Maybe Google is just better at stuff.
Maybe the question is not what will out-Google Google but will under-Google it.

Alyssa says Google is adept at expansion:

McLuhan talks about the immediacy of the telegraph and it was perceived by
literary sophisticates as distasteful. It reminded me a lot of Murdoch's
attitude toward aggregators. It is the attitude of those who feel left behind by
a medium they don't understand and would rather not try to understand. The
difference between the effect of the Internet and the telegraph, I think, is
that the telegraph was a compressional force. It forced different mediums to
come together (i.e. The Associated Press example). The Internet, I think, is
expansional. It forces companies like Google to expand beyond its original
intention, beyond its original specialization. And the nature of the Internet
itself (inter connecting networks world-wide) makes it the perfect medium for
organizations to stretch beyond itself and link multiple outlets together, which
creates sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc and aggregators like CT Report.

But are we headed for contraction now?

Tina says we need the help of "credibe people."


Kevin asks what omces after Google. Shelia asks is the future a future of links?
Alyssa says aggregators are good grabbers but lousy sorters. There has to be more than just links.


Kevin (and somebody else, but I forget who), made me think about the splintering of self and presence on the 'net. I'm Tweeting. But that's not that same as, you know, me, writing a review.

Just a collage

Matt D says the collage is an MMish response to the digital age, I think partly because the 'net is a place of raw materials for mash-ups and party because there's an implicit control-taking.
You gotta see his video.

Not related to class?

Greg, of course it is. The medium is the message.

So is Lisa's "overaching" and lovely invocation of the heart of the transistor radio.

"Why is it all so small" is a very MM question.

Dan says each new tech revolution pushes us farther from our hearts and souls. Greg's old clacking railroad board probably spoke a little more to his soul.

It is technology which further helps to distract us, pushing us farther from the
center. The more people share about themselves on Internet reveals to me the
less they truly know about themselves. Most of what people say on the Internet
is vague, inflated. The Internet takes us away instead of bringing us closer to
ourselves. But I also admit that I dislike technology because at my inner core I
am scared; scared at what I have found and what I will find in the future;
scared to be judged by others, scared that who I am and what I think will be
deemed unworthy, less important. It may seem paradoxical coming from a person
who preaches hatred for the masses and seems to claim superiority to most, who
states with confidence that people are stupid, that I would desire their opinion
and acceptance so much. And at the level of my mind, I don’t. But at the inner
core, where all the masks are stripped away and my individual human nature is
vulnerable, I desire what I feel most people who look inwardly at themselves
would desire, and that is inclusiveness and acceptance from our fellow human
beings.

The Human Factor

So who's in control, Kasey wonders, us or the machines?

Dan says that ship may have sailed:

Aside from a post-apocalyptic Terminator or Matrix scorching the sun so the
machines can’t live but we survive in a stone age world, I think that what I
want to stress, which McLuhan would agree with the contrary, is that human
beings should be in control; we should be using machines and technology to
better our lives, when in fact, we have become a slave to them, unable to live
without them. It is scary reading McLuhan’s book knowing it was written in the
60s. The fact that we are dominated by machines proves McLuhan’s idea that since
the message is the medium, it has changed the way we as a society thinks and
functions.

Interesting how many of us thought about SkyNet this week.

Kasey:

Should we be nervous? That is one of my questions as I consider the significant
power of the internet in our lives. In thinking about the notion that artists
are more sensitive to shifts in culture, especially when it comes to media, I
can’t help but ponder Terminator, I Robot, Minority Report, and even that flop
of a film with poor Sandra Bullock, The Net. All of the stories behind these
films show a world taken over by the machines, and that world is scary and out
of control. I think humans have always been at least a bit dubious of machines,
computers, and the internet. I remember when people were reluctant to begin
using debit cards.

Jessica:

Is this the maximum depth? Can any more information be available to us than
there is (or potentially could be) on the internet? Is the next step a Sky-Net
or brain implants? It's scary to consider, but given our proclivity to do
exactly as McLuhan warns against and adopt new technologies before thinking of
their consequences, it might just be possible.

Colin:

But then there's a separate set of issues about who stores stuff and where that
stuff is stored. I don't really speak the language of server farms and clustered
networks ... yet. But I feel like that's important in a way most of us don't
get. I mean, it's like "Terminator." A lot of power is flowing over to the info
equivalent of SkyNet. It's probably too important for us to let ourselves be
stupid about it, you know?

John, at some length.

You have Kasey to thank for

Interesting, especially in light of John's post about how we think news that we want should find us. But whappens when that's the model, right? We're at somebody's mercy.

On separation

From Allison:

MM concept of "media" being a medium or sorts is very interesting. The impact of
each medium varies with each social network. Meaning, while the actual medium
remains constant, the effect is different. For this I agree. However, once
someone detaches themselves from the medium, they can control the outcome of the
medium. So does this mean that everyone who attempts to change media or
technology is living in a detached state? So by detaching themselves, they
neutralize the affect the medium has. But is that possible? If the media and
technology, and all the other words he uses to describe the exact same
thing, are all around you, how can you detach yourself? It would be like
going into a different dimension, not just mentally, but completely. Maybe it
has something to do with this light bulb idea. Media isn't an actual thing, but
is determined and described by the result of the affect it has on the
environment. So does that mean the words in a newspaper isn't an actual thing,
but the result of it on the social fabric?

This from David re: MM

All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments (McLuhan 26).




I think -- don't know -- that McLuhan would say: don't imagine that you can completely separate yourself. (I think again of that video clip in which he seemed to acknolwedge, playfully, the impossibility of achieving a point of view untinctured by the media about which one is trying to have a point of view.

Jess Passing Through / Lisa Can't Stand the Rain

Reading Jessica's eloquent summing-up, I find myself answering in the voice of Dan. In a way, the rise of server-farms and cloud computing is, in MM terms, a metaphor for changes-in-mind among digitual users. Gradually, heavy IT users realized they could affordto be in the server business anymore -- or that it didn't make sense. So they outsourced storage.

Jessica says that's what's happening in education too. Students are not longer understood as storers of information but as adept getters of what is stored.

Dan would say: the problem with that is that, with no wisdom, with no core of cultural literacy, we're less likely to know what it is that we're getting and why we wanted it in the first place. Unless it's take-out.

Lisa says one of the real tests will come when an entirely digital generation reaches adulthood. Will they lose the "invented gene of deep reading?"

As Jess and McLuhan say, people become instant. That engages their passions, possibly at the expense of wisdom.

Courtney A.. at peace? Not really

Here is Courtney's last post, which begins by making the point that it's difficult to make definitive statements about the Internet because the 'net does not really stop and pose for photos. D'accord. (French for true dat.) CA then proves her point by adding another post (about the way online journalism hasn't really opened up opportunities for women) after her last post. I struggle with the same problem in teaching it.

Courtney's lingering suspicion is that idea she brought up months ago. That somehow, we have willingly assembled not merely dossiers about ourselves on the 'net but actual simulacra of our conscious minds.

Our Poet Laureate

...is Sally, for her Holiday McLuhan Epic.

...and thereafter our tools shape us

The internet sometimes seems like a hot medium pretending to be a cool one. If you use Google and Wikipedia to the exclusion of other tools your bain will be living in the crust of the internet and rarely penetrating to the stuff down below. Not only that but, in the case of Google, you will essentially be hardening and reinforcing that crust just by using it. (Use solidifies page rangk which increases use.)

There are, of course, drill-down tools.
But somebody is going to have to know how to use them. Google and Wikipedia have succeeded -- despite being slightly blunt and very general tools -- into everybody's tools of choice for anything. It as if people decided to use a Swiss Army knife for all home repairs.

You know who I think will be important? Librarians. If they can be more like this guy. The thing is, a lot of them are. Librarians had to learn the 'net early. Searchability and storage are kind of second nature to them.

The crossroads, for users of the digital media, has to do with intention vs. passivity. If you can act with intention when you look for information, you use the internet. If you put yourselves in the hands of google, the net uses you.

It's the same crossroads for social media, and my (somewhat hopeful) guess is that some people will leve Facebook and build social media sites that they truly control. This could happen at a place like Trinity. It could also happen in a community of creators and users, whether it's the arts community in Hartford or people who practice yoga in the Midwest or people who are really interested in mass transit. Build the system and make laws while you do. It's not that far from what we did the night we made up Grumpy.com.

What I've been thinking about

Contrary to my original plan, I didn't devote a class to aggregators. That was probably a mistake. I realized that after listening to and pondering a show on the subject by my colleague Mr. Dankosky.



People use these things a lot, whether its a user-rated model like Digg or a bot-driven model like Memeorandum. Or algo-driven like Google news. It's also incresingly common to see news coverge of an item's performance on memeorandum, as if that measured something (which it probably does ...in a circular, self-reinforcing manner).

TPM DC had it at 11, adding that Rahm Emmanuel told staffers "not to come back to
the next day's meeting if they hadn't read the article." The Daily Beast got it
at one twenty and, by afternoon, it was at the top of the Memeorandum--a site
that highlights in real time what is being most heavily linked to--homepage..

Obviously, that starts to put a lot of power in certain (sometimes robotic) hands. Which makes it pretty important to figure out, as this and other sites do, what's really going on with something like Google news.

But, the other problem with aggregation is that it's ahistorical and acontextual.

I mean, you can follow the links and dig around and find that stuff, but it's not there on the surface of the site itself. And that makes me wonder whether the aggregators promote a kind of snapshot-thinking. It's nice to be"ïn the moment" in your zen practice. In your understanding of news and the world you live in, not so much.

But then it's also not as simple as that, particularly at Digg, which has a really interesting search function. I decided to type in something releatively esoteric, something connected to a relatively distant news event.

So I typed in "Zoe Baird"(long story).

And I was impressed.

I even followed one of the links and wound up at this blog which regularly offers, of all things, sort of an aggregation of interesting history links.

It all made me think, though, that storage and searchability are huge battlefronts in the future of 'net culture. In the world of search, Google is inadequate and even if it were adequate it doesn't make sense to give it so much power. My guess is that there will be, there should be eventual search engine models that work in different ways. Maybe even search engines that mirror our various perspectives a little bit. Either that, or materials will be grouped and archived in places that make them easier to search in a more specific and nuanced and efficient way than the Google page-rank system. (For example, today I wanted to read an article that explains the rugby in "Invictus" to me. I bet such an article exists, but Google was a shitty way to have to look for it. But I bet somebody like our own Kevin could start a site that culls and groups the kind of article that cross references from films-of-interest to interests-sparked-by-those-films. And that site would NOT make me wade through the self-published stuff by untalented amateurs: "We didn't get until the end that Invictus was a poem. He should make that more clear.")

But then there's a separate set of issues about who stores stuff and where that stuff is stored. I don't really speak the language of server farms and clustered networks ... yet. But I feel like that's important in a way most of us don't get. I mean, it's like "Terminator." A lot of power is flowing over to the info equivalent of SkyNet. It's probably too important for us to let ourselves be stupid about it, you know?

A little weekend McReading

The second part of U.M., although long, is actualy more readable than the first, because it's a little less theory and a little more practice. I won't subject you to much of it, but do read Chapter 25 --on the Telegraph. (You'll find some amazing stuff there.), Chapter 31 on Television (possibly the most discussed chapter of part II, and the crtivcial reception to U.M. (starts on page 545 in the edition that most of us have).

A rolling log of McLuhan questions and answers

1. Why does MM says movies are hot but TV is cool?
(for me, it has something to do with the difference between dreaming and processing reality).
2. Is Google hot or cool?
3. What would MM have said about talk radio, from Limbaugh forward? [Think about what he says about symphony rehearsals]{but also think about the phrase "the illusion of"}
4. What's the deal with email. [Hint it's a _______medium trying to accomplish a ____________purpose.] What would MM have said about emoticons.
5. Comic strips!
6. Somehow this became a class at least partly about Eliot, so I point out to you that Benda -- whom McLuhan cites -- was supported by Eliot. You could take the Benda/MM argument and apply it to David Letterman and Harvey Pekar. Sharp differences in understanding and accepting roles.
7. MM says that "implosion" ended, in some ways, the notion of rugged individualty. Did the 'Net open that possibility back up? Did the 'Net in any sense, cause "explosion."
8. MM says media is power and that the owners of media tend not to be cared about content. What does this mean? And can it be different on the 'Net. Is the 'Net -- in its diffused ownership -- in someway an outgrowth of MM's ideas?
9. For the idea of cooling off -- consider Moses and the tablets.
10. Do we have permanent goals even as innovations disrupt us? What does MM say about the transfer of consciousness into the digital world?
11. What would MM tell Dan -- I can never teach a class like this again with out a Dan -- to do.? What is the job of a Dan in the digital world? If you can (or should) neither completely reject or embrace it, what do you do?

Going too far?

or just an MM moment?

Mix-a-Lot

So is the 'net hot or cool? Matt D. is struggling with this question right now. Ordinarily, we would say that speed and intensity go with the idea of hot, right. The 'net does this in ways nobody could have imagined. But ...where there's a really big but there. And I like it.

On the media fence

Props to Lisa, who found this essay. And this part, I think, is the part that might speak to the current mental condition of her and Dan (according to Lisa) anbd I would add several others in the room, including probably me.

... I feel a deep personal connection with Understanding Media because
the book was published the same year I was born. We have both entered middle age
now. For me, this means being frustrated with people older than I am for feeling
ill at ease with technologies that both fascinate me and facilitate my everyday
tasks. It also means being equally frustrated with those younger than I am
(particularly my students), who seem to have lost touch with narrative-driven
technologies such as books and old-style movies. I also feel a certain sense of
paranoia, suspecting that younger people now place me in the category of those
discomfited by newer technologies.
For Understanding Media, I suspect middle
age means sitting on the fine line between classic and anachronism. We are
living in the future that the book foretold. We cannot but acknowledge the truth
in many of its pithy aphorisms. In fact they seem self-evident, even if we can
still appreciate McLuhan’s gift for metaphor in stating them. Perhaps we repeat
his legendary phrases too glibly. Perhaps we’re not repeating them all that
frequently anymore. Much has happened since Understanding Media appeared in
1964—to the book’s place in society and to society itself. To me, it is a
classic and just as worthwhile a read for the “millennial” generation as for the
baby boomers.

I read this...

...and I thought of Dan.

One question I will ask tomorrow night

What do you think MM would say about our class if he walked in an beheld it, not having seen a college class for a decade?

Tiger Burning Bright

So here's an MMish story from today's NYTimes.

Read, in particular, the last quote in the story, from the Daish guy. It's right out of the MM playbook. The medium and what it can do are more important than facts and details.

Maybe I'm stretching a point or forcing a comparison, but I linked it to what MM said about Cubism. that Cubism -- through its claim to be able to tell the entirey of a a visual story, the inside and the outside -- in two-dimensions was asserting the dominance of its medium.

And when you think about it the way, something like auto-tune the news is a similar assertion about media.

The new electric structuring

Jess found this clip (although I think the embed was disabled, so you have to click through). Watch it. Whoever is directing the camera work has read MM and has a sense of humor. Because they are almost over-making his point, trying to see if they can overwhelm his content by overemphasizing the medium. And he's trying not to have a point, because or a fixed physical position, of course, he has already doped out the situation.

The thing is, MM himself was embodying an artifact verging on extinction. The celebrity-intellectual. They made a joke about him on Laugh-In. And look at how abstruse his work is. There is no modern counterpart, is there?

We bring good things to light

So Courtney A writes:

Maybe I am going to be wrong about this, but if Marshall decides to use a
light bulb as his example for something that lacks content but creates an
instant environment, does that mean I can take anything and apply these
principles? I guess everything in the world somehow has a "social effect",
but it must be dependent on the society, right? Because some cultures
still do not use light bulbs and wouldn't be subject to the light bulb theory
... but maybe they use fire, so does that count too?

Here's how I see it. MM cites the lightbulb just because he doesn't have to separate it from its message. It doesn't really have one. So it's easy to talk about it just as a medium. And as a medium, it does all those thing MM talks about. When you think about life before artificial light, you realize that, among other things, night was this huge fracking deal. Third shift? Are you kidding? People were just happy to make it through the night alive. There is this amazing book about the whole subject. So artifical lighting completely renegotiated our relationship with darkness. Work, family, schooling, the life of the intellect, sex, sleep. (For much of human history, towns and cities closed huge gates at darkness and sentries walked the wall, and you couldn't get in or you had the pay a toll to get in the lone gate. And it sucked if you mistimed your journey and got locked out in the frightening and completely dark countryside.) So MM says, think bout that, think about how the environment of human life changed because of this medium.

From there it is easier to understand how he views, say, the Kennedy-Nixon debates. What was said and who they were were very unimportant (to McLuhan and -- I think you would concede -- to the outcome) compared to the fact that they were on television. Television was the message. Therefore understanding television was, in a certain sense, more important and more predictive than understanding Vietnam or the economy. Because television renegotiated our relationship to so many things, including potential presidents. And people still don't get this. How many completely smart and reasonable people do you know who just cannot figure out why Dennis Kucinich does not do well in in national campaigns?

Mac users

This guy has some helpful interperetations.

Let's get this one out of the way

Eminiem, assigned

The really essential stuff is in those first seven chapters.
We can cherry-pick the rest. So, to start, read Part I.

Eminem

Tell me this was not written in the last seven years:

In our present electric age the imploding or contracting energies of our
world now clash with the old expansionist and traditional patterns of
organization. Until recently our institutions and arrangements, social,
political, and economic, had shared a one-way pattern. We still think of it as
"explosive," or expansive; and though it no longer obtains, we still talk about
the population explosion and the explosion in learning. In fact, it is not the
increase of numbers in the world that creates our concern with population.
Rather, it is the fact that everybody in the world has to live in the utmost
proximity created by our electric involvement in one another's lives.

Kevin2015 ...

...is cutting edge internet TV and

something along the lines of Google Wave, an
even-more-instant-than-Twitter real-time-service that somehow gets news to
millions in a blink of an eye. That'll actually be it's name:
EvenMoreInstantThanTwitterRealTimeServiceThatImprovesOnTheIdeasOfGoogleWave.
Google Wave users will hate it.

eMatt

Matt D. Wonders what happens when the aggregators have little or nothing left to aggregate.
And he thinks the policy-makers still have a lot of power, even in eDemocracy.

All in all a typical day in TrinblogVoxLand

OK, Lisa is freaking out but in a really really interesting post and she wants an iPhone and intends to contribute to democracy and become part of complete storytelling.

Dan worries that people are blinded by the shining promise of technology without really insisting on the preservation of any humanistic standards to go with it. He is both pessimisatic and strangely hopeful.

And Courtney found this remarkable next-phase of the New York Times and correctly (I think) delved into Creative Commons because she noted the angst in the online world over who owns what as copyright ahd paywalls and the in-out flow of information becopme more pressing issues. The basic CC argument, I think, is: to get more famous, don't charge money. But don't lose ownership. Then, if and when you get famous you can think some more of it. Noted that Lessig (see ignorance post) licenses his book through CC.

Nobody asked me, but I think there's a backlash coming against the free flow of information. Consider the Fairey/AP case.
And then there's Murdoch's block Google movement, which we need to talk about tonight.

You do/don't like the idea of posting leaked material to reddit and then letting the crowd sort it

Jessica raised some interesting questions on whether the (claimed) mission gets accomplished.
So did Allison, although she liked the set-up of reddit.

The rational ignorance argument

So Jessica's blog led me to this lengthy article basically arguing that transparency -- one of the pillars of eGovernance -- has its downsides.
Sheila would call that reporting without context.
Matt D. Would call it the problem of everybody.
Jess cited this response and there was this one on the same site.

Mostly, I think this stuff is not that hard.
If you can get to this file, you can begin asking questions, good questions that need to be asked. And you don't need to be a reporter.

Sally2015

Sally really stepped up on this thought experiment.

Update on what Aldon is thinking about

I didn't know there were two different Epics.

My assignment and thought experiment for you

Watch the scary 2014 video again. Then imagine a similar not-too-distant future. The NY Times, as we know it, is gone. So is the Courant. So are some other old semi-reliable big media models.

What do YOU see in its place?

What are YOUR content consumption habits, at that point?

What role do you see yourself playing, possibly even as a content creator?

(Support your ideas with links whenever possible.)

Things to ponder.

1. the hot new term is mutualization. What does it mean? What role would it play in your vision?
Here Shirky talks about using the same idea to save local book stores. (Even Dan would be in favor of that!) Note his use of the term "third place" to describe a type of environment. One incredible visionary described, earlier this year, how that idea of a space or place could be applied to news.

2. In the eDemocracy model, we almost do without journalists. New tools are added almost every day. You could "know" almost anything you wanted to know, but then what would you do? (I'm asking!)

3. Another option is that linked causes would create the journalism they want. Nonprofits with mutual interests -- maybe even mutual interest not immediately evident -- could band together to create media. But then who consumes the media? What are the other questions that crop up and how do you answer those?

I've signed on as a paid advisor to the yearlong project, which will happen
largely virtually. The idea is that the alternative, progressive nonprofits —
the National Wildlife Federation, National Civic League, Freespeech.tv, Mother
Jones and Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders in Philanthropy — will assign point
people to work with producers selected by San Francisco State's Renaissance
Journalism Center.

4. Another argument you could make is that journalism of all kinds will take a back seat to PR and advertising, that those sectors have been faster to master. In which case, news platforms like Foursquare might take over and make where you go, what you buy, what you like the main story of interest to you. This guy, for instance, loves FourSquare, but I don't think he's worried about the future of journalism.

1. It’s a geolocation service that you use on your Smart Phone (I use it on my
iPhone and on my Droid). It competes with a raft of services like Britekite,
Google Latitude, Gowalla, and others.2. It’s a game. You check in where you are
and it gives you points and prizes.3. It enhances your experience in each
location. Check in at the Half Moon Bay Ritz and you’ll see tons of “tips” that
people have left for you. Francine Hardaway, for instance, tells you where the
best dog beach is. I tell you how to save $40 on smores. Other people tell you
that Tres Amigos is the best Mexican place nearby, etc.4. It’s an advertising
platform that enables local businesses to give you offers based on where you
check in. Check in at the San Francisco Apple Store, for instance, and the
Marriott across the street could offer you $5 off of a cocktail to get you to
cross the street and come over.

Oh, wait, maybe he does care. I love this post, where he says the little things make you smarter. And he argues that the little things are left out of a thing like memeorandum, which I admit to using pretty addictively. Ah, mememorandum. We never did get to discuss that. Note how other journalists now use it as a way to measure how widespread a meme is.

A Revolution?

Right around the time our class is ending, there will be a flurry of activity in this movement exploring this idea that coalitions of programmers, developers, activists and citizen journalists could run around the outside of lobbyists. elected bigshots and the entrenched professional press.
So you've got a Hackathon.

And the Other Future of News. (#ofon)

A kind of convergence

So, this week Wikileaks -- an interesting concept in its own right -- released an incredible dump of 9/11-related messages .
It's of course way too much for any small group to humans to sort through.
So one of the places it went is to a special reddit thread where the act of user-voting would theoretically flush significant material toward the top.
Reddit itself is worth a look.

Depth, of a sort

One argument you could make is that what the web needs is not "the next new thing" but a chance to kind of catch its breath. It's a situation in which the amount of content vastly outstrips our ability to consume, store or even sort.
One reason I like the very old-fashioned Metafilter is that it's one of the places that guides you past some of the superficial stuff that so annoys Dan.
I mean, come on, somebody making Kant fun?

"The Road"

Getting warmed up.
I'm pretty sure I taught this video in 2005, my first class about the internet. Weidly enough, as Aldon Hynes will say, some its predictions have already come true but a lot of its implicit questions have not really been figured out even now.

Another question for next Monday:
Is there a safe way to manage your web identity?

Much more to come.

I still don't know jack

I think one of the keys to Twitter is the slight impression of anonymity. It's less binding-to-you than Facebook.
Twitter is about content and conversation -- and the blurring of the two.
The "following" feature is kind of interesting. In a way it's a lot more invasive than Facebook.
Oh, I give up.
You guys are going to have to figure this out.

Scoble

Doing Twitter wrong?

Teach me about Twitter

Some basics: Cortney C. has some useful guides and hints.
And Kasey found a very cool way of telling the story of T.

Following:
This, via Corutney A.

Sally: "Like a small, easy Web."
How Courtney C. came to like Twitter (better than blogging, anyway).
Sheila, on why she likes it.
Greg on why he likes it -- a very McLuhanian take.
Courtney A. just doesn't frackin' like it. And you know she tried. And I know what she means, too. Twitter almost isn't enough of a place. She also found this response to unflattering Twitter theories.
Jess really tried too. But it seemed hollow.
I like this (via Lisa) about the political uses of Twitter. And this which calls it a totally alien form of communcation

uses:
Matt D. "Real time story telling."
And poetry!
Matt Fitz on hashtags.
Kasey: Cultivate an audience and watch the news go by.
Searching. (Kasey found that and said this. We should try an in-class experiment.) I like the idea that you can get unbranded information, but so far in my experiments, I didn't find much,. Wrong search topics?
David says when you post a question, someone answers.

Greg likes the geostamping., but Allison doesn't.
Courtney C likes this, instead of Tweedeck.

Making us stupid?

Kind of what we have been talking about all year.

More ...

Kevin on Twitter Apps.

As someone who regularly uses Twitter (yet doesn't actually tweet all that
much), some may find it odd that I rarely, if ever, actually visit Twitter.com.
While I have nothing against Twitter's website per say, I do find that user an
application for my Twitter viewing is much better. I've tried many (and given
them a fair shake) desktop apps ranging from Tweetie to twhirl to Twitterrific to TweetDeck and on the iPhone, I've
tried TweetDeck and TwitterFon.By far, my favorite, on both platforms, is
TweetDeck. The layout is simple and user-friendly. It's a full featured app that
is powerful yet accessible. It's easy to navigate, easy to pick up yet easy to
utilize to its full potential.I do find it interesting that there is such a
proliferation of Twitter Apps readily available for free use. Unlike the other
major social networks, such as Facebook or MySpace, Twitter Apps have thrived to
the point that I'm not sure I know of any of my friends who actually utilize
Twitter by going to the service's actual website. The app experience allows your
feed to be open all the time, running in the background, allowing quick access
for checking Twitter whenever you want without having to visit the site. I guess
I've become the de-facto app guy for the class so it probably doesn't come as a
surprise that I support and use an app for this but in this case, the app
geniunely makes a Twitter experience easier and more effective.

And on differences with FB

Just as a start to my week's posts (I'm a Twitter believer), I think the
easiest way to look at the difference between the Facebook Status Update Feed
vs. Twitter's feed is that Facebook's is designed to keep track of people you
know. The beauty of Twitter lies in it's ability to follow people you don't. As
a result, where Facebook is a way to keep tabs on your friends and their
activities, Twitter is much more a true news feed from around the world. It is
entirely user-generated and operated.Some people were complaining last night
that they didn't have enough people to follow to make Twitter worthwhile. I'm
not sure Twitter is meant to just check in on friends. It is easy, however, for
people you want to hear more from (sports figures/writers, movie/music critics,
industry leaders, stars) to broadcast their thoughts. I don't necessarily "know"
or need to know ESPN's Adam Schefter but I "know" the Twitter Adam Schefter, who
has the best breaking news on the NFL around.

Kevin Knows Twitter

Here are his fave five.

Here's my list of 5 potential uses of Twitter:1. Crowd-Sourcing: A quick
search for a hashtag or trending topic will give one a pretty good idea as to
what the masses are saying about it. This was initially more difficult without
the use of a client desktop application but since Twitter has implemented a
viable search on their own site, this is a quick and easy process. Let's say I
wanted to see what Eagles fans thought about Sunday Night Football. Search for "Iggles" and there you go.2.
News Source: One can get breaking news information quicker on Twitter than any
place else on the 'net. Whether you choose to follow news organizations such as
the NY Times or rely strictly on the
idea of citizen journalism, a Twitter user can get to the point info fast and
easy.3. Blogging Platform: Tired of writing longer blog entries? Twitter
alleviates that with it's 140 character restriction. When a Twitter user is
efficient and up to date (Adam
Schefter), you can get the information you want without having to sift
through a longer blog entry. Twitter forces the user to boil down his/her post
to the bare minimum, a blast of information without the (sometimes) needless
opinion.4. Keeping up with Friends: An offshoot of #3 and an intrusion on
Facebook's (which has essentially adopted Twitter's format for their news feed)
territory, one could use Twitter for what doubters hate Twitter for. If you want
to tweet that you're sitting watching TV while eating Cheetos, have at it. Just
don't expect anyone other than your friends to follow you.5. Meeting New People:
While Facebook is designed for keeping track of people you know, Twitter is much
easier to find people with similar interests and seeing what they have to say.
Utilize the excellent WeFollow and you can
find Twitterers for just about any topic you want to learn about.

#here

Interesting use of hashtags.
People use them to create a kind of parallel same-time reality.

Or as organizing tools.

Coupla things

Sheila has the cool idea of creating a #Trinblogwar hashtag.

And then there's this.

I still don't really understand the Twitterverse

Do you?

Twitter-mining

Yahoo! jumps in.

Measuring your tweetness.

As if you didn't have enough anxieities.

Rotten Twimatoes

Sort of an interesting use of Twitter.

Speaking of rotten tomatoes...

Tiwi$$er

On a slightly more serious note, here is the latest musing about the business end of Twitter.

Tweggo

Please note the role Twitter is playing in getting us through the national Eggo crisis.

But then, it has divided Canada.

Somebody else figure out what this means

I'm reaching the point where some of the things I learn sound like the teacher talking in the Charlie Brown cartoons.

How You Tweeted

A nice example of Twitter in action right where we are.

Life Is Tweet

I barely know what I'm doing, but I did set up a Tweetdeck account. So far, it does not really please me, but I haven't figured out how to get the columns the way I want them.
same goes for TwitScoop. What I really want is a Twitscoop feed onto Tweetdeck that is customized for the searches I want. I bet there's a way to do it.
I did have some success searching Hartford on TwitScoop. I found some people who, I think, will be helpful in some shows I'm doing in early December. (They are young Christians, and I don't know how else I would have found them.) So I've started following them.
I also purged out some of the followees one seems to get as a default setting on Twitter. I kept a few, like Jimmy Fallon, just for the sake of heterogenity. Then I started following Shirky and a few other people germane to our work.

Nothing about Twitter

More of a continuation of last week's discussion.

Shirky strikes again !!!

This is SO what we've been talking about.

I Tweet, Therefore I am

If you're puzzled, you can read this helpful intro. There are links near the end that go into more depth. You might even fool around with posterous if you get curious.

This guy offers a few tips.

I'm Thecolinmcenroe, by the way.

Could someone tell me tonight if...

...monkeys are flying out my ass?
Or some other 2012 thing?

Because the improbable is happening.

And, indeed, for next week, you must all have Twitter accounts and have used them and have learned about Tweetdeck and Twitscoop.
And hashtags.

You'll all be required to find FIVE things you could use Twitter for.
This has some of the same ones but more.

The proverbial this and that

Only Courtney would have found this, but here is the website referenced in this research paper. (And here is the support group for non-profit sites.)
The thing about MyMissourian is that there's a friendliness we might like to preserve and/or copy, even if we acknowledge that the site is too random. The look and feel kind of reaches (come of) the people. Read Courtney's meditation on content, especailly her interesting assertion that online content if often presumed "alternative."

Kevin tackled the Sports question.

Blink: How about that first impression?
Here's Allison.
Courtney has a few she likes.
Mfitz cruised the Webbys. Good idea.
John cites a few sources for thoughts about design. He likes simple and clean and useable.
And this post from Lisa suggests that, in terms of courting millennials, John may be right.


Comments and interaction:
I'm sort of worried about Dan. In this post, he actually embraces the viewpoint of online culture. It's also a very well done overview of the interactivitiy question.
Jess shows you what a blogback looks like.
Very nice post by Lisa on commenting policies.

I like Matt Dwyer's idea of tying in blogs by subject.

From the reader standpoint

So, let's say I am the hypothetical reader who really cares about the political and governmental business of the state of Connecticut. It's Monday morning. I'm ready to begin my week. What do I want?
I probably want to know what got said on those Sunday morning state news shows that nobody watches. I want to know any interesting gossip and little stories I can amuse my colleagues with. I want to know if any news broke over the weekend in any venue. Above all, I want my snapshot to be comprehenensive. I want to look at one thing that doesn't leave anything out.
I some ways, my best shot right now is this non-organized impossible-to-search fairly new thing.
But it's not really what I want.

What I want does not exist right now.

Monday night

One group wants to give multiple presentations. I guess that's OK with me. You will also have time to huddle at the start of the evening.

Take me out...

Have any of you thought/talked about putting in a carefully targeted sports component? Not game coverage but some kind of niche commitment to a watchdog role. I guess this would focus mainly on UConn, a big time sports program where, I think it could be argued, the paid press doesn't really like to poke around all that much, so that the big story of the year -- before the Jasper Howard case -- was broken by Yahoo! Sports.
During the Calhoun-Krayeske run-in, the sports press largely bought Calhloun's claim about $12 million without even asking for proof. Other non-sports reporters had to go in and dig up the numbers.
And so on.
Maybe there's a vacuum.

CNP breaking news

WE already knew this.

The CDA

New media people spend a lot of time thinking about the comment issue. A lively comment thread at the end of an article drives up readership and create a sense of intensity. In a model that's working pretty well, people get excited about the comments, which become almost a second part of the story.

But there's another, slighty darker, part of all this. A law passed back in 1996 holds publishers harmless for just about anything that appears on one of those threads. In fact, those comments are basically considered not to have been published. They are not the act of a publisher in the same sense that a publisher publishes a letter to the editor. Which means that if you want your comment sections to turn into an insane sewer, you can let that happen and probably never have to pay the piper.

So the trend in mainstream publishing is to let those comments flow up onto the site without any pre-screening and then maybe fix them -- maybe -- later. The downside is that this kind of environment will scare some readers away. One solution is to interact with the commenters. There's a huge amount of related content about comments up at Poynter because they've been such a problem.

If I were starting a new site -- maybe not one with the current personality of CNP -- I would consider premoderating all comments but then having a segregated section -- maybe call it The Inferno -- where anybody could say anything. Enter at your peril.

Eat your broccoli; read your tofu

Interesting two-parter from Sally, who's already thinking about what to do when the money runs out.
Politics and government used to be the meat and potatoes of journalism. Now, says Sally, it's more like a vegetable we need but don't always want. But, says Sally, there may be ways to deliver the product so that the people who DO care will be comfortable with micropayments.

As I organize my thoughts

Somehow, I can't let go of the idea that a citizen journalism component is a good idea. One that emphasizes training.
What if we did have a Franken-Coleman style recount here? Wouldn't it be great to have trained citizen journalists who could watch and film every turn of the cards, every chad?
Because citizen journalism can be a horrible, nauseating thing.
And it's important that it NOT be.

Also little to do with this week but ...

Esquire is trying out an "augmented reality" edition. This just doesn't look like something that's going to work with its readers, and note that you actually have to hold up a print version of the magazine to the webcam to begin your fantastic voyage.

This has nothing to do with this week's assignment but ...

...it's interesting.

Resources

I'm just pulling together some resources for you guys, because I'm lonely, because I'm not in a work group.

1. This seems like a lot of the stuff Paz is already thinking about, which -- we think -- may or may lean a little heavily on geeking out about government.
2. This is a not-very-jazzy-looking site possibly similar to the Paz-Mirror. One topic we did not cover was relationship to the blogosphere. Note their blogroll which links out to non-professional bogs.
3. This is the Rolls Royce of non-profit independent news. Note the "Steal Our Stories" tab at the top.
4. The New Mexico site is part of this. Why can't any of these look better?

How's it going?

I thought I'd leave you work groups alone for a few days.
As you prepare your reports and blog about your work, do be sure to look around, do research and cite (as in link to) your findings.
One thing you may find helpful is to link to other similar models doing something well.

A little bit of this and a little bit of that

As several of you discovered, Jeff Jarvis is one of the go-to guys on this whole topic.

The Pay Model. Sally does not think the paid content question is resolved.
Here is how it gets argued out.
Lisa worries that the generosity model is too unstable.

Push and pull: how do you get audience and engagement?
That's mentioned, a bit in this post from Jess. I think it;s right that social skills become more important.

Video?

Comments and other citizen participation.

Aesthetics. Which contribute to the blink factor. And the feel and personality.

Content:
John wonders what, exactly, people care about.
Sally says there should be some way to fund journalism that is not sexy.

Tools?
MFitz found this cool town news aggregator, so I plugged Jess's town into it.
And Jess found this, which has more to do with tools and collaboration.
MDwyer wonders if CNP should work collaboratively

I think Courtney A. is right that this is where the term hylo comes from .
Matt worries that PR is the new journalism.

Notwithstanding Dan's Critiques

Some people see hope in all this.

Old v. new

Kevin argues that the form is not as important as the content and that the form need not dictate the content. Online journalism, if it's done right, need not be inferior. Kasey is not so sure. Aren't there's certain kinds of journalism that just will not get done if you don't have the bedrock of old school journalism? Lisa -- with some interesting links -- says not dying but morphing.

One key question for us and for Paz is: what do we mean by "done right?"

Texas news project

Just in time for Paz and CNP comes the impressive Texas Trib.
As Borat would sat, "We like!"
One of their goals (promise/bargains?) is a tight focus.

MFitz reports that Seattle has more of an informal fusion system.

What has been tried and will be tried

Very cool post by Kasey. It leads nicely into our discussion of CNP.

Work Groups, re-posted

Another must read. Especially because it references Mark Pazniokas who will be with us Monday night. After we talk to Paz you will be divided into three work groups to begin working on strategy for a project like CNP. You will set up a contact process, pick a leader and make a plan to work during the following week. You might as well sit together Monday night.

This group is intentionally tilted a little toward old school and print, because I want that sensibility explored
Courtney A. Dan Kasey Alyssa David Ernie

Intentionally tilted toward tech
Kevin Greg Courtney C. Mfitz John Sheila

Intentionally designed as a group likely to work on tech/legacy content fusion
Jess Sally Justina Lisa Matt Dwyer Allison

Must reads

This site is connected to the wiki book Matt D. was talking about last week.
I'm going to enjoy playing with the associated links.

And -- typical -- Courtney A. has found a lot of links to sites that help us understand the hylo concepts. Reading through the post and clicking on the links is MANDATORY.

Thenb, when you think about CNP, realize it is in some way the opposite. It's not zealous amateurs grabbing a tool. It's old school pros looking for a tool that might allow them to continue practicing their craft.

Wow

This hyperlo site about New Hartford is pretty advanced.

Leaving AP

What the Courant ownership is trying.

One stone. Many birds.

If you click on all the links in this post, you will get a tour of what has been and what will be the state of online CT news experiments. Many difference between old school and new.

Nothing to do with this week's work, but ...

I haven't introduced Twitter yet because I'm kind of pacing the rate of adoption for people like Dan and Lisa -- Techno-Resisters! Anyway, I kind wish they showed more of the Jungian conversation here. And Jess ties in some other older material. But actually, new media like CNP will have to figure out how (or whether) to incorporate Twitter. So maybe it IS relevant.

That's the way it was

in Coventry.

in Plainville.

in Wonderland.

in Farmington.

Update!!! Breaking news in Colchester.

Cha-Ching!

Could there be money in hpyerlocals?

The Times covers HL

This is how it looked to them earlier this year.

I wrote about it and managed to irritate some of them.

I feel horrible

Sally's blog has not been up on the blog roll.
Make sure you check her out.

Patch and more

If you get interested in new hyperlocal news models, this is a good podcast about it.

Election Day

Just write a little something about your experience, if you have one. It doesn't have to be much.

Hyperlocal...and more

Kevin asked a great question Monday night. Noting that legacy media companies have downsized, he speculated that new models would rise up. "Where are all these journalists going to go?" he asked. Next week, you will get one answer when one or more people from the Connecticut News Project vist our class. It's a nice opportunity for us, because not much is known, officially, about this undertaking. So one of your jobs is to prepare a series of questions for CNP.

Look at Patch.com. A citizen journalist or blogger cannot easily travel through physical space, not the way he or she can through cyberspace. Can't get on the Obama press plane or go to Aghanistan. But most of us move pretty easily through the physical space of where we live, our little town. The thing about Patch is that it sometimes seems a little boring. The election in Darien, has gone nuts. But would you know that, looking at the home page?

So pretend you're a hyperlocal reporter, and record Election Day in your town on your blog, at least as you experience it.

Crowdsourcing

You don't have to listen to this.

Meetup

One thing Shirky kind of overlooks is the shift in most of these platforms to at least a certain level of alienation and paranoia. I don't know the whole history of Meetup, but look where things are by 2005.

This was part of a switch from free to paid. I think Skirky sould say this is another example of changing the bargain. Or violating it.

Then there was The Purge.

You, Crowdsourcing

Dan thinks we could have crowd sourced the whole book.

Courtney wonders if we are all historians now. I'll let her elaborate.

The question at the end of this Kasey post is a great one. (and thank you, Jess and Sheila for commenting.)

Jess is mulling the nature of free effort. Some of the examples of crowdsourcing here are interesting to contemplate.

Courtney has found a new thinker she likes. She studies the ways people communicate. Interestingly, Jess has a story that kind of syntheiszes that thinking.

This is Shirky (via Courtney) on the dark side of crowdsourced movements. It DOES seem as though boycotts are a natural fit with crowdsourcing. I have some ideas about building, instead.

Kasey knows Meetup. And likes it.

Actually, one of these quotes cited by M. Dwyer is one I'm not sure I agree with. I think Jess has the same problem I do. And it wasn't just the white bicycles either.

Sheila is not sure she believes the old media will be Shirkianly obsolete. Neither is Jess. And Lisa is intrigued by the whole definition question. One thing we learned, thanks to Jess, is that Shirky is not sanguine about it. Not dancing on the grave at all.
Lisa gives the subject a second look. I like the phrase "nascent phase of mass amatuerization."

Greg, on stolen phones. What makes something go viral?

Print and stuff

Some of you will enjoy this ode to print. The part at the bottom about the page of paper and highlighter will especially please Courtney A. and Dan.

But print culture struggles with digital culture.

My question to you is this: Assuming that the first link is correct, it still seems imperative that any print operation adopt some Shirkyan ideas. What changes should it make, based on what you read in the book?

I will tell some stories tonight about print vs. digital.

Re-thinking Shirky, it seems to me that one of the issues -- re-self-publishing -- is the elimination of guesswork about what people care about. I will explain tonight.

The Bald Truth

Jessica is all over this book. She always finds relevant videos.
So does Kasey.

Make sure you check in with Courtney who found, among other things, a different video of Shirky.

The Rise of a New Leisure Class

The chapter on the Geohegan case in the Boston Archdiocese made me think, oddly enough, about the whole theory about coffee and the Enlightenment. Shirky describes a change from 1992 to 2002 mainly in terms of technology. But what other, underyling conditions must be in place?

The After-life

Only marginally related to Shirky but ... read this and ask yourself about every possible manifestation of your own online identity. Think about the parts you regard as private or expressions of your self. Then imagine what would or wouldn't happen to them after your death.

This is the go-to site on the subject. Digital Beyond also contemplates, interestingly, the value of online disclosures as sources for future research. We live in a world of millions on Mary Sillimans.

The future of me?

Obviously, I am very interested in Chapter 3.
Shirky argues that professional journalists are like scribes -- that their skill set and very identity are sliding toward meaninglessness. Do you agree? Why or why not? (Hint: the writer in this link seems not to have absorbed the Shirkian message.)
It's OK. You don't have to protect me.
This article is outstanding. We're going to need it as we go along in the weeks to come.

How many people in class have iPhones?

Flickr

I'd be willing to bet that some of you have far more experience using Flickr than I do.
I like Shirky's concept of abandoning any hope for managerial oversight of photographers and instead creating tools for the self-synchronization of otherwise latent groups.
I've been thinking about that a lot and about what its impact would be for professional journalists and other professional photographers. Some have tried to collaborate with Flickr. What are your experiences and your thoughts.

A Lott more

Please read this, if only because it fleshes out the Trent Lott story in the book. (One of the lesson of the Web and books, I gess, is that no story is ever really finished.)

Do not shirk Shirky!!!

I hope you have been reading Shirky all week. I'm going to start offering some supportive materials here, including, for Chapter One, the infamous website itself. If you read down the bottom links, it's kind of funny the ways he is pissed off at Wikipedia and competitive with the dog poop girl. He is mentioned here. So is she. (I think one of the things WP is doing is categorize misc. stuff.) Worth reading vis a vis our topic right now.

It's sort of karmically weird, but the particular device that was stolen turned out to have a subsequent history.
The sidekick crash was big news and created other side dramas.
I keep coming back to what Courtney has written about the question: to what degree does all this kind of data -- stored elsewhere -- represent a kind of alternate consciousness? Maybe that's why we need new narratives about what happens to it.

Wikilessons

Maybe the biggest revolution is the change in the idea of what knowing a fact is or what knowledge is. These are no longer things to be held in one person's head.
Anyone stumble onto this?

Written by some guy like you

But what's wrong with that?
A lot of people let that intimidate them.

OK, let's begin with the Colbert video.


Kasey notices that Wikipedia sometimes has a very high opinion of itself.

MattD wonders what Wikipedia considers "a source."
Jess jumped right in there and got into a revert fight.

Sheila wonders why WP is a little bit hard to use.

M. Fitz became a wiki-expert on Marlborough, CT. and Courtney worked on the Golden Girls. Lisa has been working on Rosa Ponselle. (I have a theory about why a lot of us tackle people articles.)

Kasey has neatly pinned down the issue of authority. But what does it mean to say somebody is not an expert.
Courtner A calls WP the window shopping of learning. She says it relies on -- sound familiar -- trust.

Greg decided to see what WP says about ...Trinity. He's read for wiki-haters tonight, he says.
I think Lisa will help him.
But Dan doesn't really buy the collaborative effort argument.
Jess found this, which says it's a guy thing:
Courtney A. found this which says it's even more of a guy/geek thing.

Jess says trolls are a problem. I love this thing she found about Nickelback. Lisa found the Jarre thing, which I had forgotten

Jess found this, a by no means exceptional example of the problem for Wikipedia and for people who NEED Wikipedia to work for them

Also from Jess, what happens when WP is NOT a good source -- and then pollutes the news stream.

There must be a band called Wikipedia somewhat

Cool post by Kevin about editing WP and learning about music from it.

Of course...

...you need to tour around in what Wikipedia says about Wikipedia.

Turn to Shirky

Time to read Chapter 5 in "Here Comes Everybody."

Keep on wikin'

Here are some links about how Wikipedia works.

And how it sometimes doesn't work. Please read this all the way through. You may have heard me talk in class about the DeFoe stuff, but it's worth reading about.

What happens when "the community" can't agree?

One of the more interesting commenters on Wikipedia is Jason Scott. This is just one of Jason's many posts on WP. The comments -- although they go way, way off topic -- also have some angles worth pursuing.
A lot of Wikipedia critiques seem incredibly ancient by web standards, but I think they still hold true.

if everybody is an author, is NOBODY an author

This seems to be getting at something we -- especially people having conversations with Dan --have been talking about.

If Google went bad

This particular page is a killer.

And if you find it exhausting to try to keep up with the truth ahd the changes to the truth about Google's storage architecture, all I can say is me too.

Another conversation you didn't know you were having

Let's start (or end?) with this post from Alyssa.
Especially the notion that Google is too good not to use, that we have to redefine privacy, that we need to figure out why we're willing not to care. And Lisa says we don't care.
The thing is, just the sheer prevalence of Google is a kind of power.
Here's Kevin on what happens when you use. Sheila knows a lot about cookies and spyware. M. Fitz doesn't like cookies so much anymore.

Matt D. is a good reporter, so he tried to pin down what Google does. Courtney A. pursued this question to all kinds of different levels. Who's in control? What kinds of information is truly surrendered. What about IP addresses? Is Google kind of an alternate consciousness, sorting all our questions and choices? Allison says Google is her best friend. But then she and her real friends thought about that a little more. We might want to discuss Jess's analogy to a drug dealer. Is Google a privacy time bomb?

Don't be evil? Jessica and Courtney A. discovered that was quietly decomissioned. why? Courtney isn't sure it ever meant anything anyway. Sheila seems to agree. I like the Lithwick reference -- the ranking system. Jessica thinks the two questions are inextricably linked. The motto and how Google exercises its basic function are inextricably linked. Matt wonders whether the slogan would really ever prohibit the company from doing something. Like, for example, putting in cookies that study what you look at even when you're not using Google. M. Fitz suggests that one's person's good may be another person's evil. I'm guessing that the bright line in our room will be age., that younger users like Greg won't be terribly bothered by the nature of Google and will be OK with its claim not to be evil. But Greg also believes in a kind of Lockean response to Google. Vive la common sense and les natural laws! Lisa doubts the boys of Google are mature enough to have a fully developed notion of good and evil worth paying heed to. The more you guys blog, the more Mephistophelean the pact seems to me.

If you don't read each other's blogs, you miss a lot! Check out Jessica's Google instruction videos.

When you think about Google

...don't forget to think "they own YouTube."

You do NOT have to watch this

One of the things I find baffling is Google's belief that that the best way to promote Wave right now is this self-referential, boring-ass, interminable video full of fumbling associates.

Keep on Googlin'

As we get ready to reconvene, continue reading about Google.
Read Google's own blog and assorted supporting materials and do your own nosing around. Let's see if we can really crowd source this subject and inform one another on Monday night.

Two Unskippable Assignments!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Google's motto is "Don't Be Evil." Blog about what you think that includes and excludes, based on research and/or reading by you.

Come up with a statement about what happens when you do a search on Google. What does Google wind up knowing about you and how. Blog about this. Then ask another human being this question. Ask one or more people what happens when you use Google. Blog about that.

Not everybody likes Google

In fact, some believe the worst.

Especially about cookies.

How big a problem are cookies?

Of course, there are a lot of ways to research, as we said, the facts as we have presented them to Google and Facebook.

Not sure I believe this

The end of email? Really?

The Air War

I was thinking this morning that our old mental image, for decades, of the structure of information looked something like the page on the left, and swiftly, it has been converted to the page on the right. Sometimes I think that, somewhere way up above our heads, a serious war is going on for air supremacy.

As a (very unimportant) author, I sometimes geet updates on the Google books settlment, and I tend to pay them very little heed.

But as you can see, Google's rivals take this stuff very seriously.

I'm also intrigued by the Google blog, where the founders explain themselves so (apparently) reasonably. What purpose does this serve?, I wonder.

Google has, um, complicated relationships with newspapers.

Google also competes with PayPal, and here's sort of an interesting thing (I think). If you type "Google checkout paypal" into, um, Google, mostly what you get are side-by-side comparisons, helping you decide which one you should use. (Which is sort of a funny idea all by itself.)

You get only a smidgen of offerings about why, maybe, you shouldn't use either one.

And I guess I do wonder whether there's as much reportage as there should be about the reach and ambition of some of these new giants.

Upping the Ante

I'm bringing pizza for those who attend tomorrow night's voluntary class.
Fresh. Hot. Nourishing. Savory. Pizza. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

More wet toes

Wave and Chrome

Just dipping our toes in.

We become relentless again

Enjoying your spare time?
We need to start easing back into action.

Do you know anybody who gets the New Yorker? I really need all of you to read this, but it's subscription protected.
I will make some copies and bring them to the optional class. Otherwise, read it at the library or borrow it from someone or whatever.

A discussion you didn't know you were having

Dan doubts that it's advancing or transforming communication. Anyone want to argue?
Matt D. doubts it's transforming journalism.
John says FB sometimes breaks stories ahead of the journalists.


We need to talk about the criticisms, especially the terms of service criticism

I found this amazing page on FB privacy-- scroll all the way down and see some of the encyclopedic content.
Matt D. did a privacy survey
M. Fitz thinks the hacking and messing-with is the decline and fall.
Kasey thinks the very notion of privacy might be changing.
Tina on the Obama threat.



Matt D. thinks it's a mall.
MFitz can walk us through fan pages.

Life and death and the personal and the private.
A divorce is personal. Does a FB divorce cheapen life?
Relationship status, anyone?
A lot of you are pondering FB and death: Tina here.
This from CA is the kind of definition thing I was looking for. Part 1 has some good stuff too.
Lisa is also asking: what is it?
So is Jessica. (Remind me to say that the WAY Jessica got on FB is significant.)
I do want to talk about what a friend is. Tina on that.
I had my own experience with that, which was widely covered.

remind myself to show Dillon and Tripp and Rizzo and my new friend Michael.

remind myself to talk about the changing nature of transit through life -- re Wendy and the widening of the opinion circle.