May 22nd, 2007 | Blogs, Media 2.0 | No Comments
My friend Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 has a great post up about why he thinks that every newspaper journalist should have a blog — and one of the great things about having a blog is actually illustrated in Scott’s post, since he modifies and updates it based on input and criticism from both a commenter and a journalist/blogger (Brad at Union Square Ventures has some thoughts here on how editing on the Web begins after publishing).
And no, I’m not praising Scott’s post just because he mentions me 
In a comment, John Roberts notes that journalists should always let their employers know about their blogs (wise advice), and in his own post, a journalist/blogger — Bobbie Johnson of The Guardian, who I have a lot of time for — argues that a journalist’s duty is to the story, and to his or her paper first, and that not everyone is going to want to blog, or be good at it.
Those are fair points (particularly the latter), but I would agree with Scott that the vision of journalism Bobbie is advocating is a little like black-and-white television was in the 1960s: quaint and admirable in a way, but definitely on its way out. And I think that the kind of back-and-forth that the Web allows — and that Scott engages in — will produce (or at least is capable of producing) better journalism, “scoops” aside.
May 22nd, 2007 | Media 2.0, Social Media | No Comments
Lots of commentary on Techmeme today about Google’s new Hot Trends feature, which builds on the search engine’s previous Trends and Zeitgeist features by adding news and blog posts. Many people seem to pay particularly attention to the absurd or stupid things that people search for, including “legless chihuahuas” and “nose bidet.”
Fair enough. Don’t get me wrong. There’s no question that people search for plenty of ridiculous stuff — and yes, the Trends include lots of stuff about World of Warcraft, etc. But still, I think dismissing Google’s Hot Trends as a throwaway toy or a sideshow is missing something. And I think search guru Danny Sullivan made the point in a comment on Duncan Riley’s post at TechCrunch made the point pretty well: “legless chihuahuas,” he pointed out, were in the news; Oprah referred to a “nose bidet” on her show; and one of the other search terms was a radio contest question.
In other words, browsing through the search terms is a pretty good barometer of what people are interested in at a given moment. When I looked at the terms, Justis Richert was a popular term — because the porn actress who was born with that name happened to perform… well, a service for a state trooper while he was on duty (and still wound up getting a ticket, apparently). In other words, it was sparked by another news story.
Anyone who has spent any time running a news-related website knows that there are the stories you wish people were interested in, and then there are the ones that they really are interested in — and they aren’t always the same thing. For better or worse, Google’s Hot Trends and other traffic-measuring tools are a glimpse inside the mind of the people formerly known as the audience (as Jay Rosen called them). Get used to it.
May 22nd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | No Comments
I know it’s kind of late, but this is a story I wrote for the Globe and Mail about Justin.tv (original is here).
It’s being called "lifecasting."
Justin Kan, who coined the term, is the 23-year-old co-founder of a San Francisco-based company and the "star" of an Internet video experiment called Justin.tv. He wears a small camera mounted on a baseball cap, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and the video is streamed to his website at Justin.tv.
Eating, working, talking on the phone, shopping, at parties with his friends and co-founders - the camera is always on. When Kan is asleep, the camera is mounted on a tripod pointed at his bed. He even wears it when he’s going to the bathroom (although he tilts it up toward the ceiling).
Kan isn’t wearing the camera because he thinks his life is all that fascinating; in fact, he freely admits that what he does most of the time isn’t interesting at all. And one of the few times that things did get interesting - when Kan went back to a woman’s apartment and the two wound up in the bedroom - the camera went dark, while a porn-movie soundtrack superimposed by the team back at justin.tv headquarters.
Kan and his partners didn’t fit him with a hat-cam because they think he deserves to be a celebrity. They’re doing it because they want to show how easy wearing a camera around all day can be. Kan says they want to create an army of lifecasters - actors, musicians, even "citizen journalists" who could follow political candidates around.
→ continue reading
May 22nd, 2007 | Media 2.0 | 1 Comment
Mark Hamilton, a journalism instructor in Vancouver, has
an excellent post — the third in a series — in which he looks at the popular (but wrong) argument that newspapers could somehow have avoided their current fate if they hadn’t started giving the news away for free online.
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 clipped from www.tamark.ca |
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