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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.)

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.)

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.

Um, if Jeff Jarvis ends up being Dan Okrent’s replacement as the public editor of The New York Times, I’d just like it on the record that you heard it here first.

As usual, when it comes to the Oscars, Fametracker’s got the goods:

• Rasco P. Soultrain Awards
• As usual, five Karl Malden clones choose the Oscar winners
• Oscar speeches we’d like to hear
• Best Picture nominees turned TV series

LivePlasma is a super-shiny recommendation engine. I tend to distrust these things, but then I entered “Rufus Wainwright,” and a cloud of fellow musical artists I’ve come to adore popped in and orbited his name. And the interface is Google-good (although not Google-fast).

Shorter Jay Rosen: NYT.com should have open archives. Shorter Jeff Jarvis: The NYT should bring bloggers in for bagels.

Agreed on both counts. I want bagels.

Aeons ago, Clive Thompson wrote up this humdinger about the economies of virtual worlds — MMORPGs and the like. Because people have begun assigning real-world monetary value to in-game items, the article explained, it’s possible to study these games as if they were real economies.

So we can, for example, calculate the Gross National Product of Everquest, as Thompson’s economist Edward Castronova decides to do — it’s $2,266 U.S. per capita. (“It was the 77th-richest country in the world,” Thompson writes. “And it didn’t even exist.”)

And of course, we can actually profit from our in-game activities, Thompson reports, enough to pull in a six-figure salary or even power a whole company, with 100 full-time staff members.

The 6,200-word article is somehow chock full of fascinating little revelations. My favorite moment is when Thompson points out that Everquest began as a perfect meritocracy, “the world’s first truly egalitarian polity,” making it the economist’s ideal social laboratory. That realization leads to this:

Read more…

Because I periodically like to find myself a host of excellent stuff to read in my spare time, here’s something you microscope junkies might enjoy. What follows are Web reprints of 18 of the 23 stories published in The Best American Science Writing 2004. Tell me if there are any good ones.

• Jennifer Kahn – Stripped for Parts
• John Updike – Mars is as Bright as Venus
• Oliver Morton – Strange Nuggets (well, not exactly, but close enough)
• Keay Davidson – Mapping of Cosmos Backs Big Bang Theory
• Neil DeGrasse Tyson – Gravity in Reverse
• Dennis Overbye – One Cosmic Question, Too Many Answers
• Sherwin B. Nuland – How to Grow Old
• Ian Parker – Reading Minds
• Tom Siegfried – The Science of Strategy
• Kaja Perina – Cracking the Harvard X-Files
• Tom Bissell – A Comet’s Tale: On the Science of Apocalypse
• Elizabeth Royte – Transsexual Frogs
• Susan Milius – Leashing the Rattlesnake
• Michael Benson – What Galileo Saw
• Barbara J. Becker – Celestial Spectroscopy: Making Reality Fit the Myth
• Kevin Patterson – The Patient Predator
• Michael Pollan – Cruising on the Ark of Taste
• William Langewiesche – Columbia’s Last Flight