Posts by matt

Adrian Holovaty, in a post about the potential role of metadata in news, advocates creating a database of isolated, metatagged facts pulled together by automated news-munching robots.

First came Dan Gillmor, putting his book We the Media online a chapter at a time and inviting his readers to participate in the book’s creation.

Now, Creative Commons mastermind Larry Lessig has taken his already-published book Code online as a wiki, and wants anyone who’s willing to help turn it into Code v. 2:

Lawrence Lessig first published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace in 1999. After five years in print and five years of changes in law, technology, and the context in which they reside, Code

needs an update. But rather than do this alone, Professor Lessig is

using this wiki to open the editing process to all, to draw upon the

creativity and knowledge of the community. This is an online,

collaborative book update; a first of its kind.

Once the the project nears completion, Professor Lessig will

take the contents of this wiki and ready it for publication. The

resulting book, Code v.2, will be published in late 2005 by Basic Books. All royalties, including the book advance, will be donated to Creative Commons.

Also intriguing is the platform he’s chosen for this wiki, Jotspot, which I’d never heard of before, but looks pretty cool. One hurdle for Web neophytes who want to create wikis is the bit of technical knowledge it takes to figure out how to set one up and make it all work. Jotspot boasts that it’s dispensed with those barriers to entry.

I am ever skeptical, but Jotspot’s starting off with a good, semi-high-profile project. And I’ve often wondered if wikis would become ubiquitous if the technology got a bit more democratic.

Anyway, enough of this blathering, go re-write Code!

(Oh yeah, and the collaboratively-editing-chapters thing was also done by J.D. Lasica, whose site was where I discovered this tidbit.)

Good Lord. This is so cool. (Flickr account required for full coolness. Via Collision Detection.)

OK, I wasn’t going to link to the State of the News Media 2005 report that’s been making the rounds, but then I took a look at the thing, and I saw that they start it off by describing EPIC:

In December 2004, a mock documentary about the future of news began making make the rounds of the nation’s journalists and Web professionals.

The video, produced by two aspiring newsmen fresh from college, envisioned a nightmare scenario – by the year 2014, technology would effectively destroy traditional journalism.

In 2008, Google, the search engine company, would merge with Amazon.com, the giant online retailer, and in 2010 the new “Googlezon” would create a system edited entirely by computers that would strip individual facts and sentences from all content sources to create stories tailored to the tastes of each person.

A year later, The New York Times would sue Googlezon for copyright infringement and lose before the Supreme Court.

In 2014 Googlezon would take its computer formula a step further. Anyone on the Web would contribute whatever they knew or believed into a universal grid – a bouillabaisse of citizen blog, political propaganda, corporate spin and journalism. People would be paid according to the popularity of their contributions. Each consumer would get a one-of-a-kind news product each day based on his or her personal data.

“At its best, edited for the savviest readers,” the system is “a summary of the world – deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst, and for too many, [it] is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational.”

That same year, the New York Times would fold its tent and become “a print-only newsletter for the elite and the elderly.”

“It didn’t have to be this way,” the video concludes.

And it probably won’t be.

Ha! (Oh, and “bouillabaisse“? Best word ever.)

Among the acts I had the pleasure of seeing at this weekend’s Rogue Festival was a performance of the Canterbury Tales, told in rap (scroll down).

Baba Brinkman, a medieval-studies-grad-student-turned-professional-hip-hopper from Vancouver, laid down rhymes from the Pardoner, the Miller and the Wife of Bath in an Eminem-inflected lyrical flow, occasionally digressing from Chaucer to offer M.C.-ed treatises on hip-hop’s place in the evolution of language and the history of oral storytelling.

He got a standing ovation and rave reviews from all in attendance. In fact, the reaction from the ladies seating behind me is probably best described as “orgasmic cooing.”

So check out the videos and the audio samples, and definitely check this guy out if he comes to your town.

Have we all noted the new socially networked Netflix? Grand. Any Netflix users on here I can add to my friends pile?

The case for comics journalism. (Via MetaFilter.)

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg has a sweet little essay today granting press credentials to anybody who wants to be a journalist. I totally agree with Weisberg’s sentiment, but I think he’s asking the wrong question — and I post this because I think a lot of “journalists” do.

“Who is a journalist?” strikes me as a fairly useless question, and not just since the arrival of the Internet. It seems to me we should be asking “what is journalism?”

Journalists derive the title exclusively from the function of journalism — not how good they are at it, not what institution they represent, not what stories they cover — but the bare fact of what they do. Judith Miller and Matt Cooper of Time can’t claim any special place in American democracy from the word “journalist” appearing under their names on their business cards.

But the acts of gathering information, synthesizing, and disseminating that information publicly in an essentially verifiable report — those acts, when done in tandem, can and should receive special protections, no matter the context in which they are performed.

It’s journalism, not journalists, we should be struggling to protect. I think we sometimes lose that distinction (hat tip to Rebecca MacKinnon, who might agree with me). Whether bloggers constitute journalists is abstract and immaterial. What in newspapers and on blogs and on television constitutes journalism, now, that strikes me as a provocative question.

Despite 1) appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, and 2) being funny, this, I would argue, is not journalism. Haul Jon Carroll’s pajama-wearing ass into court and make him testify. This, however, strikes me as journalism. Others might quibble. But at least we’d have a good conversation.

Weisberg notes that bloggers are trying to have it both ways in terms of the law — the folks being sued by Apple want to be treated like journalists, while those in danger of being regulated by the FEC want to be considered something else. “A more consistent stance would be to assert that the First Amendment should apply equally to everyone who practices journalism,” Weisberg says, “Whenever and wherever they do it, and that political advocacy online should be treated consistently with advocacy offline.”

An even more consistent stance would be to assert that the First Amendment should apply equally to all acts of journalism, no matter the source.

I realize that since it has now appeared in Newsweek, Yellow Arrow is a) no longer cool and b) tired. But as NBC’s late-’90s summer rerun promotional department would say, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s New to You

The above graph shows how Americans would reallocate the federal budget if given the chance, according to a PIPA survey of 1,200 adults (PDF). Kevin Drum, who pointed this study out, warns social-spending-happy liberals to chill, because if they actually proposed cutting the defense budget by a third and spending all that cash on education and renewable energy, they would quickly discover the heat of this country’s fury.

It’s unfortunate that “space program” and “science research” are lumped together on this graph (and nowhere to be found in the accompanying PDF). Because clearly, if I’d gotten my grubby little hands on this survey, NASA would become the NAA, and its budget would be approximately $959 million.* And the National Science Foundation would find its budget mysteriously expanded by about, oh, $14.5 billion or so.

I mean, take this page and multiply its coolness factor by 4. Is your mind blown yet?

Speaking of the NSF, check out the Digital Promise Project, a foundation that wants to create a sort of NSF for education. Together with the New America Foundation, Digital Promise is pushing a piece of legislation that would use the money from selling and licensing the public airwaves to create a trust fund devoted to R&D in the field of education.

I’m inclined to think that’s pretty cool. Critics of the legislation launch their broadside with the question, “Must the government establish what amounts to a new Public Broadcasting System for the Internet?”

Pardon me, I seem to be drooling just ever so slightly.

* “National Aeronautics Administration.” None of this hoity-toity space crap. Leave that to Burt Rutan and Richard Branson.