Thursday, March 28, 2002

Online Journalism Review Preparing for the Coming Era of Participatory News

"As an interconnected society moves toward participating in the news, the Brotherhood of News seeks to protect its values and exert its control. Just as zero changed the equation shaping humanity's vision of the universe, accessible media changes the equation that shapes news and informs society. Everyone is a journalist in the age of access. But for most news organizations, collaboration with their audience is an irrational concept, a dangerous idea."

redux [03.06.02]
MSNBC Can the Internet Save News?

"So how does the Internet fit into the financial survival of journalism? Right now, some people think it looks more like the kiss of death than potential salvation. The Internet forces us to produce news in all media types—text, photos, audio, video—and to do so twenty-four hours a day, with technology that requires high-priced maintenance and regular upgrading. And almost no one in the audience is paying a penny for it. There’s a business model straight out of Alice in Wonderland: let’s push costs through the ceiling and drop prices to zero!

But that’s going to change."

redux [10.19.01]
The Christian Science Monitor Is the Internet now our most serious communications medium?

"As the days and the weeks pass after the attacks of Sept. 11, an interesting development is taking place: American media is being beaten, and beaten solidly, by foreign competitors in the hunt for the stories of the new war against terrorism. This is particularly true of electronic media, whose shortcomings -- especially in terms of international coverage -- are on view for all to see. While American media seems fixated on the anthrax threat, the rest of the world is receiving better information about the larger, more complex issues."

"The limitations of other media -- time, space and depth, in particular, in various quantities -- mean that the Internet is becoming the one medium where Americans who are interested in getting the 'real facts' of the story can go to find them. Even most American media also recognize this -- witness the regular exhortations to audiences and readers to 'go to the Web to get more on this story.'"

redux [02.02.00]
First Monday Interactive Features of Online Papers

"According to McAdams, who helped create the Washington Post's online service, "A journalist with little online experience tends to think in terms of stories, news value, public service and things that are good to read, but a person with a lot of online experience thinks more about connection, organization, movement within and among sets of information and communication among different people". Journalists today must choose. As gatekeepers they can transfer lots of information, or they can make users a smarter, more active and questioning audience for news events and issues. Making users smarter means involving them in a collaborative experience; i.e. interaction ”

redux [01.30.02]
DotComScoop Interview with Rusty Foster of Kuro5hin.org

"First, we're already seeing the most wired reporters discovering the power of the blog, and rapidly becoming addicted to the kind of instant feedback and massively expanded informational networks they can provide. Watching a reporter start to blog is like watching a sugar addict stumble into Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Most of them immediately "get it" as soon as they open themselves up to the people they had always previously been talking at. I think this will continue, because I think reporters are just like that. The good ones will never pass up an opportunity to increase their reach."

redux [12.20.01]
Online Journalism Review Independents Day

"Everybody knows about the 800-pound gorillas of online news — nytimes.com, CNN.com, MSNBC — but there's another group that's contributing mightily to the craft of Web journalism: the solo, lone-wolf operation.

These outfits, each created and operated largely by one person, show that you don't need a large staff and venture-capital seed money to do news on the Net."

First Monday Online Journalism: Modelling the First Generation of News Media on the World Wide Web

"The Internet and specifically its graphic interface the World Wide Web is reaching a level of saturation and widespread adoption throughout the world. Specifically for journalism practiced online - in the discipline of computer-assisted reporting (CAR) and a specific kind of journalism: online journalism - we can now identify and theorize about the impacts the global system of networked computers has had on journalism. This paper signals four particular journalisms online as these have emerged in the 'first generation' of newsmedia on the World Wide Web (1993-2001), discusses the key characteristics - cf. hypertextuality, interactivity, multimediality - which determine the 'added value' of these journalisms, and provides three specific strategies journalists may use to further enhance the potential of journalism online: annotative reporting, open source journalism and hyperadaptive news sites."

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

The New York Times As the Web Matures, Fun Is Hard to Find
[requires 'free' registration]

"We lost our sense of wonder," he said. "The Web is old hat."

Just 11 years after it was born and about 6 years after it became popular, the Web has lost its luster. Many who once raved about surfing from address to address on the Web now lump site-seeing with other online chores, like checking the In box."

Tuesday, March 26, 2002

Salon Pretty geeky privacy

"When programmer Phil Zimmermann dubbed his pet encryption software "Pretty Good Privacy" it was a master stroke of subtle understatement. PGP's mathematical heart is so complex that it defies any meaningful lay description. The result of using it, however, is easily grasped: data so jumbled that, according to its developers and some cryptography experts, our sun would burn out before all computers now in existence, working together, would have time to find the correct key for a single message."

redux [02.15.01]
The Atlantic Online The Reinvention of Privacy

"The debate over these questions illustrates one irreducible truth: privacy is not so much a legal or technical concept as a social one. "The dominant feature of the current privacy debate," Fred Cate told me when I asked him to try to sum things up, "is its irrationality. The drivers are emotional." I think he's right. The crucial question about privacy today is the same it has always been?namely, whom should you trust?

A lot of people instinctively don't trust technology, especially in the hands of businesses, to protect privacy. But, as Robert Ellis Smith and others have pointed out, contemporary notions of privacy have in many cases evolved not despite new technology but because of it. "Privacy," the influential journalist and editor E. L. Godkin famously wrote, in Scribner's magazine in 1890, "is a distinctly modern product, one of the luxuries of civilization." Phil Agre made a related point to me, a bit more bluntly. "The idea that technology and privacy are intrinsically opposed," he said, "is false.""

Monday, March 25, 2002

The New York Times Law Limiting Internet in Libraries Challenged
[requires 'free' registration]

"This morning in a Philadelphia courtroom, a coalition of libraries, Web sites and library patrons will begin nine days of hearings in which they will ask three federal judges to help decide a seemingly simple question: What is a library for?"

"They argue that a law passed by Congress in December 2000 requiring schools and libraries to use Internet filtering software changes the nature of libraries from being places that provide information to places that unconstitutionally restrict it."

The Washington Post Pat Schroeder's New Chapter

"And who, you might be wondering, is giving Schroeder and her publishers such a fright?

Librarians, of course.

No joke. Of all the dangerous and dot-complex problems that American publishers face in the near future -- economic downturns, competition for leisure time, piracy -- perhaps the most explosive one could be libraries. Publishers and librarians are squaring off for a battle royal over the way electronic books and journals are lent out from libraries and over what constitutes fair use of written material."

redux [08.23.01]
The New York Times Librarians Adjust Image in an Effort to Fill Jobs
[requires 'free' registration]

""It's time for us to work on advocating for libraries to change the image," said one of the "21st Century Librarians," Veronda Pitchford, an African-American librarian in Chicago who wears dreadlocks, enjoys in-line skating, practices yoga and listens to eclectic music. "I want little kids to know that this is an option. I want little girls to see me."

Ms. Pitchford, 30, said that even in an age when computers may be leading children to forget the human touch of a librarian, there is no substitute.

"When I say that we're the ultimate search engine," she said, "I'm not joking.""

redux [07.12.01]
News.Com Library "radicals" targeted in latest copyright battles

"Gone are the days when a librarian's worst offense was hushing patrons one too many times."

In this digital age, the custodians of published works are at the center of a global copyright controversy that casts them as villains simply for doing their job: letting people borrow books for free."

redux [01.18.01]
MSNBC Filter THIS!

"The American Library Association has decided to file a lawsuit challenging a new federal law that would require filtering in public schools and libraries."

"The ALA has been vocal and active about free speech issues. Five years ago, it joined a successful challenge to the Communications Decency Act, which would have regulated Web content deemed harmful to minors had the Supreme Court not declared it unconstitutional. And most recently, it filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Napster case, arguing that shutting down the service could have chilling consequences for any entity that catalogs information for others to use, including libraries and search engines.""

redux [04.09.00]
Dan Gillmor Librarians are heroes of Net censorship fight

"HEROES OF FREEDOM: They are champions of some vital principles, "the unsung heroes of the fight for free expression, intellectual freedom and access to the Internet"

"Librarians help us find things. They help us read. They help us learn. And lately they've been fighting the good fight for their patrons' right to have access to the unfiltered resources of the newest information resource -- the Internet."

redux [11.24.00]
Wired News Ask a Librarian, Not Jeeves

""The public focus has swiveled to the Internet and away from libraries," said Donna Dinberg of the National Library of Canada. While interest in the library help desk is declining, free commercial Web help services such as Ask Jeeves, Webhelp.com and Yahoo are thriving."

With all these commercial online reference services, will librarians become obsolete? Dinberg wants to shift the info-power back to her domain."

redux [06.29.00]
First Monday The Work of Information Mediators: A Comparison of Librarians and Intelligent Software Agents

"Intelligent software agents promise to traverse and organize information spaces for us, alert us, remind us, call for a refrigerator repair-person, communicate with each other ... to fundamentally alter how we accomplish many of our daily tasks. These red-hot and revolutionary software critters have a lot to learn from their closest human peers: librarians. As I read and think about how intelligent systems reason, search, classify, and filter information, I'm struck repeatedly with how librarians do exactly these same tasks. Both act as information mediators for the end user: both negotiate information spaces and retrieve information relevant to a particular user or goal. Librarians have been efficiently accomplishing many of the tasks at which the artificial intelligence community is now working to make software agents competent. Therefore, the development of software agents can be informed by a look at how human information agents do their work.

This paper will examine the characteristics of agency, the work of librarians as information mediators, the differences between human and software agents, the possible tasks for software agents in libraries, and speculate on the future of human and software agency."