the years that I can unequivocally state I love this software.

I recently had an exchange with my friend Wes about whether Google Maps, by making it so difficult to lose your way, also made it difficult to stumble into serendipity. I walked away thinking that what Google Maps enabled – the expectation that I can just leave my house, walk or drive, and search for anything I could want as I go – enabled much more serendipity than it forestalled. It’s eliminated most of the difficulties that might have prevented me from wandering through neighborhoods in DC, running around San Francisco, road-tripping across New England. And it demands very little of me, and imposes very little upon me. (One imposition, for example: All the buildings I’ve lived in have been photographed on Street View. I’m happy to abide by this invasion of privacy, because without it, I wouldn’t have found the place I live in today.) For me, Google Maps is basically an unalloyed social good.

Google has been very prolific with these sorts of products – things that bring me overwhelming usefulness with much less tangible concern. Google Search itself is, of course, a masterpiece. News Search, Gmail, Reader, Docs, Chrome, Android, Voice – even failed experiments such as Wave – I find that these things have heightened what I expect software to do for me. They have made the Internet more useful, information more accessible, and generally, life more pleasurable.

I was trying to think of a Facebook product that ameliorated my life in some similar way, and the first thing to come to mind was Photos. Facebook Photos created for me the expectation that every snapshot, every captured moment, would be shared and tagged for later retrieval. At my fifth college reunion, I made a point of taking photos with every classmate I wanted to reconnect with on Facebook. When I go home and tag my photos, I told my buddies, it will remind you that we should catch up. And it worked like a charm! I reconnected with dozens of old friends on Facebook, and now I see their updates scrolling by regularly, each one producing a tinge of warmth and good feelings.

But the dark side of Facebook Photos almost immediately presented itself as well. For me, the service has replaced the notion of a photograph as a shared, treasured moment with the reality of a photograph as a public event. I realized all of a sudden that I can’t remember the last time I took a candid photo. Look through my photos, and even those moments you might call “candid” are actually posed. I can’t sit for a picture without expecting that the photo will be publicized. Not merely made public – my public Flickr stream never provoked this sense – publicized. And although this is merely a default, easily overridden, to do so often feels like an overreaction. To go to a friend’s photo of me and untag myself, or to make myself untaggable, feels like I’m basically negating the purpose of Facebook Photos. The product exists so these images might be publicized. And increasingly, Facebook seems to be what photos are for.

Of course that’s not true. I also suddenly realized that I’ve been quietly stowing away a secret cache of images on my phone – a shot of Bryan sleeping, our cat Otis in a grocery bag, an early-morning sunlit sky – that are quickly becoming the most treasured images I possess, the ones I return to again and again.

Perhaps Facebook Photos has made my private treasure trove more valuable.

I use Facebook Photos as an example first because it’s the part of the service that’s most significantly altered my experience of the world, but also because I think it reflects something about the software’s ethos. That dumb, relentless publicness of photos on Facebook doesn’t have to be the default. Photos, by default, could be accessible only to users tagged in a set, for example, not publicized to all my friends and their friends. I’m not even sure that’s an option. (My privacy settings allow most users to see only my photos, not photos I’m tagged in. But I’m not sure what that even means. When another friend shares a photo publicly, and I’m tagged in it, I’m fairly certain our friends see that information.)

Facebook engineered the photo-sharing system in such a way as to maximize exposure rather than, say, utility. For Facebook, possibly, exposure is utility.* I think that characterizes most of the choices that underpin Facebook’s products. With most of the other social software products I use – the Google suite, WordPress, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox, etc. – I am constantly aware of and grateful for the many ways the software is serving me. With Facebook, I’m persistently reminded that I am always serving it – feeding an endless stream of information to the insatiable hive, creating the world’s most perfect consumer profile of myself.

I don’t trust Google for a second, but I value it immensely. I trust Facebook less, and I’m growing more ambivalent about its value.

I don’t think I want to give up Facebook. I value the connections it offers, however shallow they are. I enjoy looking at photos of my friends. I like knowing people’s birthdays.

But I am wary of it, its values and its defaults. How it’s changing my expectations and my experience of the world.

* Thought added post-publication.

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Tweets from PubCamp 2010
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I’m sitting in the dev lounge during the last of the day’s sessions at Public Media Camp, an unconference for folks interested in public media stuff.

Fair warning: This is not going to be your standard Matt Thompson Conference Liveblog, and will possibly not be interesting in any way. I’m trying out two things: (1) live curation of Twitter (which I haven’t really done), and (2) a Snarkmarket-customized CoverItLive template, that will allegedly not require you to see the title page. I’ll be very excited if this latter thing is true. Update: Not true. Still have to click to see the liveblog. Darn it.

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Was Marc Ambinder actually a blogger?
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Today Last week, Marc Ambinder reached the end of his tenure as a politics blogger for the Atlantic, and toasted the event with a thoughtful post on the nature of blogging. The central nugget:

Really good print journalism is ego-free. By that I do not mean that the writer has no skin in the game, or that the writer lacks a perspective, or even that the writer does not write from a perspective. What I mean is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter’s insecurities or parochial concerns intervening. Blogging is an ego-intensive process. Even in straight news stories, the format always requires you to put yourself into narrative. You are expected to not only have a point of view and reveal it, but be confident that it is the correct point of view. There is nothing wrong with this. As much as a writer can fabricate a detachment, or a “view from nowhere,” as Jay Rosen has put it, the writer can also also fabricate a view from somewhere. You can’t really be a reporter without it. I don’t care whether people know how I feel about particular political issues; it’s no secret where I stand on gay marriage, or on the science of climate change, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. What I hope I will find refreshing about the change of formats is that I will no longer be compelled to turn every piece of prose into a personal, conclusive argument, to try and fit it into a coherent framework that belongs to a web-based personality called “Marc Ambinder” that people read because it’s “Marc Ambinder,” rather than because it’s good or interesting.

My esteemed coblogger tweeted some terrific observations about Ambinder’s post:

@mthomps @robinsloan Now you can blog and be a reporter in a different way from how Ambinder & The Atlantic think of those two things.less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou

@mthomps @robinsloan But Ambinder’s (& others’) conception of “reporter” & Atlantic’s (& others’) conception of blogging are incompatible.less than a minute ago via YoruFukurou


I expect when Tim has more than 140 characters, he’ll nod to the fact that The Atlantic’s website actually encompasses many different ideas of what blogging means – from Andrew Sullivan’s flood of commentless links and reader emails to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ rollicking salons to Ambinder’s own sparsely-linked analyses. And beyond the bounds of the Atlantic there are so many other ideas, as many types of blogs as there are types of books, and maybe more – Waiter Rant to Romenesko to Muslims Wearing Things to this dude’s LiveJournal to BLDGBLOG.

That Ambinder’s essay doesn’t really acknowledge this – that it seems so curiously essentialist about a format that’s engendered so much diversity – disappoints me, because he’s such a thoughtful, subtle writer at his best. His sudden swerve into the passive voice – “You are expected to not only have a point of view” – briefly made me worry that he intends to become one of those print journalists who uses the cloak of institutional voice to write weaselly ridiculous phrases such as “Questions are being raised.”

It puzzles me that the same fellow who wrote that “a good story demolishes counterarguments” would casually drop the line, “Really good print journalism is ego-free.” “What I mean,” Ambinder says, “is that the writer is able to let the story and the reporting process, to the highest possible extent, unfold without a reporter’s insecurities or parochial concerns intervening.” I think I know what type of long-form journalism he’s referring to – there’s a wonderful genre of stories that make their case with a simple, sequential presentation of fact after unadorned fact. The Looming Tower. The Problem from Hell. David Grann’s stunning “Trial by Fire” in the New Yorker.

But there’s an equally excellent genre of journalism that foregrounds the author’s curiosities, concerns and assumptions – James Fallows’ immortal foretelling of the Iraq War, Atul Gawande’s investigation of expenditures in health care. This is ego-driven reporting, in the best possible way. For every Problem from Hell, there’s another Omnivore’s Dilemma. Far from demolishing counterarguments, Ambinder’s mention of “ego-free journalism” instantly summons to mind its opposite.

Likewise, his contention that “blogging is an ego-intensive process” has to grapple with the fact that some of the best blogging is just the reverse. It doesn’t square with examples such as Jim Romenesko, whose art is meticulously effacing himself from the world he covers, leaving a digest rich with voice and judgment so veiled you barely even notice someone’s behind it. In fact, contra Ambinder, I’ve found that one of the most difficult types of blogging to teach traditional reporters is this very trick of being a listener and reader first, suppressing the impulse to develop your own take until you’ve surveyed others and brought the best of them to your crowd. Devoid as it is of links, non-Web journalism often fosters a pride of ownership that can become insidious – a constant race to generate information that might not actually help us understand the world any better, but is (1) new and (2) yours. Unchecked, that leads inevitably to this.

In just the way Marc Ambinder’s post wasn’t necessarily an attack on blogging, this isn’t necessarily a defense of it, or an attack on traditional journalism. If Ambinder recast his musings on blogging in a slightly different way, I’d actually agree with him wholeheartedly. If, as I’ve been arguing in this post, the form is flexible enough to encompass so many approaches, that means every choice contributes to a blog’s unique identity. Perhaps more than any other publishing/broadcasting format, a blog is a manifestation of the choices and idiosyncrasies of its authors.

And I think this is what Ambinder’s experience reflects – his choices and his idiosyncrasies. He chose to blog about national politics – an extraordinarily crowded (and particularly solipsistic) field. To distinguish himself from the crowd, he chose to craft a persona known for its canny insider’s pose and behind-the-scenes insights. I think it was a terrific choice; I’ve enjoyed his Atlantic writing a lot. But there’s little essential about the format that compelled him to this choice.

The title of this post is, of course, facetious. (Although I’d kind of love it if the pointless “Who’s a journalist” debates gave way to pointless “Who’s a blogger” ones.) Of course Marc Ambinder was a blogger – he tended to a series of posts displayed on the Web in reverse-chronological order. Beyond that, there are common patterns and proven techniques, but very few rules. Print imposes more constraints, but some folks find a sort of freedom in that. I hope Marc Ambinder does, and I hope to read the product.

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ONAmarket: Don't call it UGC!
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ONAmarket: Rebooting the News
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ONAmarket: Rethinking Online Comments
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Snark by Snark er … ONAmarket
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As the official Snarkmarket liveblogger, I’m always on the lookout for good stuff to liveblog. This morning’s event is the intro panel for the Online News Association conference in DC.

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The Ruleless Road
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In the long list of books I’ll never write, there’s one that’s about a theory of risk. The theory is that there’s a threshold of risk aversion beyond which our attempts to extinguish risk actually exacerbate it. It would be filled with the case studies you might expect – things like the overuse of antibiotics and how a financial insurance product short-circuited the economy. But the opening anecdote would be about roads. And I’d basically copy and paste it from from this December ’04 Wired story:

Riding in [avant-garde traffic engineer Hans Monderman’s] green Saab, we glide into Drachten, a 17th-century village that has grown into a bustling town of more than 40,000. We pass by the performing arts center, and suddenly, there it is: the Intersection. [Monderman’s baby. – M] It’s the confluence of two busy two-lane roads that handle 20,000 cars a day, plus thousands of bicyclists and pedestrians. Several years ago, Monderman ripped out all the traditional instruments used by traffic engineers to influence driver behavior – traffic lights, road markings, and some pedestrian crossings – and in their place created a roundabout, or traffic circle. The circle is remarkable for what it doesn’t contain: signs or signals telling drivers how fast to go, who has the right-of-way, or how to behave. There are no lane markers or curbs separating street and sidewalk, so it’s unclear exactly where the car zone ends and the pedestrian zone begins. To an approaching driver, the intersection is utterly ambiguous – and that’s the point.

Monderman and I stand in silence by the side of the road a few minutes, watching the stream of motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians make their way through the circle, a giant concrete mixing bowl of transport. Somehow it all works. The drivers slow to gauge the intentions of crossing bicyclists and walkers. Negotiations over right-of-way are made through fleeting eye contact. Remarkably, traffic moves smoothly around the circle with hardly a brake screeching, horn honking, or obscene gesture. “I love it!” Monderman says at last. “Pedestrians and cyclists used to avoid this place, but now, as you see, the cars look out for the cyclists, the cyclists look out for the pedestrians, and everyone looks out for each other. You can’t expect traffic signs and street markings to encourage that sort of behavior. You have to build it into the design of the road.”

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Ask MeFi: Explain me to myself
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Terrific Ask MetaFilter thread:

I found a scrap of paper with these terms on it, listed vertically. I don’t know when it was written, though it’s my writing and would certainly have been within the last 3-4 years. If you can draw any connections between these things, or interpret some of the odder ones (shapiro resp?), it would be wonderful.

The list:

godiva
silver lining
shapes yard
want faith
searches room
shapiro resp (possibly shapivo resp)
honeycombs
petula one
hermits
sons and loves (I’m reasonably sure it’s not Sons and Lovers)
ugly’s (that misplaced apostrophe is quite out of character)
torsin’/dorsin’ (one of the two)

Any guesses before you find out the answer?

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