You can construct any [effing] narrative by scouring the internet for people claiming something. It doesn’t make it relevant. It doesn’t make it true.
From Agri Ismaïl’s media criticism (start here). This isn’t an issue of not knowing the dogs on the internet, it’s a matter of not caring who’s a dog in the interest of either clicks or political interest.
Auto-Tune has been prettying up vocal tracks for more than a decade now, but applying it to news is simply brilliant. The Gregory Brothers‘ autotunethenews.com is worth a look. » about 100 words
The AP’s diagram of their Protect, Point, Pay “news DRM” scheme looked like a joke, then I saw the parody.
Despite all the smoke and hype, Ed Felton explains that it’s underwhelming, at most. Still, hNews might be an interesting format for some blogs to adopt. Most of what the AP is rattling their saber about is in the rights (containing ccREL declarations). Felton thinks the dependence on ccREL may extend derivative usage rights, rather than limit them. ccREL, after all, “states unequivocally that it does not limit users’ rights already granted by copyright and can only convey further rights to the user.”
Okay, so hNews mightn’t be so bad, but what’s good about it? It brings together a number of pieces that we all expect in a news story (and many other stories). It makes it easy to identify the dateline and geocoding of a particular story, as well as the publisher and its principles.
Oddly, the format doesn’t appear to address media within the content, but perhaps they expect us to leverage Media RSS and rel=image_src links.
Howard Weaver wants newspapers to play offense against Google and others, but Chris Tolles, CEO of news aggregator Topix.com says he’s been trying Weaver’s plan for a while, and there’s no bucket of gold to be found in it. The problem, it would appear, is that newspapers don’t sell news. They sell advertising space and […] » about 300 words
New releases from Google Labs: Similar Images and News Timeline. I count it as a failure for Google that the news timeline doesn’t show future events. » about 100 words
We all knew the sordid details of Palin’s candidacy would emerge, but who figured they pour out so soon or on Fox News? Via Borkweb.com
WPopac, a project I started on my nights and weekends, is now officially one of my day-job projects too. We’ve been using our WPopac-based catalog as a prototype since February 2006, but the change not only allocates a portion of my work time specifically to the development of the project, but also reflects the library‘s […] » about 200 words
Not all errors in news reporting are as trivial as this one: THE COST of beer kegs has risen by about 30% since the end of 2003. In addition, Neil Witte is the draught beer quality-control specialist of Boulevard Brewing Co., and Steven Pauwels is the brewer’s brewmaster. A March 14 page-one article on beer-keg […] » about 200 words
I’m not sure what to think of Richard Sambrook appearing to struggle to find a place for traditional journalism in the age of the internet, but the story’s worth a read.
David Weinberger […] talked about the crisis in US journalism with failing trust in the big news organisations. He pointed out that Google now provided a news service with just an algorithm where there used to be a newsroom of dozens of people — and suggested algorithms were probably more reliable than journalists anyway! So if information is commodotised, and the public can tell their own stories, what’s the role for the journalist? I came up with three things — verification (testing rumour and clearing fog), explanation (context and background) and analysis (a Google search won’t provide judgement). And journalists still have the resources to go places and uncover things that might otherwise remain hidden. Citizens can do all of those things, but not consistently, and with even less accountability than the media.
Thanks again to a good tip from Ryan, I’ve get something new to laugh at: The Aural Times.
| I regularly check the <a href="http://english.pravda.ru/">English language online edition</a> of <a href="http://pravda.ru/">Pravda</a> for laughs and sometimes for their take on US domestic affairs. But today's headline left me scratching my head. <a href="http://www.mille.org/scholarship/1000/AHR9.html">What calendar</a> are these people using, anyway? The <a href="http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/feedback/17-03-2006/77430-bush-0">headlined story</a> is offered without any context or explanation. As it turns out, author Ian Magnussen <a href="http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/feedback/77430-1/">really did mean</a> <a href="http://www.superbowl.com/history/recaps/game/sbxl">February 5th 2006</a>, not 2007 or later. Had it appeared two months ago it might have been called speculative fiction, though more likely seen as a crazy conspiracy theory. I just find it a bit scary. But still, why publish it now? » about 100 words
Last week I got excited about the as-yet unreleased geolocation API for BBC Backstage. Now Larry D. Larsen of the Poynter Institute is excited too. In a post titled The Future of News (… Hint: GPS) he talks about putting news in geographic context with geolocation tags. Eventually, clicking an article in a news/Google Map […] » about 200 words
The APIs aren’t yet out, but the BBC has already won me over with their Backstage BBC concept. Of course, I’m a fan of anything with an API, but the real deal here is that it appears they’re planning on releasing a “query by geo-location data” API — and I’m all a gaga about about […] » about 100 words
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 […] » about 1200 words
