Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth: March 2007 Archives

« February 2007 | Main | April 2007 »

March 31, 2007

Following Pet Food Recalls With Twitter

Earlier today I heard the disturbing news that Hill's Science Diet MD prescription cat food has been added to the list of pet foods recalled due to contamination. Both of our cats used to eat MD for a very long time due to Winnie's weight problem, though fortunately we switched to Purina OM prescription food before moving back to DC last September. I still don't know how far back the contamination goes back, but hopefully we're in the clear.

Either way, the last couple of weeks have been terrible for pet owners struggling to keep up on which foods have been recalled. I visited the FDA recall website today and discovered they publish an RSS feed for their recalls, which makes a lot of sense. So I've set up a Twitter account called FDA Food Recalls, so it's possible to receive the announcements via instant messaging or SMS. If you have a Twitter account, simply add FDA Food Recalls as your friend so you can follow the announcements. Let's just hope no more pet foods get added, though I have a bad feeling that won't be the case. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:22 PM

March 30, 2007

Now You See Him, Now You Don't

Who do you see in this picture?

Chances are you'll see Albert Einstein. Try this - back away from your computer by at least several feet and look at the picture again. The further away you get from the screen, the better. Who do you see now?

Pretty cool, isn't it? From an article in New Scientist magazine. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:47 PM

Talking Cyberbullying On The Brian Lehrer Show This Monday

Just wanted to pass along a head's up that I will be a guest on The Brian Lehrer Show on Monday, April 2. It airs on WNYC in New York City, and can be heard online if you click the previous link. I'll be talking about cyberbullying. The segment is expected to air around 11:40am eastern, 8:40am Pacific. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 5:13 PM

How to Participate in Stop Cyberbullying Day

I just wanted to post a reminder that today is Stop Cyberbullying Day, and we're mobilizing a global conversation about the various forms of online harassment and what we can do to combat them. Hundreds of bloggers have posted on the subject already, and I expect there will be many more over the course of the day.

How can you participate? Here are a few suggestions.

Post something online. Whether you want to blog, vlog or podcast about it, we encourage you to contribute something to the discussion today. It can be a personal story about cyberbullying, a collection of resources, advice you want to share - whatever you want. Then be sure to tag it stopcyberbullying so we can aggregate it.

Have an offline conversation with someone about it. Talk with your families, your colleagues, your students, your neighbors - we could all benefit from a frank discussion about online harassment.

Participate in the Stop Cyberbullying social network Since there's no way we can do justice to the issue in one day, we've set up this online community where people can share resources and talk. There's a growing number of videos and other resources related to cyberbullying, along with a feed of everything that's been tagged stopcyberbullying.

Learn more about the issue. You can learn more by participating in the social network, or you can visit resources like www.cyberbullying.org, www.stopcyberbullying.org, www.ncsriu.org and bullying.org, just to name a few.

Follow the feed. As more people contribute their own content and tag it, the number of resources will grow. You can subscribe to the rss feed or follow it on Twitter.

So please join me and countless other members of the online community as we join together and find ways to combat online harassment in all of its forms. -andy

Tags: cyberbullying | online safety | stopcyberbullying

Posted by acarvin at 10:57 AM

March 29, 2007

Using Twitter to Fight Cyberbullies

Those of you who have been following my blog for the last month know that I've been experimenting a lot with the group messaging service Twitter. It's been a great way to keep in touch with colleagues, though it borders on the addictive. Lots of folks have been playing around with ways to enhance the value of Twitter, coming up with various tools that interface with it. I've started using one of these tools, TwitterFeed, to create a Twitter account that sends out messages for news and resources related to Stop Cyberbullying Day, which begins in less than two hours. (Actually, if you're in Europe or further east, it already is Stop Cyberbullying Day, so I might as well start contributing now, right?)

TwitterFeed is a fairly simple idea - it lets you take any RSS feed and send its contents out over a Twitter account. So let's say you have an RSS feed for your blog. If you wanted to, you could send out bits of each blog post to your Twitter friends, who in turn would receive it via text messaging, instant messaging or over the Web, depending on their preference. So I decided to set up a Stop Cyberbullying Twitter account for the express purpose of sending out all the content bloggers and other Internet users are tagging as related to activities surrounding the campaign. First, I took a bunch of RSS feeds from sites like Technorati, del.icio.us, Google News and YouTube, all tailored to include content about cyberbullying. I then mixed them together into a single feed using the tool FeedDigest, then took that feed and supplied it to TwitterFeed.

In theory, TwitterFeed will post all new content from those feeds about once an hour, but it doesn't seem to be working that way so far, possibly because FeedDigest takes a while to update as well. Still, the process is beginning to work, with a number of cyberbullying resources going out through the Twitter account I created. If I could only get FeedDigest and TwitterFeed to update more than once an hour each, this could be an interesting way for anyone to get specially tailored information collected through RSS feeds out to a large audience, whether they prefer to receive the information via the Web, text messaging or instant messaging. Pretty cool, huh? -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:21 PM

On Air with the BBC Today

Looks like I'm going to be on the BBC this afternoon as part of their World Have Your Say program, talking about cyberbullying. I believe Beth Kanter will be on air as well. It'll air live at 1800 GMT - that's 1pm ET, 10am Pacific here in the US. I think I'll be popping into the conversation somewhere around 40 minutes into the show. Wish me luck! -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:43 AM

March 28, 2007

Beware of Baking This Passover, Warns Israeli Pro-Pot Party

The week-long Jewish holiday of Passover begins this coming Monday evening, and it's likely that Israeli pot smokers are going to be grumpier than usual. That's because Israel's Green Leaf political party, which advocates the legalization of marijuana, has put out a statement warning their fellow tokers that lighting up is un-kosher during Passover.

Thinking back to every Passover Seder I've attended, I don't recall any of the Four Questions addressing why on that night we abstain from smoking pot, while on other nights we can embrace our inner Bob Marley. (Maybe I was too toasted from all of those wine blessings.) That's because the Passover ban on marijuana is a recent development. Back in the day - way back - Jews avoided only leavened bread products, to help remember the hastiness of the Exodus out of Egypt. (You can't wait for bread to leaven if you're trying to get the hell out of Dodge, er, Egypt, with Pharaoh's posse on your tail.) With the passage of time, European rabbis interpreted the Passover kosher rules so that they extended to other foods, including beans and corn. And at some point, hemp seeds also got lumped into the list of All Things Not Cool for Passover. Why, I'm not sure, but that's what happened. So if you can't eat hemp seeds during the holiday, you certainly can't smoke them, apparently.

Anyway, that's the position the Green Leaf party is taking, despite the urges of every fiber of their being. "You shouldn't smoke marijuana on the holiday, and if you have it in your house you should get rid of it," explained party spokeswoman Michelle Levine.

Interestingly, though, there is a loophole - but if your ancestors came from a European shtetl, you're out of luck. Because the broader interpretation of Passover kosher rules was made by European rabbis, the rules only extend to Jews who practice European, or Ashkenazic, Jewish traditions. Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, on the other hand, aren't subject to those rules, because they hail from the Mediterranean basin, where rabbis must have had other pressing concerns on their minds. So while Jews of Ashkenazic descent will be sitting on their hands, watching the calendar tick forward eight days, the Jewish communities of Morocco, Tunisia and elsewhere will be able to enjoy a wake 'n bake of matzah brei and mary-jane. As the poet once said, "They do not eat the bread / they only smoke / sensimilla."

Hat tip: Ha'aretz -andy

Tags: drugs | Israel | kosher | Passover | religion

Posted by acarvin at 1:33 PM

March 27, 2007

Lithuanian Parliament: Bloggers Aren't Journalists

The Lithuanian parliament has denied a Lithuanian blogger's request for accreditation. The reason? Bloggers aren't journalists, as far as they're concerned. The blogger, Liutauras Ulevicius, had applied for accreditation so he could cover the parliament more effectively. They rejected his request. "The Media Law describes a journalist as a person who collects, disseminates and provides information to the media, based on a contract with the media, or who is a member of a journalists' union," stated the parliamentary committee handling his request. Ulevicius vows to appeal.

More about the story on Yahoo News. -adny

Posted by acarvin at 4:31 PM

Participate in Stop Cyberbullying Day this Friday

In response to what's happened this week to Kathy Sierra, and the undoubted thousands of Internet users who have been subjected to online threats and cyberbullying, I've decided to declare this Friday Stop Cyberbullying Day. It's the lead story on my PBS blog. Here's the idea:

I think we should all set aside some time that day to address cyberbullying. Write a blog post pointing to online resources about cyberbullying. Post a podcast about personal experiences. Create your own public service announcement about the dangers of cyberbullying and post it on YouTube. Then tag it with the phrase stopcyberbullying. If you're uploading it somewhere that lets you type in your own tags, be sure to include it. If you're blogging and don't have tagging built into your blog, you can embed it with the HTML code shown here so it will be picked up by search tools like Technorati. The more people we can get blogging about it, the better, because that will catch the attention of search tools and social media websites, spreading awareness further. It will also allow us to aggregate everyone's posts so we can see who's participating.
And if you don't have a blog or don't want to post anything online, you can still get involved. You can use some of the educational resources on sites like cyberbully.org or Nancy Willard's website in your classroom that day, or with your kids at home. You could hunt down other resources and share them at your school, your church, your community group. You could even write a letter to the editor or to your political representatives and tell them what you think.

Of course, one day isn't enough to change everything. And there are other days of the year where other people are fighting to raise awareness, like Safe Internet Day. But it's a start. And perhaps we can use some of our energies that day to discuss what we can do to make online safety a topic that we deal with on a regular basis. So I've created an online social network called Stop Cyberbullying using a free tool called Ning. Anyone who joins can post resources and share ideas, including text and video. I'll also use the site to aggregate a stream of what people are doing in support of Stop Cyberbullying Day, assuming people accept my challenge to take action on Friday.

So without further ado, I declare this Friday Stop Bullying Day. If we don't take a stand, who will? -andy

Tag: stopcyberbullying

I hope you join me that day and onwards to stand up against cyberbullying. -andy

Tags: cyberbullying | Kathy Sierra | online safety | stopcyberbullying

Posted by acarvin at 10:51 AM

March 26, 2007

Disgusted

I'm really angry right now. Angry that blogger Kathy Sierra has been forced to cancel speaking engagements and exile herself at home because she's started receiving death threats on her blog and others. Please read her post, because she explains the situation better than I can.

Bloggers have tolerated meanness in the community for far too long. What starts as tasteless name-calling and mocking all too easily escalates into vicious ad hominem attacks, humiliations and now threats against someone's well-being. It isn't the first time this has happened on a blog, and it's probably not the last, but it's first time I've seen it happen to someone I respect and cause them them almost paralytic fear.

What's the cause of this behavior? Who knows what hatred lurks in the hearts of the people behind the attacks against Kathy. More generally, though, the signs are all around us. From bad behavior by shock jocks to the endless threads of insults you can find every day on Digg, Fark and Slashdot, it seems our culture embraces those who engage in a pissing contest of increasingly caustic rhetoric. Do we have no disdain for such behavior? Do we not feel the need to stand up and shame people for acting this way? This behavior can't be tolerated, and God knows it shouldn't ever be rewarded.

Thankfully, many bloggers are standing up in support of Kathy. Robert Scoble is even taking the week off from blogging in solidarity with Kathy. I think he might be on to something.

Stay strong, Kathy. Don't let the bastards win. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:48 PM

March 25, 2007

A Twitter Haiku

Seven score keystrokes
Life summarized for my friends
Instant messaging

Tags: Haiku | poetry | Twitter

Posted by acarvin at 3:39 PM

March 24, 2007

Springtime is Gadget Time!

Spring is in the air, so I thought I'd celebrate by throwing away lots of money and getting some new toys. Okay, "throwing away" might be a bit misleading, because my mobile phone just died and my digital camera is moribund at best, so it was a matter of time before I had to get replacements anyway.

First, there's my new mobile phone - a Treo 700p. My old Treo 600 gave up the ghost at SXSW a couple of weeks ago, so I needed some kind of replacement. It just came in the mail yesterday. It's working fine as a phone and Web device, but it crashes when I try to use their email client. Can't wait to spend an hour or two on the phone with Palm later this weekend.

Then, there's my new video camera. I decided to take the plunge and buy the brand-new Sanyo Xacti HD2. A lot of my vlogging buddies have sworn by its predecessor, the HD1, which shoots in high-definition and records to digital SD card in MPEG-4 format. Unfortunately, I got scared away by several online reviews that lamented the HD1's ability to shoot video without ample light. From everything I've heard about the new HD2, they've solved this problem. And if they're wrong, well, that's why 30-day warranties exist.

Anyway, I'm really psyched to have some new gadgets to keep me busy for a while. The HD2 should come in really handy for our new Dirty Diaper Diaries videos, which could use some help in the production values department. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:21 PM

March 20, 2007

Will Nokia Phone Delay Assist Network Neutrality Supporters?

I was taking in my morning dose of Engadget Mobile perusing the lastest mobile phone news when I saw this story about the Nokia N75, which is expected to be made available by AT&T/Cingular. Accordng to Engadget, the launch has been delayed because AT&T has asked Nokia to release a "crippled" version of the phone that won't let the user access music streams of its competitors:

Word on the street now has the hotly-anticipated Nokia N75 -- the first phone out of Espoo with UMTS 850 and 1900 in tow, not to mention the first new S60 device officially launched on an American network in quite some time -- should finally hit streets in April. The bad news? The delays appear to have been caused at least in part by AT&T's request to remove the ability to stream any music not being hawked by the carrier itself or one of its partners -- Yahoo! and Napster, that is. Worse yet, there will allegedly be no ability to add apps to do so (at least for a few days after launch, at which point we suppose it'll be unceremoneously cracked for all to enjoy). For what it's worth, some folks in Nokia are apparently not terribly pleased with Cingular's demands; may we recommend a fully unlocked version be waiting for us in Nokia's flagship stores around the same time as the carrier-subsidized launch?

Assuming this is indeed the case, I wonder if it'll be used by supporters of network neutrality - who maintain that telecom infrastructure should be neutral and not prevent people from using the online services of their choice - to back up their arguments here in the Beltway. Advocates of network neutrality worry that telecommunications companies would prevent consumers from accessing competitive online services or websites critical of them if they were allowed to ignore it. Thoughts, anyone? -andy

Tags: AT&T | Engadget | network neutrality | Nokia | telecommunications policy

Posted by acarvin at 9:25 AM

March 18, 2007

Grandma's Stories: Dairy Farmers & Furriers

Watch the video

In the latest installment of my conversations with my 91-year-old grandmother, she talks about her parents dairy farm in Chelsea, Massachusetts, other family businesses and their move to Worcester in the early 1950s.

Tags: family history | Grandma | massachusetts | stories

Posted by acarvin at 6:57 PM

March 17, 2007

Introducing Dirty Diaper Diaries

Some of you may have heard that my wife Susanne and I have been putting together a new video blog about all the things we're learning as first-time parents. We're now ready to show off some of the pilot videos. The vlog is called Dirty Diaper Diaries, and Susanne has produced three videos so far. The production values still need improvement, and we're planning to buy some new equipment to help out on that front, particularly regarding the audio. So for now, we're interested in getting feedback on the overall premise and the video topics.

Here's a sample video, which focuses on everything you need to know about diaper bags:

Click To Play

We're hoping that other first-time parents will want to chime in and share their own stories, while more veteran parents can help share words of wisdom as well. I'm planning to implement a video commenting feature so people can reply to the videos with videos of their own. Hopefully I'll have something up and running soon.

Anyway, please check out Dirty Diaper Diaries and let us know what you think! -andy

Posted by acarvin at 5:49 PM

March 15, 2007

How Winnie Became a Greeting Card

Sleepy Tabby 2 (Full Size), originally uploaded by andycarvin.

One of my cats is now famous - sort of. Winston, our orange tabby, is now a greeting card.

I just received 100 complimentary copies of the greeting card, which was published by Avanti Press. Apparently some people have even seen it at places like UPS Stores, but I hadn't, so this was the first chance for me to see Winnie on glossy, thick paper stock.

Avanti originally approached me last summer and asked to license the photo, which I thought was great. The boilerplate language said I would be giving them exclusive rights to use the pic worldwide for a certain period of time. But I'd already published the pic on Flickr using a noncommercial-attribute-sharealike Creative Commons license, and I didn't want to revoke those rights for all of those people who had taken advantage of it.

My contact at Avanti wasn't familiar with Creative Commons, so I sent her some info along with links to the legal deed. A month or so later, she sent back a new contract that was revised to acknowledge the photo was licensed under Creative Commons, and that I was specifically allowing them to use the photo for commercial purposes on greeting cards. They're happy, I'm happy, Creative Commons prevails, and Winnie gets to be on a greeting card. Life is good sometimes. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:05 PM

March 14, 2007

Doodling Over Drinks With Hugh Macleod

Watch the video

So Chuck Olsen and I had just finished shooting our interview with Dan Rather and we were having a drink at the Omni Hotel in Austin, uploading the footage to his laptop. Then a scruffy guy with an odd American-Scottish accent came over to us and send he was a blogger attending the "S-X-S-W" conference. We weren't sure what to make of him but he was nice enough. Then just as he was getting ready to leave, Chuck noticed he was wearing Stormhoek Winery shirt drawn by Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void fame.

"Are you a fan of Gaping Void?" Chuck asked.

"I am Gaping Void," the scruffy Scotsman replied. "I'm Hugh Macleod."

I'm so glad Chuck ask him that; otherwise we wouldn't have had the pleasure of his company over drinks. Hugh is best known in the online world for drawing cartoons on business cards, so Chuck and I had the honor of watching him in action, drawing a blank card for Chuck and doodling on one of my NPR business cards, all the while talking about his craft.

I shot around 12 minutes of video of him doodling and talking, and for Gaping Void fans, it would have been a crime to edit it down to the highlights. So here's the full video. Enjoy. -andy

Tags: business cards | cartoons | Gaping Void | Hugh Macleod | sxsw

Posted by acarvin at 8:42 PM

March 13, 2007

Transcript of my Dan Rather Interview

Here's the full transcript of my interview with Dan Rather in Austin, Texas yesterday. It's just over 3,600 words long. -andy

Andy Carvin: Hi everyone, Andy Carvin here. Right now I'm with former CBS anchor and veteran journalist Dan Rather. Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us today.

Dan Rather: Delighted to be here, Andy.

Carvin: I wonder if we could start talking a bit about what you were saying at your keynote earlier today at South By Southwest when you referred to media concentration, media cross-ownership, and the impact it has on both journalism and civic discourse. Could you expand upon that a bit more in terms of how you see media concentration affecting specifically local news, as well as national news?

Rather: Well, the biggest thing, the most important point I was trying to make today is that we need to think about what I describe as the corporatization of news. I'm not even sure if corporatization is a word, but larger and larger corporations - fewer and fewer in number - have taken control of more and more of the major disseminators of news in the country. To the extent now that you could make the case - and I would make the case - that four, five, no more than six really large corporations control the principal mass media outlets in the country. This is not in itself a bad thing, and I don't argue that the people who run these large corporations are any less patriotic than I am or less public spirited.

However, what is true is that the corporatizing of the news is one of the factors in making our news coverage less independent, less probing in questioning. I've said it has less guts. We need an American journalism spine transplant. I do no except myself from these criticisms. And part of the reason we need those things is because of what I call the corporatizing of the news. And here's the way it works. A larger and larger corporate entity - frequently a mega-corporation on a global scale - news is only a small part of their business. In some cases, they stay in the news business only insofar because they think it can help them with their legislative and regulatory needs in Washington. Or for that matter, in state capitals, when they need it. And I think the public, those who haven't thought about it, need to think about the effects on our government, on our system of government, on the democratic process.

If on the one hand you have a head of the corporation very far removed from news, who hasn't heard a journalist say, "Great journalism begins with owners and publishers who have guts, and who are public service-minded." They probably never heard it, or if they did here it, paid attention to it. That the needs of the corporation to produce ever-increasing stockholder value puts the top of the corporation sometimes in direct opposites - makes them direct opposites - over journalism that will dig, investigate and expose, particularly in Washington or a state capital.

So here's how it would work. Corporation X, which has all kinds of worldwide, great interests, owns a news entity, tells a lobbyist, "Listen, we need this from the FCC." Or "We need this piece of legislation passed." Or "We need this piece of legislation stopped. We need more stations, we need more station coverage...." Whatever it is. And if the person representing it in Washington says, "You know what? Our news operation is investigating the very people I'm trying to convince to give you what you want."

This is a conflict of interest. Now it doesn't happen every day, it doesn't happen in every instance, but it's where some sunshine needs to shine in. And I hope the public understands that, because if they do, they'll hold these mega-corporations more to account. I do think it's time to look and see if any of these practices are monopolistic practices. But whether they are or aren't, the relationship between the top of the corporate body, which needs regulatory and/or legislative help of all kinds in Washington - probably having nothing to do with their news operation - with billboards, with aircraft engines, with whatever. When someone says we don't get much gutsy journalism any more, we don't get many tough questions any more, we don't have the kind of investigative reporting we used to have, well one of the reasons is because what I call this corporatizing of the news.

Carvin: Well, if this is the system that has evolved, and the fact that you have corporate journalism on the one hand and government on the other, with this "cozy" relationship as you've described it -

Rather: And that's the generous way of putting it....

Carvin: The generous thing, perhaps.... How do you change the system, if the entities that are in a position to change it are the ones who benefit from the relationship they've created for themselves?

Rather: Well, the answer is not easily, but we can do it - this is America. And, you know, here, We the People do rule. How can we change it? One, let the sun shine in. People need to know how it works - how it really works - as opposed to how somebody would like to convince them that it works. I believe in, you know, sunshine cures mildew in damp basements. But let the sunshine in. Let's call some attention to this.

Number two: hold people accountable. The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to represent We the People of the United States, and is supposed to husband, supposed to represent our interest with the people's airwaves, which I think rightly so. Corporate entities are allowed to make money, to create profits and to create jobs and all that. But, the regulatory agencies, whether it be the FCC - you name one - they're supposed to represent We the People. Now the question - and to ask the question is not to suggest that I know the answer - do these regulatory agencies still represent We the People? Or are they handmaidens of the very corporations, particularly large corporations, in which they're supposed to be the people's representative to. So, make people aware of it, put the sunshine in, hold them accountable.

More often than not now, the regulatory agencies, they will be - soon after elections - they will be stocked with highly partisan, political operatives. Who are there, frankly in some cases, to squeeze money out of corporations. Or in other cases, represent the political well-being of their party or the person who's just been elected. That's not the way it's supposed to work, and we all know it.

Now, this kind of thinking is not original or profound. It's essential to the American system. Your question was how to change it? Sunshine in, hold people accountable, remind people that they work for us. They are representatives of We the People of the United States, and I don't think it'll take all that much to affect some change. It'll be difficult; in some cases it'll be controversial because powerful interests don't want this to happen. Very powerful, well-financed interests say, "You know, don't pay any attention to the Dan Rathers of the world - they're journalists. They're nice people, and yes, sometimes they do good work. But you know what - they don't understand business." And I'm the first to say that my craft is journalism, not business. But I do understand this business. And in this case I'm doing my best to speak truth to power.

Carvin: I'd like to shift gears a little bit and talk about the blogosphere. When you spoke today you expressed concerns about anonymous blogging, in particular when they use anonymous blogging to hide themselves and use it a way of attacking people in "scurrilous" ways, using the term that you mentioned. How do you balance that problem with the use of anonymity internationally in the blogosphere? For example, bloggers in China, Zimbabwe, Tunisia who use anonymity as a way to speak truth to power while protecting their own rights?

Rather: Or whistleblowers in our own country?

Carvin: Absolutely.

Rather: Yeah. Well the answer to how do we do it is "not easily." And I don't have all the answers. I may not have any of the answers. And to ask the question is not to suggest that I have some solution. And this was said in the context of, I think, do blogs overall in the main add to consumer value, news consumer value. Do all of them? No. Do I like all of them? No. But, you know, we have the First Amendment. Congress shall pass no law restricting speech and information.

Internationally, when it comes to someone in China who must have the anonymity. Otherwise they die or go into prison in some societies. I think we can all agree that that's a case in which anonymity is justified, and we understand that it's justified. And in the case of whistleblowers in this country - that is, someone who's deep in the bowels of Agency X and knows the outrages that are happening. That's why I prefer that they call a reporter and if they're looking for one, Dan Rather is available. But to use the Internet for that - there are people who use it for scurrilous purposes, either just to smear and ruin the reputation of a neighbor they don't like or to undercut someone in business - a business competitor, and say, the way to get at him is to spread something scurrilous about him.

My hope is over time, that the marketplace will deal with this. But short- and medium-range, it's a problem, and what I tried to do today is say, "This bothers me." I don't know what to do about it. It may be that there is no solution to it, because you do want to protect those who need anonymity to speak truth to power, to expose corruption. You don't want to give it to those who user it for nefarious, scurrilous purposes. But like a lot of things in which freedom is involved, that it comes at a price and it's sometimes messy. I wish I had the answer to it.

I think, in terms of this country, domestically, that for those who use it for what I call for scurrilous, nefarious purposes - which can include partisan political purposes, saying something terrible about a candidate - I think it's a little easier if someone is really dedicated, you can find it out. It just takes a lot. But if you're the neighbor who's getting cut up, it's harder.

I'm afraid I'm not very good on this subject because I honestly don't have an answer. What I was trying to do is just lay out, "Here's a problem." I did say what I thought were some of the advantages, but here's a problem. And it's a problem that needs to be dealt with. It may be that there is no solution, and we just have to go. Because the Internet - and I only said half-jokingly - we've passed the Elvis Presley stage [and we're] at the Beatles stage. Which is to say, it's beginning to mature. But it hasn't reached its full maturity. I don't expect to see it do that for a very long time.

Carvin: Do you worry that the public lacks the media literacy skills to tell the difference between a blogger who has integrity and sincerity, versus a blogger who is trying to use a blog purely for ulterior motives?

Rather: Well, some do; some don't. But, you know, I trust the audience. My experience, in first print, then radio, then television, and now, early on in the world of high-def television and the Internet, overall in the main you can trust the audience. The public at large - particularly in our country, with its freedoms - the public at large has a pretty good bullshit indicator. They may not be watching the meter all the time; they may misinterpret it some of the time. But by and large, they'll separate bullshine from brass tacks. And I think that's the way it is with blogs. Maybe not immediately - but we've gone through this before. We've gone through it on radio - Father Coughlin back in the 1930s. Most people now don't even know who he was. But he was a demagogue at the time. And some people were very worried, saying, "You gotta silence him, because people are not smart enough to catch up with who and what this guy is."

We've had periods, the McCarthy period in the 50s, a lot people were worried about it for the same reason. So while this danger exists in what some like to call the blogosphere, while on any given day or hour I might say, "Gosh, I wonder if people recognize this as propaganda." It is. Then I just come back to, in this country, I trust the public.

But I said to someone earlier today, and you might find this too off the mark, but I hope not - that I hope people aren't too quick to dismiss the potential for outright propaganda on the Internet, including the blogosphere. That new technologies, new ways of conveying images and information are particularly vulnerable to highly concentrated efforts to use it for propagandistic purposes. When talking film first came in, talking movies if you will, it corresponded roughly with the rise of what we call Nazism in Hitler's Germany. And an early master of the talking films - really high-quality films - was named Leni Riefenstahl. Leni Riefenstahl turned out a masterpiece of propaganda called Triumph of the Will. I wish every school child in America could see it, be in a course about it. Because here's the point: I don't think it's far off what we were talking about before. Here was a new technology developing - film, film with sound on it, high-quality film - a master took it and put it to service of a dictator and a megalomaniac. And as they say, the rest is history.

The Triumph of the Will, perhaps more than any single other thing led to Hilter's being able to manipulate, and get behind him, the German people. And we paid a terrible price for that. Now I'm not suggesting that the current blogosphere or the Internet will lead to that, but it's just a little yellow warning flag of "Let's not be too blasé about it." Because that potential exists; it has with every new technology. When television first came in, some politicians and some partisan political operatives said, "You know what? We can manipulate this medium and we can use it to our own partisan political advantage. And they did so. But again, in this country, I believe so strongly we have the corrective devices but let us hope so. But I have somewhere back in my head Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, Hitler, new technology.... Let's be on the lookout; let's be on the alert.

Carvin: So if that's the case, is appropriate for us, for example, to think more seriously about implementing some form of media literacy curriculum in our schools, so students can actually - and adults as well - can actually view these pieces of media and review them critically?

Rather: I'd be very much in favor of it. But I don't want to mislead anybody and be hypocritical - that I believe the most important things are the three Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic. But somewhere along the line, I think media literacy is an important part of teaching civics. I don't know whether anyone teaches civics under that name any more, but it was required when I was in school. In seventh grade you took physics - I mean civics. Eighth grade you might take physics. But I'd be all in favor of doing that. But educators, I think, would argue, "You know, I think it's hard enough to get the three Rs taught, basic science and technology courses." But the key to not falling victim to something like Leni Riefenstahl and Hitler's Triumph of the Will is to have media literacy. I'm happy to say that there are some courses on the Internet you can take in media literacy. So if you can't get it anywhere else, just get up on your computer and take a look under media literacy, and you'll find a course.

Carvin: Do you ever see yourself possibly creating your own blog?

Rather: Yes, I've thought about it. I don't have any present plans right now to do that. I have about as much work as I can say grace over, doing this one-hour news program every week for HDNet. I'm a little inclined to think that for myself, I don't know if I want to blog as such. Would I consider it? Yes. Have I considered it? Yes. Do I do it now? No. I'd be more interested if there were an opportunity to help mold a new site that includes other people's blogs, and maybe one of my own. But, you know, I've spent nearly all of my life aspiring to be an honest broker of information. And I'm still trying to be a good, never mind great, journalist, and I hope some day to achieve that.

I don't know whether I'd be good at blogging. I recognize that maybe some people hoot at this, but I try to keep my own opinion and my own biases out of my own reporting. Have I done it perfectly? No - nobody does it perfectly. But that's what I've been trying to do, and that's what I'm still trying to do. So I don't know whether it lends itself to blogging or not. But I have thought about it from time to time, and probably will consider it again. Do you blog?

Carvin: Yes, I do. I blog personally, I blog professionally, and somehow manage to balance them. Most of the time.

Rather: Well, it's a lot of work. That is to say, that's the other thing I recognize: a blog takes work. I think some people think, well, a blog is just, you know, sit down at the machine and rap off a few words, a few sentences - and that's a blog. Well, it's a blog of a sort, but most of the time it's not a blog worth doing. I admire most those bloggers - and this will come as a surprise to nobody - who spend time on the telephone, talking to people, doing what reporters do, and yes, getting out and attending events, knocking on doors, wearing out shoe leather, and do original reporting. Those are my favorites. They're not limited to that, and I read them, but those are the ones I like the best.

Carvin: I'm not sure if you've been following the case, but there's a young man, a video blogger who's spent the last 200 days in prison. His name is Josh Wolf, and federal prosecutors have held him in contempt of court because he's refused to turn over footage of video that he shot at a protest about a year or so ago, perhaps a year and a half now. And one of the arguments that prosecutors have made is that he doesn't qualify as a true journalist because he's not accredited, he doesn't work for a mainstream media outlet, and so therefore, he can't make that argument.

Meanwhile, in France this past week, they've enacted a law that would essentially make it illegal for citizen journalists, if you will, to shoot footage or broadcast footage that depicts violence. Their concern is that gangs are going around and purposely shooting video of beating people up, just for kicks. But the law has been passed in such a way that would allow citizen journalists to fall under that. Do you worry, or have you observed, that there is a trend now that's brewing in which governments are beginning to fear citizen journalists, not only in countries that have a tradition of repression, but in the West as well?

Rather: Yes. One, I know about the case, I think it's in California. I do know something about that case, and yes I knew the French either passed the law or were on the verge of passing the law. This is a big subject that requires a lot of thought. I don't know enough about the law, and now we're talking about the law in this country to know whether has ruled, is settled, on what the definition of a journalist is. And I do understand, now jumping to the French case, the legitimate concern about people trying to control the images in order to achieve their nefarious gains or goals.

Look, it's very complicated; I'm not an expert on it. My instinct - my immediate instinct is to be anti-control. Now clearly, and especially in democratic societies such as our own, the old "you can't shout 'fire' in a crowded theatre" argument carries a lot of weight with me. But I always start from the perspective of a broad, rather than a narrow, definition of who is a journalist, and what is a journalistic enterprise. And I generally start with the premise of less control, not more. But having said that, in each of these cases, I do think they're harbingers of things to come, that we'll face these same issues both in our own country and abroad, increasingly as we get deeper and deeper into the Internet. Wish I had an answer for you, but on that one, I don't.

Carvin: Well, I'd just wanted to thank you for taking the time to talk with us today; it's been a real pleasure.

Rather: Well, it's been my pleasure. Good questions - wish I had better answers.

Carvin: Thanks again. This is Andy Carvin, talking with Dan Rather.

Rather: Thank you.

Posted by acarvin at 10:13 PM

Highlights From My Dan Rather Interview

Watch the video

Here are some of the highlights of my interview with Dan Rather, which ran on Rocketboom today. We talk about media concentration's impact on journalism, the importance of media literacy when it comes to reading blogs, and his thoughts about starting his own blog.

Posted by acarvin at 11:05 AM

Podcast of My Interview with Dan Rather

The video is still being edited, but I've got a quick and dirty podcast of my 25-minute interview with Dan Rather. The audio quality leaves much to be desired, as it was compressed multiple times while transferring formats. Once I get the raw footage from Chuck Olsen I hope to make a better quality recording, but for those of you eager to hear what we talked about, this version is better than nothing, I guess. (UPDATE: I've created a much higher quality recording of the interview and posted it, so when you click on the link now you'll get the better version.)

Before the interview, I put together around a dozen questions, including a mix of my own and some from suggestions posted to the blog. In the end, we got around to tackling only half of them, due to his long responses and our time being cut short by a few minutes. Nonetheless, I feel like we covered some interesting ground, including these questions:

You alluded earlier to the effects of media concentration and cross-ownership on journalism and civic discourse. Could you say a bit more about the effects of media concentration at both the local and national level?
If the relationship between media, corporations and politicians has gotten too cozy as you have suggested, how can the system change for the benefit of the public interest, given the fact that it's not in their interest to change the system?

In your talk today you lamented what you described "the ability to be anonymous and say scurrilous things" on blogs. How do you balance this with the role played by anonymous bloggers in places like China and Zimbabwe, who feel forced to blog anonymously to speak truth to power? Are there times when anonymity is the only solution?

Can you picture yourself ever publishing your own blog?

Video blogger Josh Wolf has been spent just over 200 days in jail for contempt of court for refusing to turn over footage he shot during a protest, with prosecutors arguing that his is not a "real" journalist. In France, they've just introduced a new law that would criminalize citizens from recording or broadcasting acts of violence if they're not accredited journalists. Do you see a growing clash between governments and citizen journalists, and if so, why now?

Do you worry that the public lacks the media literacy skills to recognize when bloggers have ulterior motives and when they don't? Has the rise of the blogosphere made media literacy even more important? (Built upon a question suggested by Shava Nerad)

You also talked today of one of the roles of a journalist is to hold politicians accountable. Do they have a similar role in holding their peers accountable, given the coziness you alluded to between beltway journalists and politicians?

~~Again, sorry about the crappy audio. What can I say; I'm a video guy. But I'll try to get a better version of the audio online later~~. Enjoy the new version of the podcast. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:54 AM

March 12, 2007

Dan Rather, Yahoo Party, Dinner

Good news - I managed to interview Dan Rather this evening without making too much of an idiot of myself. We spent about 30 minutes talking about a variety of issues, including the impact of media concentration on democracy and the role of the FCC in serving the public interest; the pros and cons of anonymous blogging; the need for media literacy education in schools; and western governments challenging the rights of citizen journalists, namely Josh Wolf and the so-called Sarkozy Law in France. I even managed to get him to use some classic Dan Rather Texas aphorisms - ka-ching! We're planning to run the highlights of the interview on Rocketboom, while a podcast and all the video will eventually be on my blog once I can get it from Chuck Olsen, who earned serious karma points for being my wingman during the interview.

After a really bizarre experience at the Omni Hotel Bar with Chuck - it deserves a separate blog post, so bear with me - I ended up at the Yahoo Party, where a pretty cool band rocked the first floor of the bar while Ze Frank held court along with tons of heavy drinkers on the rooftop, grabbing a variety of Yahoo/Flickr/Upcoming.org schwag. I met up with Mike Hudack of blip.tv, Susan from kitykity.com and a few folks from AOL for dinner at McCormick & Schmicks. I am so glad to take a break from tex-mex food. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:39 PM

Dan Rather Talks Media Concentration, Corporate Influence and Maintaining Journalistic Independence

Dan Rather is giving the keynote at SXSW right now and he's offering blunt words on media concentration, corporate influence on news and the coziness that exists between Beltway journalists and politicians, among other topics. Here are my notes. I'd surmise it's about 80% verbatim, when I was able to keep up with him. He talks surprisingly fast for an old Texan. :-) -andy

Q: What was it like when Nixon dismissed you and you refused.

Let me pause and say... I'm here today in the spirit that we have so many problems in the world. We're gonna talk somewhat about technology and the internet, mainstream media... But it's important to know that in the forefront of my mind is that the problems are the problems. The way we put them forward is secondary. A many great men and women are in great danger in faraway places....

I was a CBS news correspondent for 10 years at the whitehouse. I was pretty proud to walk through the gates of the whitehouse. I made a lot of mistakes.... But I saw myself as being an honest broken of information, and be in a wee small way, to be a surrogate for people who were working that day... I never saw myself as challenging Nixon... I just wanted to find out what was really going on... rather than what the president and the people around him wanted us to believe was going on.... What he was saying were the facts were not just being disproven...

What I tried to do, in my own small way , was pose small questions that say, Mr President, you're saying one thing, and the evidence is building in another direction. What say you? He would try to throw you off balance... But it may have appeared I was challenging him, but it was on the basis of the facts. You never met anyone who has more respect for the office of the presidency than I do... But the prez of the US was a member of a widespread criminal conspiracy.... Those were the facts. When someone says Watergate, that's what we mean - a widespread conspiracy that he wasn't just a part of, but the leader of.

Do you think the climate of modern journalism is that the opp exists to do what you did?

It's important for you to know that I don't exclude myself. In the last five or six years, in some important ways, American journalism has lost its guts.... There are notable exceptions, but in many cases, journalists have adopted to go along to get along... The whole game of access journalism has degenerated into what I believe to be a perilous state.... Sometimes access is important.. The danger - and it's real and present - of being accused of being anti patriotic or not supporting the troops - these are very serious charges. But we brought this on ourselves, partly because.... for example, patriotic journalists will be on his or her feet, asking the tough questions, following up with tough questions. My role in the press is to be, sometimes, a check and balance in power.... Now that sometimes happens in American journalism still but it's getting rare.

Q: but beltway journalists seem to protect their positions, don't want to jeopardize it.

In many important ways, is what we need is a spine transplant. There's always been some of us in Washington, in the 1930s when I was a child - and it's not true that I was reporting when Sam Houston was killed... What's happening in recent years is that the nexus between powerful journalists and people in corporate power has become far too close. It was transparent in the Libby trial. I don't accept myself within this criticism. But it happens when you get too cozy with your sources, you take care of me and I'll take care of you. In Washington.... You want a good, high powerful source to talk to you and appear on broadcast, but negotiating you get closer and closer to the source. You can get so close that you become part of the problem. Now let's have it clearly understood that powerful people use journalists - and they'll use them to the full extent possible until the journalists say, woah, that's too far. But journalists use sources... A great deal of time the reporters uses the source and vice versa. But the second the source believes the reporter can be pulled in and be apart of the team, that's too far. And when the reporter feels they're part of the establishment and need to play team, that's too far as well. Journalists have to rethink the whole business or relationship with sources. It's true to a certain extend that you're only as good as your sources. But it's impossible for them to totally seal you out. During Watergate, they were saying don't talk to rather, seal them out, we'll strangle them. But it didn't work. We'll start going to congress, the pentagon, go outside. And when you get some information, you call and say this is the 15th time I've called, I'm going on air tonight with info that's not flattering. If he wants to get his word in, call back before 5:45. It isn't true that you have to go along, otherwise you can't find information. I can just sit here on my butt, sip saspirilla and call my sources. If you begin to think that, then you're in trouble.

Q: is it important to ask the followup question?

I do think journalists need to go through a long list of questions - do we still believe that the best journalism is independent with a capital I, fiercely independent... ready to ask the tough questions and have the gumption... Do we still believe it's important enough that if the president... doesn't answer a question, do you set your own question aside and ask, Mr. President, you didn't answer that question... Do we still believe that barring a very few natl security secrets, that the documents of government belong to we the people and not the people in power... That no matter how in office, this person is not descended from a sun god. This person is part of we the people. And part of what the journalist does is check on him.

Now sometimes, what they say is going on is really what's going on... but do we still believe that's the role of the journalist, or now have we taken the position... that we're conveyor belts: take up what the president says and (relay it back). ... very often what will happen is if you play it safe... I know this is tough stuff, but if I broadcast this, I'm gonna pay a price for this... So maybe I should just water it down.... Do we still believe that our job is to be independent with a capital I, to be investigative. I've never liked the phrase investigative reporter because I consider it to be a redundancy. Investigative reporting, that takes a hard news, capital I attitude is an endangered species. One reason it's gone out of fashion- when was the last time you saw an hour long investigative documentary that's on the big six news and broadcast stations? It's gone badly out of fashion. One reason is that the old business, the corporatization of news. The companies that own the news outlets have gotten bigger and bigger, and news has gotten smaller and smaller. The gap between the leadership of the corp and the news has gotten so wide as to there being little to no corporation. And the interests of the corps - they make airplane engines, billboards, etc- it's the corps that have gotten large, and more distant. Feeling most of the time they'd rather do away with it entirely, but they have business of their own to do in Washington - regulations eased or stopped. Example: TV stations want to own more stations with more coverage. They need regulations with the FCC, etc. You get the drift here.... Many of these corporate folks are decent people, but there mindset is do what's good for the corp as a whole.

Investigative reporting makes someone unhappy. And if youre' the head of one of these giant corps, a lobbyist will come to you - let me tell you, you guys in the news department are taking the hide off the people I need to work with. It is something we all need to think about. I've invested my whole career in commercial journalistm, and I do believe competition leads to better journalism. The real competition has narrowed in the way that some very large corps, maybe no more than five of them, control more than 80 percent of mass communication. They're not seeking more competition - not less. What we've seen in my lifetime. We're seeing increasingly less competition... I raise the question, do we have as much competition in the major outlets that we need to be healthy. The press has a really important role to play as a watchdog. Not as an attack dog, which goes for the throat. A lapdog just crawls up in your lap to hear you say nice dog. But a good watch dog barks at everyone who's suspicious. Not that they'll always be right, but that they'll always be barking, and that's an important role.

Q: It creates a vacuum for someone raising a challenge. In the blogosphere, that's what's increased our audience for their news - to get people who aren't on the inside.

Let's don't have any misunderstanding.. The internet is a tremendous tool not for just news... but for information and education, what ed morrow used to describe as illumination. Its potential is unlimited. I think the Net is now about to be at a stage that if elvis were the early stages and the beatles moved it forward, we're now at the beatles stage. Does it have problems? Of course. Some people I meet think of the Net only as the blogosphere. But there's a whole lot more than that. The Net as a whole, unlimited potential. I have no idea where it's going, but my experience as reporter is whatever you think will be in 15 years, it'll probably be in three to five years instead. Keep in mind the Wright brothers flew, a reporter said, in 75-100 years, we may fly coast to coast.

It's easy to overgeneralize. Are there irresponsible blogs? Of course. Are there ones that are really good analysis and editorials? Yes. Valuable? Yes.. And some that do it themselves wearing out shoe leather, going to the libby trial, true. But the blogs are so large, there's a tendency to overgeneralize. Responsible journalism is of integrity, seeks to find facts and truths, speaking truth to power. I do think there's a power to anonymity but I don't have a solution to it. If you have a biz competitor you want to undercut, you can go online and use a blog to cut him up anonymously and there's no accountability. If you spend long enough, you might be able to figure it. There are problems to overcome... but given time, the marketplace will balance this. But sometimes that takes a very long time, and in the interim, reputations can get ruined. The ability to be anonymous and say scurillous things is a problem as a whole.

Q: how does new media speak truth to power?

One way is to stay on it. To hold people accountable. For example, if you think the right presidents aren't being asked at a news conference, then a constant putting out, these are the questions that aren't being asked - can have an effect. Holding a press corps isn't just news conferences. These are major truths that aren't being told. It's the old biz of so many raindrops eventually make a dent in the rock. We have to increase accountability, up and down the line. Bad things happen, but in the end no one is accountable, or just the people at the lowest end, not at the top. This is a problem with all govts, but it existed less with ours before, and we could have less again if we keep asking.

Another thing that can be done.... The form so often that I practice myself is that a prez says this. Instead of saying to yourself, what a blob of steaming horsehockey. You may say that to yourself.... When was the last time that major media said, the govt said this, but that's a lie. I don't remember that happening. When the facts clearly demonstrate it, I think that kind of direct language might be preferable to the kind of sideways dance that's often done.

Q: did journalism take a hit during the Libby trial?

This goes back to what we were saying before about the closeness of journalism to the system... Insofar that this toxic gas gets loose, we need to mark very well how dangerous that is for journalism and for the country as a whole. Not too long ago, it was clearly defined what off the record, or on background, or deep background was. You had in your own head what the guidelines were. It was incumbent of the source to say, on what basis are we talking? The presumption was that it's on the record unless you say so. Journalists wouldn't say as an opening gambit, I'm going to protect you. Depending on what it was, you might say, talk on background. That this is info I can use but won't ID you as the source. He might say that's not good enough. The next level is deep background - you can use this, but you have to use it on your own. Not source it. Then there was off the record. The definition was I'll tell you, but you're not free to use it under any circumstances. Try to develop it further, but otherwise it didn't happen. This conversation didn't happen. And they can send me to jail and I'll never tell. Not too long ago, those were the rough rules of the road. If those aren't the rules now, what are they? How can we get info from sources and still keep our own sense of integrity for ourselves and the audience. I prefer a system that everyone can understand, and that you start with the presumption that it's on the record.

What's preferable for a journalist... It's like the 10 commandments. You know them, believe they're the best we can live up to. Journalists need a capital I branded texas style on your forehead - independent. I don't take myself seriously but I take myself seriously... The role of a journalist... It isn't a technicality about how journalism works.... Do we still believe that the single most important thing in a constitutional public... is to have an informed citizenry? That the only way we decide to go to war... these are the important things. The way we help people is to give them as much info as we can, and we have to go to the ideal of the independent journalist than the cozy-up, don't ask kinda journalism that many of us have engaged in in the last few years.

Q: is this because of the loss of the fairness doctrine?

It's been exacerbated by it. It's because people haven't been privy to enough information to make a collective right decision.... I'm a journalist and I'm trying to ask the right questions, and come to venues like this to ask the right questions. There are people who believe that journalists are already too aggressive and independent. That's obviously the direct opposite of what I believe. Or people who say I've been in govt my entire life and we know better, compared to some working guy in Boston. But that's not the American Way. Give me the facts, the truth and let me make up my mind. I and my neighbors will make a decision about what to do. That's what journalism is supposed to do - is to fill that gap.

Posted by acarvin at 4:03 PM

Balancing User-Generated Content with Editorial Processes

Just wrapped up an interesting panel at sxsw on user-generated content. Here are my notes:

Mike Tatum GM of CNET Lifestyle, CNET Networks
Julie Davidson 30 Boxes
Dave Snider Co-Founder, Enemy Kite
Will Smith Editor in Chief, Maximum PC Magazine
Scott Rafer CEO, MyBlogLog/Yahoo
Evan Williams, Founder of Blogger.com, Odeo, Twitter

Scott Rafer:

USA Today's makeover was necessary. They've received a lot of guff for it, but that always happen when you do a redesign. The people who complained were actually using their new social media tools to do it. For a first pass, they've done pretty well, actually. USA Today needs to be a safe area to do social media or they're going to lose market share. The NY Times is doing a pretty good job, letting their columnists blog. Maybe not journalists yet, but the columnists. Look at their wine guy - amazing work. The boundary between user and news content is artificial - they let you comment on blogs but less on news stories.

Snider: They see news as factual; people aren't supposed to comment on news.

Smith: It's like people weren't seen as sophisticated enough to comment on news, and that's just wrong. But it's definitely a conversation. The people who contribute the most are our top two percent of users. They're important, but we can't totally cater to them either since other people buy our paper and don't participate. So it's a tough balance.

Tatum: The editors always think they know what the news trends are and tell the audience. USA Today is now letting the user start to influence that voice. Do we need to find a way that users have their own areas to broadcast what's relevant to them, and should this area be separate from traditional news content?

Smith: Print mags are always being influenced by what's being said by the public. We take that info and find the best way to present it, explain it to a mass market. The benefits of comments system is you get more input in the editorial process. I think your process is always better the more you involve the public in the process, since they can help you sort out what's going on.

Tatum: What about news sites that are done entirely by their users? Do they need editorial staff or is it irrelevant?

Snider: I build user sites because we need user input. My site has two guys running it basically. We rely on the public to submit data, almost like wikipedia. It's moderated by people who come to the site and earn status. It's good to have editorial in the sense of giving people direction on how to participate. In the future, news websites will be primarily user submitted, because it's so cost-efficient. Three people can moderate 20,000 others. We have sites with thousands of submissions with literally one person overseeing the process. We let stuff in that may not be perfect, but the community will fix it themselves. We don't have to be grammar police. It's better to have a page with bad content than no content, because the community will work to make it good content.

Smith: People want it to be an easy process.

Snider: People want to do things their way. They have strong opinions.

Rafer: But this is stereotyping. Everyone has a topic that they're a freak about, but they want to be spoon-fed everything else. Some people know a topic, like chronic pain or whatever, but they don't want to participate in other topics. What happens when something gets fact checked two weeks later?

Snider: That's an issue with wikipedia. When was this edited and should you trust them?

Tatum: Sometimes there's no tone, no fact checking, and that can be scary for some of us.

Rafer: But many of these sites do have a tone. The community imposes the tone, publicly, organically, on their own timeline.

Snider: Editors on our site are just glorified users. The majority of edits are being done by three dozen guys, and among them, three of them just crush everyone else, writing guidelines, submitting every day. Because they're creating the site they always wanted to build but lacked the tools to do it. So we build the tools for them to do that. The secret sauce here in monopoly money. People come here for hours and hours, and if you don't give them a perk, they leave. That perk might be talking to us directly to give us ideas. That kind of rapport creates long-term loyalty. Other sites like Wikipedia have people working just to earn virtual gold stars - and they love it.

Tatum: What about actual compensation?

Snider: That's a big fear. Some day someone may actually demand money for all the stuff they did if the company gets sold. They want a piece of it. And that might change the rules of the game. The majority of people submitting content tend to be young, and that can be scary for some. Explains the bad grammar, too.

Davidson: So you want users to generate content but you fear them too.

Snider: Sure. But some of these folks get so good at what they do, we end up hiring them. They know our sites better than we do.

Tatum: Will we have ownership issues?

Davidson: Webshots.com had a large community generating page views for user-submitted photos. We used to love you could type in any location and you'd find a picture of it. The terms of service were such that you relinquished the copyright by uploading it. (Really bad idea -ac) At some point it'll be legally challenged. (As it should. -ac) Someone somewhere will argue that they didn't understand the terms and sue a big site (read: Boston.com's photo policy -ac) for these practices. YouTube is the biggest example of this. (Except that YouTube doesn't claim ownership - just commercial licensing rights. -ac)

Tatum: Will there be professional twitterers?

Williams: Well, we didn't think people like Scoble would take over like he did. Who knows.

Tatum: When you founded blogger, you didn't anticipate the commercial apps. Do media companies not need to be using these tools? Do they have to integrate or just use third-party apps?

Williams: News sites probably need to use more social media apps because it's in their financial interest.

Tatum: Why was Yahoo interested in mybloglog?

Rafer: They're pretty good at figuring out what people care about, except in the blogging world. We had sites that a couple hundred million folks looked at. We don't have much personal information of these folks, but we could make some general assumptions based on our data. Bloggers want to have a presence. They use our widget to create additional human connections. Once people's faces start showing up, it feels a little less lonely. We don't use a timestamp because new bloggers may only have one or two visitors. So we don't want to discourage them. About 70% who create a profile on mybloglog have a blog already. In a lot of cases, they have profiles on a bunch of social networks. But then there are middle aged British politicians or pastors whom we suspect just created their first social networking profile.

Tatum: For some of our users, like on Chowhound, that's their only community, and they scream whenever we make a change. That sense of ownership can lead to some friction. What are the best ways to pool those voices in without losing your own voice?

Snider: Well, you separate the brands, right?

Tatum: But we want them to have ownership, where they feel connected. What we do in separate branding sometimes makes it difficult to program for them because they think it's their site, not ours.

Rafer: Well, you treat the editorial folks as peers of the community, not taskmasters. (Not the word he used, but that was the idea.)

Smith: Paid editors can write reasonably well and the users can't, but they may actually have the same level of expertise on a given subject. You need to actively engage users and make them feel like they're a part of the process, give them that monopoly money, include their submissions in high-profile places so they feel they're rewarded for good input.

Rafer: Ignore for a minute who's good at it and who isn't. If users get obnoxious, why should you care?

Tatum: because marketers care. They need to feel there's a safe place to advertise.

Snider: Bulletin boards don't get much advertising but they attract tons of traffic. That's an obstacle. You need advertisers comfortable with that chaos. We're trying to build a resource where people are building topical resources, rather than let people do anything they want, like MySpace. We moderate to make sure they don't harm us; that's the threshold. Anything else is fair game.

Smith: It works for your site - comics. Does it work for other topics?

Snider: Sure. Gardening, pets - look at dogster.com. (Woof woofs from the crowd.)

Smith: What if you do a baby raising site and people give bad advice? Or pet care advice?

Dogster founder: People want to share opinions and they know they're just opinions, not professional advice. People have strong opinions about pets, like should dogs eat processed or raw food. After a while, you just have to say it's been discussed to death - agree to disagree.

Tatum: But you've gotten tons of advertisers. How?

Dogster guy: The circle of trust. It sounds goofy, but we bring in advertisers, help them figure out the messages they want to share, and bring it into the community in a way they would want. Not banner ads - things like contests and the like. Things the community appreciates.

Tatum: You can sell ads, sponsorship or advertorials. Top Chef came to us and said we want to be a part of your blog launch. They didn't seem to understand we can't just cover them as news and get paid for it. Otherwise our users will think we're total whores. You need integrity and trust. So we test strategies. Our community is adverse to marketing messages, so we need to be careful what will resonate. With Top Chef, we said we'd like to do a podcast or something unique. So it gave them an advertorial placement and it was useful to the community. AmEx did a campaign with us, interviewing chefs. Should be a perfect fit. But none of our users cared. They didn't associate that content as being relevant. So it didn't work.

Smith: Advertorial works when a discerning user can actually use it. In magazines, they get shoe horned in and no one cares. On the web, they can ignore it or use it without feeling like we're interfering with the experience.

Snider: Have you ever faked user accounts for promotional purposes?

Smith: I used to a long time ago but it was difficult to maintain.

Snider: Well, it's a form of espionage to see what's going on in the community. There may be some crazy users, but they use your site to be crazy, and that generates more traffic. It's kinda funny, actually. You ban them, then email every director in the company and say "fire this guy!"

Smith: But if you did something to generate that, then you're engaging them, and that's better than ignoring them.

Tatum: How will Twitter make money?

Williams: We don't. We're a tool provider rather than a content provider. With blogger, people used us for their own content purposes, they can pay us for more features, otherwise it's free. We don't care about editorial. They can worry about it. We have millions of blogger sites - we can't care about editorial.

Tatum: Does gmail freak you out when you get an ad based on what you write in your email? It creeps me out.

Davidson: Gmail is a bit creepy that way, but that's the nature of contextual advertising, and that's what they do. That's why we don't use google ads - it's just a little too creepy for user-generated content. We collect very little personal information. If we take your zip code, we can offer you feeds relevant to your zip, and at least that's useful. It's not scraping really personal info, like from your calendar or email.

Tatum: I went from reading certain sites to using my rss reader and aggregators. Digg is interesting because you get the story and the discussion. Is that a threat to media sites?

Williams: They're filters, pointing back to your site, driving your traffic. You may not go to your site directly any more.

Smith: but if you create good content, then the aggregators cover you and drive lots of traffic.

Snider: But they're also just popularity contests. Good content may not rise to the top.

Tatum: It rewards interesting content. But how do you know you can trust the content that's getting all the attention?

Smith: Well, if the comments on Digg say the story is full of shit, then you get a sense of whether it's good content.

Williams: "Professional" content isn't always factually correct either.

(quick break to Twitter and check email.)

Audience question: How effective are filters like Digg? Do they truly bring the best stuff to the top?

Rafer: They're subjective. Rafer doesn't work to me in the slightest; I don't go to the site. Others love, it, though. There are as many filtering systems as consumption habits, and it's all going to get spread out.

Smith: I spend a lot of time trolling these sites to see if there's stuff we should cover.

PublicSquare.com creator: What about reputation systems for users?

Snider: We use them as a way of filtering content. You get to a certain level by participating at a high level, and you get more trust because of it. It helps a lot. If we had to deal with the submissions ourselves without reputation systems, we wouldn't exist.

Posted by acarvin at 12:01 PM

What Should I Ask Dan Rather?

Later this afternoon I'll be interviewing former CBS anchor Dan Rather, and I'd like your thoughts on what I should ask him. When the interview was booked, I told his assistant that I'd want to talk about the changing media landscape, including citizen journalism. Among the topics I'm hoping to discuss with him:

The jailing of video blogger Josh Wolf for contempt of court;
The new law in France that would ban citizen journalists from recording or transmitting acts of violence;
The role of Fire Dog Lake in the coverage of the Scooter Libby trial;
The role of YouTube and other video-sharing sites in Election 2006 and 2008;
The role of bloggers questioning his coverage of the Killian documents;
The decline of evening news;
The decline in foreign news bureaus in contrast to the rise of blogging worldwide;
The evolving relationship between bloggers and mainstream media;
The effects of media concentration on local and national news coverage

Are there any other topics you think I should address? (Apart from asking him, "Kenneth, what is the frequency?") If so, please post a comment on the blog or twitter me, and I'll try to include them in the interview. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:27 AM

Austin City Limits!

Voxtrot @ Austin City Limits, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Tonight I got to visit hallowed ground - the studio of Austin City Limits. PBS hosted a party there tonight featuring the band Voxtrot, and it was just amazing getting to stand in the space so many of my favorite performers have played: Tom Waits, Los Lobos, Franz Ferdinand, the Pixies, the Raconteurs....

I'm on cloud nine. I want to go back already. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:11 AM

March 11, 2007

Conversation with an Austin Waiter

[austin, texas, 7:18 pm; a tex-mex restaurant.]

"So you're a videographer/photographer," says the waiter, pointing at the text on my digital camera's photo pass.

"Something like that."

"Me too," the waiter says with pride. "A videographer. More of the triple-x variety, if you know what I mean."

"Oh." [awkwardness] "Good luck with that."

[waiter takes order, disappears. returns with food some time later]

"Here's your chipotle burger," he says. "Can I ask you a personal question?"

"Uh, yes?"

"So I'm trying to break into the porn industry...."

"Yes?"

"... and I'm wondering if you have any experiences with dealing with local jurisdictions when it comes to getting the appropriate licenses."

"For porn?"

"No, for videography and such, being that you are one. A videographer, that is."

"Well, I'm based in DC, and I don't do this full-time. I'm also not in the porn -"

"- but I'm sure you would have to deal with all the appropriate licenses and such for becoming a small business owner."

"You mean like incorporating?"

"Precisely," the waiter continues. "Right now I'm struggling as to whether to become an LLC or a C corporation. An LLC lets you pass your tax burden through to yourself, while an C corporation might be a better decision as I expand my business and bring in more partners and investors."

"Well it sounds like you should probably talk with an attorney or an accountant."

"I'm doing all that, but it's hard because porn isn't big business like technology here in Austin, and all the folks with this kind of business acumen are on the west coast. In the Valley, you know."

"Oh."

"Anyway, thanks for the pep talk. Enjoy the rest of your conference."

"Thanks...."

Posted by acarvin at 9:24 PM

Wiki Wiki Teriyaki: Restaurant 2.0

Wiki Wiki Teriyaki, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

This is the coolest restaurant. It's called Wiki Wiki Teriyaki, and it's in Austin, a few blocks from the convention center.

Rather than having a set menu, they just have a bunch of ingredients and invite you to bring your own. The diners, who call themselves "recipedians," get to put together their own recipes and have them cooked. Other diners can then build on each other's recipes and discuss them, creating a seemingly limitless array of recipes. Soon they'll add ratings and tags to make it easier for diners to parse their options.

Actually, none of that is true. It's just a restaurant with the word "wiki" in it. Twice. But how cool would that be?

Posted by acarvin at 5:39 PM

My renew orleans t-shirt

Reneworleans, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

More than a dozen people have come up to me today and asked me about my "renew orleans" t-shirt, so I figured I'd post something on the blog in case you're wondering as well. It's part of a campaign organized by Okay Player and a few other groups to raise money for displaced New Orleans musicians. If you want to buy your own shirt, you can order it here. And no, I won't sell you mine. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 4:08 PM

Wifi Woes and False Advertising at BarCamp Austin

The Austin Convention Center really needs to upgrade its wifi. The network was down for most of the first session this morning, and it's been hit or miss ever since. Generally the network is up right now, but it's running at a snail's pace. Forget about uploading or downloading video - I can barely get the mobile version of the sxsw website to download promptly. If this last much longer I may have to start getting really snarky.

Speaking of snarky, I'm still annoyed about something that happened during lunch yesterday. I was with Steve Garfield, Bre Pettis and a few other folks, trying to figure out our lunch plans, and someone from BarCamp told us they'd be having free pizza over at their venue, a few blocks up the road. We had planned on going elsewhere, but he insisted we come for the free grub. So we went to the venue and were told to get in line and wait for the pizza boxes to be laid out. Then some guy came by and said - and I quote - "Cough up some money for delivery guy. Now." He shoved his hand in each of our faces until we gave him some money. That's fine, of course - free food seekers should at least be willing to cover the deliver guy's tip.

We then waited for a while longer, and the guy manning the boxes of pizzas announced they'd be charging $6 and up for food. We'd just wasted 30 minutes going out of our way, forced to pay delivery costs, then informed that we'd have to pay more. I know, it's not a large amount of money, but the point is they were advertising it as free, then pulled a bait and switch once we got there. It's one thing if they said from the start, "Buy our food and it'll go to help pay for the event." But this was total BS. Really uncool for an unconference. -andy

Tags: BarCamp | false advertising | pizza | sxsw

Posted by acarvin at 3:50 PM

Vloggers, Vloggers Everywhere

SXSW Party (one of the many) 7234, originally uploaded by Lan Bui.

Just when you thought it was impossible to find an Austin restaurant without a two-hour wait, Bre Pettis suggests a place called the Marisco Grill. Awesome Mexican seafood, dirt cheap and totally empty, allowing more that two dozen vloggers to converge over margaritas and enchiladas. Here's a pic taken by Lan Bui using his mega-insane fisheye lens. Serious wide angle, but man, my head looks funny.

Left to right: me, Steve Garfield, Bre Pettis, Amanda Congdon, Chuck Olsen. I wish all conference dinners were this fun. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:13 PM

Blogging Where Speech Isn't Free

Jon Lebkowsky, moderator
Shava Nerad, TOR
Ethan Zuckerman, Global Voices
Rob Faris, Harvard Berkman Center
Shahed Amanullah, HalalFire Media
Yasmina Tesanovic, Serbian filmmaker

Faris:

The OpenNet Initiative. There was a time when we hoped the net would be a frontier place not subject to natl sovereignty. That idea is pretty much dead. And many countries use that sovereignty to censor or filter the Net. We've looked at 40 countries so far, and more than two dozen of them are using filtering. Half are filtering social issues or political content, primarily blogs. Filtering is a messy, incomplete process. It targets certain content, but it's basically impossible to actually block everything you want to without knocking out stuff that's not on your hit list. So when Pakistan tried to block certain yahoo hosts, they knocked out 52,000 other websites.

In North Korea, suppression of opposing viewpoints basically shuts down the Net, while China wants to maintain a vibrant internet but still try to block things they find unacceptable. The rules of censorship have changed and continue to evolve. It's very fluid and ill-defined. That creates both opportunities and dangers.

Zuckerman:

I tend to work on citizen media - blogging, podcasting and the like - particularly in the developing world. We often talk about it in the context of press freedoms. There's high repression in places like North Korea, Burma, Turkmenistan. In medium oppression stakes like China, Iran and Zimbabwe, citizen media tools are embraced more actively. In places with freer press, like South Africa, they use these tools less because they have other platforms for sharing their ideas. Iran is an amazing case study. In 2004, suddenly you had 60,000 blogs start. The independent press had shut down and many of them moved into the blogosphere. So even the vice president started a blog to have better communication with his constituents.

My org, globalvoicesonline.org, looks at citizens media in the world. Some of it focuses on just cultural activities, but a lot focuses on freedom and politics. In Bahrain, there's a pdf from google maps showing how much land is controlled by the monarchy, and the size of their palaces compared to where everyone else lives. They blocked Google Maps because of. The Tunisian Prison Map used google maps to show where the secret prisons are, and which dissidents were there. Alaa abd el Fatah blogged on paper while they were in prison, and his wife posted it at www. manalaa.net. We even see video being smuggled out, like Zimbabwe protestors being broken up violently in Harare.

This is all user-generated media, and it's making states very, very upset. They react in four ways. They block the sites, the tools; register bloggers, even threaten their safety. In Ethiopia, you can't see a site like nazret.com, the leading opposition site. In Pakistan, blogger.com is blocked, just so they can censor six sites. This lead to dontblocktheblog.com to get around this. (A guy from Blogger in the audience says the block ended last week.)

FreeKareem.com - Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in prison, and now there's an active campaign to have him released.

How do we fight back? We can mirror sites, like isaacmao.com and notisaacmao.com. Isaac redirects people to the second site when he's blocked. There are also anonymous blogs, like sleeplessinsudan.blogspot.com, which was run by a relief worker in Darfur. I maintain a guide on anonymous blogging, and Reporters Without Borders has one as well.

What's most important is bringing attention to the fact that governments are blocking sites and denying access. The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is blogging, and that'll probably lead to a crackdown. And we need to fight for the rights of these voices and others, even if we disagree with their politics.

Shava Nerad: TOR allows people to circumvent firewalls and go online anonymously. We have around 1,000 proxy servers around the world. When you connect, you get randomly routed through a trail of these servers, making it impossible for authorities to see where you came from. So you can blog without authorities knowing which cybercafe your at, for example. When you blog, you normally leave a trail that shows your physical location. If you're saying risky things, that makes you vulnerable. So you need to wipe the footprints off of that trail to keep you safe.

We talk a lot about free speech as if it were an absolute good we need immediately. It's a good idea, but a lot of my family comes from parts of the world where free speech isn't a reality. There are ways to protect yourself - they're safety valves. Medium suppression countries realize that free speech is inevitable in a Darwinian sort of way, but they want to control the pace of change. China doesn't shut down all free speech but they try to throttle it so they control the message. So it's not as monolithic as it seems. It's process. When I see people in the US blogging about it, they don't always see it as a live action roleplaying game involving internet diplomacy. It's an ongoing story of cultural tensions. People need the tools to do this, but here in the US, we need to understand that there's a process going on, and in our activism, we should recognize that rather than just vilifying the other side.

Amanullah:

I run altmuslim.com and HalalFire Media, trying to cultivate the Islamic blogosphere. A lot of online repression happens in Muslim countries. Why is that the case? You have political instability, undemocratic regimes and the rise of extremism, because Islam is in flux. Why should we care about that? The Muslim world deserves political and press freedoms just like everybody else; they shouldn't be written off as backwards and hopeless. There's a need for free expression to create an Islam that's in sync with modernity. We all have a stake in that battle. Sept 11 reminds us that we just can't "contain" them. We need to support Islamic bloggers who are trying to help countries go through this change.

Even when governments aren't legitimate, they wrap themselves in a clock of religious responsibility. There are also extremists trying to drive a political or moral agenda. It's tough to run a bookstore that's open without getting flak for it, literally or figuratively. Despite getting it from both ends, Muslim bloggers are coming out, wanting to join the modern world and get out of the crossfire of regimes vs. extremists.

It starts with simple questions. When a Saudi girl asks why she can't driver herself. It has big ramifications in places where people aren't used to asking simple questions. The bloggers are the vanguard of that, asking questions that are never asked. It also breaks the govt monopoly on information, including govt-controlled press. The bottom line is that the freer the discourse is on Islam, the more modern and moderate the practices are. Muslims in America are a prime example of that. You're free to say what you want and develop in harmony with your non-Muslim neighbords. It's almost a linear correlation. That's why I side of the free speech side of things, even while Muslim countries are grappling with the issue.

How can we help? We can use technology to pry the doors open from the outside. I'm hoping for the day when govts give up on filtering and battle ideas with other ideas rather than jackbooted thugs. We need to read and publicize the work of bloggers, advocating good ones and shaming bad ones. We need to reduce anarchy in the Muslim world. There's been a rise of extremism, and it plays a role in what's going on right now. That's something the Muslim world needs to deal with internally. We need to advocate for persecuted bloggers and freedom in general. Not necessarily specific bloggers, since we don't want them to seem like US puppets. But we should push for general press freedoms while leaving specific advocacy to us - the blogosphere.

Tesanovic:

I come from Serbia. In the early 90s, I was a feminist and activist for Women in Black. When the war was going on, people would ask me what was going on, so I decided to write a letter for everyone. It wasn't journalism but more than a diary. It was a blog before they were called that, sent over mailing lists. When Serbia was bombed in '99, I was sitting in my flat watching the international news channels, and I was seeing myself bombed on TV. But it was still information - Milosovic was lying and you couldn't trust local news. When a southern town was bombed, I called my relatives and they saw people killed by cluster bombs. Milosovic denied it but NATO called it collateral damage and acted like it didn't exist. So we were invisible victims. So I started writing about it online anonymously.

This went on for a couple of months, then a friend asked me if I was the one doing it. Eventually the media started asking me if it's me. They wanted to talk with me but not identify me, since they didn't want me to get killed by Milosovic or looters or NATO or anyone else. But I outed myself in a letter and said the public is my only protection, then told the governments, this is where I live - come and get me. I didn't want to hide.

Posted by acarvin at 1:16 PM

The Rise of Mommy and Daddy Blogs

Marrit Ingma of the Austin Chronicle ran a great session this morning about the rise of parenting blogs. Here are my notes from the session - andy.

Marrit Ingman, Austin Chronicle
Asha Dornfest, ParentHacks.com
Dan Evans, Dad Gone Mad
Tracy Gaughran-Perez, Sweetney.com
Amy Corbett Storch

Ingman:

Blogging about parenting used to be considered strange. Why would anyone read it? But people do. Telling stories and creating communities is both natural and necessary for parents. We look it as a way of interacting with other parents and staving off the isolation. Question: Some people see it as boring and narcissistic. Why are they wrong?

Corbett: I'm not boring! I read a lot of parent blogs. Some are boring, but the authors don't care. Not everyone is out for readership and money. The most valuable thing is documenting my baby's childhood. The community keeps it interactive.

Gaughran-Perez: It's boring if you're a bad writer. But that holds for any blog topic. There are bad mommy bloggers, but there are lots of great ones.

Dornfest: When people find a strong voice, it doesn't matter what they're talking about. If it resonates, the reader is engaged.

Ingman: The act of parenting engenders storytelling. How many times do you have a great story at the end of day? Not just the funny things kids say, but the narratives our parenting.

Evans: That's the difference between "my kid used the potty!" and "here's the story of my child's life as it unfolds and what we're learning from it."

Ingman: what about making money?

Evans: I sell t-shirts on my vlog.

Ingman: Do you make money?

Evans: You have no idea. J

Dornfest. Parenthacks is a bit different because it's a community, so people share info about products - reviews, advice, etc. So I connect it with Amazon affiliates program and google ads.

Gaughran Perez: Multiple income streams. You can have primary advertisers. We use Federated Media and BlogHer ad network. I haven't been able to get Google Adsense to work well for me. But if you cobble together you can cobble together an income. But there's a difference between an income, a living.

Corbett. I have a couple of paid blogging gigs. It's strange when people want to buy your voice, but then there are restrictions due to that. If I didn't have those paying gigs, I'd be very nervous that this wouldn't work.

Ingman: What do you mean by restrictions?

Corbett: Subject matter - you don't own the copyright. I can't always put pics of my son up because I want to own them. Language is an issue - some of us can be a little salty. One of my vlogs is PG-13, the other is Rated G.

Gaughran: I gave up my paid gigs because they were too restrictive. I got an offer from a major corp. At first they said do whatever you want. But contract time, they said it had to be rated G and fit with the corporation's image. I said no - have you read my blog? Do you know how I am? You can make good money, but you have to give up a little freedom.

Dornfest: If you do a blog that gets some traffic, traditional media may approach you. You have an opportunity because you've created a name for yourself. This can give you other writing opportunities. So it's indirect, but it's still money.

Evans: When you have a corporate blogging gig, you need to write to their target audience and not offend them. You're making a sacrifice of your own style in order to make a buck. It's acceptable for a while, but I write because I want to write what I want. Compromise can be uncomfortable.

Gaughran: It's not like we're getting rich. You need a couple of paying gigs to really make a living off of it.

Corbett: I'm concerned about how long-term I can do this. Even with a loyal audience, they may not follow you to a corporate gig where you're not being authentic. And the corporate folks may be disappointed because your audience didn't follow you.

Gaughran: Readers will only go to so many sites. They came to you because of your voice and perspective, and if that's reigned in and controlled, it loses its allure.

Ingman: So they want your readers and not your writing?

Corbett? To an extent. I've been able to make it work but it's a challenge. For some companies it's a race to have parent blogs, but they want to control it.

Evans: It's becoming corporatized. The only parenting pros were the folks who write the What to Expect series. It's so clinical and not personal. Now we're hearing real voices about what it's really like to be a parent. We're talking about poop now! And corporations are having a hard time adapting to that realism.

Ingman: For parenting hacks, you're focusing on user-generated ideas - you're not doing all the advice.

Dornfest: The premise is that experts have a place. But the most useful info is from friends and relatives. So we want to be able to collect that info in one place. People are feeling recognized because their advice is being heard and shared. Blogging just lends itself to that.

Ingman: How are your sites fostering collective wisdom?

Corbett: I have a 17 month old who lives on lint and cheerios. When your kid is finicky, it's easy to rant and ask for help. And my readers rushed to help me, giving advice and sharing their own stories. I got practical advice. I have a community to turn to.

Ingman: Each of us has felt a bit let down by real-world networks. Relationships change when you have a kid, but online you can find other parents in the same situation.

Corbett: I'm always amazed when I hesitate to publish something about losing my temper, or when I'm afraid. I never knew that so many people go through this stuff. Everyone was so supportive and grateful that we were talking about it.

Ingman: Since you're writing personal stuff, do you feel you're really under a microscope?

Corbett: Mothers are always held to a higher standard. When a child is involved, people get judgmental.

Gaughran: People can be supportive, but you'll have some folks who judge you. But the overall responsiveness far outweighs the negatives.

Corbett: And it's not about the money. It's the personal, emotional support you get.

Dornfest: It may sounds like a cliché, but we do it because we love it. If you don't, you stop. Otherwise it's not worth the money.

Gaughran: And most of us started blogging before anyone started talking about "monetization." When Dooce started putting up ads, people freaked out. I started with no ads, no designs on earning money. But then the world started shifting.

Corbett: I started ads when I realized so much of my leave would be unpaid.

Evans: Can you make real bucks? It depends on what you mean real. Guess a number and then move the period two places to the left.

Gaughran: I knew someone who just got pregnant, and people were saying quit your job and make it a career.

Corbett: You need to earn this, write every day, give people a reason to come back. Blog audiences are savvy and can smell someone who's in it for the money.

Dornfest: People forget it's like any other writing career. You have to keep at it and produce good, quality content. It needs a strong, compelling voice or offer compelling information. And it's the size of the readership that helps generating income.

Evans: If you start a blog just to make money, you're doing it in the opposite order. This is a different genre.

Ingman: Is it different for dads?

Evans: Most of my readers are probably women. It's different because I can stay away from the drama. I don't think my writing doesn't have much banter; I tell a story and people read it. Male voices aren't as popular as female voices. Women seem to look for a community of other moms, while dads do that less.

Question: Is parent blogging a female space? And is that wrong?

Evans: There's definitely a space for dad blogs. We have a different view. My wife does the dirty work and I teach the kids how to fart. It's a totally different perspective. But wives want to know what men do and why, which is why my readership is female.

Dornfest: My readership is 50/50 because parenthacks is about problem solving. Dads have said that it's a place where they can be fathers. There's a huge opportunities for strong voices in the fatherblogging community. There's room for a lot more.

Tags: blogs | parenting | sxsw

Posted by acarvin at 1:12 PM

Tesla Coil Rock

Watch the video

When I was a kid, I loved two things unconditionally - the Red Sox and tesla coils. The Boston Museum had the biggest tesla coil in the world - I wanted one for Hanukkah. So you can imagine how giddy I was when I stumbled upon a pair of tesla coils at the geek fest organized at SXSW by Make: Magazine and Dorkbot. Unless most tesla coils, which just shoot out lightning, these coils are tuned to shoot lightning at different frequencies, generating music. In this video, Joe DiPrima demonstrates his mad, mad invention as it performs the 1812 Overture.

Posted by acarvin at 12:45 AM

Armwrestlemania

Watch the video

Bre Pettis and Chuck Olsen go head-to-head in an arm wrestling match. Cameo appearance by Amanda Congdon.

Tags: arm wrestling | Bre Pettis | Chuck Olsen | sports | sxsw

Posted by acarvin at 12:30 AM

Mentolicious!

Watch the video

Chuck Olsen sucks down a diet coke full of Mentos, whipped up by blip.tv's Mike Hudack. Mmm.... Mentolicious!

Tags: Chuck Olsen | Diet Coke | Mentos | sxsw

Posted by acarvin at 12:15 AM

March 10, 2007

Emerging Social and Technology Trends

Here are some notes from a session on emerging technology and social trends, moderated by Laura Moorhead of Wired. These notes are summaries, not verbatim quotes.

Moderator: Laura Moorhead, Wired
Robert Fabricant, Frog Design
Andrew Blum, Contributing Editor, Wired and Metropolis
Elliot van Buskirk, Wired News Listening Post
Daniel Raffel, Yahoo
Peter Rojas, Engadget

Moorhead: What is the relationship between social trends and tech?

(Silence, squirming, no one wants to go first.)

Rojas: I think what we're seeing is technology is driving social change. It's not seen as a separate sphere anymore - everyday people can affect and drive it. They're creating new forms and mediums, democratizing media. And it's affecting the way we think about ourselves, too. Tech is now a social medium, driven by the people who use it.

Raffel: People aren't consumers anymore - they're purveyors, making the ecosystem more interesting - more so than if just big producers were doing all the heavy lifting.

Blum: The speed of change is kinda astounding, compared to the speed of change of cities and other systems.

Fabricant: Tech doesn't propagate until there's a social need. But today, people's identities are bound up in the online life too. It's much harder to separate social and tech trends now because of it.

Moorhead: What have we seen play out in the last 18 months?

Van Buskirk: Widgets. They're going across the Net, doing to the Net what the Net did to the world, taking away a sense of place. I just saw one widget that lets people to chat and listen to music together. It's brings them to the same spot even if they're spread across the world.

Moorhead: How is "place" changing?

Blum: Placez.com does geographic social networking, connecting your online ID with your geo location. It's young and hard to tell what will happen, but it's exciting because geographic anonymity online is disappearing, just as it doesn't exist in the real world. Or outside.in - it's powerful in the way it's reconnecting what's online to the way we live in real life.

Rojas: People have a different sense of privacy now. New York Magazine talked about how today's youth put out stuff that's very, very revealing, and they're okay with that. (Read: Antonella Barba.) I'm straddling that generation gap and feel really conflicted about it. I don't want to feel old, but should I sign up for Twitter.com? (laughs) But teens think it's weird I don't put my personal stuff online all the time. Today's kids are constantly negotiating their public self, their private self, and the public one is much more revelatory than ever before.

Fabricant: It's definitely a generational think. I'm so glad my 20s were clocked in darkness. (laughs) But the way kids constantly check email, IM, txt, etc, is a continuation of old people's blackberry culture. (my words, not his) The blurring of biz and pleasure is another sign of it.

Moorhead: Yahoo collects lots of data. How do you think about what's up for grabs and what's not for mass consumption?

Raffel: When we launched Yahoo Pipes, we wanted it to stay within Yahoo so users could extend their own data and identity, but do it in a very secure fashion. Like getting your IP info and filling in location info - we take privacy very seriously and shouldn't play with that. Disruptive tech needs to evolve legal and biz practices. It's not just pushing the product no matter what's possible with it.

Moorhead: what about these 14-year-old digital natives? Will they burn out?

Rojas: I wonder if today's four-year-olds may think today's teens are so square for being so public about anything. The pendulum could swing the other way, because youth culture often swings away from whatever the prevailing trends are. So don't be surprised if we see a new youth culture that rebels against the always-on, always-open lifestyle of today's teens. There was a time when I only bought vinyl records and used old typewriters, just to be different. It's a healthy reality check. We probably won't see a mass rejection of tech, but there may be a subculture like that.

Van Buskirk: Today everyone has a myspace account, but we'll soon see more private networks where you actually have to meet someone in real life to be given access.

Fabricant: We're hitting an inflection point. With the increasing sense of insecurity in the world, people are aligning themselves against institutional voices, but their personal anxiety is increasing. This always trickles down to youth culture, and it cuts across demographics. They're more attracted to evangelical voices - not in the religious sense, but more in a tribal sense, hanging out with others they see as true believers in whatever is they care about.

Moorhead: Even if you have a niche interest, online you can find a community of thousands. That might fracture dialogue when people get in their pigeonholes. How do you get away from that?

Fabricant: There's an amplification of stronger voices online. Companies are now trying to figure out who the strongest voices are in any particular group. And they also want to be able to understand outlier behavior in these groups.

Tags: sxsw | technology | trends

Posted by acarvin at 3:40 PM

Bill Paxton Goes to Hollywood

Watch the video

Actor Bill Paxton talks about how he broke into acting.

Tags: acting | Bill Paxton | Hollywood | sxsw

Posted by acarvin at 3:25 PM

Fish Heads and Other Memories

Bill Paxton, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

I'm sitting a few feet from Bill Paxton while he talks about the making of the classic music video Fish Heads. Podcast and video forthcoming. -andy

Tags: acting | Bill Paxton | movies | sxsw

Posted by acarvin at 12:39 PM

Line 'Em Up!

The registration line at SXSW is unlike anything I've ever seen before. It zigzags down two floors, with people queued up at the edge of escalators waiting to be told to move forward. Upstairs, you're rushed through a u-turn, where you must fill out a card with your name, rank and serial number. Suddenly a volunteer grabs you, tells you to have your ID ready, and shoves you forward to have your picture snapped for your badge. Then you enter the mosh pit of despair, waiting for about 30 minutes for someone to call out your name and hand your that badge. Then you get the hell out of the way. Next!

Posted by acarvin at 12:16 PM

Can Twitter Save Lives?

Some of you may have noticed a colored badge in my blog's right column that shows what I've been doing recently. If you haven't explored it further, it's from a messaging service called Twitter - and I'm beginning to wonder if it could be used to save lives. Seriously.

First, let's talk Twitter. Over the last year there's been an explosion of dot-coms blazing trails in the text messaging space. Twitter is just one of these companies. Some people describe it as a form of "microblogging." Rather than posting a blog entry to write a few sentences or paragraphs about what you're doing, Twitter lets you post quick phrases online, such as "Getting ready to board a plane to Texas" or "Doing homework - test tomorrow." That in itself isn't particularly interesting, given you could do that if you wanted to on any blogging platform. But Twitter's goal is to help you circulate these updates among a group of friends in real time, no matter where they are.

When you participate in Twitter, you identify other Twitter users as friends. Each time you post an update about yourself, it's circulated to them via multiple platforms: on the Web, through instant messaging, via RSS, and perhaps most interesting, using SMS text messaging. Your friends can pick whichever of these platforms suits their needs. So when you're at your PC, you might receive these updates via instant messaging, but when you're on the go, you switch the alerts to SMS. Similarly, you can use any of these platforms to publish your updates as well. It's all one big happy multiplatform group experience.

I've been using Twitter for a few weeks now, and mostly it's just a fun way to keep in touch with people - particularly the insane number of videobloggers that have embraced it in recent months. But along with being able to get a constant play-by-play of how people like Zadi Diaz and Steve Garfield spend every waking moment, Twitter raises some tantalizing possibilities as a tool for first responders in times of public emergencies.

Two years ago, not long after the Boxing Day Tsunami struck the coasts of Asia, several bloggers including Taran Rampersad began discussing the potential for SMS text messaging as a tool for first responders. Why SMS? Because it's often the last technology standing during disasters. Take Hurricane Katrina for example. Mobile phones and email became unreliable due to heavy traffic and damage to infrastructure. Satellite phones were few and far between. Yet text messaging continued to work, because it's very low bandwidth and designed to be re-routed around problem areas within a network. Taran and others began talking about building a tool called Alert Retrieval Cache, or ARC. ARC would be an SMS discussion group system allowing first-responders to text each other with updates and requests, each tagged with keywords so the message would get to the right person.

It was a great idea, but it didn't get very far. There wasn't a critical mass of people with the time and energy to make it happen. In the meantime, I began playing around with kludging together free tools like Google Groups and the SMS-email gateway known as Teleflip to see if it was possible to set up a discussion group comprised only of people sending and receiving text messages. It worked, but it wasn't exactly pretty.

Fast forward many moons, and now we have text messaging tools like Twitter, Mozes and others that were developed simply for people to keep in touch and have fun. I can't say I'm surprised that's how these tools are developing, because it's a hell of a lot easier to get venture capital from investors when you're creating a tool that would be the darling of teenagers everywhere. Now that these tools are slowly maturing, though, I think it's worth asking the question again: might text messaging groups serve any purpose in times of public emergencies?

My gut tells me yes. Take this hypothetical situation. Well before any disaster, groups of first-responders would set up accounts on Twitter, then mark each other as friends. After that, they might remain dormant until a disaster happens, but then they'd fire up their mobile phones and start texting each other through Twitter's shortcode. Almost instantaneously, messages would get routed to everyone in the group, allowing them to keep in touch with each other even when other networks crash.

Of course, that's somewhat of a primitive communication model of doing business. Not everyone in a given group would literally need to receive every message, and sometimes you'd need to communicate with multiple groups simultaneously. We'd need to see some extra functionality added to the system for this to happen. For example, we'd benefit from the ability to route messages to specific groups of people and contextualize them with tags. For example, a volunteer Red Cross worker who also happens to be a member of an animal rescue league might need to be able to route their posts to specific groups of people. So if they have a text they only want to send out to their Red Cross colleagues, they would text the phrase "groups: redcross" before typing the rest of their message, getting it to that specific group. The same idea could be used to send messages to multiple groups ("groups: redcross, animalrescue") or to all of your groups ("groups: all").

Taking it a step further, your messages might only apply to certain individuals within a large group, say Red Cross workers near New Orleans with access to insulin. In these cases, you'd want to be able to preface your text message with group designations and keyword tags for additional context. It might looks something like this:

groups: redcross
tags: insulin, requests, neworleans-louisiana
Insulin needed stat, Convention Center, 100 units min

Allowing users to post to a group with specific tags would then route the message to other first responders who identify those tags as being relevant to them, in the same way current Twitter users would "follow" the posts of specific friends. Meanwhile, the same messages would go out via RSS, instant messaging, email and the Web, so those people who still had access to those platforms could monitor what's going on and offer their assistance. Similarly, entire cities of people could subscribe to groups and keywords related to their communities, so officials could communicate with them en masse, vice versa and with each other.

Anyway, I know tools like Twitter weren't designed for saving lives. But that doesn't mean they wouldn't if they had a few more features and were put to use properly. -andy

Tags: Emergency Management | First Responders | SMS | Twitter

Posted by acarvin at 11:03 AM

BBQ and Karaoke

It didn't take long to get into the spirit of SXSW. After the opening panel, I crammed into a car with Jay Dedman, Richard Hall and his wife Maureen, driving about 30 minutes outside of Austin to Driftwood - I'll say that again - Driftwood, Texas, for barbecue. You might wonder why someone would leave Austin and go more than 20 miles away for something you can find in every corner juke joint in the city. It's because Austin doesn't have Salt Lick.

Salt Lick is hard to describe. A rambling ranch of a place filled with picnic tables and pickle jars, some located in indoor halls, others under shade trees outside. And it oozes BBQ - some of the best I've ever eaten. The good folks at Divx organized the event, bringing together a few dozen vloggers over ribs, cole slaw, mashed potatoes and BYOB beer. (It's a dry county.) Good times were had by all.

We then spent the next - oh, I have no idea how long it took, but it felt like hours - getting lost on the far side of Austin, trying to find a Karaoke bar, where a surprise birthday bash was being held for Casey McKinnon. By the time we got there, we missed the surprise, but that's okay. (And who know Casey was so petite in real life?) After that it was karaoke, Texas vs. Baylor, and more karaoke. I wanted to sing "Bandages" by Hot Hot Heat, but they didn't have it in the karaoke machine. I was off the hook. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:58 AM

March 9, 2007

Vlog 101 at SXSW

Just managed to get over the Carver library in time for one of the first sessions from SXSW, Your Video Blog Can Save the World. Vlog gurus Jay Dedman, Ryanne Hodson and Michael Verdi are currently showing a video by Chuck Olson. There are probably 30 or 40 people here; no idea how many of them are vlogging newbies vs. veterans.

No wireless from what I can tell, too dark to vlog. Gonna shut my laptop and listen for once. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 6:17 PM

Goin' to SXSW

Goin' to SXSW, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Right now I'm en route to Austin, Texas for South By Southwest, better known as SXSW. It's one of the biggest media festivals in the country, perhaps best known for its musical festival. Unfortunately I can't stick around the full two weeks to enjoy all the bands coming to Austin, but I will be there for the interactive and film fests. Among other things, it'll be a who's who of the video blogging world, so I expect there will be an appropriate amount of mischief taking place.

Needless to say, I'm gonna do my best to blog the hell out of the next four days - text, photos, podcasts, video. If smellcasts existed, I'd do that too. It's my first SXSW, so I'll try to blog with the appropriate wonderment. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 1:28 PM

March 7, 2007

China: 113,000 Cybercafes Are More Than Enough, Apparently

The Associated Press is reporting that Chinese government officials have decided that the country's 113,000 cybercafes are more than enough to support a country with a population of more than 1.3 billion people. Do the math and that works out to about one cybercafe for every 115,000 people in the general population. Let's be generous and assume each cybercafe has 50 computers. That gives us one cybercafe computer per 2,300 people.

According to the China Internet Network Information Center, there are 137 million people in China with Internet access. Approximately 76% of them - 114 million people - access the Internet from home, compared to 32.3%, or 44 million people, relying on cybercafes. (The numbers don't add up to 100% because some people access the Net from multiple locations.) So for those people who use the Net at cybercafes, there's one cybercafe for every 389 people. That's pretty good for those folks who already have access. But there are still more than 1.1 million Chinese without any form of access.

Meanwhile, approximately 23 million Chinese access the Net over mobile phones, a number that's bound to grow as Internet phones become cheaper and data services penetrate rural areas. Soon, China will surpass the US as the country with the largest number of Internet users.

Still, you've got to wonder why 113,000 is the magic number for cybercafes. Perhaps it's possible that the Chinese government is satisfied with the growth curves of at-home Internet access and mobile penetration. Or perhaps the thought of even more people publicly congregating around tools for accessing and creating open knowledge scares the living crap out of them. Maybe some Chinese policymakers will want to chime with a comment. Oh, wait a second - my blog is blocked in China. Never mind. -andy

Tags: China | cybercafes | digital divide | Internet statistics | policy

Posted by acarvin at 10:44 AM

France: Says "Non" to Citizen Journalists

Perhaps shaken by the long jail stint of Josh Wolf or rattled by the effect that the export of America's Funniest Home Videos has had on Francophonie, France has decided to ban citizen journalists from recording acts of violence. As reported by MacWorld and elsewhere, the French Constitutional Council has approved a law that would criminalize the recording or broadcasting any type of violence by non-professional journalists. Take those riots that happened in France not so long ago. Whipping out your phone and recording footage of someone setting a car on fire - or getting pummelled by police for that matter - could subject you to a five-year prison term and nearly $100,000 in fines. Taking it a step further, the French government has proposed a system to regulate websites, blogs, mobile phone operators and other purveyors of content in order to offer certification that they are or aren't government approved.

Reporters Without Borders is none too pleased with the new policy:

[A]ll Internet users are now in a position to participate in the creation and dissemination of information. They are often the "recorders" of an event, especially thanks to mobile phones with photo and video capability, and can disseminate their own content online.
These "citizen journalists" can play a role in monitoring the activities of the authorities throughout the world. In Egypt, for example, bloggers recently revealed a series of scandals involving the security services and showed, by means of video recordings made clandestinely in detention centres, that torture is still regularly practised in Egypt.

In the field of human rights, it is them and not professional journalists who have been responsible for the most reliable reports and information - the information that has most upset the government. Reporters Without Borders thinks it would be shocking if this kind of activity, which constitutes a safeguard against abuses of authority, were to be criminalized in a democratic country.

In an ironic twist, the decision was announced on the 16th anniversary of a certain George Holliday using his videocamera to tape a group of policeman beating down an African American man named Rodney King. If the incident had instead taken place today in France, I wonder if Monsieur Holliday would have hesitated grabbing that camera knowing that he could get stuck in jail until 2012. -andy

Hat tip: Farivar, Doctorow

Posted by acarvin at 9:34 AM

March 6, 2007

Introducing Blog of the Nation

Yesterday at NPR we launched a blog for Talk of the Nation called - what else - Blog of the Nation. Why does Talk need a blog? Well, we wanted to peel back the curtain so the public could better observe the show's editorial processes. We also needed a better way for the public to talk among themselves about whatever issues happen to be the talk of the nation on any given day. And lastly - hat tip to Radio Open Source and World Have Your Say - we wanted to expand the feedback loop that allows the public to interact with the show's producers, helping them develop new story ideas.

The blog hasn't been up for even 24 hours yet, and we're already getting tons of public comments. It probably didn't hurt to have radio segments yesterday about Ann Coulter and a debate over who produces better actors - Britain or the US. More opinions than you can shake a stick at, to put it mildly. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:07 AM

March 3, 2007

Grandma's Stories:
The House in Chelsea; Brothers & Sisters

Watch the video

This video is the first in a series of interviews I did with my 91-year-old grandmother, Theresa Goldman Kaplan, in February 2007. She and I had never really sat down before and talked about her childhood, and she agreed to let me record it.

In this piece, she talks about the home she grew up in, near her family's dairy farm outside of Boston. We also learn a bit about her brothers and sisters, all of whom were much older than she was. She had a pair of older brothers, one of whom died after being struck by a baseball pitch as a kid; the other brother never fully recovered from the loss.Â

Posted by acarvin at 10:27 AM

March 2, 2007

Sam Sheridan on the Daily Show

For those of you who didn't catch The Daily Show last night, Jon Stewart interviewed boxer/author Sam Sheridan. Sam was the subject of the documentary that Susanne and I produced for the National Geographic Channel, Thai Boxing: A Fighting Chance. Since we first followed Sam's training in Thailand seven years ago, he's traveled the world learning about different fighting techniques, conducting research for his new book, A Fighter's Heart.

In this clip, he talks a lot about his Thai boxing training.

The best part, though, was when Jon Stewart asked Stephen Colbert what was coming up on the Colbert Report, and Colbert went after Jon, saying he missed a prime opportunity to sucker-punch Sam.

>

Anyway, if you want to catch more of it, the episode will replay on Comedy Central at 7pm ET tonight. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 1:24 PM

March 1, 2007

Josh Wolf, Wikipedia and the Debate Over Who's a Journalist

Josh Wolf, as photographed by Amanda Congdon

Earlier this week I was perusing the Wikipedia entry for Josh Wolf, the video blogger who recently set the record for being the journalist with the longest time spent in jail for contempt of court. As I first blogged last August, Josh has been sitting in jail for refusing to turn over footage he shot at a protest in California. A police cruiser was allegedly set on fire by protestors, and the feds demanded that Josh turn over his source materials so they could review his footage. Josh refused, arguing that a journalist shouldn't be force to turn over such materials, and he's sat in jail ever since.

Josh's case has fueled an ongoing debate among some folks over who is a journalist and who isn't, trying to drive yet another wedge between mainstream media on the one hand, and bloggers and vloggers on the other. Jay Rosen famously wrote two years ago that this particular war is over. Yet the debate continues to flair up in some circles, most recently on PBS Frontline, as Jeff Jarvis lamented this week. It's flaired up on Wikipedia, too - and part of it appears to be my fault.

The day Josh was sent to jail last summer, there wasn't a Wikipedia entry about his predicament. At that moment in time, there was only what's called a "disambiguation page" - a Wikipedia page that links out to entries sharing similar names. So when you searched for Josh Wolf you got a page listing three different Joshes. One of the three - Josh Wolff the soccer player - had an entry already, while two of them - Josh the vlogger and a comic with the same name - did not. To clarify which one was which, Josh the vlogger was labeled like this:

Josh Wolf (journalist) — Independent Journalist Charged With Civil Contempt in RE: Federal grand jury.

"Josh Wolf (journalist)" was a dead link - no one had created the entry for him yet. So I clicked away and started writing, creating a new entry based on the way it had been worded already: Josh Wolf (journalist). That first entry I wrote about Josh was brief:

Josh Wolf is video blogger and freelance journalist who was jailed by a U.S. district court on August 1, 2006 for refusing to turn over a collection of videos he recorded during a July 2005 anarchist protest in San Francisco, California. During that event, anarchists allegedly set a police cruiser on fire. The district court empaneled a grand jury to determine whether arson charges should be brought against some of the protesters.
Because Wolf shot video footage during the protest, he was subpoenaed by the court, which demanded that he turn over the footage to the grand jury. To date, Wolf has refused to comply with the subpoena, arguing that taking such action would serve as a chilling effect to other journalists trying to cover future protests. U.S. District Judge William Alsup disagreed with this argument and found Wolf in contempt of court, sending him to jail. Judge Alsup also denied bail while Wolf makes his contempt appeal to the Ninth U.S
Circuit Court of Appeals.

Since then, the article has been edited around 120 times, with Wikipedians adding more detail, just as the media began covering the case more seriously. Behind the scenes, though, it's opened a fierce debate among Wikipedians as to whether Josh is a journalist, even questioning whether the entry should be titled "Josh Wolf (journalist)." The battle broke out on February 8, the day after Josh set the record for journalistic contempt of court, when a Wikipedian charged that the article was biased because Josh "isn't a journalist."

The entry describes Wolf as a "journalist", when his claim on that professional title is tenuous at best. Wolf is primarily an activist, not a journalist. He has no professional credentials as a journalist (his college degree is in psychology), and his journalistic experience -- such as it is -- is mostly limited to school papers, a 6-month unpaid internship with an independent weekly, and contributions to the "Haight-Ashbury Beat", a sporadically-printed neighborhood rag. Otherwise, he's really just an activist vlogger, and one with outspoken anarchist ideology, at that. Vloggers are not necessarily journalists.
It appears that the attention and support that Wolf has received thus far in the media far exceeds his merits as a journalist, much less any validity of his defense, and is primarily an expression of the contempt that many in the media and politicians on the Left have for the Bush Administration (a contempt that I happen to share) and due to their umbrage at any perceived threats to the freedom of the press. The media has made Wolf its cause celebre for its own reasons, not because of the merits of his case. I would like to see the entry reflect this view, rather than merely perpetuating the misconception that Wolf is a journalist.

Another Wikipedian, going by the name Cowicide, fought back:

that's the same insult the govt. gave Josh as well... but the Society of Professional Journalists awarded Josh with a Journalist of the Year award "for upholding the principles of a free and independent press." Also, I think it was the New York Times that referred to him as a journalist as well. Unless you have superior credentials to The Society of Professional Journalists... Wikipedia should go with them on this and not you... and certainly not the govt... I mean, if the govt. now determines who are journalists or not... maybe we should just give up on this whole "America" thing and go with straight up communism? Welp, that's not going to happen... not over my dead body anyway. Whether you like what he's investigating or not... he's still a journalist according to the experts on the subject.

To this, Wikipedian Wowaconia added:

PBS Frontline spoke to him and asked the question if a blogger is a journalist here. On a separate page they themselves called him "a freelance journalist and video blogger." at This is another example of respected journalists calling him a journalist, these people are experts at journalism and their definition of "journalist" is an expert opinion. If one wants to say that he is not a journalist they should provide references from different experts arguing that he is not or be in violation of Wikipedia:No original research.

Anson2995 wasn't impressed:

Oh come on, that's ridiculous. I'm trying to assume good faith here, but it's getting more dificult. You folks are arguing that the issue of whether Wolf is a journalist isn't in dispute. But it's *the central issue* of his case. Arguing over which "expert opinions" carry weight is pedantic, and its a disservice to both this article and the wikipedia process to present a one-sided view of the subject. It's veering towards blatant advocacy.
For what it's worth, I personally believe that Wolf is a journalist, but it doeesn't matter what I think or what the folks at PBS think, and it doesn't matter how "experts at journalism" define it. What matters for Josh is the legal definition. In the 9th Circuit's ruling, they spell this out pretty clearly: "The California Shield Law protects a 'publisher, editor, reporter, or other person connected with or employed upon a newspaper, magazine, or other periodical publication, or by a press association or wire service.' ... Wolf produced no evidence this videotape was made while he was so connected or employed." (You can read the court's ruling in full if you scroll down from this column [1] at the Huffington Post).

So in repsonse to Wowaconia, Cowicide, and others, I submit that the Court's ruling meets your request to provide a reputable source on the subject. Let's add a paragraph to the article which explains that a) there is controversy over whether or not Wolf (and people like him) are covered by laws protecting reporters and b) that many journalists have come out in support of him. But let's not simply pretend that the issue is indisputable. Even if you're the strongest supporter of Wolf, I can't believe you'd favor an article that omit discussion of the central issues of his case

Meanwhile, this particular thread spun off into another debate, entitled "What does this guy do?" One anonymous Wikipedian sniffed:

I've been hearing about this guy [Josh] being a journalist, blah blah blah, and I come to his wiki and see nothing of his work.
If his only journalistic quality is that he runs around with a camera and films stuff, then a whole lot of teenagers can be considered journalists...

...to which Cowicide shot back:

What does he do? Apparently, journalism. As I've mentioned above to Bricology, the Society of Professional Journalists awarded Josh with a Journalist of the Year award "for upholding the principles of a free and independent press." Also, I think it was the New York Times that referred to him as a journalist as well. Unless you or Bric have superior credentials to The Society of Professional Journalists... Wikipedia should go with them on this and not your baseless opinion that his "only journalistic quality" is that he "runs around with a camera", etc. BTW, I hope to God we do end up with a bunch of teenagers acting as journalists... America desperately needs them. [emphasis mine, not his]

I could go on and on with these replies, but I won't - you can read them yourself. All of this boils down to a debate among Wikipedians over who gets to decide who is a journalist: a court or the journalistic community. What they can't seem to embrace is that the answer includes both. Courts clearly have jurisdiction to decide who is a journalist when it comes to legal proceedings. We may not like their conclusions, but that's what courts do - make legal decisions based on precedence and evidence. But because press shield laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, the legal definition of who is a journalist varies with them, often contradicting each other. Does that mean Wikipedia should consider one person a journalist and another person not a journalist simply because of their home jurisdiction? Of course not.

Meanwhile, you have communities of professional journalists determining their own norms, based on their day-to-day practices. While their definitions may not hold up in court, they do dictate whom they consider to be their peers or not. And more and more traditional journalists are embracing increasing numbers of bloggers and vloggers as peers. Granted, the majority of bloggers/vloggers may not produce journalism all the time, nor define themselves as journalists, but that doesn't deny the fact that within those communities, journalism happens. (Three words for you: Fire Dog Lake.)

Many bloggers and vloggers see themselves as journalists, even if it's not in the full-time, professional, disinterested sense of the term. These are folks like you and me - well, maybe you, depending on who you are. We blog, we vlog, we participate in online communities, and sometimes, we craft journalism. It's not necessarily a matter of getting paid - some people crank out amazing journalism just because they're passionate about an issue or a community, and they earn nary a penny from it. Nor is it a matter of how much of your time you commit to doing journalism. I would surmise that less than five percent of my blog entries or videos count as journalism. Does that make me a journalist? When I'm producing journalism, yes. When I'm not, I'm something else - perhaps just a guy who posts too many videos about his daughter and his cats. Even if Josh isn't a journalist full-time, shouldn't his random acts of journalism give him that status - and legal protections - while he's engaged in those acts? Meanwhile, alternative news outlets like Oneworld.net and indymedia.org certainly produce journalism, even if they're engaged in activism in the process. So being an activist doesn't necessarily rule you out as a journalist, either.

It boils down to this: blogging, vlogging and other forms of participatory media defy the categorizations that the law - and some people within Wikipedia - use when deciding who is a journalist. It shouldn't matter if Josh is an activist, if he's engaged in the activity full-time, or if he managed to sell his video to a "real" media outlet. Vlogging is journalism by other means - and at that moment in time, he was doing a service that cannot be separated from journalism. Vloggers may not always strive to be journalists or meet the standards that professional journalists would demand of them, but that doesn't mean that you can dismiss them as being beyond the realm of journalism. The law - and some Wikipedians - just have some catching up to do. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:15 PM

Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

Occasional Musings on Internet Culture, the Media and Countless Unrelated Topics

March 31, 2007

Following Pet Food Recalls With Twitter

March 30, 2007

Now You See Him, Now You Don't

Talking Cyberbullying On The Brian Lehrer Show This Monday

How to Participate in Stop Cyberbullying Day

March 29, 2007

Using Twitter to Fight Cyberbullies

On Air with the BBC Today

March 28, 2007

Beware of Baking This Passover, Warns Israeli Pro-Pot Party

March 27, 2007

Lithuanian Parliament: Bloggers Aren't Journalists

Participate in Stop Cyberbullying Day this Friday

March 26, 2007

Disgusted

March 25, 2007

A Twitter Haiku

March 24, 2007

Springtime is Gadget Time!

March 20, 2007

Will Nokia Phone Delay Assist Network Neutrality Supporters?

March 18, 2007

Grandma's Stories: Dairy Farmers & Furriers

March 17, 2007

Introducing Dirty Diaper Diaries

March 15, 2007

How Winnie Became a Greeting Card

March 14, 2007

Doodling Over Drinks With Hugh Macleod

March 13, 2007

Transcript of my Dan Rather Interview

Highlights From My Dan Rather Interview

Podcast of My Interview with Dan Rather

March 12, 2007

Dan Rather, Yahoo Party, Dinner

Dan Rather Talks Media Concentration, Corporate Influence and Maintaining Journalistic Independence

Balancing User-Generated Content with Editorial Processes

What Should I Ask Dan Rather?

Austin City Limits!

March 11, 2007

Conversation with an Austin Waiter

Wiki Wiki Teriyaki: Restaurant 2.0

My renew orleans t-shirt

Wifi Woes and False Advertising at BarCamp Austin

Vloggers, Vloggers Everywhere

Blogging Where Speech Isn't Free

The Rise of Mommy and Daddy Blogs

Tesla Coil Rock

Armwrestlemania

Mentolicious!

March 10, 2007

Emerging Social and Technology Trends

Bill Paxton Goes to Hollywood

Fish Heads and Other Memories

Line 'Em Up!

Can Twitter Save Lives?

BBQ and Karaoke

March 9, 2007

Vlog 101 at SXSW

Goin' to SXSW

March 7, 2007

China: 113,000 Cybercafes Are More Than Enough, Apparently

France: Says "Non" to Citizen Journalists

March 6, 2007

Introducing Blog of the Nation

March 3, 2007

Grandma's Stories: The House in Chelsea; Brothers & Sisters

March 2, 2007

Sam Sheridan on the Daily Show

March 1, 2007

Josh Wolf, Wikipedia and the Debate Over Who's a Journalist

Contact Me

Subscribe via Email

Andy's Photo Blog

RSS Galore

Search

Categories

Grandma's Stories:
The House in Chelsea; Brothers & Sisters

Travelogues and
Photo Galleries