Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
The Britannica Blog has been running an absolutely terrific series of essays on “Newspapers & the Net,” which is examining the questions: “Are newspapers dead? Should we care?” The series kicks off with essays from three of my absolute favorite bloggers: Nick Carr, Clay Shirky and Jay Rosen, who is the author of the amazing blog, PressThink. I highly recommend that you read all the installments, however. Here’s the rundown of participants and essays in the series thus far:
Continue reading →
“Tags are keywords that you type into a pastel box, and keywords are tags that you type into a green-screen application”
Over at Ars, I beg to differ with Eric Alterman’s concerns that Web-based journalism will be somehow inferior to the 20th-century variety:
Looking at the broader media world, it’s true that the majority of high-quality journalism still happens in traditional mainstream media outlets. It would surprising if this were not the case, since they still control a majority of eyeballs and advertising dollars. But the idea that the web is, or is likely to become, a journalistic wasteland doesn’t make a lot of sense. As the reader attention—and with it, advertising dollars—shift to the web, web-based publications (along with those mainstream publications that successfully navigate the transition to the web) will have the resources to recruit the best journalists to work for them. High-quality reporting draws eyeballs, and eyeballs generate advertising revenue, so talented writers will continue to be in demand regardless of the medium.
One of the big challenges that mainstream media outlets will face is that their size and bureaucracy makes it difficult for them to experiment with new news gathering techniques. As we’ve seen here at Ars, one of the big advantages of web-based publishing is that it’s possible to draw on contributions from a broader range of professional writers, bloggers, and amateurs with subject matter expertise. Large, monolithic news organizations, which rely on full-time employees for the bulk of their writing, may have difficulty exploiting this model. If a natural disaster occurs, for example, a news organization that flies a professional reporter to the scene of the tragedy will likely get scooped by a news organization that has an existing network of freelancers in the area who can cover the story without leaving their home towns. What those writers lose in writing skills they are likely to make up in timeliness and depth of local knowledge.
One other criticism Alterman makes that seems off base to me is that at one point he faults the web-based publications like the Huffington Post for failing to be “full service” media outlets–lacking a sports section, say, or book reviews. But this is actually a strength, not a weakness, of the web model. I’m not at all interested in the sports section of my local paper, and if I took the paper that section would have been nothing but landfill. More to the point, there’s no particular reason to think the same hierarchical organization that brings you your technology or political news is also the best qualified to deliver you book reviews or sports news.
Anyone who’s upset that the Huffington Post doesn’t have a sports section should learn to use an RSS reader and subscribe to any of the hundreds of excellent
sports blogs and news sites out on the web, just as anyone who wants more technology news than the Huffington Post has to offer can subscribe to Ars or the Technology Liberation Front. The “one stop shopping” model of 20th-century media was a reflection of the limitations of 20th-century communications technologies. It wasn’t, in and of itself, anything to celebrate or emulate.
I originally found the link to the New Yorker via Yglesias, who made some additional good points on the subject, especially that the 20th century American model of “objectivity,” in which reporters pretend not to have opinions about the subjects they’re covering, is far from universal and not necessarily superior to the more adversarial model that prevailed in the 19th century and still prevails in parts of Europe.
Wow:
Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.
I would have guessed something like this—I haven’t read a paper newspaper regularly since high school—but I didn’t realize the statistics were that stark. If hardly anyone under 35 reads a newspaper today, that suggests that within 20 years the readership of newspapers will be almost entirely retirees. And not too long after that, it will likely cease to be profitable to print and distribute newspapers at all. The New Yorker quotes one author who predicts the last newspaper will be printed in the 2040s. Newspapers will be to our grandchildren what punch cards are to us.
As everyone knows, Scientology gives one superior cognitive skills, as displayed in this brilliant bit of JavaScript:
function validZip(s)
{
if(trim(document.getElementById("M_land").value.toLowerCase()) != "sverige")
{ return(true); }
s = s.replace(/ /g,"");
s = s.replace(/1/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/2/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/3/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/4/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/5/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/6/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/7/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/8/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/9/g,"0");
if(s == "") { return(true); }
if(s == "00000") { return(true); }
return(false);
}
The tech works, as they say.
For non-programmers: this function is supposed to determine whether a given string is a valid zip code. It does this by replacing each digit in the string with a 0, and then seeing if the resulting string is equal to “00000.” If the string contains something other than digits, then this comparison will fail and the function will return false. But Javascript has a native functionality for string pattern matching called regular expressions, so the last 12 lines of this function would be more succinctly expressed with something like:
return s.match(/^\d{5}$/) || s == ""
The expression /^\d{5}$/ means “match any string containing exactly five digits.” The really funny thing about this is that those expressions enclosed by slashes in the “replace” lines of the original function are regular expressions, so whoever wrote this obviously was familiar with regular expressions. He (or she) simply extremely bad at using them.
Hat tip: Lippard
I always thought “rickrolling” was a stupid meme. So I’m happy to see it covered in the New York Times, a sure sign that the fad is on its way out. (And yes, that goes to the New York Times, not the stupid video)
I’m seeing more and more people joining Twitter and I thought I’d share a few thoughts about it. My initial reaction to Twitter was skepticism, but I became a convert after I subscribed to Clay Shirky’s feed and received a tweet from him a couple hours later about his talk in D.C. that I would have never known about. That was useful, and since then I’ve found Twitter more and more useful.
First of, I’d like to explain what it is for the sake of those who don’t know. I’ll do so by way of video:
The first thing to note is that Twitter is a classic example of network effects because its usefulness increases relative to the number of users on it. Its usefulness also increases exponentially when people you know and care about make there way onto it. The network seems to be growing in concentric circles and while it’s been dominated by the elite digerati in Silicon Valley so far, it seems to be making its way to DC now.
The video presents Twitter as a way to let people know what you’re doing at the moment. In fact, Twitter itself suggests that you use the service to answer the question, “What are you doing?” But if we took that literally, like some do, Twitter would truly be dull: “Going to the bank,” “Eating ice cream,” “Going to sleep.” Alex King suggests that the “what are you doing” question be replaced with the imperative, “Say something interesting.” In practice that’s what most people have done.
My friend Julian Sanchez uses Twitter mostly to announce at which bar he is currently so that anyone nearby who gets his tweet on a mobile phone can drop in an join him for a drink. I’m sure people join him who otherwise wouldn’t have. Blogger Robert Scoble uses it to crowdsource. Recently he was scheduled to interview the CFO of Amazon on stage before a conference. He’s got about 13,000 people in his network and he asked them what he should ask the CFO. He got back many insightful questions he would never have thought up himself. (As an aside, I’m curious if you know of other innovative uses. Post in the comments.)
Ultimately the best thing about Twitter is that it’s a different experience for each user. You only see the tweets of the people you follow. If someone’s not your cup of tea, you can silently boot them. The result is a stream of interesting stuff that only gets more useful as more people you know get on it. In the short while I’ve been on it I’ve been pointed to more interesting article, sites, and videos than I could have imagined. Give it a whirl… and follow me!
A couple of scientists demonstrating voiceless communication. There’s a band around one chap’s neck that reads his brain waves. At present it has a vocabulary of about 150 words…
Wander down the street, wonder “where is the nearest restaurant?”, and hear the answer in your brain…?
I admit I’ve gotten so jaded by inventions (especially those in their early stages) that I can’t really get myself to react even over this one. But I did think it was worth noting. It has the potential to evolve into something that challenges concepts of privacy and property and calls for new ones. Rules on what others may feed into your brain, the default settings of commercial products that read in and out; whether such a device may ever be used against one’s will; the reliability of testimony based on on data read off of such a device.
Which is interesting, because at one time I would have thought that there really could not be new rules and basic rights, or ought not to be. One was pretty much stuck with whatever had evolved in a state of nature–for anything new like this, it would be a rule-less environment, a war of technology against technology. Want to keep someone out? Physically block it with your own tech… and so on.
But that sort of limitation on our rules of the game won’t do; it is far too limiting and arbitrarily so. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean anything goes. Difficult territory.
Ironically, despite writing about technology for a living, I have a bad track record when it comes to adopting new web tools. I only joined the Facebook and RSS bandwagons last year for example. At Jerry’s virtual urging, though, I’ve broken down and joined the Twitter revolution. Now you, too, can read all the interesting things I have to say in 140 characters or less.
One of the things that annoyed me about the sign-up process is that it asked me for my GMail/Yahoo!/whatever password in order to add all of the people in my address book to my Twitter watchlist. This is a Bad Idea, and especially now that sites are starting to offer dedicated APIs for this purpose, there’s no excuse for demanding peoples’ passwords.
I’ve got a Mac. Any recommendations for good Twitter-related software I should be checking out?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.