Category Archives: Jay Rosen

Booting up a personal recommendation system for news

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As I mentioned yesterday, I’m a big fan of ‘Rebooting the News’. That goes for both meanings: I love the podcast series by Jay Rosen and Dave Winer; and I’m also totally intrigued by the phenomenal transition of our system of news which is happening right under our noses.

In the 9-minute passage of RBTN 82 that I transcribed, our hosts talk about an idea that Dave put forward in a recent blog post, ‘Find me stuff that I’m interested in‘. It’s a discussion about the concepts of a personal recommendation system for news, on Dave’s part inspired by collaborative filtering technology which underpins Amazon’s personal product recommendations.

Not only do I agree with all the conceptual choices that Jay and Dave favor, – such as avoiding categories, using gestures, using feeds, looking at other users’ previous behavior, including information about authoring as well as consumption, including serendipity… – ; I have actually been thinking about these exact concepts for years.

Now, I’m not going to say, “It’s all been done already”, because Dave would think I’m trying to pitch a product :-)   Truth is, had it been done, we would all be using it. A personal system of highly relevant information is pretty much the Holy Grail of the Internet.

One potential complication with applying collaborative filtering to news content is that, when news breaks, there is no critical mass of gestures from previous users. This may cause some delay in the build-up of a recommendation. Instead of immediate, mass-scale amplification of the breaking news event, the news item might be a more slowly developing “trending topic” as per Twitter.

Also, when the news is very fresh, and its relevance is very personal (i.e. highly relevant to a small number of people), it may take too much time for a collaborative filtering system á la Amazon to collect sufficient gestures from other users in order to deliver the recommendation to the right people.

Therefore, rather than waiting for a new news item to pick up the critical mass which can enable collaborative filtering the Amazon way, we could instead look at the *history* of users’ gestures. If the stuff I have “gestured” in the past is very similar to the stuff you have “gestured” in the past, there is a likelihood that what you “gesture” next will be of interest to me.

So what I propose, instead of collecting many gestures from different users in order to generate a recommendation to one specific user, is to identify pairs of users whose gesture behavior is most similar, and let their behavior inform their mutual recommendations.

One could calculate a “similarity-percentage” for each combination of two users based on their gestures. With a view to serendipity, the ideal similarity is not necessarily approaching 100 percent. The system could offer users a feature to mix their own doses of serendipity. Want more off-beat news today? Turn the potmeter down to 70 percent signal and get 30 percent noise!

BTW, one headache which this idea would take care of is the eternal question: “What is news?” Whatever news means to you is defined by what you “gesture”. Hence the more accurate question to ask would be: “What is relevant?” or, indeed: “What is interesting?”

Like said, I’ve been pondering over this stuff for a while and I’d just love the opportunity to help make it happen.

Transcript of 9 minutes ‘Rebooting the News’, episode 82

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I have listened to all 82 episodes of ‘Rebooting the News‘, the podcast series by Jay Rosen and Dave Winer. (This probably means that I’m their biggest fan and/or that I should get a life)

I felt an urge to transcribe the following 9-minute passage from episode 82, recorded on February 14, 2011. (More about that later)

Forgive the occasional typos and other glitches.

How is that for a gesture? :-)

http://soundcloud.com/josschuurmans/rbtn82-9mins

[STARTING AT 04:43]

Jay Rosen: ‘Find me stuff that I’m interested in‘.

Dave Winer: Yeah, oh, that’s not a question for me, is it?

J: That’s an opening for our next theme here. This is something that’s interested you for a while; it’s interested me for a while.

D: I don’t know. No, actually this is a recent thing. This is recent. This is like the mantra, you know, when you are a product developer camped out in a category, you know – if you’re listening -, you know what people want. I mean, you get that short list of features that everybody wants and on that list are some thiings that you have no clue how to do. But you’re listening and trying to understand it. And *this* is at the top of the list.

Absolutely the one that you hear the most often is: ‘Just find me what I want.’ Now, my brain kinda turns off when I hear that, ’cause what I think is going to happen if you ever trust somebody to do that for you, they are not going to give you what *you* want; they are gonna give you what *they* want you to have.

That’s what I worry about, that you’re not gonna get… So, any diet of news that I’m interested in has to also include subscriptions to places that are going to give me news that I don’t know that I’m interested in.

J: That’s one of the problems.

D: Well, that’s easily solved, actually. Just take… but you know, here is the model. You might say that I’m addicted to Amazon. I just, like, in an idle moment, if there’s nothing happening in the world, I’ll go to Amazon, I’ll go through their recommendations, right?

J: Recommendations for what?

D: For products that they want me to buy. Things they want me to buy. So I can influence that, I can definitely influence it. Like, I was looking for a lamp a couple of weeks ago. And now they show me lamps. Or, I buy a lot of shirts through Amazon and… I always get shirts. I buy a lot of books, I get a lot of books. I’ve bought stereo equipment, computer nerd stuff, vitamins… This is an interesting mix…

J: It’s just reacting to what you bought before.

D: And I can manipulate it by just looking at things. I can inform them that this is an interest of mine. And they will start recommending things for me. I think, well, the epiphany was, why don’t we do this for news?

What we need is a way of expressing an interest in a news area, right?

J: Right.

D: In other words, the equivalent of looking at lamps. Or the equivalent of looking at cameras. Well, I look at a story about prince Charles, right? So, the system infers… Maybe I don’t look at a story, but I tweet a link to it.

J: Well that would be a stronger signal.

D: And maybe that’s the only signal I want it to use, is the fact that – and this is a way that I have become… I think of this as becoming my own editor-in-chief.

J: Yeah, I would love that. If it took everything that I tweeted…

D: Actually, you know, the technology…

J: That’s not a bad idea.

D: The technology here is…

J: It can’t be that far away.

D: It’s not far away. I was about to say, we know how to do this. This is like a well-worn path. It’s not something, not a whole lot of innovation, *no* innovation needed here.

The bad new is that, as far as I could tell, only one or two people reading that blog post understood what I was talking about. ‘Cause the responses that I got were like, oh that’s already been done.

J: People always say that.

D: They do. And they’re always wrong. Because usually they are the people who made the product and they are pitching it. They are trying to sneak in all their spam there.

So, I don’t know, if anybody listening to this wants to do this, just let me know. I want to do it. I’d like to get into a position to do this.

J: Every time I look at a product that [claims] to be able to do this, to send me a quote-unquote ‘personalized news stream’, the problem I find is that they have these pre-fab categories that represent what *they* think of as the significant divisions of news, right? Like: ‘business’. Well, I’m not interested in ‘business’.

D: That’s bogus. This is why I get bored, my eyes glaze over…

J: It’s a category of production, it’s not a category of use.

D: Correct.

J: And that’s the problem…

D: Do you know why it’s a problem for them, is that they’re not… First of all, this wouldn’t work for everybody. Okay? Let’s be clear about this.

J: Right. What I want is something that works for me.

D: Exactly. And you would be easy, because we already have a very good handle on your stuff.

J: [Well, I would be...]

D: We have it in a database. I have your links in a database, right?

J: Right.

D: So, building it for you would be easy. And you know, once you get a little critical mass thing going there, it is just self-maintaining. Because the things I link to, you know, if I have a hundred people in this mix, I can now do collaborative filtering. That’s the name for the technology you use here.

J: Right, so give me a quick sketch: what is collaborative filtering? I think I know, but…

D: ‘People who like this, also like this’. That’s the idea.

J: Right right right.

D: It’s like Facebook recommending friends to you. It has noticed that you and this person are friends with five other people. Therefore we might guess that you might like anybody that this person is a friend with. So we’ll start suggesting this to you.

[Technician:] …products…

J: Product, yes, Amazon does that.

D: News is a product just like that. There is no reason news can’t submit to this. Also there is another source of valuable information here that could be used is your blog. You know, I’ve been blogging for god know how long. That is an incredible base of information about my interests.

J: Right.

D: So, I’ve always said Google ought to take that into account. I ought to be able to tell Google, ‘Hey Google, this is my blog and I can prove it to you.’ Okay? Now I want… or, why should I have to prove it? All I’m saying is I want my search results to be customized for the author of this blog.

J: Right.

D: Period. You know, that’s how Google… Everybody says, oh, we need a new generation of search. Why hasn’t anybody tried this yet?

J: Right. So, instead of using consumption behavior as the signal, you use authoring behavior as the signal.

D: That’s correct. Yeah.

J: Now we’re cooking.

D: I think we’re definitely cooking. I think, this is a business model by the way that would work for editorial organizations because the way we evolve something like this requires an understanding of news. Which the tech industry typically, as you have noted, doesn’t really have.

J: And also, the more of your user base you have authoring, the better the recommendation engine gets.

D: Always. That’s exactly how this stuff works.

J: And that’s the incentive – right? – to get more people blogging at your site an recommending things and sending links and comments and… yeah.

D: Well I don’t want people blogging on anybody else’s site. ’cause I want them to operate their own infrastructure.

J: Right.

D: But we’ll get to that later.

J: But you could affiliate your blog with the news system you’re using and it could therefore learn from what you blog about [...]

D: Oh, absolutely. Just give me the pointer to the feed. Or give me the pointer to the blog, from there you can get to everything. There is no… absolutely. But I think… just because you use Tumblr and I use Tumblr doesn’t mean we have anything in common as far as our interests are. [...] the list of feeds that I subscribe to might give you another good idea.

J: Here’s what I like to do. I don’t read most 99% of the news or commentary written about the NBA. I’m not a big fan of the NBA. However, if anybody writes and article about race and the NBA, I want it. Because it’s like this hidden subject that almost never gets talked about. Like, black players, white players, white coaches, black players, the compositions, the racial mix, different ways that these things play out in the politics of the sport. Like, I’m totally fascinated by that. But, the system as it stands says, ‘Do you want NBA news?’ No, I only want ‘race and the NBA’-news.

D: You can’t… I think that the point here is that you could never ever customize… you can never be the editor-in-chief of your own news channel by setting up queries like that. It has to be done with gestures. It has to be inferred from…

J: ‘With gestures’. What do you mean by that?

D: Gestures would mean pointing to… pointing to an article is a gesture. Reading an article is also a gesture.

J: Right.

D: As you pointed out, pointing to intuitively feels as a stronger endorsement, a stronger gesture if you will.

J: Well, let’s move on. That’s definitely need.

[ENDING AT 13:53]

Jay Rosen’s Maxims

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@jayrosen_nyu’s new media maxims, as he presented them to the World Bank, are…

  • “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” – A.J. Liebling (…and now, because of new media, anyone can own one);
  • Open systems don’t work like closed systems (“Anyone can sign up”);
  • “Sources go direct” (Dave Winer);
  • Audience atomization has been overcome (People are connected across to one another as effectively as they are connected-up to big institutions).

[UPDATE, June 4, 2012:

I just found a version of Rosen's maxims, adding up to ten. (Okay, perhaps these number more because they are journalism maxims rather than new media maxims?) In any case, I subscribe to them all:

Video streaming by Ustream

1. Audience atomization has been overcome. (Link)

2. Open systems don’t work like closed systems. (Link)

3. The sources go direct.  (Dave Winer)

4. When the people formerly known as the audience use the press tools they have to inform one another— that’s citizen journalism. (Link)

5. “There’s no such thing as information overload, there’s only filter failure.” (Clay Shirky)

6. “Do what you do best and link to the rest.” (Jeff Jarvis)

7. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; I just don’t know which half.” (John Wanamaker)

8. “Here’s where we’re coming from” is more likely to be trusted than the View from Nowhere. (Link)

9. The hybrid forms will be the strongest forms. (Link)

10. “My readers know more than I do.” (Dan Gillmor)

Bonus notion: You gotta grok it before you can rock it. (Link)

]

Would we still call it journalism?

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Tweet (by me): [Reading:] The End Of Hand Crafted Content http://ping.fm/kzv9s

Tweet (by Katri Lietsala): @josschuurmans What did you think about Arrington's article? In my opinion, he is so right: excellent journalists can have their own brand.

We're talking about Michael Arrington's article on TechCrunch, 'The End Of Hand Crafted Content', which by now has received 350 comments and, according to Topsy.com, was retweeted 1246 times.

Tweet: @katrilietsala http://ping.fm/lxNzC I agree that excellent journalists can have their own brand. There are several push factors at play.

For one, "disintermediation" and "sources going direct" imply that one
no longer needs to be part of a news organization – the news industry -
to conduct and share acts of journalism. We really are witnessing a
revolution, with the means of production changing hands.

For another, the social web, particularly the blogosphere and the
real-time web, appear to appreciate personal perspectives just as much
as "objective reporting". This seems like an opportunity for
individuals, including the "excellent journalists" that you mention, to
build their personal brands.

Furthermore, I expect that journalists will be increasingly compelled
to go solo if their news organizations keep hanging on to their model
of "lecturing" rather than facilitating conversation.

Some freelancers have always been successful at franchising their personal brand across various channels and publications.

The Demonic Verses

Having said all that, the other interesting point that Mike Arrington made has to do with the advent of highly automated,
"fast food" content production.

The illustrating example here is Demand Media, a company whose way of producing “content” was characterized by Jay Rosen as "demonic".

Demand Media immediately brought to my mind the animated video "EPIC 2015" (the Evolving Personal Information Construct), in which GoogleZon operates in a rather similar fashion and the New York Times finally goes off-line to continue as an elite newspaper for the rich and the elderly.

Yet, personally, I am not so afraid of this type of spam. As Doc Searls wrote:

"(…) Just as an aside, I’ve been hand-crafting (actually just typing) my “content”
for about twenty years now, and I haven’t been destroyed by a damn
thing. I kinda don’t think FFC is going to shut down serious writers
(no matter where and how they write) any more than McDonald’s killed
the market for serious chefs. (…)"

The web has always challenged us to distill signal from noise. The vast
majority of content on Twitter, for example, is of no consequence to
most of us.

If anything, should spammy businesses like Demand Media succeed in
gaming the major search engines (which I doubt), it would only boost
our reliance on social filters: if I know you and you have read
something that you'd like to share (and possibly discuss) with me, I'd
probably be interested and trust that it's not spam. We are already
relying more and more on human filters this way.

The business model is still up in the air

The big question remains, how is "excellent journalism" going to be
paid for in the future? Jeff Jarvis is exploring possible answers within the 'New Business Models for News' program at the City University of New York's CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Nikki Usher contends that the business model for news has always been broken – which, in my view, seems to imply that news provision may have to be subsidized. Looking at it
that way, Arrington may be right in suggesting that for some, the only
way to keep publishing may be pro bono.

Perhaps if we made a distinction between b2b and b2c journalism?

The revenue model for b2c journalism relies on sales and advertising.
Selling journalistic content to consumers seems an increasingly
difficult proposition. And on the flip side, Dave Winer sheds some doubt on the future of advertising as well, in Rebooting the News #35:

"(…) advertising itself may go away. “In a way an ad is a query… They try to
guess as to what I’m interested in. And the better they guess, the more
it becomes information." (…)"

The revenue model for b2b journalism is a content model. Businesses
will always be willing to pay for timely and/or exclusive information
as long as it's an essential part of their supply chain. The potential customer segment here is not limited to the media.

But what then, if the customer is not a media organisation? Let's say it's a mobile phone producer, or an insurance company instead. If journalists were to supply them with information which has been researched and packaged exactly as if it were supplied to the media, would we still call it journalism?

Amplification is the new circulation

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When one quotes, forwards or retweets a reported fact (or opinion, for that matter), I believe it is considered good journalistic practice to try and reference a source as close as possible to the original event, observer or report.

David Weinberger‘s “transparency is the new objectivity” would support the suggestion that such practice is just as much required on the Net today than it has been in the press and public discourse traditionally.

(And BTW, Just like professor Weinberger does, I should really apologize for the cliché of “x is the new y.”)

Dan Gillmor appears to support this principle as well by recommending that we should be skeptical of everything (while not equally skeptical of everything) we read and always consider the trustworthiness of the source and the verifiability of its claim.

And while I agree that the transparency and verifiability of a story’s origin  is an important attribute of its credibility, I also observe a dilemma here:

With the proliferating practice of reblogging and retweeting, it often seems increasingly cumbersome to track down the original source.

Amplification is the new circulation.

As we move away from the lecture model to the conversation model, facts and opinion spread through the social graph as by “word of post”.

Tweet: http://ping.fm/F2TxI @jayrosen_nyu Is it reasonable to expect from everyone who amplifies a message that they link to the origin?

Jay Rosen, I believe that this is a challenge for the rebooted news system and I would love to learn your take on it.

Let me offer an example.

My wife, Minnna Ojamies, is a native Finn, who follows the Finnish mainstream media closely. She serves as my “human filter” to the news in Finnish. She uses Google Reader to share the news reports which she considers most interesting. I subscribe to her shared reading on Google Reader.

Also I happen to share stuff I read; articles, posts and tweets which I think may be of interest to others and/or which I would like to capture for possible future reference.

What I share on Google Reader flows into an RSS feed (edited on Yahoo! Pipes to include the string “[Reading:]” in front of the headline), which is forwarded by notify.me via Ping.fm onto a number of “social” web services including my account on Twitter.

The other day, she shared this article published on Taloussanomat, reporting that the 100-dollar laptop, for which Nicholas Negroponte has been campaigning, had arrived.

I hadn’t seen this news in any of the other RSS feeds that I subscribe to. Unfortunately, the article was rather poor on source references. Also, it didn’t mention much anything about the timing of availability of the laptop in question, nor about its competition.

In other words, there was little transparency and verifiability to go by. Yet, when it comes to overall credibility as a news brand, Taloussanomat finds itself – in my perception at least – in positive territory. Therefor I shared it.

The topic interests me and if the report turns out to be “new and true”, I will be happy that I captured and amplified it. If not, I will be disappointed in Taloussanomat and regret amplifying noise rather than signal.

I could have done my own background check, of course. A simple web search would probably have done the trick. And services like Techmeme are helpful, too.

But my point, really, is that it may not be realistic to expect “amplifiers” to routinely carry out verification checks.

Personally, when I am in “reading mode”, catching up with my RSS subscriptions, I don’t  necessarily want to allocate much time to verification. My priority is to read, capture and share (and amplification is a by-product which serves the rebooted news system).

So, I’m kinda wondering if it would be acceptable that we simply link to where we read the news – in my case the article by Taloussanomat – and perhaps trust that the rebooted news system will somehow take care of verifying the origin itself.

That, across all these chains of amplification, some people will actually go back and refer to the origin of the story – especially when doubt or controversy (combined with a lack of transparency or verifiability) pass a certain threshold.

 

There’s another remark or two that I wanted to make around amplification being the new circulation.

If we accept this framing of the new news system for a moment, it might lead us to believe that pay walls a la Rupert Murdoch constitute indeed an act of shooting oneself in the proverbial foot.

Let’s assume for a moment that the way to reach people on-line is less about signing up subscribers and more about amplification.

In a sense, the newspaper sales model can be associated with “push” and the amplification model with “pull”. Through subscription and sales outlets, stuff is pushed to people on certain terms, but only after recieving the package will they find out what they appreciate and what not. What they subsequently do like and decide to amplify is what they have pulled out as signal from the noise.

You can’t put it back into the tube, Mr. Murdoch!

In such a world, where pull trumps push and amplification trumps circulation, any content behind paywalls cannot be amplified.

Or rather, of course the message can be amplified – Washington Post readers also have Twitter accounts – but the paywall discourages the referencing of the original source.

So, if amplification is the new circulation, perhaps the amplifiers (that’s us) won’t always take the trouble of reading and verifying the original source, especially when it’s made cumbersome to do so. If important enough, we’ll do the fact-checking somehow routing around the paywall. Perhaps we’ll find our own sources.

Hm, Dave Winer, perhaps it’s not only that sources are going direct, (@davewiner, what would be the best link to this theme?), but also readers will go direct, namely directly to the source.

Tweet: http://ping.fm/F2TxI @davewiner Seems to me that not only sources, but also receivers go direct, namely to the source.

(When sources go direct, they become senders. And if senders can go direct, so can receivers or readers.)

Finally: how about if the half time of news is approaching to zero, much like the cost of storage of digital content is approaching to zero?

In a variation to Chris Anderson, will it make best business sense to give the news away for free and sell something else? Some type of premium content? Live experiences?

In such scenario, high-quality news including investigative reporting will merely be a brand builder, an investment rather than a business of its own.

Capturables from Rebooting the News #10

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Just arrived to the office. Lots of stuff I feel like unloading.

On my way here I listened to episode 10 of Rebooting the News. I think it was one of the best shows in the series so far (among the first 10, that is – I have some catching up to do).

Jay Rosen makes two very pertinent connections between the tech world and journalism. The first connection is about bug catching, a very common and appreciated practice in software development, but very under-utilized and unappreciated in journalism.

In software development, everyone acknowledges that you cannot ship a perfect product. There will always be bugs and users are actually thanked for pointing them out. In journalism however, the expectation is that journalist check and double-check before they publish, and then ship a "perfect" product. If a reader points out a mistake or contradiction, typically the journalist either doesn't respond at all, or responds in a defensive fashion. Jay explains it as tribalism.

Blogging seems to allow for a less defensive attitude. Blog posts are perceived as less finished or less perfect, and bloggers seem more willing to correct and update their copy, while acknowledging readers' feedback.

It's an interesting phenomenon to point out and certainly something that needs to be addressed in the "new news system".

The second connection Jay makes is about usability. Why are geeks not better at making things easy to use? Dave Winer says it's because it's so damn hard to do. And it requires a great sense of empathy – the ability to put oneself in the users' shoes. He mentions Martin Scorsese and Marlon Brando.

Jay sees a nice parallel in that journalism is about making it easy for users to user their own democracy, lowering barriers to participate without much prior knowledge. (This is so true and elegant!)

What else? The Church of the Savvy. That's Jay's description of the undeclared religion of the press. Above anything else, journalists will value, remain loyal to and defend their savvy-ness.

Jay's inspiration of the week is Elvis Costello's recording of Nick Lowe's classic, 'What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love and Understanding'.

Note-to-self: action points:

  1. Check out Jay's tumblr blog – I didn't know he had one, and I was wondering why Google Reader hasn't served me any blog content from Jay lately (I've subscribed to PressThink);
  2. Check out blogtalkradio, which is what Dave is using for these podcasts. I need to figure out a way to produce podcasts easily and economically.

[REPEAT from June 1: Dave built a dedicated site for 'Rebooting the News', at http://rebootnews.com/. He also created an RSS feed of this podcast series, at http://rebootnews.com/rss.xml. And a package of the first ten episodes which he uploaded as a torrent to Mininova at http://www.mininova.org/tor/2637891. He announced all of this here: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/30/rebootingTheNews110.html]

And don't miss the FriendFeed room either!

I just decided to follow all my followers on Twitter

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[UPDATE, June 25, 2012: My Twitter policy still stands: I'll follow back anyone who follows me, while taking exception of and reporting objectionable spam.

Compared to when I wrote this post 3 years ago, I now do have better filters (e.g. Twitter lists) and I think I use Twitter in a more conscious, engaged and conversational fashion. It's certainly become one of my main social news filters. Over the past few years I've found myself increasingly filtering-out (twitter accounts of) media channels while filtering-in people, i.e. thought leaders and perceptive followers of news topics that interest me.

I've integrated Twitter in my WordPress back-end with plug-ins like Social 2.5 and WordPress to Buffer. I tweet more of what I browse, spreading those tweets over the day using the Buffer extension button. And I schedule tweets using Hootsuite. Further, I'm happy to find Twitter integration with other services such as Quora and IFTTT. In other words, Twitter use in various forms has become more important to me. And I'm excited to see where it will lead us.

If you care to know what I've been tweeting in the past, check out 'My All-Tweets Echo Chamber'.]

 

[UPDATE, August 6, 2009: We can now also call this the trade-off between the visions of Robert Scoble, who just dumped 104,000 followers, and Marshall Kirkpatrick, who is "(...) a big believer in oversubscibing and then creating groups based on priority and context (...)"

I agree with Marshall; I think it's okay to dip into the river of news when the urge arises - while accepting that we can't read everything. BTW, he seems to have developed pretty sophisticated methods to be alerted when the tastiest fish swim by.

At the same time I must grant to Robert that most of us don't get the same amount of spam he does.]

 

My mind has been going back and forth about reciprocity among followers on Twitter. I think of it as a trade-off between Jay Rosen‘s and Guy Kawasaki‘s position.

Jay wants people to follow him who are really interested in what he has to say – and I infer that he presumably also follows only people he finds interesting. Jay also, immediately, requested to be taken off Twitter’s Suggested Users List.

Guy calls it a matter of common courtesy to return “follows”, plus he regards Twitter as a broadcast marketing channel. In short, Jay is looking for relevance, while Guy is looking to maximize reach.

So I decided to follow everyone on Twitter who follows me. With the exception of objectionable spam, which I block and report when I see it.

I chose to maximize reach because a lot of stuff I tweet links back to my blog or my shared reading. This is stuff I’d like to converse about and if I can grab more people’s attention, that adds value to me – at least at this stage.

I also considered that there will be other ways to filter for relevance, such as subscribing to feeds from part of my Twitter followers, then filtering those by content.

I must admit that I don’t use Twitter as a very interactive, engaged, conversational medium. Must of the time when I engage in dialog with people online, it’s over email, via Skype, in blog comments, in Ning.com sites, or on Facebook.

I do hope to increase the significance of “live web” services in the mix, e.g. by engaging more actively on FriendFeed. And perhaps on Twitter once I get those filtered feeds sorted.

Citizen journalists in Prague: how does Google teach you better journalism?

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In an article on ReadWriteWeb, 'Google Offering Training Services for Hyperlocal News in Europe', Marshall Kirkpatrick points out that Google is teaching a local news network in the Czech Republic how to use online (Google) tools to support for their investigative reporting.

He read about it on NYTimes.com:

"(…) The newsrooms-cum-cafes are part of a new venture in so-called
hyperlocal journalism, which aims to reconnect newspapers with readers
and advertisers by focusing on neighborhood concerns at a neighborhood
level (…)"

For Google it's an opportunity to build market share in online advertizing.

As Nicholas Carr wrote in his most insightful analysis of Google's strategy, 'The Omnigoogle':

"(…) If hot dogs became freebies, mustard sales would skyrocket. It’s this natural drive to reduce the cost of complements that, more than
anything else, explains Google’s strategy. Nearly everything the
company does, including building big data centers, buying optical
fiber, promoting free Wi-Fi access, fighting copyright restrictions,
supporting open source software, launching browsers and satellites, and
giving away all sorts of Web services and data, is aimed at reducing
the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. Google wants
information to be free because as the cost of information falls it
makes more money. (…)"

Now, to the ReadWriteWeb poll, Do You Think the Web Industry Has An Interest or Obligation in Helping Old Models of Reporting Transition Online? , I'll say: "Yes I do." Definitely an interest, that's very clear when it comes to Google.

Whether the new industry has an obligation to help the transition, is more complicated. In my view, it is primarily the responsibility of the journalist profession to pull themselves up by their hair and relocate to the new reality. Jay Rosen has called this a 'Migration Point for the Press Tribe':

"Like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them. When to leave. Where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life. They have to ask if what they know is portable."

In terms of corporate responsibility, I do think that web companies have an obligation to act in ways that support and help sustain forms of journalism which strengthen the workings of democracy. These may be new forms of journalism, and they may well compete with the "old models of reporting".

Marshall mentions the Lawrence Journal World as a well known model of effective local online reporting and closes by saying: "For more on this general topic, I'm going to listen to this collection of podcasts by Dave Winer and NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, titled Rebooting the News."  :-)

What I would like to hear is how well the Czech initiative will succeed. The first time I visited the country was in 1993, just after Czechoslovakia had split up in two. It was fascinating to talk with (young) journalists then, to hear their genuine concerns about their new democracy, and to note their motivation for building a new, post-communist, civil society.

Any (citizen) journalists out there getting involved in Google's initiative in Prague, do share your views and experiences!

Jay Rosen’s most linked-to post, ever

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In the first episode (audio) of his podcast series 'Rebooting the News' with Dave Winer, Jay Rosen calls this post, 'Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press', the most linked-to post on his blog, ever.

Jay wrote:

"(…) Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the
center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape.
Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region
“sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of
deviance.” (…)"

Jay argues that journalists in the U.S. will not step outside of the agreed boundaries of what is considered "the political debate". If your coverage stays between "what the Republicans are saying" and "what the Democrats are saying", you're safe.

This phenomenon is not confined to the U.S.

“Rebooting the news” | Dave Winer’s and Jay Rosen’s podcasts

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[UPDATE, June 1, 2009: Okay, Dave built a dedicated site for 'Rebooting the News', at http://rebootnews.com/. He also created an RSS feed of this podcast series, at http://rebootnews.com/rss.xml. And a package of the first ten episodes which he uploaded as a torrent to Mininova at http://www.mininova.org/tor/2637891. He announced all of this here: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/30/rebootingTheNews110.html. So, I think my work is done. :-) ]

I'm sure Dave Winer would suggest a better way of doing this, but I'm not a geek and still wanted to collect all of Dave's and Jay Rosen's podcasts on "rebooting the news" in one view. Subscribing to the RSS feed of Scripting News (http://scripting.com/rss.xml) helps but shows all of Dave's other posts as well.

See also: Rebooting The News – A FriendFeed room to discuss the weekly Jay/Dave podcast about news and tech
(http://friendfeed.com/clique-with-claque).

So here comes:

Rebooting the News #10 (May 24, 2009)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/24/rebootingTheNews10.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot09May24.mp3
"(…) We got this one folks! (…) Topics include: Maureen Dowd of course, the Church of the Savvy, One year of Twitter for Jay. Why is user interface so damned hard? 10 years since Edit This Page. And an inspired choice for Inspiration of the week, Elvis Costello's recording of Nick Lowe's classic What's So Funny 'Bout Peace Love and Understanding.
One of the best Reboots yet, imho.
PS: As usual subscribe in your podcatcher or iTunes. (…)"

Rebooting the News #9.5 (May 19, 2009)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/19/rebootingTheNews95.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot09may19.mp3
"(…) A 15-minute test-cast that turned into a mini-episode.
Jay asked me to explain why it was so important that the NYT has a River of News.
We're now using the full-blown BlogtalkRadio system, this was just a
test to make sure we knew what we were doing after Sunday's disaster.
However the feed stays the same, you can follow us in your podcatcher or iTunes. (…)"

Placeholder podcast (May 17, 2009)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/17/placeholderPodcast.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/cn09May17.mp3
"(…) I screwed up and lost this week's Rebooting The News podcast.
This brief three-minute solo cast explains what happened and expresses apologies to Jay and everyone for this screwup.

Sorry!! (…)"

Rebooting the News #9 (May 10, 2009)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/10/rebootingTheNews9.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot09May10.mp3
"(…) Jay and Dave talk about paying for the news, Ted Nelson as inspiration, "Giant Pool of Money." (…)"

Rebooting the News #8 (May 3, 2009)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/05/03/rebootingTheNews8.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot09May03.mp3
"(…) Topics: Jay opted out of Twitter's Suggested Users List, he explains why and we discuss. His choice for Inspiration of the Week is Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo. (…)"

Rebooting the News #7 (April 26, 200)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/04/26/rebootingTheNews7.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot09Apr26.mp3
"(…) This week's 40-plus minute podcast with Jay Rosen and myself. (…)"

Rebooting the News podcast for April 19 (April 19, 200)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/04/19/rebootingTheNewsPodcastFor.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot09Apr19.mp3
"(…) A bit of housekeeping — the podcast now has a name — Rebooting the News. Perfect name, cause it's got the technical side with rebooting, and boot is the first part of bootstrapping. And News is what it's all about. (…)"

This week's podcast with Jay Rosen (April 12, 200)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/04/12/thisWeeksPodcastWithJayRos.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rosen09Apr12.mp3
"(…) I spent 40 minutes this evening talking with Jay about news, tech and the future of journalism. As always it was a great learning experience with the NYU journalism professor. (…) At the end of the show I promised to create a room on FriendFeed to post links to stories we'll discuss on future shows. (…)"

Jay and Dave ride again! (March 29, 200)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/29/jayAndDaveRideAgain.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/clickClack09Mar29.mp3
"(…) Four weeks in a row, the clicking and clacking blogging brothers talk about the reboot of journalism, the news of the week, and a new $1.75 million fund for investigative journalism that Jay is advising. (…)"

Click and Clack the Blog Brothers (March 22, 2009)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/22/clickAndClackTheBlogBrothe.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/clickClack09Mar22.mp3
"(…) Really enjoying this. Today it was more laughs and less serious. (…)"

Can Twitter save the news? (March 15, 2009)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/15/canTwitterSaveTheNews.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rosen09march15.mp3
"(…) Jay Rosen, this week the question of Twitter as an environment for journalism came up. If the outlets of MSM are in trouble and if Twitter is rising, can it fill some of the role vacated by MSM? (…)"

Interview with Jay Rosen (March 8, 2009)
Blog post: http://www.scripting.com/stories/2009/03/08/interviewWithJayRosen.html
Podcast: http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/rosen09Mar08.mp3
"(…) It's a good idea to check in with Jay on where journalism is at every once in a while, which is what I did this morning. I'm going to try to do these more regularly with people who are on the Friends Of Dave channel, like Jay. We start off talking about curmudgeons, then on to rebooting journalism, Meet The Press, the broken government, and everything related. Jay is really smart, spends a lot of time thinking about things I really care about. I thought the interview came out great. Hope you all listen. 40 minutes. (…) Jay is a professor of journalism at NYU and was my choice as Blogger of the Year for 2008. (…)"