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DAVE WINER'S LATEST PROJECT is dangerous stuff for political news junkies. Available in web, RSS, Twitter, and FriendFeed.

Now Using Twitter

I'VE STARTED TO USE TWITTER. I plan to use it for microblogging -- the brief, remaindered links that I have usually stored up and then posted in bulk, leaving Seat1A for longer items. I've updated my blog template to include the five seven most recent posts to my Twitter feed, and if you'd like to follow my feed you may do so here.

While Twitter is a recent Web 2.0 rage, the user community is still comparatively small. Still, usage has increased dramatically of late, and I'm starting to notice more of the geeks in my circle using Twitter. One of these is Michael Hyatt, who is not a personal acquaintance but someone whose blog I follow. He recently posted a Twitter 101, which follows two other posts on the topic. The Wikipedia article on Twitter also is a nice primer.

Frankly, I just love the ability to post via a text message from my phone. I so often see random things on the road and think, "That's a great Seat 1A post." Now I can fire it off with a simple text. The 140 character limit is also a nice creative constraint, forcing a sort of blog haiku form.

A FEW DAYS AGO I posted Lee Lefever's "RSS in Plain English" video. He's now done one on wikis. Click and learn.

Click To Play

New Media Speech Video

In 2004 I gave a speech on new media to the annual meeting of the Associated Press Managing Editors. I've had the prepared remarks online for some time, but this past weekend I came across a DVD of my comments. New Mac-enabled powers in hand, I've put the address online here, and it runs about 30 minutes.

If you choose to watch the video note that it should stream from the site, meaning you shouldn't need to download it prior to viewing (although it might take a minute for the first bit to download and for an image to show on your screen). You might, however, need Quicktime viewer -- which is free, powerful, and something you should have anyway. You can get it here.

It's always a strange thing, watching yourself. Seeing this I take away three things from my 2004 self: Lose weight (in progress), get more sleep (doing much better), and speak more slowly (perhaps a lost cause).

Pew Internet

Pew's Internet group have published their latest report on blogging trends. You may find it here.

APME Speech Published

MY 2004 SPEECH ON NEW MEDIA to the Associated Press Managing Editors has been published in The Reference Shelf's Representative American Speeches, 2004-2005, which they describe as "the year’s most notable speeches from politics, business, and academia."

I don't know if my speech was notable, but it will be nice to one day tell my kids that their dad's words are in a book alongside those of Barak Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton, G. W. Bush, and Condoleezza Rice. (And that those guys needed to start running with better company.)

Tags: representative american speeches, new media, apme

* Scheduled post written earlier.

Goodbye CNN, Hello Reason

/ RANT ON /

HERE'S A SCREEN CAP of CNN online this morning (click the pic to see it full-sized). It's an important screen capture, one I'll likely keep and maybe even print, placing it in the same Rubbermaid bin we use to keep important newspapers for our yet-to-be-born children.

Let's see ... what's in that bin ... "Too Close To Call," from Nov. 8, 2000 (the day after the 2000 election); "Pope Dies," from Apr. 3, 2005; "U.S. Attacked," from Sep. 12, 2001 (and others from Sep. 13, 14, 16, 17, 29); "Baghdad Hit," from March 20, 2003 (the Command Post's birthday, BTW).

Surely "U.S. murder suspect faces UK court" has a place among such meaningful historical artifacts.

Note the bold headline. The photo of Neil Entwistle and the family he apparently murdered. The striking, blood-red "BREAKING NEWS" banner across the masthead. Also note the smaller, less noteworthy stories to the right: "Libby: My 'superiors' authorized leaks," "Israeli, Palestinian diplomats face of on peace process." We should be glad our computer monitors have high resolutions lest such less meaningful stories slip entirely off the page.

If you've not noticed, the news media has lost its collective mind. Yes, we've always had tabloids, yellow journalism, and jingoist editors. Indeed, some would claim that for much of its history advocacy and sensationalism was what the news was for. Half the founding fathers got into the news biz so they could have a stage upon which to beat their political drum. Newspapers in the 1850s were instrumental in building the shrill divisiveness preceding the Civil War. In the 1940s the news often served as an external outlet for the Roosevelt / Truman propaganda machine.

But today is different than 1776, 1876, and 1976. Today, with web pages and pager alerts and Blackberrys and web-enabled phones and 160 TV channels and satellite radio and AM talk radio and FM radio and broadband Internet connections and wikis and chat rooms and instant messaging and online forums and static web pages and podcasts and streaming video and Flikr and social bookmarking and blogs ...

... today with SARS and avian flu and Darfur and Hamas and China and outsourcing and Dow 10,000 and hedge funds and GM layoffs and Davos and WTO and global warning and el Nino and immigration and the Olympics and sex trafficking and briefcase nukes ...

... today we need help navigating the noise. It's a complex world. The stakes are high. We need news that helps us identify the wheat of our world from the damn chaff.

And the fact that Mr. Entwistle may have murdered his family and has been caught does not help me live my life, it does not entertain me, it does not make me more learned, it does not help me reason. It's an excruciating, terrible, sad story, one deserving the greatest sympathy ... and CNN is blaring it from the headlines simply for its shock value and base appeal. Like motorists passing an accident, most of us can't help but look. CNN knows that, and they're using the murder of a wife and child to sensationalize and sell their product.

It's wrong, and it should stop.

Today we need our news editors to actually act the part -- to muster the guts to make editorial choices based on what will add the most value to their audience. Not because they're an elite class that knows best, but because they have common sense and appreciate what it takes for the average Joe to reason about the world.

Back in the day, when my grandfather was editor of the Logan Herald Journal and taking my dad down to tear the early stories off the AP wire, he wouldn't have talked of journalistic ethics or editorial obligations. He would have simply said that as the person who held the keys to the news, who knew everything that was happening in his small town, serene or sordid ... who had the power to inform, educate, distract, and ruin ... he needed to show good sense. He would have said he felt a duty to his community, to his neighbors, to judiciously exercise that power. And he did.   

That's what I long for: News media that shows good sense. Some glimmer of obligation not to attract attention and sensationalize, but to inform and educate. To help us reason.

I was struck by this passage from last month's Atlantic Monthly, to which I subscribe, and which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year:

[I]f some things about The Atlantic Monthly have changed in 150 years, the most important things have not.

First, the founders of the magazine understood that breaking news was not always worth paying attention to, and in fact could distract the public from important stories that needed to be told—and that took more time to tell. One of our early contributors, Henry David Thoreau, noting the impact of the telegraph, warned that soon we would be hearing minute-by-minute updates on Princess Adelaide's whooping cough. This concern is all the more relevant in our own era of round-the-clock cable and Internet news. Nobody in America complains, "I'm not getting my news bites fast enough!" People do complain that they're not getting the full truth. They do complain that the foam of headlines, and of what Philip K. Dick might have called "pre-news," conceals vast shoals of reality.

Second, from the outset the magazine's vantage point had no roots in political ideology. The Atlantic would be a forum, not a pulpit. It would cover potentially anything and be open to the sharpest thinking and reporting, no matter how contrarian. There is of course nothing wrong with partisan newspapers and magazines—they are one of the glories of the free press in America. But The Atlantic was designed to be something else.

Third, the magazine has always tried to be entertaining as well as informative. From the beginning it has set aside a place for a special kind of humor, a kind that may be gentle, cerebral, or utterly off the wall, but is rarely broad. Mark Twain once said that he liked writing humor for The Atlantic because the editors allowed him to be funny without asking him to paint himself in stripes and stand on his head. Garrison Keillor (whose poetic parodies are published in this issue) and Christopher Buckley carry on this tradition.

Finally, the founders of The Atlantic believed in what they called "the American idea." This was not some saccharine notion of American exceptionalism or a hyper-patriotic American boosterism. It was a recognition that America was an experiment, based on certain principles—an experiment that could fail, but would if successful offer a rare kind of hope. It could be easily contaminated—by ignorance, venality, selfishness, hatred, hubris. The founders were realists: the biggest threat of all, the slave system, was at the peak of its power, and the challenge of race, they knew, was destined to become the nation's central concern.

What is "the American idea"? It is the fractious, maddening approach to the conduct of human affairs that values equality despite its elusiveness, that values democracy despite its debasement, that values pluralism despite its messiness, that values the institutions of civic culture despite their flaws, and that values public life as something higher and greater than the sum of all our private lives. The founders of the magazine valued these things—and they valued the immense amount of effort it takes to preserve them from generation to generation.

That is the tie that binds fifteen decades. In the years before the Civil War it was not certain that the American idea would have a future. It still isn't.

[T]he foam of headlines, and of what Philip K. Dick might have called "pre-news," conceals vast shoals of reality. Indeed.

Fortunately for me, this is something over which I have control. Our media is a marketplace, one with many choices. So goodbye CNN. Goodbye ticker with your inane, superficial factoid distractions. Goodbye Larry and your fawning, grumbled interviews of tragic figures. Goodbye overhead news-chopper coverage of petty criminal car chases. Goodbye Wolf and your breathless, urgent Situation Room lacking meaningful situations. Goodbye Nancy and your morbid, shrieking courtroom voyeurism. Goodbye Paula, goodbye Anderson, goodbye Lou.

Goodbye FOX. Goodbye MSNBC. Goodbye local Action News. So long, goodbye, good riddance.

Hello Atlantic. Hello NewsHour. Hello FRONTLINE. Hello New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Hello Glenn, hello Kos, hello Manolo, hello citizen journalism.

Hello self-empowered editorial license.

Hello reason.

/ RANT OFF /

Tags: cnn, journalism, citizen journalism

Dave Weinberger's Fact-Based Ethics for Bloggers

DAVID WEINBERGER OFFERS a "fact-based" ethics for bloggers:

Coming up with a "code of ethics" for bloggers makes about as much sense as coming up with a code of ethics for people who say things. The diversity of blogs makes a code of ethics not even a pipe dream but a pipe nightmare ...

... There are some facts about blogs that pertain pretty generally, and those facts — features of the landscape, if you prefer — give rise to what I think are some reasonable ethical expectations.

"Reasonable expectations" is an excellent way to put it. Another might be "General Principles," which I take as an answer to the question: "You have free reign to do whatever you choose so long as ..." [1]. David's ethics as a response to that question: "A a blogger you have free reign to do whatever you choose so long as ..."

• You "correct errors because erroneous posts may be around for many years."
• "When you change a post, indicate that you have done so to prevent posts linked to it from becoming incomprehensible."
• "Unless there is some reason not to, [you] provide some contextual information about who you are, or who your pseudonym is."
• You are "transparent about relationships that may influence you, perhaps by providing a persistent link to a disclosure statement of some sort."
• You "respond in a way that tries to find the common ground rather than assuming there is none."

Works for me. Read it all.

1. A picked up the "free reign" structure for identifying principles in David Allen's Getting Things Done.

Tags: david weinberger, blogger ethics

* Scheduled post, written earlier.
 

The WSJ Rides The Cluetrain

LOOK CLOSELY at this screen capture I made of this morning's Wall Street Journal online edition front page (click the pic for a bigger view). Notice anything? I did: Three podcasts and a blog on the law. Of course, the content has to be good -- I've not yet listened to the podcasts, although the law blog (subscription may be required) is substantive and appropriately "bloggy" -- but this is great to see from the Journal.

Last year I gave a speech to the Associated Press Managing Editors (full text here). The theme of the day was "The Newsroom of the Future," and I spoke about how the Internet was changing journalism (with blogs as a case in point). One point I tried to make was that in a connected world newspapers needed to focus on truly being editors -- professionals that (1) know their audience better than anyone else, (2) know the news (and more likely, some element of the news) better than anyone else, and (3) connect those two things by scanning the world and surfacing issues relevant to their audience. This is not how most news sources typically act: They're much more like brokers, treating news as a commodity that they simply pass from source to consumer. As I said then:

I think that in the newsroom of the future the role of the editor will change from someone who works primarily as a gatekeeper of the facts with an interest in quality, to someone who “serves” the reader as a consumer based on an understanding of what readers will consider relevant ... and on an understanding that readers will judge the veracity of the content based on comparisons to a much larger and transparent flow of information and ideas.

I also asked ...

So where is the value for the newsroom of the future?

It might be in doing little to no national or international coverage ... coverage that’s highly commoditized and democratized ... and instead offering a deep, detailed level of local coverage that’s unrivaled and that readers value highly.

Or it might be that the writing in the newspaper of the future looks more like news magazine writing ... a level of detail and analysis that the wire services don’t provide.

Or it might be that ... like stock brokers ... you become more of a consultant, and less of an information broker ... offering not just news to your readers but expertise and counsel in how to deal with that news.

Regardless, you’re absolutely going to have to find a new way to add new value.

My performance was well-received, but the reaction to the content was (as I'd expect) mixed: Some enthusiasm, some energy, some suspicion. A year later, when you review how many papers are using the connectivity the web affords, most still aren't getting it right. While many certainly have said "We gotta do this blog thing," many made an equally superficial attempt, usually launching blogs that were simply web-based versions of traditional print features, or blogs that were simply links to items in non-newspaper blogs (there's nothing wrong with link-based blogs, but there are many other choices that do a better job).

I think the Journal's got it right. They seem to appreciate that blogs and podcasts are unique mediums adept at communicating specific types of content, and rather than fitting existing content in to a new channel, they've made an appropriate match (admittedly, I judge the podcasts by their titles).

That content appears to be specific expertise, even counsel, that plays well to where the Journal would be credible as an editor of the world -- specific financial topics -- and that is relevant to its readers. Finally, the blog seems a "real" blog: Full entries, first person, comments (not essential, but nice if we're trying to engage readers), frequent updates, permalinks, and trackbacks.

So, good for the Journal. They continue to lead the way online. Let's remember that the Journal was one of the first papers to have a "pay-for-full-access" online version, which many derided at the time. They're now in the black. In the Q&A of the APME speech I suggested that it would be strategic for papers to charge not only for the full online version, but to charge significantly more for the full print version. This was taken by several folks as heresy, but in keeping with the logic of the experience economy, "you are what you charge." Start charging three bucks a paper and it forces the question: What are we doing to make the paper worth three bucks?

A final note: While the law blog is the only WSJ blog to date, it sits in the "blogs.wsj.com" domain -- here's hoping there are more Journal blogs to follow.

Tags: journalism, newsblogs, newspapers, citizen journalism, apme, wall street journal

Irving's Reflections On Blogging (And A Few Of My Own)

IRVING WLADAWSKY-BERGER, Vice President of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM, has posted a very nice reflection of his first year blogging.

In my very first entry, which was posted less than eight months ago on May 16, I said that I anticipated an exciting journey.  It has been that and then some.  For years I had resisted starting a blog because I thought that it would have been primarily an exercise in narcissism.  But in the last year, I was frankly taken by surprise by the rise of blogging, and by the number of people I knew and respected who had started personal blogs. So, when colleagues at IBM encouraged me to start one myself earlier this year (when we launched the IBM blogging initiative), I finally took the plunge.

After a while, I developed a point of view on what blogging was about for me.  At heart, blogging is very personal, intensely so.  After all, this is all about writing: deciding what you want to write about, organizing your thoughts on the chosen subject, and finally, finding the needed "quality time" to put your thoughts down on "paper."  I did not anticipate how much effort writing this blog would take.  I also did not anticipate how much I would enjoy doing it.

The sentiment resonates. I started blogging in 2002, shortly after we began using blogs at CRA as the heart of our intranet (and began recommending them as an internal communication channel to clients). I, too, worried about narcissism -- mine -- and at one point even published a completely anonymous blog with no traffic counter just to reassure myself that my primary motivation wasn't the attention of others. I found that it's not (although the attention is nice); for me it's a combination of a desire to share information and the creative outlet the writing and site coding afford.

He's also right that it's intensly personal. Not just in putting a bit of yourself out there for the world to see (or criticise), but also in that regular posting makes you significantly more accessible to the world courtesy Google's (and others') indexing of your site. I first realized this when Command Post started to generate press inquries, and it was reaffirmed when I was contacted by Renita Clark -- a woman I'd never met, but about whose deceased son I had written a post. As I wrote then:

The intersection of blogs and powerful search engines reduced Renita and me to one degree of separation … two independent events—a journal-style post and a web search—immediately linked two strangers in an unmediated exchange. It’s an extremely powerful thought: as we post, we are indexed. As we are indexed, we are made searchable. As we are made searchable, we become accessible to the full universe of users.

As we blog, we become prone to the world … we are no longer participants in the electronic network, we become part of the global SOCIAL network. Blog regularly and the nodes and degrees surely diminish, one by one, until the entire world is just outside the room, only one click away from walking through your virtual door.

Similarly (but more eloquently), Irving writes:

Blogging should also be considered as part of a broader and very important shift in the world – the rise of social networks.  Many view this trend as part of the evolution of the Web, generally referred to as Web 2.0.  I prefer collaborative innovation – but whatever you call this phenomenon, it represents a major change in how people and institutions function and interrelate.  The Internet has now emerged as a platform for people to find and communicate with each other, share knowledge on a wide variety of topics, and self-organize themselves into productive communities to work on and solve problems.

It's a big part of the experience, and an even larger part of the consequences of blogs as a medium. I won't belabor the hows and whys -- for that, read Cluetrain -- but the simple electronic "ping" of someone finding you via Google is the sound of the earth moving beneath our feet.

Tags: Irving Wladawsky-Berger, blogging, new media

On Continuous Partial Attention

THE O'REILLY RADAR has a nice account of a recent speech by Linda Stone (former research lead at Microsoft) on "continuous partial attention" -- the diminished state of effectiveness that comes from attending to multiple communication inputs at the same time (noted before on this site here). Here's her hook:

Pop quiz.  It's okay to answer "yes" to a question even if you're contradicting an earlier answer:

• Technology has improved my life
• Technology has harmed my quality of life
• I pay full attention to people when they talk to me, when I am in meetings, when I work
• I pay partial attention to what I'm doing and I'm scanning my devices or software for other inputs
• Technology sets me free
• Technology enslaves me

In 1997 I coined the phrase "continuous partial attention".  For almost two decades, continuous partial attention has been a way of life to cope and keep up with responsibilities and relationships.  We've stretched our attention bandwidth to upper limits.  We think that if tech has a lot of bandwidth then we do, too.

With continuous partial attention we keep the top level item in focus and scan the periphery in case something more important emerges.  Continuous partial attention is motivated by a desire not to miss opportunities.  We want to ensure our place as a live node on the network, we feel alive when we're connected.  To be busy and to be connected is to be alive.

We've been working to maximize opportunities and contacts in our life. So much social networking, so little time.  Speed, agility, and connectivity at top of mind.  Marketers humming that tune for two decades now.

Now we're over-stimulated, over-wound, unfulfilled.

Sound familiar?

I've said it before and I'll say it again: turn the stuff off. Shut off the computer and turn off email auto-notification (after all, we have a mailbox outside the house that's available to people 24-7, but we don't check it 40 times a day, do we?). Frankly, shut off your cell phone, pager, Blackberry, and Treo while you're at it.

We need white space to think, work, and process. You may not be accessible, but trust me: you're still available. If somebody absolutely needs to get you during that hour or two (or three), they will. As you can probably surmise from this blog, I'm one of the most technologically connected people out there. That said, I unshackle those channels all the time (it's one of the reason so many of the posts here are noted "scheduled post, written earlier" -- when I blog, I blog, and when I don't, I don't).

It's essential to a decent workflow, and frankly, quality of life. Communication technology affords enormous advantages, but every technology also creates it's own problems -- continuous partial attention being one.

From time to time each day, unshackle the new media and set your work free. You'll be glad you did.

Tags: linda stone, continuous partial attention, oreilly radar

 * Guess what: Scheduled post, written earlier.

JoHo: Wikipedia

DAVID WEINBERGER offers an excellent deconstruction of the Seigenthaler / Wikipedia affair in his latest JoHo; very worth reading. My favorite passage:

The media — amplifying our general cultural assumptions  — have come to expect knowledge to be coupled with arrogance: If you claim to know X, then you've also been claiming that you're right and those who disagree are wrong. A leather-bound, published encyclopedia trades on this aura of utter rightness (as does a freebie e-newsletter, albeit it to a lesser degree).The media have a cognitive problem with a publisher of knowledge that modestly does not claim perfect reliability, does not back up that claim through a chain of credentialed individuals, and that does not believe the best way to assure the quality of knowledge is by disciplining individuals for their failures. Arrogance, individual heroism, accountability and discipline ... those have been the hallmarks of the institutions that propagate knowledge.

Technorati tags: JoHo, Seigenthaler, Wikipedia.

* Scheduled post, written earlier.

Digg

GO SEE DIGG, a very cool technology-leaning news site that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and "non-hierarchical editorial control." From the home page:

With digg, users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

It's populist editorialism, and it's a great way of learning what's new and becoming popular. A great site to track via Bloglines.

* This is a scheduled post written earlier; I'm likely in Seat 1A at the moment.

SlowLane Blog?

THIS MORNING IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL[1]  I read that GM is going to restate results for 2001, and possibly, subsequent years. I then clicked over to the FastLane blog to read GM's take on the issue and found ... nothing. Nothing yet, at least, and I'll be interested to see if Lutz or others offer an account on the site.

What's more, I notice there's not much at all happening at FastLane these days. There are only three posts on the front page, and only five over the past six weeks or so. (compared to eight in May and 11 in June).

When FastLane debuted most new media observers credited the site with being the "right" way for a big company to publish an external blog: posts by senior leaders, not highly spun by the PR group, and a mix of marketing flogs and candid takes on the company.

Now, though, I wonder if the site's losing its steam. We lose steam at CommLog from time to time, but we also don't widely promote CommLog as a portal into our firm. If anything it's a mix of hobby for us and service for clients, with any branding benefits a plus.

Is FastLane becoming SlowLane? We'll see, but the announcement of earnings restatement is exactly what a company using blogs in the "right" way would use a blog for: to offer an authentic, not-press-release take on the issue to supplement their other communication efforts.

We'll see if they do.

1. Subscription only; here's a link to Reuters' story.
2. I posted this over at CommLog, too.