This month’s debate: Who screws up the most?

The debate begins with the claim “you can’t trust anything on the Internet.” The new twist is that my friends are convinced that Google, Wikipedia and a gazillion bloggers are not only spreading bad information but instilling bad habits in good reporters.

Reporters have become poor spellers who don’t check things, they contend, because they rely so much on that insidious web of misinformation and opinion. The editors worry that professional reporters are beginning to perform like the unskilled and distrusted amateurs of the Internet.

My friends are also upset with the error surcharge. They complain that newspapers and broadcasters pay a far higher price for making errors or expressing opinion than do Internet sites.

I wanted to tell them that the public expects more – perhaps too much – from professional news organizations and their promise of rigor, objectivity, and truth to power.

I also wanted to explain how the Internet itself acts an editing mechanism where editorial judgment is applied at the edges, sometimes after the fact, not in advance.

Instead, I yielded to the wine, the time and a respect for dedicated friends doing the hard work of a good profession

Then came the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. Near the end of the broadcast, Williams paused to announce a correction. The previous week, NBC reported that Russia had planted a flag on the seabed directly under the North Pole in a move seen as a symbolic claim on the resource rich region. NBC ran video footage from Reuters called “Russia plants flag under N Pole.” Reuters posted the story and video on its news site on August 2.

The problem was that a 13-year-old boy who saw the footage on NBC thought the Russian MIR submersible in the video looked a lot like the submersible used in the search for the Titanic more than a decade ago. Which it was.

Blaming Reuters, Williams acknowledged the error. Poof. It was gone.

Reuters merely posted this clarification above the story on its site: “This story contains file shots of Russia’s MIR submersible. The story also contains video of a submersible which was shot during the search for the Titanic in the Atlantic.” Poof.

The bad video tumbled without correction from one medium to the next. CNN, MSNBC, Fox and other stations ran it for days. Dozens of newspaper sites linked to it.

On the Internet, an error gets around like a lobbyist in Washington. Reputations are shaped by how quickly peers, critics, friends, experts and, yes, editors correct it. Participation in the process of setting the story straight is part of the currency, as well as the sport, of the Net.

It used to be that journalists were expected to be an expert on something. Today some 13-year-old probably knows more about the thermal tiles on the space shuttle than a reporter covering NASA. Chances are the 13-year-old is communicating with a larger network of readers on My Space. So why not use their knowledge network, even if the kid (or the reporter) may misspell “Endeavour.”

That’s the promise of We Media – the media environment where shared or connected knowledge is an opportunity, not a threat. As great as the promise of “truth to power,” interactivity and communications technology enable citizens to spread knowledge,

“Who screws up the most?” is not the question we ought to be asking at dinner parties, in newsrooms or on the Internet. We ought to be asking how skilled journalists can collaborate with connected, informed citizens to better make sense of a complex world.

Editors might help everyone with their spelling. Or they could blame an algorithm.

It’s very fun these days to obsess over various Web 2.0 technologies and how to integrate them into your existing site. But keeping up with the items listed below can do a lot to help companies grow and maintain readership.

Here goes nothing:

Improper copyright year in the footer – If the reader thinks you don’t know what year it is, it doesn’t do much to help credibility. I subsequently found this in a lot of places. When this extends into the second quarter of the year (as it now does as of this posting), it looks much worse than seeing it in Jan. and Feb.

Contact info without a means of communicating via the web — The site listed a collection of phone numbers for News tips, Classifieds, Display advertising, and Subscriptions. But there was no link to pages for these departments or Web-based email forms. This can frustrate the reader and cost your company a good chunk of change in the man hours needed to answer all those phone calls.

Articles with no comment functionality – I had the chance to integrate Topix.net into the iFocos site and was impressed with how easy the integration was. Such a service, or others like it integrated into the bottom of each article, could both enable reader feedback and expose the article to a wider audience. Also this wasn’t a matter of the site not encouraging any comments, as it’s blog had them fully enabled.

Registration requirement — I think the ESPN.com’s Insider approach is much better than preventing a user from seeing anything at all. If you’re going to require registration, I feel you should give the reader a tease of the first two or three grafs.

Hiding back-door views of your site — I’m a view-source kind of guy. I deleted some of the URL for a blog post, down to http://www.DOMAIN.com/CATEGORY/ and found a “test page” was exposed. This should probably be an inventory of all the company’s blogs. I also noticed that it said “Powered by Movable Type 3.16″ Much has happened to Movable Type since version 3.16. Keeping on such an upgrade path can sometimes uncover new publishing, revenue and social networking opportunities for your company.

Make your headlines clickable – Not everyone instinctively knows to click on a “permalink.” Having both the word “permalink” and the headline clickable could result in increased page vews.

OK, I lied. I am now meandering into some more Web 2.0 territory. But don’t worry, none of this requires a computer science degree or anything …

Google maps indexing – I started playing with integrating Google maps into Movable Type recently for a client. I think this is an amazing opportunity for companies to explore. What I envision is a Google map that, when you click on a specific region, your last X number of articles, blog posts etc. that relate to that area show up.

Very targeted advertising could be integrated as well in the pop-up windows in the map. When users mouse over one of the markers on the map. Constructing such a map is no more complicated than creating specialized RSS feeds.

Go where the high school kids are — Why not create an account on MySpace that features links to your latest content? You could get thousands of potential young readers to be your paper’s “friend” and communicate with them on a level newspaper execs haven’t even let themselves ever dream about.

Recruit and host guest bloggers, and make them a real part of your publishing effort – Several news sites are warming up to the idea of “guest bloggers” as part of a citizen journalism effort. However, the areas these fine folks often post into is not always fully utilized by the newspaper company. Including small widgets showcasing “Latest headlines” or articles and features related to what the guest is blogging about seems to be a natural fit that would enhance the user’s experience with the guest blog and the company’s ability to reach a larger audience.

Speaking of reaching a larger audience … claim your blog on Technorati! – Once you’ve created these blogs for guests, take the next step and get them on Technorati’s radar. Make sure the ping settings in your publishing system are correct, and embed the little bit of HTML that enables visitors to make that blog one of their favorites on Technorati.

This is obviously just a small snapshot of opportunities and mistakes out there. We’d love to hear other from you. Comment below and get those gripes off your chest!

Chad Capellman is an occasional contributor and site constructor for iFocos. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed at http://www.linkedin.com/in/capellman

During his presentation, he indicated that:
- “Only 27% of the public said they were satisfied with the news but 76% of people inside it are satisfied.
- Only 12% of the public read newspapers but 26% of the industry reads them.
- 32% of the public get their news from Tv but only 5% of the media does.
- 40% of the public gets their news form the internet but 60% of the media industry does.
- Just over half the public said blogs are important but 86% of the media said they are.”
(excerpted from Jemima Kiss’s detailed notes)

We caught up with John Zogby afterwards to ask him a few more questions (Click here to view the interview):

But that’s actually a positive spin on a negative situation for Yahoo. While it’s true that Yahoo has been doing significant development in terms of buying or building content sites powered by social networks, I don’t think that Google is doing any worse.

Consider Yahoo: Flickr, MyBlogLog, de.lic.ous, Konfabulator, blo.gs, upcoming.org, webjay, jumpcut. And they’ve built Yahoo Answers and Yahoo 360 and the just announced Yahoo Pipes.

Google: Blogger, dodgeball, YouTube, MySpace (advertising & serach deal), YouTube, JotSpot. Built Google groups, Orkut, Public Calendars and Maps

So, is Yahoo outflanking Google? Not really. But since Yahoo isn’t making any significant growth in basic search against Google, the area that they are doing well in (social search) starts to look like their strategy. Ultimately, though, revenue comes from page views and advertising, and it’s unclear if Yahoo’s social growth will provide this.

Christine Gambito’s Happy Slip introduced us not only to her work as a performer and actress, but also to the community and lifestyle where she lives. I was definitely drawn to the series of situations she played out in her piece as well as the different ways they were portrayed. Whether she was in the rain even indoors or outside with friends and family, she was consistently engaging. We could have seen just one situation she had conceived, but instead saw a series of portraits similar to what you would expect from a one woman show. When she spoke at the end about some of her goals, it was clear the video represented just the beginning of a process that she would take with her as she moved forward.

JD Lasica took us to yet another space with his work by showing us how much could be done with existing media. Instead of always accepting what traditional media presents as the sole representation of an event or idea, JD’s piece exemplified how media mashups are already reflecting community ideas on the most serious topics. As more and more people use the Daily Show as their source of news, and embrace more comedic interpretations of world issues, the new media community needs to understand the use of the mashups and the influence they have in this participatory media as it evolves.
Finally, there were the students. Whenever we seek to know what the future may hold, we must always look at what inspires a student to create. This group from Miami University was clearly inspired by viewing a story from different backgrounds and embracing the humor that can make the even the most uneasy stories palatable. In the “Minority Hotel” two people were presented with implied stereotypes. The essence of the story begins to reveal the reality. The way they shot, organized, and structured made the piece compelling and kept me wanting to know how it would end. They only had a moment to convey their idea and make me want to follow up for more. The piece was strong enough that I will be looking for their next webisode. Curious what other identity realities and/or misconceptions they may explore.

In the end, the festival definitely reflected the most contemporary ideas being developed for new media environments today. Storytelling today through digital media on various platforms is in a similar space today as film was before Birth of a Nation. It takes one piece to tell the story and create the structure that will lead the rest of the community to longevity. I ended the video festival with more questions, ideas, and a greater understanding of the options. In the end I was humming the same tune presented by one of the pieces “We’re All in this Together” and contemplating what the next image would be.

In the past four days alone, Global Voices’ authors and editors have posted detailed reports on the conversations taking place in the blogospheres of Kuwait, Sudan, Bolivia, Libya, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Morocco, Mexico, Molodova, China, and various part of South Asia, in addition to the numerous short items posted daily by our regional editors highlighting individual items of interest. As I write, for instance, an article arrives reporting on the suing of a blogger by the Bahraini government, followed by one from Turkey and another on press freedom in the Maldives. This material — which is Creative Commons-licensed — is linked to and used daily by journalists, bloggers and others, and is made available through a variety of customisable RSS and JSS feeds.

Last year Global Voices enhanced its multimedia offerings, with the addition of a branded compilation podcast and the launch of the Witness Human Rights Video Hub pilot program, a collaboration with Witness that resulted in a human rights video editor being added to the team. And an even newer version of Global Voices is rapidly taking shape.

Thanks to a grant received late last year, we’re on the verge of hiring an Advocacy Director who will coordinate Global Voices’ efforts in supporting online freedom of expression; and we’ll soon be looking for an Outreach Director to spearhead our efforts at putting the tools and skills required to create citizen media within the reach of more people around the world.

Another exciting project in the works is Lingua, which seeks to address a deficiency of the project of which we’re only too aware: the fact that the majority of the material on the website is in English. Inspired by the work of the team of volunteers who have been translating Global Voices into Chinese since June 2006, Lingua grew out of discussions that took place among francophone bloggers this past December at the Global Voices annual summit in Delhi, India. Lingua will comprise a series of foreign language pages where Global Voices material will be made available in translation. A key aspect of these pages will be a set of tools designed to connect and build the foreign language communities within Global Voices.

Lingua is one of several Global Voices projects we plan on discussing at the Global Voices breakout session, which will take place on Thursday 8 February at 5pm. Other areas we’re seeking to develop include more organised curation of citizen-created video; expanded photo coverage and the repackaging of some of the tools we’ve created for our own use.

In our open discussion on Thursday at 12.30pm at the WeMedia conference in Miami we hope to engage the community sitting in the audience in a discussion of the different ways of working with communities – without alienating them!

Who are we? I’m Nic Fulton, Chief Scientist for Reuters Media, and a self-styled black sheep who walks that thin line between radical innovation and being fired. I’ll be joined by Mark Jones, Reuters Community Editor whose task it is to make Reuters news a interactive community experience. And finally we’ll have Adam Pasick on the phone, who in Second Life is Reuters bureau chief “Adam Reuters”. Hopefully Adam will also be with us virtually if all network connectivity behaves.

What do we want from you? Questions, anecdotes, experiences and more. Who are the 1% who comment on blogs? Who are the residents of Second Life? What should the byline of a story about Second Life be?

Come along and participate – and of course feel free to post issues you’d like to discuss via the comments below.

An article in the Archives of General Psychiatry says that lonely individuals may be twice as likely to develop the type of dementia linked to Alzheimer’s disease in late life as those who are not lonely. This is disturbing when you also realize that Americans are far more socially isolated today than they were two decades ago, according to an article in the Washington Post.

A sharply growing number of people say they have no one in whom they can confide, according to a comprehensive new evaluation of the decline of social ties in the United States. A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles, more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people Americans have in their closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two.

Internet to the rescue: Online communities are in some ways helping to fill this lack of North American social networks. This growth of community can be seen in online gaming, in online media, in online dating and other emerging online communities. Certainly, communities online have been around since the days of dialup BBSes, but their accessibility and ubiquity continue to grow.

However, there will always be a need for local, physical community, which needs to be interwoven with the online.

“That image of people on roofs after Katrina resonates with me, because those people did not know someone with a car,” said Lynn Smith-Lovin, a Duke University sociologist who helped conduct the study. “There really is less of a safety net of close friends and confidants.”

Rhizome was founded in 1996 as an email list for some of the first artists experimenting with art online. Since that time it has grown into a dynamic non-profit organization that serves diverse individuals and communities, yet the spirit of internationalism and exchange remains at its heart. Now, Rhizome serves artists through a commissions program, exhibitions and editorial coverage. We also maintain our community discussion platforms, and archives which hold digital art and new media art-related commentary produced over the past yen years.

Currently, we are interested in enhancing and developing online spaces for collaboration, in order to maintain our vitality as a platform for emerging artists as we move into our second decade. These include tagging of our archives and simple comments on our reBlog amongst other possibilities all geared towards collaboration and discussion. For me, We Media seems like a great opportunity to connect with leaders in technology and non-arts fields, people whose work, undoubtedly, informs my own practice. Discussions related to digital tools and communities are of the utmost importance to me and the substance of my everyday labor. I believe I will have quite a bit to contribute to conversation, and know I will take ideas back with me that will fuel my own work.

Lauren Cornell
Executive Director
Rhizome.org

As an interactive producer at P.O.V., the question of community and participatory media in this digital age is of the utmost importance to me. As we approach the redesign of the P.O.V. website for our 20th anniversary season in 2007, we have been thinking about how best to serve the communities involved with our documentary films. In a connected world, community means that people who live in different places can work together based on their common interests and goals; the notion of community, now more than ever, is no longer shackled by geography. Communities of people, who otherwise might never have met, can exchange points-of-view, share resources and work toward common goals. The creation of these virtual communities is especially exciting to us at P.O.V.: We’re thrilled to see communities of citizens actively seeking solutions to the social issues addressed by our films; communities of viewers discussing our films after every broadcast; communities of documentary filmmakers sharing their knowledge and experiences with each other; and a growing community of new-media makers learning, creating and experimenting with new technologies in their work both online and off.

Alongside communities of viewers, educators and activists, this community – of new-media makers – is the one that P.O.V. Interactive would like to do a better job of supporting and encouraging with our website redesign. Digital video has taken the Internet by storm, and huge numbers of young media makers are participating in media and making their voices heard. We can support this community by providing the guidance and expertise of established documentary filmmakers, by cultivating a virtual space where they can meet other like-minded media makers to discuss ideas and best practices and share their work, and by presenting their work on PBS.org, acting as the microphone through which their voices could be amplified.

As we think about how to best serve the diverse communities in the 2007 redesign of the P.O.V. website, we’re paying close attention to their needs and desires, and to the trends, technologies and practices of participatory, community-building sites around the Net. We would like to attend the We Media Conference to find out more about new ideas, trends, prototypes and success stories from participatory media culture. We’d also like to meet other organizations that are interested in enhancing communities through digital media to explore possibilities for collaboration. The We Media Conference speaks acutely to some of the issues we at P.O.V. are thinking about as we get ready to re-conceive our website to reflect the “points-of-view” of the various communities that we serve. We believe that attending the conference would be a wonderful opportunity to learn from the organizers, panelists and participants about building and improving P.O.V.’s online community in the 21st century.

Ruiyan Xu
Associate Producer
P.O.V. Interactive

First Life is a 3D analog world where server lag does not exist. Find Out Where You Actually Live! Go Outside!  Membership is Free!

What’s especially notable, other than the dead-on humor, is that Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, responded with a direct anti-”seize-and-desist” letter. It’s nice to see a company that allows, even encourages, parody and derivative creativity — though given Second Life’s ethos, I’d have been surprised by any other response.

The most critical aspect of projects of using ICT to construct community is to understand what forms technology activists will find inviting and how they are likely to use this technology. I have worked most extensively with projects related to Iraq (including a three-week, in-country contract in summer 2004) where there is limited experience with using newer forms of technology. What we quickly discovered was that having access to email did not entail understanding that rapid response should be the norm, or that people would feel uncomfortable about speaking to counterparts in partner organizations without clearing every conversation with their superiors. Introducing new technology in and of itself rarely worked – although giving Iraqi University leaders access to webcams in 2003 did remarkably increase their willingness to communicate. What one needs to do is to map the technical network that one is seeking to build onto the social network of existing personal relations and activities. Our organization has found that universities in contexts such as East Timor and Iraq are the best places to start – since they are most likely to have the infrastructure and the experience – and then to build out to community groups from there. If you can establish a foothold in a university, it is then much more likely that you will be effective in building a community technology center.

I am look forward to better understanding how to construct and maintain long-term, long-distance relationships. I am particularly interested in learning more about how groups have used socially collaborative software such as wikis, blogs and collaborative bookmarking, as well as about experiences with Drupal technology to build community and mobilize folks to act. I am also curious to see how groups are using the newer forms of Web 2.0 technology. I am hoping to get both ideas that I might practically implement and those that I might use to enrich my teaching.

Ted Perlmutter, Ph.D.
Director of Information Technology and Knowledge Management
Center for International Conflict Resolution, Columbia University
Visiting Professor, Department of Sociology, College of William and Mary

 . . .You might have heard of a few of those speaking:

• Caterina Fake, Founder, Flickr, USA
• William H. Gates III, Chairman, Microsoft Corporation, USA
• Chad Hurley, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, YouTube, USA
• Mark G. Parker, President and Chief Executive Officer, Nike, USA
• Viviane Reding, Commissioner, Information Society and Media, European Commission, Brussels
• Dennis Kneale, Managing Editor, Forbes Magazine, USA

Here’s the description from the WEF site.

The rapid rise of online social networks is both a social and business phenomenon, the impact of which is only beginning to be understood. The consumer-powered Web 2.0 creates innovative ways for businesses to operate and people to communicate.

1. What is driving the emergence of virtual communities? Is the rapid rise in their valuations justified?
2. How are companies beginning to use social networking strategies for product and market development, as well as for communication?

“There is a broad trend for people to share their lives with as wide an audience as possible”, Chad Hurley, Co-Founder of YouTube, said. Using his own company as an example, Hurley added that, “since we are now the largest audience, even more people are choosing to share their experiences on our site.”

The panelists also discussed the new and different ways to measure online success. “Page views are becoming less relevant. What’s taking their place is the number of connections that are made on your site,” said Caterina Fake, Founder, Flickr, USA.

It’s in Real Media or Windows format. Sadly, you can’t download it and watch it on your iPod. That would REALLY be Web 2.0.