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Tuesday, February 28, 2006
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 Tuesday, February 28, 2006
started 2/28/2006; 2:42:26 PM - last post 3/15/2007; 6:19:43 AM
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Doc Searls - Tuesday, February 28, 2006 
2/28/2006; 6:42:26 PM (reads: 7761, responses: 8)
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Independence and linkage 
Turning journalism inside out
| | The top still thinks it can "manage" its way to success by manipulating the bottom. This is exactly the opposite of what's required in the business disruption that's impacting the communications world. Why? Because the bottom is now in charge, and the laws of attraction "work" where laws of promotion don't. Before you try and "leverage" people (that's what this is really all about), you ought to ask if they want to be leveraged. They don't. |
| | As with everything Terry writes, I'm in substantial, perhaps even complete, agreement. |
| | The one thing that felt odd to me, in agreeing with Terry in that paragraph, was the top/bottom construction. If you haven't read Daniel Steinberg's Why No Pictures post quoted in the item below, please do that now. In that post, Daniel tells how a friend kept lying local news jackals at bay while Daniel and his family dealt, in privacy, with the death of their daughter — before Daniel reported his own story later, in his own way, and with far more dignity, depth and meaning that would ever survive the local TV filter, on his Dear Elena blog. |
| | Now I ask, who are the "top" and "bottom" characters in this story? |
| | Rivers or ink and mountains of pixels have been wasted on the question of whether blogs are real journals, or bloggers real journalists. |
| | Yet so much of what "real" journals and journalists do is harmful or morally awful, that I wonder if we shouldn't push a big reset button on the whole thing, and start grounding our definitions in journals, period. |
| | Most of those today would be blogs. |
| | Rather than anchor the definition of journalism in some top-down manner defined by professional pyramids of long standing, how about anchoring it in writers? Specifically, individual, independent writers. |
| | What makes Terry Heaton and Daniel Steinberg real journalists isn't who they work for. It's who they are, and that they write with honesty, humanity and insight. They move and increase us as human beings. Their relationship with the world, through their blogs, is from the inside to the outside: literally, inside out. They come from their guts and their brains and their hearts. |
| | That's the beginning of a new and better ism. |
| | Writing from one's organs isn't new. We've had it since Pepys, Franklin and others, centuries ago. What's changed is the environment, which is so supportive of independence that the old dependency-leveragers are simply made ridiculous. |
Dear Daniel
| | Thank you for Dear Elena, a blog that chokes me up for the worst and best reasons, which are both the same: because it's true. |
| | I wince and flush to read a paragraph like this one — |
| | How often have you been with your child and not been with them. You've taken the time to be at a kid¹s soccer game but been on your cell phone. You've left work to pick your kid up from school but your mind isn't there on your son or daughter and the day they've just had at school - your mind is already back at your desk on the next thing you have to do. |
| | — and to know my child is alive, and I'm not not always truly present with him. |
| | Last night we did something we rarely do: watch the evening news. There was a scheduled feature involving friends and colleagues from the University, and we wanted to know more about the heavy rains that battered the town all day. But the first story was about hideous abuse of her own children by a woman who runs a day care center. It wasn't sensationalized, but it was too interesting in too many wrong ways for a nine-year old, so we turned the tube off. The thought in my mind: A picture can subtract a thousand words. |
| | Our boy went back to reading. |
| | ...we're not posting pictures of Elena. |
| | Channel 19 came over twice trying to come into our house and shove a camera in Kim and my face. Patti has been guarding the door and watching over us. She kept them out. Kim and I don't watch local news - it's one tragedy after another overplayed in ways that don't serve the public. We certainly didn't want to be the subject of a story. The woman from the t.v. station said "he's already talked to channel 8." Patti wisely said, "no he hasn¹t and I still am not letting you in." |
| | They came back a second time while Kim and I were at the funeral home picking out a casket. Patti was playing board games with Maggie. Maggie had beaten her at Deflexion and Mancala and had moved to Sorry because "it's mainly a game of chance so maybe you can win." This time they told Patti they just wanted to come in and film Elena's picture. Again Patti sent them away. |
| | But it isn¹t because of privacy that we aren¹t posting her picture. It's hard to describe, but I'll try. |
| | I've read all of your comments. Thank you. Many of you have sent us support and that means a lot. But many of you have sent us a note about looking at your own child differently. Others have sent stories of losses you have suffered. A picture makes this story about one particular little girl. We¹re touched that you have personalized this story and made it about you and your family. |
| | Thank you, too. And your whole family. |
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Wigwam Jones - Re: Tuesday, February 28, 2006
3/1/2006; 2:53:57 AM (reads: 1333, responses: 0)
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On "Ending the Tyranny of the Link" and "hyperwords."
What's right - links are still useful, but the author is correct in noting their limitations.
What's wrong - author's suggested 'hyperwords' is not an answer - it slices salami with a battle-axe. The response list is less restricting, but still very canned, limited, and has only the context that the author thought to give it - or alternatively, by the context that the reader chooses to give it. It saves the reader only the mechanical searching for data via Google or some other mechanism, it does not address the underlying problem.
The web turned data to information by organizing it, but subject to the limititations imposed by each website author's technical abilities, linguistic skills, pre-existing prejudices, and worldview, etc.
Hyperwords would turn information, shallow and single-dimensional as it is, back to data; in this direction is chaos.
Correct (read: useful) interpretation of a line of text requires appropriate heuristics, for which one can substitute that bugaboo of the 1980's, 'Artifical Intelligence' - or equally scarybadbuzzwordiness, 'Expert Systems'.
We have touches of this already - in places like Amazon, Tivo. You liked X, you will probably like Y, the system infers. Often wrong, but a noble effort and frequently correct. Even the condescending and irritating Microsoft Bob, Clippy, and Agent made moves in that direction.
Humans can no longer be expected to polyglot the Internet, is too much. But the rules humans apply to reason, query, and search can be applied to hueristic systems, which can apply the links in an appropriate manner on-the-fly.
This should properly be applied at the client side, not the server side.
Why? Because context is everything, and my information is not your information, what I care about is not what you care about - the important bits of a sentence for me are not the important bits for you.
In addition, applying server-side personal heuristics requires gathering them, and you can't have mine. If my dataprivacy is important - facts which are historical data about me, then my personal heuristics are even more important - with them, you can predict, and that is not to be encouraged on the storage side.
Furthermore - the author identified that links are single-ended, and this would remain the case even with the use of hyperwords. A protocol to allow an overlay of links to be applied to OBJECTS LINKED TO back to whence they came, without having to modify or update the original objects, would be useful. This would function like a clear acetate overlay on an overhead projector (for those who remember those ancient devices) - the reader would see the original object and the overlay (or overlays, or a selection of appropriate overlays) which make links back to from where they were linked. Now we're getting somewhere.
Back to Prolog, we've got to get going on with canning human brains.
Embrace the horror, don't be afraid to say AI.
Smooches,
Wiggy
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Mike Warot - Re: Hyperwords
3/1/2006; 4:01:04 AM (reads: 1304, responses: 1)
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Doc, everyone has some stories which they are constantly adding to in their lives... this is one of them for me, amongst many others.
Here's the relevant part of my latest blog posting:
HyperWords
Doc Searls solicited comments about the HyperWords plugin. With the above view of what it really takes to interact with a document, and the words within... I'd have to say it doesn't fit the bill. This plugin, though clever, and apparently a great tool, does nothing to change the read-only nature of the web (even the "Live Web").
I'm already using "search google for" in Firefox (highlight text, then right-click) as a very powerful cross referencing tool. The problem is that the cross reference doesn't persist. There's no permanent connection made between the document and the found links. In fact, there's no way to make any persistent markup of a web page in a browser. The browser is read-only, and is likely to remain that way for the duration.
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Mike Warot - Re: Hyperwords
3/1/2006; 8:44:21 AM (reads: 1258, responses: 0)
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Conrad Strydom - Re: Tuesday, February 28, 2006
3/1/2006; 6:31:21 PM (reads: 1328, responses: 0)
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Mike + Doc,
I agree I don't really see this plugin as solving much other than enabling me to do something I could already do before, albeit a bit simpler. Read more in my blog post.
Mike I like your idea of a read|write web, provided the original copy is left untouched, however I think ego and ?dare I say it again? spam will still be the big obstacles there.
I have for years been pondering the value of allowing people to add markup onto pages in a sort of "view user input" layer which can be switched on and off at will. This is now definitely very possible with Ajaxian techniques, though versioning a multipage document remains an issue, and then there is always the worry of moderation and abuse. However in restricted access wiki's this has been known to be an easily overcome obstacle, so perhaps it is a possibility for us right now if some bright spirit comes around to host a service like this.
Now there would be a real value adder. And people can add as many links as they want which will hopefully retain the context and cross-reference.
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"Rather than anchor the definition of journalism in some top-down manner defined by professional pyramids of long standing, how about anchoring it in writers? Specifically, individual, independent writers."
An excellent point... As a reader, I go to blogs for something altogether different from what I get from other media, except perhaps from the occasional personal essay or Op Ed piece. Blogs are diverse, opionated, lively, personal, ad hoc, idiosyncratic, varied, and often amusing and fascinating, like intimate glimpses of real human beings spontaneously reacting to current events and to each other.
The "old media" versus the blogosphere is one of those either/or frames that distorts the topic. Blogs are necessarily affecting the "old media" but the either/or frame is misleading.
I'm not a techie nor a blogger, so I don't know enough to comment on Hyperwords. But I do often follow links and often find the linked material rewarding. For searches, I use Google as available in Firefox.
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Mark Bernstein - Re: Tuesday, February 28, 2006
3/1/2006; 9:33:39 PM (reads: 1197, responses: 0)
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Doc Searls - Re: Tuesday, February 28, 2006
3/5/2006; 2:35:42 AM (reads: 1322, responses: 0)
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GnuS - oh
3/15/2007; 10:19:43 AM (reads: 802, responses: 0)
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