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Change is gonna come

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I’ve been following some of the coverage of the Blog Credibility Conference at Harvard (from, Weinberger, Jarvis and Winer, among others). It continues to amaze me how much of this debate is a retread of the mid-’90s, when journalists first moved online and discovered that the Web moved really fast, had different norms, gave their readers new voices and made their own voices sound stuffy and institutional. First I think, “Come on already!”; then I think, “Oh, it’s okay.” Lessons that change one’s professional habits need to be learned from experience, and a much wider population of journalists is being exposed to these changes now that blogging software has drastically expanded the universe of personal media.

This post by David Weinberger puts some of this in a smart perspective — focusing, as I and many others often will, on the critical fact that the vast majority of blogs (like the vast majority of the Web itself) represents stuff created not to “aggregate eyeballs,” build traffic, produce revenue, compete with the pros or otherwise challenge or replace the existing order of the media. People are building something fundamentally new, something that had no opportunity to exist before, and that will — as all such new developments in media do — end up changing but not replacing what’s already here.

There’s another disconnection between the “we’re-changing-everything” bloggers and those newsroom veterans who don’t understand what the fuss is about, and it has to do with scales of time. If you run a newspaper or a TV news operation you have spent your whole professional life in a stable structure, one whose supporting beams of business and technology have never fundamentally shaken or broken under you. The world of professional media has experienced such changes only across the span of a century. But the world of the technology business experiences big changes on a scale of decades — an order of ten faster. Dominant companies rise and fall, new technologies change the rules of the game, and habits of doing business get tossed in the trash every 10-20 years instead of every 100-200 years.

As a lifelong professional journalist who jumped headfirst into the tech-industry world a decade ago, I’ve made my choice. I don’t see getting anywhere by putting one’s money on the idea that change in this field is going to slow down rather than speed up. Which means that, if I were sitting in a newsroom today, I might think it prudent to listen a little less to the voice that says, “Who are these upstarts telling me what’s wrong with my work?” — and a little more to the one that says, “Wouldn’t it be fun to do things differently?”

Links without fear

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There’s a conference at Harvard this weekend about blogging, journalism and credibility. That’s a reasonable topic. The invitee list has caused some discussion in the blogosphere — too many pros? not enough bloggers? Some of this, I think, is just natural “why wasn’t I invited?” peevishness. (I froze through enough Januarys in Cambridge to cure me of any envy.) But reading Rebecca MacKinnon’s FAQ on the conference leaves me with a small sense of deja vu.

There are questions about how blogging and journalism intersect that are worth talking about more, even though we’ve already talked about them endlessly. But there are other questions that arose ten years ago when journalism and the Web first collided (pardon me for donning my old-timer’s hat, but it happens when you’ve been doing something long enough), and that ought to be settled by now.

For instance, MacKinnon asks: “What happens if one of your news organization’s blogs links to something that ends up not being accurate (despite being interesting)…?” This question was first raised in the mid-’90s by mainstream news editors who were hostile to the Web. They asked it because they already had their answer: Links were scary, so let’s not link at all, or only link after a committee of poobahs has said that it’s OK.

The notion that a link is an endorsement is something that died a slow death in the mid and late ’90s, as people who actually spent their working lives on the Web — as opposed to the editors who ran newsrooms and still didn’t know what an URL was — came to understand that an editorial link (one chosen by a writer rather than paid for as part of a business relationship) can be a reference, a courtesy, a footnote, a means of documentation, but that it is not an endorsement. The “endorsement” concept enjoyed a brief revival when Google came along and people worried that if, say, they linked to a Nazi site when they were writing a story about anti-Semitism, they were helping that site out by boosting its page-rank or “Google juice.” Google’s new scheme to defeat comment spam provides the ultimate technical fix to that problem. But even without it, choosing not to link to a site you were writing about, but didn’t approve of, was never much more than a discourtesy to your readers, who’d now have to go Google the site themselves.

Links are part of the vocabulary of writing for the Web. Telling Web journalists they can only link to “approved” sites, or sites whose accuracy is pre-vetted, is like saying, “You can only quote people who you agree with.” If a Web journalist or blogger links to a site and later discovers that it’s “not accurate,” why, then go edit the original story or blog post (and note that you’ve made the edit). Or post again with the new information about why the original link was inaccurate. Or both. The answer is, and has always been, more information, not less linking.

I sat through many conferences in 1996 and 1997 and 1998 that hashed all this stuff over. I’m sure the folks at Harvard have plenty of new controversies to explore; I hate to think Web journalism will be reinventing its own wheels every few years.

Tail gunning

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Wired editor Chris Anderson has started a good blog to follow up on his Long Tail essay and seed the ground for a book on the subject. Cory Doctorow takes Anderson to task for his “middle-of-the-road” stance on efforts to lock down intellectual property via increasingly desperate and continuingly futile technical schemes for digital rights management (DRM) — schemes that tip the balance between propertyholders and the public way too far.

Anderson is dead right in elucidating the way the Net economy restores market value to works that are not big hits. The story of the next few years will be one about whether that market in “long tail” intellectual goods (I wrote about its promise in October) thrives in the same open environment that allowed the Net itself to evolve and prosper — or shrivels under the furious weight of technical and legal efforts to squeeze every last dollar from every last little hair on the long tail. My money is on the former, happier outcome. But it won’t turn out that way without persistent and stubborn resistance — which we can thank Doctorow and the EFF for ringleading — to the “we control the horizontal, we control the vertical” paternalism and anti-consumerism of the DRM mafia.

(For a little example of what happens when rights holders hold too many cards, check out the sad saga of “Eyes on the Prize,” the documentary that is the “principal film account of the most important American social justice movement of the 20th century,” in a Stanford professor’s words from Wired News’ account. “Eyes on the Prize” can’t be publicly shown or distributed because “the filmmakers no longer have clearance rights to much of the archival footage used in the documentary.” You want your audiovisual history? Pay up first!)

Assuming the Long Tail isn’t clipped by DRMania, we face an ever-expanding banquet of media goods. The BBC sounds an alarm. We are coming
face to face with the scourge of “digital obesity”:

  Gadget lovers are so hungry for digital data many are carrying the equivalent of 10 trucks full of paper in “weight”. Music, images, e-mails, and texts are being hoarded on mobiles, cameras laptops and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), a Toshiba study found. It found that more than 60% kept 1,000 to 2,000 music files on their devices, making the UK “digitally fat”.

Or maybe not. The term is a ludicrous oversimplification and distortion; we keep all this stuff around precisely because we can now — because it doesn’t fill trucks, it fills infinitesimal chips and drives, and it’s easier to keep everything around than to worry about cleaning house. Carrying the stuff around? No problem. Finding it? Harder. Finding time to absorb it all? There’s our rub.

Obesity is simply the wrong metaphor. This post by Rajat Paharia hits closer to the mark:

 

I’m finding that the “digital photo effect” is starting to make its way into my music and video experiences as well. What’s the DPE? My ability to produce and acquire has far outstripped my ability to consume. Produce from my own digital camera. Acquire from friends, family, Flickr, etc. This has a couple of ramifications:

1. I feel behind all the time.
2. Because there is so much to consume, I don’t enjoy each individual photo as much as I did when they were physical prints. I click through fast.
3. Because of 1 and 2, sometimes I don’t even bother.

I first noticed this phenomenon back in the late ’80s, when I switched from buying music on vinyl to CDs, and noticed how quickly I stopped listening to an entire 50-60 minute CD if the first track or two didn’t grab me. Of course, this kind of impatience coincided with the speeding up of my professional life and my crossing the threshold into my 30s. Something tells me that the problems Paharia and I and perhaps you are facing in this realm of overload may not feel so dire to today’s teenagers and twenty-somethings, for whom this thick soup is a native muck.

Still, the “I feel behind all the time” phenomenon is real enough, as today’s RSS addicts know — and as indicated by the rising popularity among the geeknoscenti of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology, with its promise of liberation from uncomfortable behind feelings.

I’m not liberated yet. Behindness surrounds me on all sides. But finding stuff is getting easier. I’m slowly trying to teach myself the methodology that Doctorow has modeled for several years now: If you want to be able to find something in the future, don’t bury it in your files — blog about it, put it out on the Net, where Google will never lose it, and if for some reason you can’t find it, someone else will probably have picked it up and saved it for you.

So to hell with bookmarks, and long live the blogmark. Here’s a handful:

Lexis Nexis Alacarte: No longer the preserve of big-media newsrooms — now in handy personal-journalism size.

For years, I tuned my guitar with one of those little electronic tuners in a plastic box; but when they were two, my kids decided that it made a great toy and disembowelled it. Well, all that is solid melts into Net: Today you don’t need a physical object, all you need is a Net connection and a browser. Just Google “guitar tuner” for a bunch of options; I liked this one for its retro look.

Feel-good link of the day: First it was the beer and wine, now it’s spicy food! Curry may help block Alzheimer’s disease. (It’s the turmeric.)

Hyperlink hyperbole

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Jeremy Zawodny is scratching his head over an odd thread in the Slate/Washington Post coverage:

 

I’m catching up on e-mail as my flight is delayed in O’Hare and came across the following tidbit about Slate Magazine in the latest Edupage mailing:

“Although the magazine only recently achieved break-even status on revenue of about $6 million per year, Slate won a National Magazine Award for its editorial content, and mainstream news organizations frequently cite it. The publication is also given credit for shaping Web publishing and introducing the use of hyperlinks and Web logs.“

(Emphasis mine.)

Am I reading that right? Edupage wants me to believe that Slate is responsible for introducing hyperlinks to the world?

I’m having a very, very hard time believing that.

Am I alone?

No, Jeremy, you’re not alone. The source of this odd statement is almost certainly David Carr’s New York Times piece, which included the following passage: “Although Slate has never achieved steady profitability, it is credited with helping to shape Web publishing as well as pioneering the use of hyperlinks and Web logs.”

Carr’s “pioneering” was marginally closer to reality than Edupage’s feeble substitution of “introducing.” But neither is particularly correct.

I sincerely doubt anyone at Slate would have claimed to have introduced either hyperlinks or blogs to the world. Slate was in fact rather shy of linking for the longest time — in the early days, the links in each article were typically segregated in a little afterword section. As for blogs, Slate gave Mickey Kaus’s blog a home at a time when, quite possibly, only three people in the Washington Post newsroom knew what a blog was; but at the same time, blogs were already a widespread format, and widely known to the web-aware world.

Slate deserves tons of credit for many things; after a lot of false starts in the first few years, it became quite adept at devising creative Web-native formats for writers (like the e-mail exchanges). But “pioneering the use of hyperlinks and Web logs” is just not an accurate statement.

I imagine Carr meant to write something more like “The publication is also given credit for raising the profile of hyperlinks and blogs in the media and government circles that constitute some of its core readership.” Or if he didn’t, he should have.

Slate bought by Post

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Congratulations and best of luck to everyone at Slate, which is being purchased from Microsoft by the Washington Post Co. Let’s hope the Posties pick up some of Slate’s online savvy, and the Slatesters get the benefit of smart media owners. Any way you cut it, keeping a high-quality Web site going is not easy (I say that from intimate experience), and persuading another business to buy in represents a real achievement. We can assume everyone involved did this out of faith in Slate as a publication; if there is one certainty here, it’s that Microsoft didn’t sell Slate out of a need for extra cash.

Google and the public good

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For those of us who are still consumers of those bundles of printed content known as books, the importance of today’s news of Google’s library deal is almost impossible to overstate. It’s just huge.

While the Web has represented an enormous leap in the availability of human knowledge and the ease of human communication, its status as a sort of modern-day Library of Alexandria has remained suspect as long as nearly the entire corpus of human knowledge pre-Web remained locked away off-line between bound covers. “All human knowledge except what’s in books” is sort of like saying “All human music except what’s in scores.” There’s lots of good stuff there, but not the heart of things. Your Library of Alexandria is sort of a joke without, you know, the books.

Now Google, in partnership with some of the world’s leading university libraries (including Stanford and Harvard), is undertaking the vast — but not, as Brewster Kahle reminded us at Web 2.0, limitless — project of scanning, digitizing and rendering searchable the world of books.

Google’s leaders are demonstrating that their corporate mission statement — “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — is not just empty words. If you’re serious about organizing the world’s information, you’d better have a plan for dealing with the legacy matter of the human species’ nearly three millennia of written material. So, simply, bravo for the ambition and know-how of a company that’s willing to say, “Sure, we can do it.”

Amazon’s “look inside the book” feature provides a limited subset of this sort of data. But where Amazon has seemed mostly interested in providing limited “browsability” as a marketing tool, Google has its eye on the more universal picture. And so the first books that will be fully searchable and readable through this new project are books that are old enough to be out of copyright. The public domain just got a lot more public. (And presumably, as John Battelle suggests, we’ll see a new business ecosystem spring up around providing print-on-demand physical copies of these newly digitized, previously unavailable public-domain texts.)

This is all such a Good Thing for the public itself that we may be inclined to overlook some of the more troubling aspects of the Google project. Google is making clear that, as it digitizes the holdings of university libraries, it’s handing the universities their own copies of the data, to do with as they please. But apparently the Google copies of this information will be made widely available in an advertising-supported model.

For the moment, that seems fine: Google’s approach to advertising is the least intrusive and most user-respectful you can find online today; if anyone can make advertising attractive and desirable, Google can.

But Google is a public company. The people leading it today will not be leading it forever. It’s not inconceivable that in some future downturn Google will find itself under pressure to “monetize” its trove of books more ruthlessly.

Today’s Google represents an extremely benign face of capitalism, and it may be that the only way to get a project of this magnitude done efficiently is in the private sector. But capitalism has its own dynamic, and ad-supported businesses tend to move in one direction — towards more and more aggressive advertising.

Since we are, after all, talking about digitizing the entire body of published human knowledge, I can’t help thinking that a public-sector effort — whether government-backed or non-profit or both — is more likely to serve the long-term public good. I know that’s an unfashionable position in this market-driven era. It’s also an unrealistic one given the current U.S. government’s priorities.

But public investment has a pretty enviable track record: Think of the public goods that Americans enjoy today because the government chose to seed them and insure their universality — from the still-essential Social Security program to the interstate highway system to the Internet itself. In an ideal world, it seems to me, Google would be a technology contractor for an institution like the Library of Congress. I’d rather see the company that builds the tools of access to information be an enabler of universal access than a gatekeeper or toll-taker.

The public has a big interest in making sure that no one business has a chokehold on the flow of human knowledge. As long as Google’s amazing project puts more knowledge in more hands and heads, who could object? But in this area, taking the long view is not just smart — it’s ethically essential. So as details of Google’s project emerge, it will be important not just to rely on Google’s assurances but to keep an eye out for public guarantees of access, freedom of expression and limits to censorship.

Dan Gillmor’s new venture

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Congratulations to Dan Gillmor on his announcement that he’s leaving the San Jose Mercury News to launch a new venture in the field of grassroots journalism/citizen reporting. Whatever Dan comes up with will be worth watching. Gillmor writes:

  A friend who knew about this ahead of time asked the question I’m sure some others will ask: “Are you nuts?”

That is precisely the question people asked me and my colleagues from the San Francisco Examiner when we left nine years ago to start Salon. I’d been at the Examiner roughly a decade, the same amount of time Gillmor’s been at the Merc. I haven’t regretted the leap into a more entrepreneurial fray, and I don’t think Dan will either. Perhaps being nuts is, you know, underrated.

Random links

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## Oliver Willis (who I met last year at the first Bloggercon) is having fun dreaming up pithy ads for “Brand Democrat.”

## Merlin Mann of 43 Folders offers some good tips on breaking thru writer’s block — not my particular affliction, thankfully, but the advice is useful for all sorts of creative logjams.

## Reason #5637 to love RSS: I knew that NPR offered RSS feeds, but only recently did I realize that they’ve intelligently broken up shows like “Fresh Air” into individual segments — so that, for instance, I can listen to my friend David Edelstein’s movie reviews even when I don’t have a full hour to hear the whole show.

Two good things

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J.D. Lasica and others have begun building Ourmedia, a/k/a Open-Media.org, “an open-source initiative devoted to creating, sharing and storing works of personal media” — “a place where people can share works of personal media and have them stored forever — for free.” It’s a work in progress right now, but the basic notion of an accessible and reliable (thanks to the Internet Archive) repository for “grassroots media” — “digital stories, photo albums, video diaries, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, children’s tales, Flash animations, student films, parodies of Hollywood films” — makes wonderful sense. There’s a wiki here for people interested in contributing.

Rebecca McKinnon, a fellow at the Berkman Center who describes herself as “a recovering TV reporter-turned-blogger,” has sparked the formation of Bloggercorps. The nonpartisan group’s mission is “Matching bloggers with activists and non-profit groups who want to blog and need help getting started.” Here’s more info.

The Iranian information blockade

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I read this New York Times op-ed by Iranian Nobel Prize winner Shirin Ebadi with great interest. Ebadi complains about the absurd U.S. Treasury Department rules that prevent American publishers from commissioning or editing work by people in Iran:

  Despite federal laws that say that American trade embargoes may not restrict the free flow of information, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control continues to regulate the import of books from Iran, Cuba and other countries. In order to skirt the laws protecting the flow of information, the government prohibits publishing “materials not fully created and in existence.” Therefore, I could publish my memoir in the United States, but it would be illegal for an American literary agent, publisher, editor or translator to help me.

We encountered this ridiculous regulation here at Salon a couple of years ago in trying to pay a reporter who was spending time in Iran. Applying the rules of trade embargos to informational products is not only silly, it’s counterproductive to the United States’ larger global effort. We should be working hard to open up the flow of information into and out of these so-called axis-of-evil nations — not behaving like petty dictators eager to clamp down on the free reporting of news and expression of ideas.

Oh, wait, that is the order of the day for our new, improved, “mandate”-driven democracy. I guess it all makes sense.