Month: May 2007

This has to be the single weirdest journalism story I’ve come across in weeks — and yet at the same time, it makes a kind of terrible, brilliant sense: A news website that covers the city of Pasadena has hired two writers in India to cover the city council in that California town, despite the fact that they are thousands of miles away and have likely never been to Pasadena. James Macpherson, editor and publisher of the Pasadena Now website, hired one reporter who lives in Mumbai and will be paid $12,000 a year, and another who works in Bangalore for $7,200. He will send them copy and have them edit and write it and then file it to him working in Pasadena.

“A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages,” said Macpherson, 51, who used to run a clothing business with manufacturing help from Vietnam and India.

And these aren’t just Indian workers that Macpherson is trying to turn into journalists. One of the reporters that responded to his Craigslist ad is a former student at the UC Berkeley graduate school of journalism. The L.A. Times story notes that Pasadena city council broadcasts its meetings on the Web, and since India is 12.5 hours ahead of LA, the new journalists will be able to file reports while their boss sleeps.

Terrible? Brilliant? Stupid? Perhaps a little of all three. As Editor & Publisher notes, Reuters already has staffers in India rewriting press releases. My friend Neil Sanderson has more.

As we all know by now, Facebook is the new black. It’s the social network by which other social networks are judged — even MySpace, which it may already have eclipsed in terms of page views, if not users. So when it launches something it’s definitely worth paying attention, especially when it is something like classified ads, which Craig Newmark and the gang over at craigslist.org have turned into a low-price battleground.

The always-insightful Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 (who is also clearly a fan of the Cutline theme for WordPress, as I am) says this is another blow for newspapers, and he’s right of course — although they have taken so many body blows in the classified arena, both external and self-inflicted, that it’s getting hard to spot the individual bruises. Donna Bogatin at ZDNet makes the point (while arguing with my friend Mark Evans) that the classifieds on Facebook will not be open to everyone, since Facebook requires you to be a member, and people posting classifieds can choose who can see them), which is a fair point. But it’s not going to help.

It’s clear to me, as it is to Scott, that one of the things that makes Facebook so powerful as a competitor in this particular space is the social aspect it brings. Does anyone feel like they have really connected with someone through their newspaper classifieds? Unlikely. But Facebook and other social networks — including craigslist — are more like the bulletin board at the local campus centre, multiplied by a million. That is a powerful force.

To be quite honest, I’m not sure whether newspapers can compete on that level, since the amount of time and effort they have put into becoming a social network for their communities is in most cases approaching zero.

Guess I missed this somehow, but Richard Rosenblatt — one of the co-founders of MySpace — has formed a new company called Demand Media with Carson Daly, one of the early MTV video jockeys, and they are offering people who want to create their own video channel a video website-in-a-box, with a .tv domain name — they have a deal with Verisign to resell .tv domains — and some social-networking tools to grab, create and share video (the .tv domain, incidentally, ultimately belongs to the tiny island nation of Tuvalu — only 10 square kilometres in size, the least-populated country next to Vatican City, according to Wikipedia). An interesting idea.

As a journalist, I know that sometimes people in my profession get fixated on a particular storyline — in some cases before they even know anything about the subject — and then do everything in their power to force every peg into that particular hole. And I know that sort of thing is particularly prevalent when it comes to “the hot young startup” storyline.

That’s why Matt Mullenweg’s description in his latest blog post rings such a loud bell. There seems to be an unquenchable desire for that quintessential startup myth, of the young founder discovering something in a flash of insight and then becoming a gazillionaire overnight, to the point where some magazines create stories pretty much out of whole cloth to try and get them to fit the archetype, no matter what the cost to their believability. But Matt puts his own story so much better when he says:

“I’m not a millionaire, and may never be, but there are now hundreds of people making their living using WordPress, and I expect that number to grow to tens of thousands.

That’s what gets me out of bed in the morning, not the prospect of becoming a feature on an internet behemoth’s checklist.”

Well said, Matt. I for one find that a much more powerful story.

Some good points in David Pogue’s latest Circuits column in the New York Times, about how much there is left to do with what we call "Web 2.0." He writes about how there should be a social web that updates people about the latest flu virus or bug going around (although there’s kind of something like that already — too bad the domain name Sickr.com is taken by some German outfit), and about how there’s a British site that allows people to set up civic petitions of all kinds and vote on them. Some good business ideas in there.

(cross-posted from my Globe and Mail blog)

Sir Tim Berners-Lee doesn’t sound like a legend on the phone. He sounds like a friendly, slightly absent-minded scientist — which isn’t surprising, since that’s pretty much what he was before he invented the World Wide Web in 1990 while working at a particle-physics research lab in Switzerland, and along the way became a legend. He says he has a rule that anyone who calls him Sir (he received a knighthood from the Queen in 2004) “has to buy a round of drinks.”

In a phone call from Banff, where he was taking part in the 16th annual International World Wide Web Conference, Sir Tim talked about what he sees as the future of the “semantic Web” — in which not just websites will be connected together, but all kinds of data everywhere will be interconnected — and also some of the things he thinks could put the future of the Web at risk, such as the potential for large telecom companies to try and control the flow of data.

Globe: What sorts of things are you talking about at the conference?

TBL: “There are a number of trends happening on the Web. For example, there are pragmatic trends, such as the fact that we’re starting to see people using all kinds of small, portable devices to access the Web, as well as now huge screens. So the question is how do you make a web site that takes advantage of the big screen, when you’re planning a trip or whatever, but still works on a small screen when you’re checking your flights. The Web is also getting more into developing countries, so the number of people and the number of cultures on the Web is exploding… so that’s exciting. And then there’s the work we’re doing on the idea of the semantic Web.”

Globe: What do you mean when you use the term “semantic Web?”

TBL: “It’s a way of taking the data that is in lots and lots of different systems and connecting it together — for example, in a company or a database — and not just connecting it together, but realizing that it’s part of a community, that there are partners and suppliers and customers who all want to see and use this data in different ways. There’s a lot of excitement in the life sciences about doing this, where there are scientists looking for drugs and so on, and they have huge amounts of different sources of data. They’re looking for creative solutions to medical problems, but not everyone who is working on the problem has access to the right data.”

Continue reading “A chat with the Father of the Web”

I know, you’re probably kicking yourself for missing the latest mesh meetup — a social event aimed at poli-bloggers and various other hangers-on, fellow travelers, etc. that we had last night at the Charlotte Room. And so you should, because we had a great time without you 🙂

Liberal blogger Jason Cherniak showed up, as did Steve “Angry in the Great White North” Janke, and our good friend Andrew “call me Andrew” Coyne, who held court at the bar (as is his wont) until well into the evening.

We also had Mike “On the Attack” Brock– who has a new talk show called the Al and Mike Show — and many other luminaries, including Saleem and Kareem Khan, Leila Boujnane and her cohort from Idee, David “Troublemaker” Crow, Jevon MacDonald of Firestoker and a host of others (if you were there and I missed you, please let me know).

Obligatory mesh blurb:

mesh is only a few weeks away, and we have tons of great speakers and panels (see the full schedule here), and tickets are going quickly, so get your butt over to the site and grab a few, etc. etc.