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Kinsley, Time, and the scourge of automatic linking

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Print is in trouble these days; everyone’s saying it, most recently Michael Kinsley in Time, so there must be something to it. Kinsley’s piece is a discourse on how some news organizations will survive and prosper in the transition from print to online and others won’t.

Given this context there’s an amusing gaffe in the piece as it’s presented on the Time Web site. At one point in his argument, Kinsley writes, “There is room between the New York Times and myleftarmpit.com for new forms.” I assumed “Myleftarmpit.com” was just some phrase Kinsley invented as a generic put-down for a personal Web site, but there it was on Time.com, highlighted as a link. Gee, maybe it’s real! Some obscure site Kinsley wants us to see?

I clicked on it. Oops — file not found. There is no myleftarmpit.com. But some dumb process in Time’s content-management software recognized the domain name and automatically turned it into a link.

Additional, inadvertent lesson from Kinsley’s piece: When news organizations transition from print to online, they need to pay attention to the links they post. Links aren’t technical window-dressing; they are as or more important than the words around them. They need to be edited, too.
[tags]linking, michael kinsley, time magazine[/tags]

Larger meaning in H-P’s scandal

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In a column today aimed at defending corporate boardrooms from additional regulation in the wake of an outrageous scandal, The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins — who never met a business story he couldn’t twist to suit his own ideology — declares that “The H-P snafu is devoid of larger meaning.”

“Larger meaning” is always, ultimately, in the eye of the beholder. Was H-P’s spying on journalists and its own board members simply a matter of poor judgment, loose ethics and a betrayal of the “H-P Way” (the original Don’t Be Evil imperative)? Maybe. But It doesn’t take a private detective firm to see that there’s a likely connection between H-P’s shame and a broader trend in U.S. corridors of power. Information is power; information is increasingly unresponsive to command; leaders — from the board room to the White House — are fighting harder, and dirtier, to try to bring it back to heel.

As access to once-inside information becomes increasingly difficult to block, institutions have a simple choice: they can accept that board members are going to talk to the press (in H-P’s case, the leaker was saying positive things!), employees are going to blog, and news and information is going to flow no matter what, so they might as well embrace transparency; or they can resort to ever more desperate ploys (cf. also: Apple) to repair cracks in informational dams and hound people who are trying to build conversational routes around those barriers.

That’s a large enough meaning for me.
[tags]hewlett-packard, wall street journal[/tags]

Cool projects: MadLiberals, JPG

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  • If, like me, you spent some significant portion of your childhood in the back of a car dreaming up parts of speech to complete Mad Libs, you may find this site, and the book it’s based on, irresistible. Even if you didn’t, it’s worth a look. MadLiberals takes the classic fill-in-the-blanks game and updates it for the Bush era. The Web site offers a few interactive “MadLiberator” pages; an old-fashioned book is also available.

    (Full disclosure: My agent, Stuart Krichevsky, also served as the agent for MadLiberals, and he wants people to know that a substantial chunk of the proceeds will go straight to various charities and nonprofits.) And here, for the heck of it, are some more, more traditional, amusing Mad Libs.

  • Derek Powazek and Heather Champ have been publishing a cool little photo magazine called JPG for some time. Now they’ve expanded the project into a Web community intended to feed the magazine with contributions. (More on their blog.) Derek is a veteran Web designer and instigator of Web communities; Heather created the Mirror Project way back when. So it’s no surprise they’ve put a lot of thought and care into their project. The photos are pretty great, too.

Old-media money for new-media ideas

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Congratulations to Jay Rosen, who today announced a $100,000 grant from Reuters to underwrite hiring a full-time editor at NewAssignment.net, Jay’s nascent experiment in networked “smart-mob”-style journalism (which I earlier discussed here).

That’s a significant sum from an old-school media outfit that is putting its cash where its talk is. (Full disclosure: Rosen asked me this summer to join an informal advisory board for his undertaking, which I’ve been happy to do.)

Torture as an abstruse legal issue

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In August I noted how regularly the Bush administration has relied on formulations like “No one could have anticipated…” and “No one expected…” to explain its missteps. They’re at it again, this time with regard to the dustup between Bush’s demand for the right to torture and the senators in his own party who think that unilaterally carving out exceptions to the Geneva Conventions might be a bad idea.

Here’s what some anonymous administration official told the New York Times’ David Sanger about the controversy:

“I don’t think anyone anticipated the avalanche of opinion that would be assembled on the other side of what seemed like a pretty abstruse legal issue,” one official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to discuss the issue with a reporter.

No one anticipated it, nope. Abstruse legal issue. John McCain’s position on the matter? Big surprise. Disagreement over abandoning a central tenet of the 150-year-old foundational agreement on wartime ethics? Who’da thunk?
[tags]torture, bush administration, john mccain[/tags]

BASIC as mirror

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Programming pioneer Edsger Dijkstra once said, “Teaching BASIC should be a criminal offense.” (At least it’s attributed to him — he had a lot of snarky things to say about a lot of other computer languages, so at least it’s in character.)

David Brin disagrees — in fact, Brin is appalled that BASIC, which used to be pre-installed on every personal computer available for purchase, is now a rarity. His article recounting his and his school-age son’s search for a simple BASIC tool is in Salon today.

Brin likes to draw — and rile up — a crowd, as he did years ago in arguing the case that “Star Trek” is philosophically superior to “Star Wars.” And he’s succeeded again.

What I’m finding most interesting in the 150+ letters his article has already generated, whether they share Brin’s views or disagree, is the sheer passion on the part of the programmers responding. I guess the topic combines programmers’ near-religious intensity on the topic of languages with the deep-seated connection all creators have to the tools of their youth.
[tags]programming languages, basic, david brin[/tags]

9/11, Breughel and Auden

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Thomas Hoepker's 9/11 photo The photo shows five people on the Brooklyn waterfront on 9/11. Two crouch, facing the smoke rising from lower Manhattan; three others stretch out on the embankment, facing away from the unfolding tragedy.

The photographer, Thomas Hoepker, waited four years to publish the image. He told David Friend, the author of the 9/11 book “Watching the World Change,” that his subjects were “totally relaxed like any normal afternoon.” Frank Rich wrote about the photo in his column last Sunday, saying it represented how the 9/11 trauma “would recede quickly for many.”

Now there’s a bit of a controversy, fanned by David Plotz in Slate, who argues that Rich was wrong on the face of it: “They’re almost certainly discussing the horrific event unfolding behind them. They have looked away from the towers for a moment not because they’re bored with 9/11, but because they’re citizens participating in the most important act in a democracy—civic debate.”
Ed Cone agrees.

Surely the photographer who was there understands the moment best? But wait — now one of the people in the photo has written in to Slate to say, no, the photographer got it all wrong, he never even talked to the people he was photographing, and of course they were talking about the attack on the World Trade Center and not just going about their daily business.

Breughel's IcarusWho knows? I wouldn’t jump to blame-throwing in any direction. Rather, I’d note that the power and the appeal of the image lies in the archetype it evokes, one that goes back to an extremely famous Breughel painting: Breughel’s Icarus. You’ve probably seen it — it’s the one with the closeup of the ploughman in the foreground and the mythic tragedy unfolding so far in the distance it barely registers. W.H. Auden explicated the painting in his “Musee des Beaux Arts”; it’s about relative perspective, life going on while great events unfold in the background, and the way the ripples of tragedy and heroism pass over the surface of deep waters leaving nothing behind.

If Hoepker got his explanation of his image wrong, it’s important to know; and bless the Internet for making it easy for people to correct the record. Still, the image is potent on its own because it plugs into this tradition of thought. The people in Hoepker’s photo may have been fully engaged with the events of 9/11 at the instant the image was captured, but the image itself tells a different story, one of people at a safe remove from tragedy, unaffected visibly by it.

As Auden said: Suffering “takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.” Towers fall, yet “everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.” That’s the truth, and I think that’s ultimately what Rich was writing about.
[tags]9/11, photography, w.h. auden, breughel[/tags]

Machine-readable data and human-memorable stories

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I spent much of the last few years immersing myself in the lore and culture of computer programmers, but not until today did I encounter the Lojban phenomenon. Lojban is an invented language (in the tradition of Esperanto, which I actually studied for a couple of months in seventh grade, thanks to Mr. Glidden). One Lojban enthusiast was profiled on the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal; the article was mostly about a German programmer who has led a campaign against software patents in Europe. But it mentioned in passing his interest in Lojban, “an artificial language…intended to eliminate ambiguity and promoted by some programmers.”

Eliminate ambiguity? No wonder programmers are leading the bandwagon.

The Journal’s shorthand description may not do full justice to Lojban, which turns out, according to Wikipedia, to be an evolution out of Loglan, a “logical language” intended to “test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” (the idea that the structure and nature of language shapes human thought). There is much more here at Lojban.org and also here — including the idea that Lojban is structured to be more machine-readable (i.e., intelligible by computers) than naturally occurring human languages, making it well suited for “human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence research.”

I got to thinking about Lojban and the desire to smooth out all the fuzziness and overlap of our naturally evolving languages while reading Adrian Holovaty’s fascinating recent posting about the future of newspapers. Holovaty is a pioneering figure at the crossroads of the newspaper and technology industries; he started out working for newspapers in Lawrence, Kansas, where he and a group of Python developers created the content-management framework now known as Django; now he’s with the Washington Post.

Holovaty’s post argues that the “story” paradigm of newspaper journalism is a straitjacket the profession needs to shed if it expects to make full use of computers in its future. Stories are just “big blobs of text”; they’re not structured in ways that allow their data to be reused creatively. Newspapers are producing vast volumes of information each day, but because they don’t store the information in ways that allow it to be computer-readable in meaningful ways, they are failing to take real advantage of what technology can do with it all.

I think Holovaty is basically right, particularly when he points in the direction of information like weather data, sports scores, crime stats and the like — “news” that is essential metric, information that arrives from day to day in a relatively predictable format and ought to be stored in ways that let you compare it and reuse it. And he’s smart enough to understand that the structured-data model he is advocating wouldn’t and shouldn’t replace real old-fashioned stories: “News articles are great for telling stories…The two forms of information dissemination can coexist and complement each other.” Amen.

But I’d also like to pause and reflect for a moment on the enduring value of the “story” as a tool for human memory compression.

Unstructured information, Holovaty complains, is information with a short shelf-life: “The information gets distilled into a big blob of text — a newspaper story — that has no chance of being repurposed.” That’s not quite true: It has no chance of being repurposed by machine. But the process whereby a writer distills a volume of data and detail into a coherent narrative that sticks in the memory, if done with lively care and skill, is one that very much promotes “repurposing” by other people. The story sticks in the mind. You repeat it to your friend at work or your spouse over dinner. They get interested and repeat it. In exceptional cases the story becomes a part of the collective memory.

The kind of “repurposing” that machines do with structured data isn’t often going to result in that kind of experience. It’s closer to the stuff that has always been looked down on in newsrooms as “service journalism” or “news you can use.” That condescension is regrettable, but it’s in part inspired by journalists’ awareness that this sort of work really can be done pretty well by machine.

The “repurposing” of structured information that Holovaty describes — say, the ability of someone looking at a Little League schedule to call up the weather forecast for that day and location — is highly useful. So far, as he points out, the newspaper industry has failed to offer such services, or even see them as part of its mission. And so Yahoo and similar online “portal” businesses have moved into the vacuum and turned them into businesses that newspapers now eye jealously.

But Holovaty’s post suggests a way that newspapers — and, really, any journalistic enterprise — can get back into the game. If newsrooms begin to build up storehouses of structured data, someone’s going to need to look through them for patterns and insights. Why are state corporate tax returns dropping in a booming economy? If twice as many restaurants opened this year as last year, why were there only half as many health citations? Are sunspots governing the fortunes of the local high school football team? (OK, so there’s also room for fun and nonsense.) This is the kind of work newsrooms remain uniquely well-situated to perform.

In other words, there’s still plenty of room for the old-fashioned journalistic roles of fact-finder, truth-teller, story-creator. The quest to make more information more useful to machines isn’t an end in itself; it’s a way-station along the way to telling new kinds of stories — lovingly mined out of machine-organized data and then composed in “big blobs of text” for human consumption.

I’ll be glad to read those blobs in a language that still leave plenty of room for double meanings and for poetry. Lojban looks fascinating, but I’ll keep my ambiguity, thank you. Wordplay and nuance and music don’t fit easily into a database schema — but they’re how we encode data so it sticks with us long-term. They delight us, and that delight carves new pathways in our brains. Story is repurposed into memory. It’s our ancestral algorithm. Computers don’t really get it. But who says we have to change for them?
[tags]journalism, newspapers, structured data, storytelling[/tags]

Standing behind your words

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A fascinating thread runs through a pair of this week’s scandals.

First we have two of the top names in Silicon Valley’s old-boy network at odds over some quite possibly illegal boardroom shenanigans at one of its most hallowed companies. In an effort to plug media leaks they were sure emanated from a board member, Hewlett-Packard’s chairman, Patricia Dunn, hired a private consulting firm that apparently hired someone else who obtained private phone records of board members via, not to mince words, fraudulent means.

Those means now bear the delightfully euphemistic label “pretexting,” which sounds like something harmless, out of high school debating. But what we’re really talking about is calling up institutions like phone companies and claiming to be the person whose records you’re trying to obtain. Old-fashioned black-hat hackers used to call this “social engineering.” I’m not a lawyer, and others will determine the precise legality or lack thereof of what went down at H-P; but whatever you call it, it’s deceitful and dishonorable, and that is plainly why Silicon Valley grandee Tom Perkins, whose name bedecks the industry’s most august venture-capital firm, quit the H-P board in a huff. Perkins is now at odds with Valley uber-lawyer Larry Sonsini, who represents H-P’s board and who has been saying that the company did nothing illegal. (Leading technology journalists were also apparently targeted by the H-P-sponsored “pretexting.”)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, the New Republic, a little magazine with a venerable history, has suspended one of its critics, Lee Siegel. Siegel was caught posting anonymously on his own blog, under the name “sprezzatura,” singing hosannas to his own genius and lashing out at his critics.

It’s self-evident that there’s something loathsome about any writer who would don a virtual ski-mask in order to post pompous paeans to his own work along the lines of “Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be” — and then, when confronted by users who suspect the truth, deny it with “I’m not Lee Siegel, you imbecile. If you knew who I was you and your n + 1 buddies would crap in your pants.” Wit! Intelligence! Grace!

But how, asks Slate’s Jack Shafer, is what Siegel did any different from what legions of blog-commenters do every day in posting anonymous comments? Shafer is too locked into Slate’s contrarian-for-contrarianhood’s-sake stance (a journalistic mode pioneered by Slate founder Michael Kinsley when he ran the New Republic years ago) to grasp the simple and obvious difference: As the author of the blog, Siegel writes from a position of privilege. He can defend his own work from the stage mike without concocting a fake claque to cheer himself. By inventing “sprezzatura” he is not only deceiving his readership, he’s casting doubt on anything anyone has ever posted in favor of his work elsewhere on the Web. Now anytime you read anything nice posted on a blog about Siegel’s work, you’re going to be wondering, is this a real comment? Or is this Siegel playing games?

Anonymity is not a simple good — it’s a complex phenomenon that cuts positively or negatively depending on the power equation in play. When anonymity allows an insider to blow a whistle on corruption, or a dissident in a repressive regime to communicate about atrocities, it is plainly good. When anonymity allows people in positions of power to shrug off responsibility for their words, it’s problematic at least, and often harmful.

Siegel’s “sprezzatura” impersonation is a relatively low-stakes matter; with its exposure the only real harm is to the writer’s own reputation and to his publication’s dignity. But the common practice among denizens of the Bush White House of defending their actions and ambushing their opponents via anonymous, disownable statements shares in Siegel’s dishonor. They’re in power. They control the dialogue. There’s no excuse for them not to stand behind their words — and their record of unwillingness to put their names behind their statements has now fully eroded their credibility.

Back at the H-P boardroom, we have a sort of double-deniability maneuver: a primary act of impersonation on the part of investigators seeking to unmask an anonymous boardroom leaker, and then a secondary act of anonymous distancing on the part of the board and its chairman, who claim they didn’t know what their henchmen were up to. Henry II invented this “plausible deniability” gambit 900 years ago when he wanted to off Thomas Becket; it’s no more credible today.

According to CNET, before he quit the H-P board Perkins suggested that the chairman “just ask the board members if they had leaked information, rather than launch a full-blown investigation, and ask for a private apology.” Good plan. Too bad even this statement is attributed to an anonymous source.

To be fair, Perkins and his adversaries are all now tightly bound in legal webs as to what they can and can’t say. Nonetheless, we’re left with the spectacle of a group of rich, powerful people behaving appallingly. When a corporate board reaches a point as far gone as this, it’s time for everyone to resign. And I don’t mind being quoted on that — by name.
[tags]Hewlett-Packard, anonymous sources, lee siegel[/tags]

Job titles for the new millennium

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Each wave of Web development brings with it a new crop of confounding job titles. Consider the Vertical Keyword Analyst, which appears to have something to do with picking keywords that will be valuable on Google in certain market segments that the media business refers to as “verticals.”

Is the vertical keyword analyst someone versed in the lore of vertical keywords but unfamilar with, or utterly bored by, horizontal keywords? Or are we talking about a keyword analyst who happens to work standing up? Can a vertical keyword analyst still live up to the job title after the fifth margarita? Or is this in fact a shrink who uses a novel variation on the old Rorschach technique, asking patients to fill in the DOWN rows of a crossword and then studying their revealing choices?