From The Register:

Inspired by a recent New York Times piece that questioned whether the Mountain View search monopoly is morphing into a media company — which it is — Finnish blogger Timo Paloheimo promptly unveiled Google minus Google. Key in the word “YouTube,” and the first result is Wikipedia.

New 160GB AppleTV. How far away are we from a standalone unit that can download from iTunes store directly, sync iPods, and write to USB-attached burners?

apple, tv, itunes, itunes store, ipod, media, AppleTV

What Liberal Media author Eric Alterman arrested, mocked at GOP debates.

Speaking at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism last month, David Halberstam struck the chord of competition journalists must struggle with. As a newspaper man who started at the smallest newspaper in Mississippi and worked his way up to the New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer for his reporting on the Vietnam War, he learned that television’s constant stream of images offered “drama and excitement,” but perhaps incomplete reporting. Not that he was criticizing TV, no, he praised it for bringing images and awareness into our living rooms nightly, raising questions among the viewing audience that “we [in newspapers] had the chance to answer if we used our skills properly.”

But, “if we’re to compete, we’d better be very good storytellers.”

There is, I think, craft. …Knowing where to look. Knowing how to build steam. Knowing how to sustain a narrative drive. How to keep a reader interested — this is a real challenge. Everybody’s attention span is short. We are really competing. I mean, it used to be just television. Now it’s 200 channels. It’s four channels of Law and Order. There’s 20 sports channels. And there’s the Internet, there’s the blog — every person is his or her own editor. First you have to get it right. You have to make it accurate. Then you have to learn how to dramatize it, to bring it alive, to find the people and the events that make it real. So you’re not just a reporter, and you’re not just a historian — not in the world we live in with all the competing forms of information. You are a playwright too. You’ve got to bring in the drama.

competition, David Halberstam, media, storytelling, dissemination, speech, tv vs. newspapers, television news, newspapers, news writing

Matt tells us the office pranks he masterminded a couple weeks ago got reported in Saturday’s Daily Mirror (scan above):

JOKER Matt Batchelder had the last laugh after he was left out of an office conference trip.

Alone at his desk for a week, the snubbed computer geek dreamed up a series of pranks to greet his boss and three colleagues as they returned… on April Fool’s Day.

First he “ovenwrapped” all the chairs in 1,100 sq ft of tin foil.

He also plastered 5,300 post-it notes over every available work surface. Then he painstakingly arranged 578 plastic cups on the office floor. And finally, he filled the place with 280 balloons.

Married Matt, a whizkid web engineer, was the talk of the campus at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, where he works in the admin department.

An insider said: “We don’t know if his bosses saw the funny side – or if he’s been fired.”

Nobody here knows who the “insider” is, and Matt’s bummed that he didn’t get his blog mentioned, but the coverage is still sweet. And, now we can officially call Matt the office nerd.

Can anybody send a copy?

Daily Mirror, Matt Batchelder, Matthew Batchelder, co-worker, co-workers, media, mpow, newspaper, office, office prank, prank, pranked, pranks

The folks at WMUR’s Chronicle are featuring my friends Joe and Wendy and their dog sledding tonight. The photos above are of Justin in a race a few years ago (video of the finish also online). Warren hasn’t been so proud since we put the rocket up.

dog sledding, warren, winter, snow, wmur, television, wmur tv, new hampshire, warren nh, media, media attention

Somebody at Gizmodo found this Agence France-Presse story about the intersection of American surfing and bathroom habits in The Hindustan Times. It’s based on a report by the USC Annenberg School’s Center for the Digital Future. For five years running now, the center has tracked internet use (and non-use) in a 2,000 household representative sample of America (choosing a new sample each year).

This year, researchers found: “Over half of those who used Wi-fi had used it in the bathroom.”

Gizmodo is going a little farther than I’d initially care to by asking readers to comment on their behavior, but I found this gem that reminds us that this may just reflect the evolution of our media: “The laptop in the john is the new newspaper for the millennium.”

I apparently have too many neatnik issues to go down that path, but rather than devolve the discussion, I’d like to point out that this Center for the Digital Future report appears to be a good complement to OCLC’s latest report and the regular stream of reports from the Pew Internet Project.

Now back to the funny: RSStroom Reader.

restroom, bathroom, rss, media, newspaper, report, Center for the Digital Future, wifi, in the bathroom, technology, computer use, behavior, research, on the throne, in the can

Via an IM from Ryan Eby: a pointer to Andrew Escobar’s directions on how to install Apple’s Front Row.

apple, front row, hack, install, media, media pc, media player, jukebox, mac, computer

Note: these are my presentation notes for a brown bag discussion with library faculty and university IT staff today. This may become a series…[[pageindex]]

More: my presentation slides and the Daily Show video.

Introduction

Public awareness of blogs seems to begin during the years of campaigning leading up to the 2004 election, but many people credit bloggers for swaying news coverage of Senator Trent Lott’s comments at Senator Strom Thurmond’s 100th birthday celebration in December 2002. Blog reaction was strong, and critical of both Lott’s comments and the limited coverage they received at first.

Media attention to blogs has grown since, with political blogs like the top rated Instapundit and Daily Kos among the most visible. A November 2004 episode of The West Wing featured blogs in the plot, and blog coverage has now become so common in cable news that The Daily Show did a piece on it.

Most everybody understands that “blog” is a truncated contraction of “web log,” but there’s little consensus on what a blog is. What is or is not a blog can’t be strictly defined by style, form, content, structure, or even the technology employed.

Types of Blogs

Political blogs get a lot of attention, but preliminary results of an MIT Media Lab sturvey of bloggers found that 73.62% (28,141) of respondents said that half or more of their posts were “personal.”

The Washingtonienne may be the most (in)famous of personal blogs, but LiveJournal, the blog hosting provider most identified with personal blogs, claims over 8 million user-bloggers (2.5 million “active in some way”). LiveJournal’s media relations page quotes a story that connects LiveJournaling with emo rock, saying:

The impulse to LiveJournal is the same as to go to the show and sing your heart out in front of strangers.

Though LJ blogs are derided by many as “mundane, banal or even primitive, inhabited mainly by teenagers producing thoughtless and valueless babble,” the service has also attracted serious study, including in peer production of popular culture and a mood study by Gilad Mishne of the University of Amsterdam. Danah Boyd, study of linking patterns noted that personal bloggers are among the least likely link to other sites in their postings and that there is an assumed familiarity between the blogger and reader.

Starfishncoffee is one LiveJournal blogger, but I would also describe the anonymous Feel-good Librarian as a personal blogger.

Other types of blogs:

Promotion — think “online book tour”

• Freakonomics Blog
• Findability

Niche News

• The Shifted Librarian
• Wi-Fi Networking News
• Copyfight

Blogmedia — for profit blogs with editors and staff writers

• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• Boing Boing

Numbers

Technorati, an online service near the center of the “blogosphere,” claims to track 20 million blogs and 1.6 billion links. Though Technorati is not a blog, it offers services like blog searching, link tracking, and “tag” indexing. They also, of course, rank blogs based on the number of their incoming links.

Alexa, recognized as the Neilson ratings for websites, allows users to graph site traffic and compare it against other sites. This graph for BoingBoing, the site Technorati lists as their #1 blog, shows they’re ranked #4,195 of all sites in the world. That ranking compares favorably with The Chicago Sun-Times #1,233 position.

According to the Jan 2005 Pew Internet & American Life Project report on blogs and blogging, of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the internet…

• 27% (32 million) read blogs
• 12% of have posted comments or other material on blogs
• 7% (8 million) say they have created a blog or web-based diary

James Torio’s MA Thesis in Advertising Design discusses the commercial and marketing aspects of blogs:

Blogs are effective for disseminating information because they have similar characteristics to word of mouth. People tend to listen to the recommendations of friends and trusted resources and many Bloggers are viewed this way by readers.

Torio suggests that companies ignore bloggers at their peril, and offers as examples accusations of censorship by Microsoft (handled successfully by acknowledgment, p.74) and the issue of Kryptonite locks that could be hacked with a Bic pen (completely ignored, p.77).

Blogs Are Conversations

Indeed, that personal and conversational nature of blogs seems to be hugely important in their success. Chris Bowers, in an informal study that looked at popularity of political blogs over time and their community-building features, like the ability to comment or contribute, found that such features are vital to growing readership.

Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian, points to Ann Arbor District Library as a an example of an organization that makes good use of a blog in their relations with their patrons:

The posts are written in the first person and in a conversational tone, with the author’s first name to help stress the people in the library. The staff isn’t afraid to note problems with the new catalog, the web site, or anything else. Full transparency — nice. You can feel the level of trust building online. They respond to every comment that needs it, whether it’s a criticism, question, or suggestion. And some of the comments are fantastic. Users are even helping debug the new catalog.

Risks

The notion that blogging is a risky career move is remains persistent. A rather negative story in The Journal of Higher Education noted (discussion):

A candidate’s blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant’s blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger’s tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.

Wikipedia, in fact, lists a few relatively well-known cases of bloggers fired for their blog postings, including former employees of Delta Airlines (for pictures) and Friendster (for discussing technology decisions).

Though causality can only be inferred, a 2004 MIT Media Lab Blog Survey found:

[T]he frequency with which a blogger writes highly personal things is positively and significantly correlated to how often they get in trouble because of their postings; [...] generally speaking, people have gotten in trouble both with friends and family as well as employers.

Legal

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Legal Guide for Bloggers and guide toblogging anonymously are worth a look. Also of relevance is a recent Delaware Supreme Court ruling that establishes precedent that readers are expected to use context to aid their evaluation of meaning.

Cold Water

• Dvorak vs. Blogs
• Why your Movable Type blog must die

The Google Economy

Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen describes blogs as “a Web-native content genre,” continuing:

[W]eblogs are part of an ecosystem (often called the Blogosphere) that serves as a positive feedback loop: Whatever good postings exist are promoted through links from other sites. More reader/writers see this good stuff, and the very best then get linked to even more. As a result, link frequency follows a Zipf distribution, with disproportionally more links to the best postings.

Google was quick to understand the value bloggers offered in identifying new resources to index, and what resources to index more often, a fact that lead to their purchase of Blogger, recognized as the first blog service, in early 2003.

As it turns out, hyperlinks are among a blog’s most valuable products. Because the web makes it easy to do large-scale citation analysis, and because every popular search engine now uses the technique as a significant component of their search ranking, the large number of bloggers hold great power over what we can or can’t find in those search engines.

The Google Economy is a recognition of the role linking and link-ability have on the propagation or success of an idea, product, or service. More discussion of this can be found in Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, subtitled “what we find changes who we become.”

Blog Technologies

• social software
• tags, tagging, and folksonomies
• trackbacks and pingbacks
• RSS and microformats
• moblog
• podcast
• vlog

Get Yourself a Blog

• Ask Ken
• WordPress
• TypePad
• Blogger

tags: plymouth state university, lamson library, tech tuesday, tech tuesdays, blog, blog study, blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogs, content structure, libraries, library, livejournal, media, networked information, presentation notes, typepad, wordpress

James Torio has been working on his masters in marketing and took a strong look at blogs for his thesis.

I looked at how Blogs have impacted business and communication, how some Blogs create revenue, how some companies are using Blogs, how Blogs greatly boost the spread of information, how Blogs add richness to the media landscape, how Blogs work in the Long Tail, how some companies are tracking the Blogosphere and what the future of Blogging may be.

Via Blogging Pro

tags: blog study, blogging, blogging thesis, blogosphere, blogs, communication, james torio, media, media landscape, research, thesis

Wendy Seltzer alerts us to the Delaware Supreme Court’s ruling last week in Cahill v. Doe, a case that tested our rights to anonymity online, as well as the standard for judging defamation.

As it turns out, the court decided against the plaintiff, a city councilman, and protected the identity of “Proud Citizen,” who the councilman accused of posting defamatory remarks in an online forum. Further, it also decided that the context of the remarks “a chatroom filled with invective and personal opinion” are “not a source of facts or data upon which a reasonable person would rely.”

In short, as Seltzer points out, the ruling hold readers responsible for seeing materials in the context they’re presented in:

The standard empowers a wide range of bloggers’ speech. Because readers can use context to help them differentiate opinions from statements of fact, bloggers are freer to publish their choice of opinionated gossip or citizen journalism. And thanks to courts like Cahill and Dendrite, they can do so using pseudonyms or their real names.

tags: blogger, bloggers, blogging, blogosphere, blogs, cahill, cahill v. doe, chatroom, citizen journalism, city councilman, context, delaware, delaware supreme court, first amendment, free speech, freedom of speech, liability, media, media landscape, online forum, proud citizen, pseudonyms, real names, wendy seltzer

Reuters: FEMA accused of censorship:

“It’s impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story,” said Larry Siems of the PEN American Center, an authors’ group that defends free expression.

Brian Williams’ MSNBC Nightly News Blog:

While we were attempting to take pictures of the National Guard (a unit from Oklahoma) taking up positions outside a Brooks Brothers on the edge of the Quarter, the sergeant ordered us to the other side of the boulevard. …a police officer from out of town raised the muzzle of her weapon and aimed it at members of the media… obvious members of the media… armed only with notepads.

…the National Guard now bars entry (by journalists) to the very places where people last week were barred from LEAVING (The Convention Center and Superdome)…

[emphasis added --Casey]

Josh Marshall/Talking Points Memo:

…it’s pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration’s takeover of the [New Orleans] situation is to cut off press access to report the story.

Photo credit: Reuters, published in Mainich Daily News’ Katrina photo special. Request: honor the Katrina dead and the lessons they can teach us, don’t hide from them. Don’t ignore them the way Bush did while they were still alive.

tags: brian williams, bush, bushh, catastrophe, censor, censor this, censor this!, censorship, dead bodies, death, fema, george bush, george w bush, government, government censors, government censorship, hurricane, hurricane katrina, joshua micah marshall, katrina, louisiana, media, msnbc nightly news, national guard, new orleans, nola, pen american center, shame, talking points memo, w

Welcome the flacks. I don’t get many comments on stories here at MaisonBisson, so I was interested when I found a comment to my story about the Outfoxed documentary just an hour after I’d posted it.

Here’s my theory, and it’s supported by stories in Eric Alterman’s What Liberal Media and Al Franken’s Lies: conservative groups spend a huge amount of time identifying and attacking every liberal criticism. This mysterious Matt (perhaps from Ohio?) is a brownshirt on a mission. Are such personal attacks fair? No, but neither are Matt’s attempts to reframe my stories. It’s that reframing that so identifies the comments as conservative.

Answer the point, Matt. The question is about Fox news, an organization soundly criticized as biased and inaccurate by darn near every liberal, a bunch of centrists, and even a number of it’s own staff. You’re rhetorically and logically wrong to think you can disprove that by claiming other sources are more biased. But that’s how conservatives work: think Obi Wan as a republican saying “this is not the argument you’re looking for. You liberals should go chase your tail while we rewrite the constitution and shift your tax money to the rich.” Or something like that.

And that’s what’s happening in Matt’s comments to the Farenheit 9/11 story. Oh no! “Farenheit 9/11 contradicts itself.” But the Hitchins quote you offer as proof is less coherent than he claims the movie was. Here’s a fact, and let me suggest you watch Fog of War and read some psychology texts to understand it, people are not always logical, reasonable, or consistent. Furthermore, it seems people — heads of state included — will often tolerate extreme cognitive dissonance while in pursuit of money and power. The Hitchins quote plainly illustrates this fact, further darkening the sad conclusions Moore makes.

I will, however, compliment Hitchins’ rhetorical style. The play of equally unlikely and exaggerated opposites (“they do, or they do not; he is, or he isn’t”) create a lulling rhythm that leads nowhere, but appears sound.

As for Moore’s facts, let me repeat what I wrote in my earlier story: “Collectively, Bushwacked, Lies, and The Iron Triangle all lead the reader to the same conclusion Moore comes to. These authors’ references show a diversity of well researched primary sources — including government documents and qualified informants — that paint a fairly clear picture. It’s this brush that Moore uses for Fahrenheit 9/11.” I’ll gladly listen to any equally detailed and documented rebuttal, but please, no more empty accusations and false claims.

Finally, however, I’m amused by the apparent criticism of Moore for suggesting that troops should never have been sent to Iraq. That’s the point. Isn’t it? Our troops are suffering death and disability and and our nation deficits and diminished civil liberties in a war with no end in sight. This like like Vietnam and McCarthyism all it once if you think you can silence Moore and others for saying so.

[UPDATE]: Matt’s still at it….

Fox News is undoubtedly the most conservative news channel, and any argument to the contrary is intentionally misleading or stupid. Anybody who can count can tell you that Hannity gets three times as much air time as Colmes, and a mildly perceptive time counter will tell you that Colmes’ boss, Hannity, doesn’t allow him any time or opportunity to cross, correct, or criticize him. And that’s what happens when centrists are allowed any voice at all. Yes, one example is sufficient to characterize the entire network.

The problem isn’t that Fox News is biased, anybody who understands the history of journalism can tell you that the idea of unbiased news coverage developed sometime during WWII, peaked around 1970, and has been fading since. Democracy actually thrives amidst the cacophony of biased news outlets, so long as there is diversity and sufficient numbers of them. The complaint against Fox News is that they falsely claim the banner of “fair and balanced” despite contradictory evidence.

This is one of the reasons that former Fox News news anchor Jon Du Pre is speaking out against the channel. This is why former contributor Jeff Cohen is doing the same.

What is reframing? I put up a story about Outfoxed, you try to dismiss the argument with a comment that claims the source is too liberal to be listened to. I put up a story about Fahrenheit 9/11, again you try to dismiss it by claiming Moore is self contradictory. Another reader comments that he too has a family member in Iraq and is glad to find bumper stickers with a message he appreciates, and you dismiss him too. You ask what it means to (attempt to) reframe these stories? Clearly you know better than I do. Not once have you addressed the facts of any of these stories; you’ve made no attempt to demonstrate contradictory evidence.

What makes a liberal or conservative? The authors I name use primary evidence to discuss facts. Facts, by definition, can be neither liberal nor conservative. The authors don’t agree with my perspective, they’ve presented logical arguments based on independent evidence. That these authors make conclusions based on these facts that are offensive to people like yourself does not make them or their work liberal. You paint yourself as a conservative by claiming they’re liberals. Once again, these are facts, and nothing you’ve written here contradicts them.

But you knew that, you knew all of this. Why would you write such misleading comments in this blog, so far from the rest of the world? What motivation could you have? In the big picture, this conservative sniping serves a purpose, and I have to commend your efforts. But aren’t they sort of wasted here? In a larger forum, there’d be at least one idiot who didn’t see through you and would instead join with in wearing me or another blogger down with endless arguments about points off from my message.

Today, my message is about how conservatives like yourself are doing everything they can to snuff the flames of opposition. I’m up for a debate, but this isn’t debate. It’s a delay and distraction tactic. So here are your options: reveal yourself and enter a real debate with evidence to back your arguments (include citations), or leave. Further comments that do not meet this criteria will be edited or deleted as the commercial speech they are. This is an odd decision to make, as I believe strongly in the first amendment protects to free speech, but I also agree with the courts that commercial speech is subject to lesser protections. Further, I won’t let my blog, a media I pay for, be used as a mouthpiece for lies and deception in support of a candidate and ideology I oppose. That is to say, you can’t have both Fox News and my blog, but I’d gladly trade.

Technorati Tags: al franken, blog, colmes, conservative, conservative groups, conservatives, deception, eric alterman, farenheit 9/11, fog of war, fox news, hannity, liberal, media, news, obi wan, outfoxed, personal attacks, political, politics, progressive, psychology, reframing, republican, tax money, taxes

On the Media’s recent show on November 29th and a piece in All Things Considered explored the relationship between technology and pornography. This is familiar territory for some — Wired magazine reports on it regularly…

Click the links above and listen for yourself.

sex, media, on the media, porn, pron, radio