www.josschuurmans.com

Social Media Growth - Online Advertising Opportunity | YouTube

The Intelligence² Debate - Stephen Fry (Unedited)

The Intelligence² Debate - Stephen Fry (Unedited)
Uploaded by Xrunner17. - Watch feature films and entire TV shows.

Looking for "people" and "network" images for a magazine article

I'm looking for two images for a magazine article. This is the idea:

(1) The first image would be a photo of people, a crowd, something to the tune of:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/victoriapeckham/164175205/
CC Attribution: victoriapeckham

But I'd like perhaps a larger crowd, more people in a larger space.

(2) The second image would be a computer visualization of a network, something like:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/3976415352/
CC Attribution: Marc_Smith

But I'd like this to be more, ehm... "beautiful", I suppose.

We would then overlay the computer image on top of the people photo. The idea is quite straightforward: to visualize the notion that real people are nodes in a network.

In the spirit of social media and user generated content, I'd prefer images under Creative Commons Attribution license.

Any great pointers, anyone?

My top-3 favorite podcast feeds

Lost the podcast feeds on my Nokia N97 for some reason, so I had to look them up and re-insert them manually - since the podcast search feature doesn't seem to find many of my favorite podcast.

FWIW, here's my top-3 favorite podcast feeds:

1. Rebooting the News
   http://rebootnews.com/feed/


2. IT Conversations
   http://feeds.conversationsnetwork.org/channel/itc


3. The Gillmor Gang
   http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheGillmorGang/

#NED beats #BRA in #Worldcup football; one Brazil player sent off #historyrepeatsitself

Holland vs Brazil World Cup 1974. History tends to repeat itself...

Thomas Power on the transition from CSC to ORS (video, 3:59 min.)

Thomas Power on the transition from CSC (closed, selective, controlling) to ORS (open, random, supportive).

The big shift we are making this century is from institutional to networked thinking. Very cluetrain, too!

(Via Erwin Blom)

Social Media in Plain English (video, 3:44 min). | CommonCraft.com

'Web 3.0', video by Kate Ray (14:25 min.)

Kate Ray's 14:25 minutes video documentary on "Web 3.0". Useful introduction to the concept of the semantic web.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Web 3.0 by Kate Ray is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Removing the clutter around published content with Readability

I heard about Readability on the Rebooting the News (RBTN) podcast, episode 55, where Rich Ziade was a guest. Seems very useful. I'm thinking that we might want to apply a similar technology in the content retrieval algorithm of Cluetail Radar Pro - Cluetail Ltd's on-line Media Intelligence tool.

Readability - Installation Video for Firefox, Safari & Chrome from Arc90 on Vimeo.

'A Corporate Approach To Social Media' | my presentation at ViestintäGran

Here's the slideset accompanying my presentation at ViestintäGran's social media seminar in Tampere, Finland, on Friday, May 28, 2010:

There was a little bit of tweeting from the seminar with the hashtag #GranSM.

Thank you Katri Lietsälä for presenting as well - I think our stories really complemented each other.

Thank you Olli-Pekka Lehtisalo and Kaisa Kaipia-Gran for organizing the seminar!

Jay Rosen's New Media Maxims | YouTube

@jayrosen_nyu's new media maxims, as he presented them to the World Bank, are...

1. "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" - A.J. Liebling (...and now, because of new media, anyone can own one);


2. Open systems don't work like closed systems ("Anyone can sign up");


3. "Sources go direct" (Dave Winer);


4. Audience atomization has been overcome (People are connected across to one another as effectively as they are connected-up to big institutions).

How shall I teach 'Negotiation and Meeting Skills' to under-graduate business students? (HELP wanted)

I've been asked to plan and teach a ten-hour course (to be conducted within one week) in 'Negotiations and Meeting Skills' coming autumn to two groups of under-graduate students of business administration.

Any pointers to useful and interesting teaching material / approaches (including relevant theories and exercises) would be greatly appreciated!

If you have any suggestions, please submit them in the comments, or send me an email at jos(at)josschuurmans.com, or a direct message via Twitter to @josschuurmans.

Reading the Introduction chapter of 'The Power of Pull' http://ping.fm/T4XOG

http://ping.fm/Mfv7h Jay and Dave, with reference to the Studio 20 WordPress plug-in: "A comment system is way too limited in terms of user engagement."

http://ping.fm/B4TfG In #RBTN 51, Jay Rosen introduces an inspiring protocol for hyper-local, on-line beat journalism, integrating the explainer and a two-way encyclopedic topic page to complement the river of news, as well as an assignment desk with a WordPress plug-in.

http://ping.fm/XhstK Both in #RBTN 52 and 53 Dave touches upon just-in-time journalism. I think he's on to something.

http://ping.fm/3SZ11 Veteran wisdom from Dave Winer in #RBTN 51: "Don't read intonation into what people say on-line, because there is no intonation."

Great music on http://YLEX.fi*: Suburban Tribe, Magic Numbers, Broken Social Scene...

Subscribing to http://ping.fm/ZC9qH Digital First blog (via Jay Rosen / #RBTN 53)

Best butter chicken within a 200 km radius at Chili, Kuortti.

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Driving_to_Tampere_to_talk_at_Viestint=E4Gran's_?= =?ISO-8859-1?Q?seminar_on_social_media_tomorrow,_Hotel_Tanner.?=

http://ping.fm/Diwd8 Great insight by NYT's Jeremy Zilar on #RBTN 52: Why should we need back-ends? Why CMSs? They are invisible on Facebook and Flickr...

#VRM Looking for legally sound yet light-weight, user-mindful terms of service for a new web tool. Pointers?

Listening to Rebooting the News podcast #50. Dave prefers diaspora model of conversation over centralized, flame-plagued comment systems.

Transcript: IT Conversations | Tech Nation | 'John Hagel: Small Moves Equal Big Changes'

Transcript: IT Conversations | Tech Nation | 'John Hagel: Small Moves Equal Big Changes'

I was intrigued by this interview with John Hagel about his co-authored book, 'The Power of Pull'. A lot of the things he talks about link in with Cluetail's value proposition, including some of his observations about the importance of serendipity, the notion that we don't know what to search for anymore, and some of his ideas about the use of social media.

The other day I was looking for a transcript or a way to generate a transcript. Didn't buy any speech-to-text software, nor used any "Mechanical Turk"-like services. Decided instead to transcribe the podcast show myself.

Should I have posted this on a wiki instead? That way, others could edit and enhance, e.g. adding time codes...

So here comes:

G = Dr. Moira Gunn
H = John Hagel III

[STARTS]

G: Today on Tech Nation, I speak with Deloitte's John Hagel, about 'The Power of Pull - How Small Moves Smartly Made Can Set Big Things In Motion'.

The global economy is in disarray. And it's not just because the banks and financial institutions have made a mess of it. We keep hearing that we all have to go back to how we used to do business. I asked John Hagel, who heads Deloitte's Center for the Edge, how wrong is that?

H: It's very wrong. In fact, that was one of the key motivators for writing this book. The Power of Pull was the notion that so many of these executives we deal with are clearly under great stress right now but they have this still a sense of complacency that somehow, sometime, we're gonna come out of this downturn and things will go back to normal. And we hope this book is a bit of a clarion call to say: Not so fast. There are some longer term trends that have been playing out and we don't see them abading at all, so.

http://ping.fm/EAqOo [Reading:] Imagining the Internet | Doc Searls at FutureWeb

Jos Schuurmans
Founder & CEO, Cluetail Ltd.
http://www.cluetail.com
http://ping.fm/TZlRi
(this email was sent from a mobile phone)

http://ping.fm/V7Z0l One of our children is missing | Nokia Conversations

http://ping.fm/nVKcR BagTheWeb Erwin Blom's "proof of concept"

My take on Apple vs. open: there is a tension between product/UX-design/aesthetics and open platforms because aesthetics requires holism while openness fosters atomism.

Jay Rosen and Dave Winer discuss Apple vs. open.

Driving to Helsinki, listening to Rebooting the News podcast #47.

Multimedia Message









Driving to Helsinki, listening to Rebooting the News podcast #47.

http://ping.fm/HZ2R8 What makes a netbook a netbook? Or: should I install Ubuntu 9.10 or Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix on a 7-years-old laptop?

Running and upgrading Ubuntu from a USB stick

Tweet: http://ping.fm/HZ2R8 How I formatted a USB stick to run Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix on my ASUS eee PC 900, using my Windows PC.

Wow, I'm so thrilled that I was able to make this happen! :-)

I just formatted a USB flash drive (USB stick) to run Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix on my ASUS eee PC 900, using my Windows PC. It runs wonderfully and it's a giant leap forward from the Linux Xandros installation that came with the ASUS netbook's sales package.

It took me some time to figure out how to do this, and I got somewhat lost in the Ubuntu wiki forest. In the end it was much easier than it seemed at first, so if you want to do the same, let me recap my steps to perhaps save you some time:

1. Download the desired installation from the Ubuntu website (in my case, a file called "ubuntu-9.10-netbook-remix-i386.iso" onto your Windows PC.


2. Insert a USB stick with sufficient memory (1GB for Ubuntu's Netbook version, 2GB for Ubuntu 9.10 for the desk top, ?? GB for the server version?)


3. Backup any files from the USB stick that you may want to save, as the stick will be reformatted in the process.


4. Download the Universal USB Installer from PendriveLinux.com.


5. Install and run the Universal USB Installer:
   1. Select your Ubuntu distribution from the drop-down list.
   2. Select your USB flash drive (USB stick).
   3. Select a Persistence Option for your USB (Optional) - (I actually didn't select this because I didn't know what to choose)
   4. Click "Install".
   5. At some point you could check a box to reformat the USB stick (recommended).
   
   
6. After completion, safely eject the USB stick from your Windows PC.


7. Insert the USB stick to your switched-off compatible netbook.


8. Switch on your netbook.


9. For the ASUS eee PC 900: press "Esc" on startup to display the boot drive options.


10. Choose the USB flash drive to boot the netbook.

And there you go!

What's cool about this is that the netbook now runs on a complete netbook OS from the USB stick. I am planning to install Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix on the machine itself and get rid of Linux Xandros after backing up all my files first.

After that, I'm planning to install Ubuntu 9.10 for the desk top onto a USB stick in a similar way, and use it to upgrade Ubuntu installations on computers at the office.

Next question:

Tweet: http://ping.fm/HZ2R8 What makes a netbook a netbook? Or: should I install Ubuntu 9.10 or Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook Remix on my 7-years-old laptop?

Lazyweb request: lists of "good" and "bad" words for sentiment analysis

ENGLISH: I'm looking for "positive" and "negative" word lists which can be used as reference material when analyzing text.

The idea is to classify text with a high frequency of positive words as content with positive sentiment, and vice versa.

I imagine that such reference lists are already in use by applications which measure sentiment. Any ideas on where to find them in the public domain?

I'm primarily interested in these lists in (1) Dutch, (2) English, (3) Finnish.

NEDERLANDS: Ik ben op zoek naar woordenlijsten met "positieve" en "negatieve" woorden die ik kan gebruiken om het sentiment van teksten te analyseren.

Teksten met een hoog gehalte aan positieve woorden kunnen zo worden geclassificeerd onder positief sentiment en vice versa.

I stel me voor dat zulke referentie-lijsten al worden gebruikt door bestaande applikaties die sentiment meten. Enig idee waar ik zoiets kan vinden?

Het gaat me in eerste instantie om (1) nederlands, (2) engels en (3) fins.

SUOMEKSI: Jaaha, voisiko joku pliis auttaa - siis kääntää - kiitos? :-)

'Madame Magazine' Raili Mäkinen, over Nederlanders | Talouselämä 3/2010

Raili Mäkinen, vertrekkend algemeen direkteur van Sanoma Magazines Finland, in een interview in Talouselämä, 29 januari 2010, pagina 25:

"Hollantilaisilla ei ole minkäänlaista herran pelkoa. He ovat kerta kaikkiaan hyviä kyseenalaistamaan kaiken. Ensin ajattelin, että hyvänen aika, eiväthän nämä tiedä Suomen markkinoista mitään ja silti sai koko ajan olla selittämässä. Mutta kun antautuu kyseenalaistavaan keskusteluun, oppii paljon."

Jammer dat het artikel niet op Talouselämä's website te vinden is, anders had ik ernaar kunnen linken.

'So that people would find each other'

This .pdf file has page 10 of Länsi-Savo, the daily newspaper from Mikkeli, for January 18, 2010.The feature story, 'Jotta ihmiset löytäisivät toisensa' ('So that people would find each other') by reporter Kaisa Parta is the result of her interviewing me at our home in Mäntyharju.

We talked about the differences between Finland and the Netherlands, how I've settled as an immigrant, and how moving to live among the woods and lakes of Eastern Finland wouldn't have been very likely for our family without the Internet.

Although she claims to be rather novice to Internet technology, Kaisa is very perceptive, asked pertinent questions and managed to unpack Cluetail's core business idea - developing recommendation technologies to connect people to the people and information most relevant to them - in what I consider a pleasant read.

Yeah, well, I would, wouldn't I? :-)

[UPDATE: solution] Struggling to re-route my microblog posts and shared reading

[UPDATE, January 30, 2010: I think I found a solution. I created an additional notify.me account, so now I can handle two different flows.

(1) Shared reading:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipe -> notify.me (1st account) -> Ping.fm -> Twitter, Hi5, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Identi.ca, Plurk

(2) (Other) status updates / microblog posts:

Twitter -> Yahoo! Pipe -> notify.me (2nd account) -> Ping.fm -> LinkedIn, Typepad, Hi5, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Facebook, Identi.ca, Plurk, Tumblr

(3) Posting from any other place (e.g. Skype) to Ping.fm, or from the Ping.fm web UI:

-> Ping.fm -> @tt in post -> Twitter -> (see 2 above)

I'm testing now. Hope it will work this way.

Tweet: http://ping.fm/txw1h [UPDATE: solution] Struggling to re-route my microblog posts and shared reading

Okay, method number (3), with the @tt prefix, seems to work. At least it seems to post to Twitter only...]

Twitter's implementation of "reply" and "retweet" functionality inside its web UI is compelling me to set it apart from other social networks that support status updates and microblog posts.

Where I used to input my microblog posts in Ping.fm in order to distribute them to virtually all my accounts on social web services (including Twitter), I now find it a better idea to input on Twitter first, and then have my tweets automatically route to the other services.

Why? Because I want to use Twitter's "reply" and "retweet" buttons whenever an interesting conversation unfolds on Twitter.

Until now, I would type in the @ or RE or RT syntax manually. This involved the same effort whether on the Twitter web UI or on the Ping.fm web UI. So I would usually go to Ping.fm in order to spread my tweet across services.

Twitter now adds useful metadata when e.g. replying to a tweet. Due to that metadata, you can actually see on Twitter to which tweet I was replying. This is very useful. Since that metadata does not travel with my message when I write it on Ping.fm, I am compelled to write every reply on Twitter itself.

One such compelling reason is enough for me to switch from Ping.fm to Twitter.

Current flow:

Ping.fm -> all my accounts on social web services

AND:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> notify.me -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts

Desired flow:

Twitter -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (except Twitter)

AND:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> (notify.me?) -> Twitter -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (except Twitter)

OR:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (including Twitter)

The challenge that I've run into is to do with notify.me. As far as I can tell, I can setup notify.me to post to Ping.fm in one way only: either for Ping.fm to post to Twitter only, or for Ping.fm to post to all my social web accounts (including or excluding Twitter).

I'm wondering if there's a hack, or whether I will need to find another service, similar to notify.me, in order to create a different route.

I've been trying some syntax suggested by Ping.fm in order to specify to which services it should post - by including that syntax into the Yahoo! Pipes feed.

In particular, I've tried to include #T in the Yahoo! Pipe after I had created a posting group "#T" on Ping.fm which included only Twitter. To no effect.

I then tried to include @tt in the Yahoo! Pipe hoping that Ping.fm would post only to Twitter, but none of those posts seem to go through at all. Three of them were picked up by notify.me, but none appeared on my "recent posts" on Ping.fm.

(I do apologize for my messy language here. It's late and I should really be sleeping. But this is bugging me.)

LATER: Right, after I removed "@tt" from the Yahoo! Pipe, my Google Reader shared reading items do seem to go through again.

EVEN LATER: Well, maybe not. But I need to get some sleep now. Let's see how much has gone through by sunrise. In any case, seems like I need to find an additional grab-and-post service like notify.me in order to enable two out of three routes from the desired flow described above.

Happy New Year, everybody!

 
 

Police find killer dead after shooting spree in Finland, taking six lives

(Information based on Finnish media reports - see sources below)

Six people lost their lives today in a shooting spree in the Finnish city of Espoo, near the capital Helsinki.

Three men and a woman were shot dead in the Prisma super market store at the Sello shopping center, around 10 am Finnish time (= 8 am UTC). All four were employees at the store.

A fifth victim, the ex-spouse of the killer, was found dead in her home in Espoo. She was an employee of the Prisma store, too.

In a live broadcast press conference which started at 14:30 Finnish time (12:30 UTC), police revealed that the shooter, Ibrahim Shkupolli, born in 1966, had killed himself in his own home in Espoo. Shkupolli is a native Kosovo Albanian.

The shooter assassinated his victims with a 9 mm hand gun. A restraining order was in force against Shkupolli, to prevent him from approaching the Prisma store as well as the home of his ex-spouse.

He also had previous convictions, in 2003 and 2007, for illegal possession of fire arms and ammunition.

The exact motive of the killings is still under investigation.

Finland has a history of public massacres in recent years. Eleven people, including the shooter Matti Juhani Saari, died in a massacre at a vocational school in Kauhajoki, September 2008. Nine people, including the shooter Pekka-Erik Auvinen, died in a shooting incident on Wednesday at Jokela High School, in Tuusula, November 2007.

The following are my tweets, based on Finnish media reports. I'll copy-paste them here in chronological order:

Tweet: [Reading:] Sello Espoossa: Ainakin neljää ihmistä ammuttu - Suomi - Uutiset - Ilta-Sanomat http://ping.fm/vHvR8

Tweet: http://www.yle.fi Four people killed in Finnish shopping mail shooting #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: Three men and a woman were killed in a shopping mall shooting in Finland this morning. #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: Police know the identity of the shooter, male, born 1966. Motive as yet unknown. #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: Shoot-out happened at Sello Prisma mall, city of Espoo near capital Helsinki #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: Police were alarmed 10:08 am. Still looking for killer, who used a 9 mm hand gun. #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/ET2pf Suspect, Ibrahim Shkupolli, is known to the police. Updated 11:30 UTC. #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg Blog post: 'Another shoot-out in Finland: four people killed in shopping mall' #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg Not 4, but 5 killed in Finnish shopping mall shooting; killer at large #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg 5th victim found dead in a private home in Espoo #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg Killer still at large, "armed and dangerous" (Police) #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg Shooting spree in Finland; five dead, killer at large #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg Police: possibly 6 dead (not 5), possibly including the killer. #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg Police have surrounded home of suspected killer #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg Killer convicted for illegal arms posession 2003, 2007; restraining order #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg Police have found the suspect killer, Ibrahim Shkupolli, dead #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg Police find killer dead after shooting spree in Finland, taking six lives #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet: http://ping.fm/zHaYg Gunman in Finnish massacre Ibrahim Shkupolli was Kosovo Albanian #Finland #news #shooting

Tweet:

Sources:

Neljä kuoli ammuskelussa Espoon Sellossa - tekijä on edelleen kateissa | YLE (national public broadcaster)

Tässä on poliisin etsimä ampuja | MTV3.fi (national commercial TV channel)

Police press conference broadcast via YLE Areena

...

Would we still call it journalism?

Tweet (by me): [Reading:] The End Of Hand Crafted Content http://ping.fm/kzv9s

Tweet (by Katri Lietsala): @josschuurmans What did you think about Arrington's article? In my opinion, he is so right: excellent journalists can have their own brand.

We're talking about Michael Arrington's article on TechCrunch, 'The End Of Hand Crafted Content', which by now has received 350 comments and, according to Topsy.com, was retweeted 1246 times.

Tweet: @katrilietsala http://ping.fm/lxNzC I agree that excellent journalists can have their own brand. There are several push factors at play.

For one, "disintermediation" and "sources going direct" imply that one no longer needs to be part of a news organization - the news industry - to conduct and share acts of journalism. We really are witnessing a revolution, with the means of production changing hands.

For another, the social web, particularly the blogosphere and the real-time web, appear to appreciate personal perspectives just as much as "objective reporting". This seems like an opportunity for individuals, including the "excellent journalists" that you mention, to build their personal brands.

Furthermore, I expect that journalists will be increasingly compelled to go solo if their news organizations keep hanging on to their model of "lecturing" rather than facilitating conversation.

Some freelancers have always been successful at franchising their personal brand across various channels and publications.

The Demonic Verses

Having said all that, the other interesting point that Mike Arrington made has to do with the advent of highly automated, "fast food" content production.

The illustrating example here is Demand Media, a company whose way of producing “content” was characterized by Jay Rosen as "demonic".

Demand Media immediately brought to my mind the animated video "EPIC 2015" (the Evolving Personal Information Construct), in which GoogleZon operates in a rather similar fashion and the New York Times finally goes off-line to continue as an elite newspaper for the rich and the elderly.

Yet, personally, I am not so afraid of this type of spam. As Doc Searls wrote:

"(...) Just as an aside, I’ve been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my “content” for about twenty years now, and I haven’t been destroyed by a damn thing. I kinda don’t think FFC is going to shut down serious writers (no matter where and how they write) any more than McDonald’s killed the market for serious chefs. (...)"

The web has always challenged us to distill signal from noise. The vast majority of content on Twitter, for example, is of no consequence to most of us.

If anything, should spammy businesses like Demand Media succeed in gaming the major search engines (which I doubt), it would only boost our reliance on social filters: if I know you and you have read something that you'd like to share (and possibly discuss) with me, I'd probably be interested and trust that it's not spam. We are already relying more and more on human filters this way.

The business model is still up in the air

The big question remains, how is "excellent journalism" going to be paid for in the future? Jeff Jarvis is exploring possible answers within the 'New Business Models for News' program at the City University of New York's CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Nikki Usher contends that the business model for news has always been broken - which, in my view, seems to imply that news provision may have to be subsidized. Looking at it that way, Arrington may be right in suggesting that for some, the only way to keep publishing may be pro bono.

Perhaps if we made a distinction between b2b and b2c journalism?

The revenue model for b2c journalism relies on sales and advertising. Selling journalistic content to consumers seems an increasingly difficult proposition. And on the flip side, Dave Winer sheds some doubt on the future of advertising as well, in Rebooting the News #35:

"(...) advertising itself may go away. “In a way an ad is a query… They try to guess as to what I’m interested in. And the better they guess, the more it becomes information." (...)"

The revenue model for b2b journalism is a content model. Businesses will always be willing to pay for timely and/or exclusive information as long as it's an essential part of their supply chain. The potential customer segment here is not limited to the media.

But what then, if the customer is not a media organisation? Let's say it's a mobile phone producer, or an insurance company instead. If journalists were to supply them with information which has been researched and packaged exactly as if it were supplied to the media, would we still call it journalism?

Amplification is the new circulation

When one quotes, forwards or retweets a reported fact (or opinion, for that matter), I believe it is considered good journalistic practice to try and reference a source as close as possible to the original event, observer or report.

David Weinberger's "transparency is the new objectivity" would support the suggestion that such practice is just as much required on the Net today than it has been in the press and public discourse traditionally.

(And BTW, Just like professor Weinberger does, I should really apologize for the cliché of “x is the new y.”)

Dan Gillmor appears to support this principle as well by recommending that we should be skeptical of everything (while not equally skeptical of everything) we read and always consider the trustworthiness of the source and the verifiability of its claim.

And while I agree that the transparency and verifiability of a story's origin  is an important attribute of its credibility, I also observe a dilemma here:

With the proliferating practice of reblogging and retweeting, it often seems increasingly cumbersome to track down the original source.

Amplification is the new circulation.

As we move away from the lecture model to the conversation model, facts and opinion spread through the social graph as by "word of post".

Tweet: http://ping.fm/F2TxI @jayrosen_nyu Is it reasonable to expect from everyone who amplifies a message that they link to the origin?

Jay Rosen, I believe that this is a challenge for the rebooted news system and I would love to learn your take on it.

Let me offer an example.

My wife, Minnna Ojamies, is a native Finn, who follows the Finnish mainstream media closely. She serves as my "human filter" to the news in Finnish. She uses Google Reader to share the news reports which she considers most interesting. I subscribe to her shared reading on Google Reader.

Also I happen to share stuff I read; articles, posts and tweets which I think may be of interest to others and/or which I would like to capture for possible future reference.

What I share on Google Reader flows into an RSS feed (edited on Yahoo! Pipes to include the string "[Reading:]" in front of the headline), which is forwarded by notify.me via Ping.fm onto a number of "social" web services including my account on Twitter.

The other day, she shared this article published on Taloussanomat, reporting that the 100-dollar laptop, for which Nicholas Negroponte has been campaigning, had arrived.

I hadn't seen this news in any of the other RSS feeds that I subscribe to. Unfortunately, the article was rather poor on source references. Also, it didn't mention much anything about the timing of availability of the laptop in question, nor about its competition.

In other words, there was little transparency and verifiability to go by. Yet, when it comes to overall credibility as a news brand, Taloussanomat finds itself - in my perception at least - in positive territory. Therefor I shared it.

The topic interests me and if the report turns out to be "new and true", I will be happy that I captured and amplified it. If not, I will be disappointed in Taloussanomat and regret amplifying noise rather than signal.

I could have done my own background check, of course. A simple web search would probably have done the trick. And services like Techmeme are helpful, too.

But my point, really, is that it may not be realistic to expect "amplifiers" to routinely carry out verification checks.

Personally, when I am in "reading mode", catching up with my RSS subscriptions, I don't  necessarily want to allocate much time to verification. My priority is to read, capture and share (and amplification is a by-product which serves the rebooted news system).

So, I'm kinda wondering if it would be acceptable that we simply link to where we read the news - in my case the article by Taloussanomat - and perhaps trust that the rebooted news system will somehow take care of verifying the origin itself.

That, across all these chains of amplification, some people will actually go back and refer to the origin of the story - especially when doubt or controversy (combined with a lack of transparency or verifiability) pass a certain threshold.

There's another remark or two that I wanted to make around amplification being the new circulation.

If we accept this framing of the new news system for a moment, it might lead us to believe that paywalls a la Rupert Murdoch constitute indeed an act of shooting oneself in the proverbial foot.

Let's assume for a moment that the way to reach people online is less about signing up subscribers and more about amplification.

In a sense, the newspaper sales model can be associated with "push" and the amplification model with "pull". Through subscription and sales outlets, stuff is pushed to people on certain terms, but only after recieving the package will they find out what they appreciate and what not. What they subsequently do like and decide to amplify is what they have pulled out as signal from the noise.

You can't put it back into the tube, Rupert!

In such a world, where pull trumps push and amplification trumps circulation, any content behind paywalls cannot be amplified.

Or rather, of course the message can be amplified - Washington Post readers also have Twitter accounts - but the paywall discourages the referencing of the original source.

So, if amplification is the new circulation, perhaps the amplifiers (that's us) won't always take the trouble of reading and verifying the original source, especially when it's made cumbersome to do so. If important enough, we'll do the fact-checking somehow routing around the paywall. Perhaps we'll find our own sources.

Hm, Dave Winer, perhaps it's not only that sources are going direct, (@davewiner, what would be the best link to this theme?), but also readers will go direct, namely directly to the source.

Tweet: http://ping.fm/F2TxI @davewiner Seems to me that not only sources, but also receivers go direct, namely to the source.

(When sources go direct, they become senders. And if senders can go direct, so can receivers or readers.)

Finally: how about if the half time of news is approaching to zero, much like the cost of storage of digital content is approaching to zero?

In a variation to Chris Anderson, will it make best business sense to give the news away for free and sell something else? Some type of premium content? Live experiences?

In such scenario, high-quality news including investigative reporting will merely be a brand builder, an investment rather than a business of its own.

links for 2009-12-21

• MeFeedia - Media Engine
  "(...) MeFeedia is a video community, where you can watch videos from a variety of sources and easily share them with your friends via email or your favorite social network. (...)"
  (tags: MeFeedia social video)

Interesting conversations at the MobileBrainBank startup scene inTampere

Tweet: Thank you @PetraHelsinki for #MoBB! Here are my slides: http://ping.fm/T3ADP

I had the privilege of presenting my company, Cluetail Ltd. and demonstrating our Cluetail Lunch Date concept at the pikkujoulu edition of MobileBrainBank (#MoBB) at Demola in Tampere on Tuesday evening.

Cluetail at MobileBrainBank

View more documents from Jos Schuurmans.

Thank you, Petra Soderling, for pulling this entrepreneurial network together! Thank you all participants for some very interesting conversations!

UPDATE, Wednesday, December 16, 2009:

Tweet: @PetraHelsinki has put yesterday's #MoBB video material out on YouTube. I just embedded #Cluetail's here: http://ping.fm/T3ADP

Petra has uploaded the video material she shot with her Nokia N97 to YouTube, as embedded here:

links for 2009-12-10

• Topsy - A search engine powered by tweets
  (tags: Topsy search tweets Twitter)

links for 2009-12-08

• 40TWITS
  "(...) 40twits.com makes it super-easy to push links to Twitter, ranking your last 40 links by number of clicks. (...)"
  (tags: 40twits.com Dave Winer Twitter)

links for 2009-12-05

• MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
  The MIT Center for Collective Intelligence brings together faculty from across MIT to conduct research on how new communications technologies are changing they way people work together. Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?'
  (tags: Center Collective Intelligence MIT)

"I know - I have - I bond - I do" | Christopher Evatt on connecting from our center

I was just watching a video'd presentation by my friend Christopher Evatt (@evatt @tar1na) and so I thought I might as well share my notes below, for what it's worth. It's definitely not a transcript - more like a collection of snippets.

Most of his New Age insights are not entirely new to me. What I find interesting though, is how he applies Jung to societies and cultures. Must admit that I quite recognize his experience of the Finnish culture as being biased towards transactions.

I hope he's right in that it's changing. Maybe there are more signs of it changing in the capital area than in my part of the woods. Which leads me to the observation that the new cosmopolitanism in the Helsinki area seems quite in contrast with most of the rest of the country.

Dicole OZ, Christopher Evatt: Do you want the secrets to empowering communications and relationships? from Teemu Arina on Vimeo.

[NOTES START]

"(...) When I had just come here, I thought that Finland was a very transactional country.

People are now getting more and more together. One of the things that show this is that people are now eating on the streets.

What was the spirit that pulled us out of the cave and into this room today?

1987 in China the University of the Emperor. Lectures called "the Four Seasons". That's where I met my wife.

Truth, love and freedom underly the quality of the cement in human relations.

Drives:
I know - thinking
I have - protecting
I bond - feeling
I do - action

Similar to Jung's personality types.

The "feeling" drive is now particularly coming through in Finland.

Each can be followed by "...therefor I am."

We are all of these, but under pressure we will fall back into one of these four drives.

Example of the stain on the table. I wanted to "do", i.e. to fix the problem, while she wanted recognition for her "feeling".

Different cultures have different emphases. Climate dictates it to a significant extent.  Compare Fiji and Scandinavia. In Fiji, bonding is very strong. In Scandinavia we need to "do" things under time pressure because "it will start snowing tomorrow".

(Draws a Maslow-like pyramid:)

inspirationally
|
emotionally
|
mentally
|
physically

Energy in the top of the pyramid, inspiration, is lightest and most fluid, moving fast. This is when things are happening quickly.

We need to become the master of our own lives. Our power is in the center. It cannot be defined: it is the "I am".

The center gives energy to all of the four drives.

If we connect across cultures and languages, we have a very pure connection if we connect from the center.

We are only waking up to these concepts in the West. They've been known in Asia for thousands of years.

Our challenge is how to blend together the intelligence of the heart and the mind. That is the center of our wisdom, the center of "I am" and "We are". (...)"

[NOTES END]

links for 2009-12-04

• If We Ran The World

Waar kan ik een pizzadeegkneedautomaat kopen?

Stel, ik overweeg een pizzeria te beginnen, maar ben bang voor repetitive strain injury (RSI). Nou heb ik een automaat gezien die pizzadeeg kan kneden en rollen. Waar in Nederland kan ik zo'n (of vergelijkbaar) apparaat kopen?

(Bron: http://www.archiexpo.com/prod/oem/commercial-dough-divider-and-rounder-49724-51692.html)