Way back in 2002 Dave Winer made a bet:

In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times’ Web site.

It’s important to remember that in 2002 people still wrote “weblogs” in quotes, as though they weren’t sure how to use the word. Winer won his bet in 2007. Anybody want to make a bet about 2014?

The New York Times has struggled with TimesSelect, now they’re killing it. But the news here isn’t that a media giant is giving up on a much hyped online venture. The news is that a media giant is endorsing what we now call web 2.0:

Since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly. Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources. In light of this shift, we believe offering unfettered access to New York Times reporting and analysis best serves the interest of our readers, our brand and the long-term vitality of our journalism. We encourage everyone to read our news and opinion — as well as share it, link to it and comment on it. [Emphasis added.]

If only they’re realized it back when they started it.

web 2.0, web20, NYT, New York Times, TimesSelect, linking, open access

I’m going to violate my rule against linking to NYT (because) and give a shout out to this article. Not just because it quotes my friend Jessamyn, but for what it says: libraries are full of smart, hip people.

[tags]library 2.0, Jessamyn West, New York Times, libraries, hip, smart[/tags]

The New York Times last week announced that it’s giving away TimesSelect to students and faculty that hold a .edu email address. TimesSelect, of course, is the paid access site that debuted in January 2006 to a confused and critical web. Editor and Publisher repeated the Times’ claim that they’re doing this for the good of democracy:

“It’s part of our journalistic mission to get people talking on campuses,” says Vivian Schiller, senior vice president and general manager at NYTimes.com. “We wanted to open that up so that college students and professors can have a dialogue.”

But with fewer than 700,000 Select subscribers and declining (zero?) readership among people under 40, NYT clearly had to do something. As Zach predicted, the Times’ Alexa rank has fallen precipitously since the Select launch. Welcome to the Google Economy Mr. Sulzberger.

nyt, new york times, google economy, timesselect

I’ve been talking about it a lot lately, most recently in a comment at LibDev.

In the old world, information companies could create value by limiting access to their content. Most of us have so internalized this scarcity = value theory that we do little more than grumble about the New York Times’ authwall or similar limitations to the free-flow and linking of information.

Jenny Levine wrote recently about OCLC/LJ’s short-run (though not yet ended) experiment with authwalls. Jenny concludes that the move might have sold an extra subscription here or there, but completely killed the online linking that made LJ’s articles so authoritative in search engines.

Roger at Electric Forest struck to the heart of this recently:

…keep the [information] under heavy protection and you will find that people ignore this sheltered content in favor of the sources that embrace the web and make everything accessible… [Open and accessible resources] will become the influential authorities, not because they are more trustworthy, or more authoritative, or better written, but because they are more accessible.

In this new world, value is measured by search engine rankings, which are largely a measure of the number of links pointing to a resource. Because it’s impossible to link to things behind authwalls, or to material that isn’t online at all, Google et all have turned that scarcity = value equation on its head.

Today, in order to be relevant…in order to gain value, material must be available, linkable, indexable, and usable. Over the long haul, the best way to increase your Page Rank is to create outstanding content and make it freely available to everyone.

This is (part of) what got Zach blogging and it’s exactly what make’s Google’s non-hierarchical world work. Soon to be very related: social bookmarking as made famous by del.icio.us, now Yahoo! feature.

tags: accessibility, accessible resources, authoritative, electric forest, google, google economy, information, jenny levine, new york times, oclc, scarcity, scarcity = value, search engines, the shifted librarian, value, value equation, value theory

George Weller won a Pulitzer Prize, a Polk Award, and was named a Neimann Fellow during his fifty-some-odd year career during which he covered much of Europe and Asia for the New York Times and Chicago Daily News. Weller died in 2002 at age 95, leaving behind a body of work that tells much of the 20th century’s events. His 1943 story about an appendectomy performed by navy pharmacist’s mate Wheeler Lipes in a submarine 120 feet below Pacific waters amid the concussive blasts of depth charges is legendary. But Weller also left mysteries, like his early reports from the ground in Nagasaki (geolocation) shortly after the US bombed it with the second nuclear device used in war. From his obit:

As U.S. forces neared Japan, MacArthur forbade correspondents to go ashore. Mr. Weller hired a Japanese rowboat to take him to Nagasaki, and the general retaliated by killing all 30,000 words Mr. Weller filed.

Others (one, two, three) are less generous and claim a government cover-up of the facts of nuclear weapons and fallout was the motive for burying the story. Whatever the reasons, Weller’s stories about Nagasaki never saw publication, and were thought lost until now.

Japan’s Mainichi Daily News reported yesterday that Weller’s 60-year old report has been discovered by his son who is still researching the files in Weller’s old apartment in San Felice Circeo, Italy (geolocation).

The stories had been typed and carbon-copied. The paper on which they had been printed had browned. The stories were typed out on about 75 pages and comprised some 25,000 words. There were also another 25 photos taken of Nagasaki soon after the bombing.

Weller’s reports included some of the first descriptions and photos of the then unknown effects of radiation.

“These patients begin with slight burns which make normal progress for two weeks. They differ from simple burns, however, in that the patient has a high fever. Unfevered patients with as much as one-third of the skin area burned have been known to recover. But where fever is present after two weeks, healing of burns suddenly halts and they get worse. They come to resemble septic ulcers. Yet patients are not in great pain, which distinguishes them from any X-ray burns victims,” Weller wrote, adding that most of these patients died after no longer than five days.

– – –

Context: Christopher Simpson’s Science of Coercion tells of how the US government and military became very crafty with their use of the media to shape public opinion during the 20th century. According to Simpson, censorship and “information” campaigns were common and often leveraged the complicity of those in the media and academia.

tags: censorship, chicago daily news, george weller, governement censors, hiroshima and nagasaki, information campaign, nagasaki, new york times, nuclear, nuclear bomb, nuclear device, nuclear weapon, radiation, radiation poisoning, radiation sickness