Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth: Media & Politics Archives

October 24, 2008

Sneak Preview Tour of NPR's Election Studio

I just streamed a live 15-minute tour of NPR's election studio with NPR election producer Tom Bullock. Here's an archive of the video in case you missed it:

Posted by acarvin at 1:23 PM

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June 20, 2008

Discussing Twitter, Liveblogging and Journalism at the Guardian in London

For those of you wondering why I've been quiet for the last couple of weeks, I was in London with limited Internet access (stupid US phone doesn't work there) and then moved into our new house. I'll talk about the move later, but for now I wanted to share the podcast that was recorded of the event I attended in London, hosted by The Guardian newspaper. The event was part of a two-week series of forums on the future of journalism, and it focused on how real-time publishing tools like live-blogging and Twitter are actually tools for generating conversations journalism and how to make journalism better. It's 90-minutes long, but if you're interested in the subject, it's worth a listen. You can hear it by playing the streaming media file below or downloading the podcast of the event.

Posted by acarvin at 2:14 PM

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May 23, 2008

Impromptu Interview with Jacob Soboroff of Why Tuesday?

So I was working at my desk yesterday when Weekend Edition Sunday producer Davar Ardalan suddenly appeared with Jacob Soboroff of Why Tuesday?, a nonpartisan group that produces a fascinating video blog about electoral reform. (In case you're wondering about the name, it's based on the question of why on earth U.S. elections are held on a Tuesday, when most people are stuck at work.) Jacob has been participating in Weekend Edition's Sunday Soapbox blog, which features political commentaries from video bloggers and podcasters, and he was in town for some meetings. (He's also headed to a Memorial Day clam bake at Joe Trippi's horse farm; hope he shoots some video while he's there.)

We ended up running across the street to the local Starbucks to grab a drink and enjoy the first tolerably warm temps we've had in a few days. It didn't take long for me to whip out my N95 and record an impromptu interview with Jacob about Why Tuesday? and electoral reform:

Posted by acarvin at 9:48 AM

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March 20, 2008

Lessig Launches Change Congress: Political Reform a la Creative Commons and Wikipedia

Today at the National Press Club, Professor Lawrence Lessig launched the Change Congress project. Created in conjunction with Joe Trippi, the project intends to employ the strengths of the Internet to end the impact of PACs and lobbyists on congressional policymaking. What's really fascinating about this initiative is that he's taking the lessons learned from creating the Creative Commons copyright initiative and applying it to political reform in a way that's never been done before.

In his speech, Lessig gave several examples of policy changes that should have taken place but didn't because of the influence of money, such as combating global warming or limiting the recommended allotment of sugar in our diets. These are policies that should have been no-brainers, but industry influence upended the process. He noted that when the country's forefathers talked about independence, it wasn't just about independence from Britain, but independence from improper influence as well. In that sense, he argued, their goal of achieving independence has failed.

But Lessig thinks it's still possible to remove this dependence between Congress and money once and for all. The Change Congress project will take a three-step approach to the issue.

First, he wants members of Congress and the public to go online and pledge their support for up to four different goals: no longer accepting money from lobbyists and PACs; banning earmarks; supporting public financing of campaigns; and achieving total transparency of how Congress works. Users will be able to do this in the same way you select a Creative Commons license for your website. Their website will have a form that lets you select which ones you support, and it'll generate a code you can put on your own site. This code will contain metadata driven by the semantic Web - essentially, a collection of URLs, each defining which of the policy goals you support. (update, 4:20pm: when I wrote this paragraph, the site's badge generator wasn't up and running yet, but now that it is, it seems that the code generated for users doesn't contain Semantic Web metadata yet. Update 4:37pm: I'm now told that Semantic Web metadata might be rolled into the badges very soon, possibly later this evening or tomorrow; a volunteer is working on the code and hopes they'll use it. -ac)

Embedding this code into your website, whether you're a policymaker, a candidate or a member of the public, will let them reach step number two: tracking who supports what. In the same way that search engines can pick up websites that employ different Creative Commons licenses, Change Congress will be able to pick up which sites support each of the four policy goals. They'll then be able to map out where support is strongest and where it's weakest. Then, they'll deploy crowdsourcing, just like on Wikipedia, to get an army of volunteers delving into the details to see who's just pledged support and who's actually supporting the cause in measurable ways. This information, too, will be mapped for all to see and scrutinize.

Step number three will be to employ these tools for raising money. The public will be able to make small donations - even just five or 10 dollars - to candidates that share the same policy reform beliefs as they do. This will allow for grassroots fundraising to take place, not unlike Emily's List or the Obama campaign. Taken all together, he describes his project as a "Silicon Valley approach" to policy reform.

Lessig admitted there will be naysayers, particularly those who feel there are other problems more important that reforming Congress and the flow of money. To them, he gave the example of the alcoholic. An alcoholic faces many problems - loss of family, employment, health, etc - but none of them can be solved until the underlying problem - dependence on alcohol - is addressed first. To Lessig, before we can solve all the major policy issues of our day, we must first eliminate Congress' dependence on money and outside influence. Once this can be done, the real work of implementing important policy solutions can take place. Harnessing the power of the Web and its seemingly endless community of concerned citizens, he may just be on to something here. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:42 PM

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March 12, 2008

Get My Vote: NPR's User-Generated Political Commentary Initiative

Eighteen months ago this week, I started working at NPR as senior product manager for online communities. I've spent a lot of that time working with shows on social media experiments and educating NPR staff about the role Web 2.0 can play in journalism. But I've also spent much of the last year working on a big project - one that would have NPR dive head-first into user-generated content. The project is called Get My Vote, and we've just launched a public beta of the website.

As the name suggests, the project is based around a basic premise: what will it take for political candidates to get my vote? Every person has their own reasons for selecting a particular candidate, their own litmus tests, and we're asking the public to articulate this in the form of open letters to the candidates. Using Get My Vote, you can upload your own commentary - audio, video or text - and talk about what issues or concerns will drive you to the ballot box. NPR is then planning to incorporate these commentaries into our shows throughout the rest of the election cycle.

We've also designed the project in such a way that local stations - both NPR and PBS stations - can create their own Get My Vote initiatives on their websites by embedding Get My Vote widgets. That way, a station can localize the project. A station in Arizona, for example, might create a local version of Get My Vote focusing on immigration perspectives, while a station in Massachusetts might challenge users talk about what it would take for local mayoral candidates to get their vote. So while most users might end up talking about the presidential candidates, I'm hoping it's used for state and local races as well.

On the Get My Vote homepage, you'll see that we're using a tag cloud prominently. These tags are submitted by users when they upload their commentaries. For example, a commentary from an Iraq war vet about healthcare for vets might include tags like "Iraq," "healthcare" and "Walter Reed." The more often a particular tag is used by commentators, the larger it appears in the tag cloud. That way, you can get a sense of what topics and ideas are being referenced most often by commentators. Clicking any tag also will show you all commentaries associated with that word or phrase.

We've also ensured that the commentaries are embeddable on other websites and social networks - a first for an NPR project. There's an embed code available for commentaries that you can grab and place in your website. You can also click an option to post on another blog or network, giving you a list of more than 20 sites where you can upload your own Get My Vote commentary, or someone else's. For example, here's a video featuring Texas musician and author Kinky Friedman talking about the death penalty:

Speaking of Kinky, you'll notice that some of the videos in the site have been produced by NPR staff. That's mainly because we didn't want to launch a site that was devoid of any commentaries, so we put together a few just to get things going. Soon enough, I expect the number of user-generated commentaries to far surpass the numbers of commentaries we've produced for the site.

The site is now in public beta. This means that anyone can now access the site, upload their own commentaries and explore the site in general, but we're still working out a few bugs and other minor fixes. We're hoping that if you have any problems with the site you'll alert us through the contact form. Over the next few weeks we'll continue to tweak the site, and soon after that, we expect some of our shows to begin using it on air.

So when you get a chance, please visit npr.org/getmyvote, upload your own commentary and please let us know what you think. Our team is really eager to hear what you have to say. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:51 AM

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March 5, 2008

Let's Play Stump Speech Bingo!

Having watched the presidential candidates give stump speeches a gazillion times, it didn't take long for me to start recognizing certain phrases. On Twitter, several of us even began to joke about having drinking games every time McCain said "my friends" or Obama said "hopemonger," for example. So it occurred it me it would be fun to create some kind of game for spotting all the catch phrases they use in their stump speeches again and again. So I came up with Stump Speech Bingo. I tracked down some code that would allow me to generate random bingo cards, which I then populated with stock phrases used by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Here's an example of a randomly generated John McCain bingo card:

Since my blog isn't printer friendly, you won't want to print out this page. So I created a new page that would generate random bingo cards for each candidate:

Game rules: Before a candidate begins a speech, have each player print out their own copy of the candidate's bingo card. (It'll generate a new random bingo card when you reload the page.) Then, as the candidate uses stock phrases from his or her stump speech, look for them on your card. If you find a match in one of the boxes on your card, mark off that box. The box marked "BINGO" is a freebie that you can mark off immediately. As soon as you get five across or diagonally, call out "stump speech bingo!" and you'll be the winner. (If you're playing via Twitter, simply tweet the message to your friends.) If you have any questions about the game or would like to suggest other stock phrases from candidates' stump speeches, please post a comment here or email me at andycarvin _at_ yahoo DOT com. I'm also hoping to create special editions to be used at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions - stay tuned! And special thanks to Karl Geiger for making the source code of his bingo card generator available on his website. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:48 PM

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February 8, 2008

Amy Winehouse and Media Concentration:
Why Going Back to Black in the US Radio Market Ain't Easy

This morning I was listening to a story on NPR's Morning Edition by Rob Gifford talking about British soul singer Amy Winehouse, who is nominated for more Grammy awards this year than any other female artist. The bulk of the story focused on how Winehouse and her runaway hit album, Back to Black, has paved the way for new wave of young women songwriters with a decidedly retro outlook, harkening back to the glory days of Motown. But then it took a twist I wasn't expecting: the impact of media concentration on musical diversity and the US racial divide.

I'll let Gifford pick it up from here:

What's perhaps most noticeable about the new young women singers is the crossover in styles and influences: blues, jazz, soul, folk, even Celtic rhythms.
Author and broadcaster Paul Gambaccini, who has spent 30 years covering the British music scene, says this is partly because of the diversity in what gets played on the radio in Britain, compared with often centrally programmed stations in the United States.

"In the States, it has been possible, with narrow casting and formatization, to only hear the kind of music you know you like," he says. "The result of this is that in American music, the tendency has been for white music to get whiter, and African-American music to get more ghetto. The point is that in Britain, where there is no such formatization of music, you can have an Amy Winehouse singing 'Back to Black' and nobody thinks you shouldn't be doing this."

It's not the first time I've heard someone make the argument that media concentration in the US commercial radio market negatively impacts the range of music you can here in your community. If I had a nickel for every time I heard the same damn song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers or 311 on DC's local rock stations, I might not get rich, but I probably could use it to buy a satellite radio receiver and tune them out for good. But it's been a while since I've heard anyone say in such direct terms that media concentration is contributing directly to a racial/cultural divide in the US.

What do you think? Does Paul Gambaccini's interpretation of the impact of media concentration have merit? If Amy Winehouse had been born in New London, CT rather than London, England, would the Clear Channels of the world prevented her from going back to black?

Posted by acarvin at 8:47 AM

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February 5, 2008

Super Tuesday Election Returns, Courtesy of Google

Posted by acarvin at 2:40 PM

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Following Super Tuesday Results on Twitter

Tonight's going to be a busy night for Twitter users, with more than 20 states voting in the biggest Super Tuesday primary in US history. Twitter use has spiked during major election events, like debates and the Iowa caucuses, so tonight should be even crazier. Thankfully, the folks who run Twitter just moved their servers to a new ISP, so hopefully they'll withstand the crush of tweets once the first polls close at 7pm ET tonight.

If you're interested in joining in on the fun, I'll be tweeting from NPR headquarters into the wee hours of the morning, monitoring the results with the rest of the NPR.org Super Tuesday team. I'll be posting official precinct results, as well as whenever NPR makes the call for a particular primary using nprnewsblog, while I'll use my acarvin Twitter account for more general observances. I've set also up a Twitter account called SuperTweetday. All Twitter users are invited to reply @SuperTweetday to share stories about what's happening locally in their voting precinct at the polling stations, as well as observations on the results. These posts will then be automatically to the SuperTweetday account, so if you follow it, you'll receive everyone else's comments.

Meanwhile, you should check out Twitter accounts Supertuesday, which is already covering election activities now that the polls are open, and IVoted, which invites people to tweet their votes @IVoted to share them with other users.

It's gonna be a fun night. Hold on to your hats, and keep your fingers crossed that the system doesn't come crashing down.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:46 AM

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February 4, 2008

Attention Political Podcasters: Wanna Contribute to NPR's Weekend Edition?

Yesterday, NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday put out a call for political podcasters - audio podcasters as well as vloggers - under the age of 30 to serve as contributors to the show. They're looking for young people from across the political spectrum to participate. Here's the announcement that went out on air, drafted by yours truly:

Are you a podcaster under 30 who's passionate about Election 2008? Weekend Edition Sunday wants to hear from you!
We want a diverse group of podcasters to tell us how the election is playing out in their areas. Tell us why you'd be a good choice.

Send us an e-mail with details about yourself and your interest in the election. Please put "WESUN Podcaster" in the subject line. Be sure to include links to your previous podcast work.

Once we figure out which podcasters will be contributors to the show, our plan is to set up a blog that will serve as the home base for their stories through the rest of the election cycle. They'll also be airing some of the podcasts as on-air commentaries as well. So if you're a young podcaster with insights on Election 2008, please send us some samples of your work and audition for the project. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:12 AM

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January 26, 2008

A Charge to Keep, A Horse to Steal

On this week's broadcast of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me they opened the show with what I thought was a joke about a painting owned by President Bush. But it wasn't a joke.

Here's the story. For years, President Bush has owned a painting he's referred to as "A Charge to Keep," in reference to the Methodist hymn by Charles Wesley. Here's a picture of the painting:

According to Bush, the picture shows a man on horseback trailed by a group of followers - in other words, a Methodist evangelist spreading the Good News across the American West with his flock. The painting has been so influential on Bush he's even used it as a name for one of his books.

White House commentator David Gergen wrote about the painting and its symbolism in a 2003 article:

As Bush recalls in his memoir of the same title, he then sent a memorandum to his staff: "When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves."
Bush's personal identification with the painting, which now hangs in the Oval Office, reveals a good deal about his sense of himself as a political leader--who he thinks he is, the role he plays, and the centrality of his religious faith. But the way we respond also reveals a good deal about us, his intended followers, and about the effectiveness of his leadership style.

His followers today tend to see in Bush what he sees in the painting: a brave, daring leader riding fearlessly into the unknown, striking out against unseen enemies, pulling his team behind him, seeking, in the words of Wesley's hymn, "to do my Master's will." They see him as a straight shooter and a straight talker. They take comfort in his religious faith and think he is leading us toward a mountaintop.

His critics can look at the same painting and see something very different: a lone, arrogant cowboy plunging recklessly ahead, paying little heed to danger, looking neither left nor right, listening to no voice other than his own. They think he is careless, even deceptive, and often says one thing while doing another. That he believes he is doing the Lord's work only increases their apprehension. He's not taking us up a mountain, they fear, but over a cliff. Indeed, some believe he is the most dangerous president in a century or more.

It turns out, though, that the story behind the painting isn't exactly correct. In his new book on the Bush White House, Jacob Weisberg conducted research on the painting's provenance.

[Bush] came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.

Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled "The Slipper Tongue," published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: "Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught."

You can't make this stuff up. Read more in Slate and the Carpetbagger Report. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:13 PM

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January 15, 2008

Widget Fest: CPB Grant to Foster Public Broadcasting Collaboration & User Engagement for Election 2008

Earlier today, NPR and its partners announced that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is awarding more than $1.3 million dollars to a consortium of public media organizations to expand our coverage of election 2008 across multiple platforms. The consortium, led by NPR and including American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Capitol News Connection, KQED, PBS, PRX, PRI/Public Interactive and The NewsHour, will work together to produce election-related content and interactive tools available to the entire public broadcasting system.

"By pooling content produced locally and nationally -- for radio, television, and online -- we will discover new ways of doing business to better serve the public," said NPR CEO Ken Stern in a note that went out today to the public radio system. "We are pleased to have succeeded in coming together to deliver on the commitments made at the 2007 Annual Meeting."

"This grant underscores CPB's support of innovative projects that move public radio and television into the digital future so they can help individuals better connect with their communities wherever they are," added Pat Harrison, CPB President and CEO. "This ambitious project will provide us with new ways of looking at how we serve the public on existing and emerging media platforms."

The basic premise of the project was built around a simple reality - many public broadcasters were planning to create on air content and interactive modules for their websites, but we didn't have a structure in place to work together during the election cycle. Around a year ago, NPR and PBS began conversations around editorial partnerships for the election, including the creation of an interactive map that would work on both of our websites, as well as on the TV show NewsHour. While that conversation was taking place, I co-organized a group discussion at the February 2007 Integrated Media Association conference for public broadcasters to talk about the Election 2008 social media plans and how those activities might be replicable across the system.

The conversation kicked into high gear at NPR's annual meeting last April, where you may recall I blogged about some of the ideas that were brewing among those of us present at the event. We organized breakout conversation in which we laid out what was at stake and how we might collaborate. It didn't take long to realize that we had an opportunity that might quickly slip through our fingers if we couldn't get our act together. We needed to pull together a SWAT team and get to work.

At the encouragement of CPB, we organized a May meeting at NPR laying out all the possible ways we might collaborate, and get that SWAT team going to pull together a plan. By the end of July, we submitted our plan to CPB, which today has been christened with this $1.36 million grant.

So what exactly are we doing? For one thing, we're going to take all of the cool online election activities we've got planned for 2008 and we're going to make them available as widgets, including:

An interactive election map from NPR and The NewsHour;
Localizable news modules from Public Radio International's Public Interactive;
A curated collection of election audio and social media content from PRX;
Election-related video from PBS;
An archive of broadcast materials covering New York-based presidential candidates from WNYC;
A collaborative content initiative entitled "Global Perspectives on Election 2008" from PRI;
User-generated political commentaries curated by NPR;
Capitol News Connection's interactive 'Ask Your Lawmaker' widget, enabling citizens to directly question their lawmakers and listen to answers obtained by CNC journalists;
Election simulations and thought-provoking interactive activities from American Public Media and KQED.

Some of these tools, like the NPR/NewsHour map and CNC's Ask Your Lawmaker widget, are all ready up and running. Others, such as NPR's user-generated political commentaries project, will be launching in the coming months. (You have no idea how excited I'm am about this one. We're working like gangbusters to get this puppy launched - more soon.) In each case, the projects will exist wherever they originally resided, but they'll have widgets, too, so stations can take these tools and localize them for their own uses. Some of the projects, like our user-generated commentaries, will be embeddable on blogs or wherever else you'd want to place them.

Meanwhile, underlying all of these projects will be an experimental social network - a "knowledge network" for public media entities to share election resources and data, find tutorials and best practices for utilizing these tools and other social media activities, and coordinate their election coverage. It's basically an extranet for PBS and NPR stations, along with other public media partners. Last but not least, PBS will be creating curricular materials for some of these online modules so they can be used in classroom settings.

I am so glad to see this project announced publicly. I've been working on this for the better part of the last nine months, and it's so gratifying to see so many entities across the public media system coming together to improve our election coverage, while providing the public with interactive tools to help them make a more informed decision when going into the ballot box. This year is going to be a total blast. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 6:19 PM

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January 10, 2008

The Potential Impact of Polls and Punditry on the New Hampshire Primary

sign, Exeter, NH Like pretty much everyone else, I totally blew it. Before the voting wrapped up in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, I posted a note on Twitter predicting that Barack Obama would beat Hillary Clinton by 10 points. Talk about missing the mark. (I nailed the GOP race, though, calling it for McCain over Romney by five points, but who's counting.)

At least I was in good company, as pretty much every pundit, professional and otherwise, predicted an Obama blowout. And they based that assumption on the polls. These polls leading up to the primary were generally consistent, showing Obama leading Clinton by double digits. Yet in the end, Clinton beat Obama by three points. So for more than 48 hours now, the media has spent an inordinate of time analyzing what went wrong with the polls.

On the one hand, there's the issue of margin of error; when you hear a talking head on TV saying "So-and-so leads the other candidates by a seven-point margin," they don't always follow it up by noting that the poll had a margin of error of four points, making that seven-point lead more like a three-point one.

On the other hand, we can't forget that this is New Hampshire, a place that places much pride in helping kick off what's perhaps the our ritual of civic engagement. Some New Hampshire voters consider the casting of their ballot as a strategic decision, in which they vote for a candidate whose inclusion makes for a better race, if not a winning one.

Jon Greenberg, executive editor of New Hampshire Public Radio, believes that a certain percentage of New Hampshire voters, particularly women voters, decided to vote in a particular way directly because of the wide margin in the polls.

"My thesis is simple," Greenberg told me earlier today. "The polls gave many women a tangible sense of what primary night might be. They didn't like that picture and acted to change it. Put another way, the polls, which we think of as describing reality, became a factor that changed the outcome. Ordinarily, I would not think this possible but never before have we had a primary with a strong, entirely credible, female contender. There are two elements of the NH primary that I think play a key role in explaining the outcome.

"In the traditional framework of the NH Democratic primary, Clinton was not just a woman candidate, but an establishment candidate," he continued. "If you know the work of Dante Scala, the establishment candidate always has the edge with working class voters. In Dante's typology, it is part of the definition of that sort of contender. In that light, Clinton's edge among those voters was typical.

"The other factor that is peculiar to NH is that NH voters can be much more strategic than voters elsewhere. I don't want to exaggerate this, but I don't think you can see the NH electorate during a primary as using the same decision rules as voters elsewhere. There is a systemic difference for some appreciable portion of the population - at least 10% and possibly more. They game the system.

"My theory is that you take these two conditions and throw in gender politics in a way that's never existed before in a presidential race and it's plausible that the polls themselves generated a groundswell reaction among women - and Clinton's edge over Obama would reflect that - that ultimately altered the outcome."

In particular, Greenberg takes note of the voting results from the southeastern portion of the state, and the so-called gender gap. "In terms of polling data, I'd point to the 12-13% margin among women that Clinton had over Obama. She enjoyed equally great margins with lower income and less educated voters but as I said, that's typical of establishment candidates. Less precise but intriguing data comes from the town by town breakdown. Clinton won in the southeastern quadrant of the state where you have many towns with above average household incomes. It's just my guess, but I don't think it was the lower income folks in those towns that put her over the top. I think it was the women."

And then there is the growing number of stories from the voters themselves. Greenberg has spent the better part of the last year involved in Primary Place Online, a community media initiative in which New Hampshire Public Radio created a website for residents of the town of Exeter to publish their thoughts on the election in the months leading up to the primary. Greenberg has examined posts from local women voters on the site, some of who have noted how the polls changed the way they and their friends ended up voting.

One post from a user going by the name Alewife comments on how she's begun to hear from other people who changed their votes due to the wide margin in the polls. "It's noon and I have already met three people who were undeclared voters who chose to vote for McCain so that Romney would not win, but wish now they had voted for Obama," she wrote on the site the day after the primary. "They thought, BECAUSE OF THE POLLS that Obama had it locked up over Clinton." Another commenter replied to her remark by adding, "I have also heard Obama supporters say that because Obama was doing so well IN THE POLLS, they used their vote 'strategically' elsewhere, namely to vote for McCain because they hate Mitt Romney so much."

Another user going by the name MMF explained in great detail how she shifted from being a Clinton supporter to a Richardson fan, then settling as a Clinton voter at the last minute:

Richardson was here on election eve and he was fantastic. I agree squarely with him on almost every issue. I was persuaded to vote for him and keep him in the race too. But then, a student of mine told me of these last polls putting Obama ten points ahead of Clinton. The news confirmed this even yesterday morning. Ultimately, I think it's more important to keep Clinton in the race than Richardson. These polls made me think Clinton might really need my vote and voting for Richardson would help Obama to a big win. That sealed the deal for me. I walked downtown and voted for Clinton.

Another woman named Bricci described how she was one of those voters who didn't make up her mind until the very end:

I myself saw all the candidates speak and studied all the issues that I felt were pertinent. After doing all this I decided to endorse the person most suited for the position of leading our country and that was Christopher Dodd. My second choice was Joe Biden (can anyone see where this is going)? So after the Iowa caucus I was at a loss. I read and reread everything I could get my hands on. I went and saw senator Edwards, governor Richardson and John Mccain. Still as I entered that booth and the curtain closed I was not sure what circle to darken with the sharpie. Taking a deep breath, I filled in the oval next to Hillary Clinton's name. After all the rhetoric, all the speeches, all the reading, I voted with my heart and instincts.

"Are they just anecdotes?" Greenberg asks rhetorically. "Sure, but I think they are relevant." And he's right: three or four examples don't exactly make an empirical data sample. Yet their stories are informative nonetheless.

Assuming there's a connection between the media playing up the wide margin in the polls and some voters changing their mind about how they planned to vote, it raises questions as to what responsibility, if any, the media should have when it comes to how they report their polling results. In some ways, the New Hampshire primary results almost seem like the journalistic equivalent of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, working in combination with the so-called Observer Effect. With the Uncertainty Principle, the more accurately you try to measure the position of a particle, the less precisely you can measure its movement. And in the case of the Observer Effect, the very act of attempting to observe something causes an inadvertent interaction with it, thus leading to an unintended change in its behavior. In this case, the media tried to offer as accurate an assessment as possible regarding potential voting behavior. And by touting both their findings and the consistency of those findings, again and again, they may have directly impacted voter behavior when they punched their ballots.

"The media will continue to pay for polls and they will continue to report the results," Greenberg added. "However, I do think the media have an obligation to present polls more carefully. If I were to make any suggestion for the media, it would be to break the rule of putting the lead of the story first. If the elements that show the uncertainty of the poll were presented first - for example, 45% of voters say they have yet to make up their minds and no difference smaller than 8% should be taken seriously - and the simple comparison numbers were presented second, it might lead the audience to see the polls more realistically. I have a hunch that if the media did something like this, they could effectively encourage the public to treat all polls as hazy shadows of reality rather than as accurate representations of what's really there."

It's certainly an interesting theory. What do you think? -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:03 PM

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November 21, 2007

Four Ways to Participate in NPR's Democratic Presidential Debate

Mark your calendars: On Tuesday, December 4 at 2pm ET, NPR and Iowa Public Radio will jointly host a Democratic candidate presidential debate in Des Moines. The event will be a first for the current election cycle, as it will be an audio-only debate - just the candidates in a two-hour conversation with NPR moderators, and not a TV camera in sight. It should make for an interesting discussion.

Meanwhile, there are four ways you can get involved in the debate:

Propose a question. Our debate moderators want to hear from you and find out what kinds of questions you'd like to see asked of the candidates. In particular, NPR is interested in hearing your best thinking regarding some of today's hot-button topics, including immigration, the environment, Iran and Iraq, China and healthcare, among others. And if you'd rather pitch a question on an issue that you think isn't being discussed much, you can do that too. You can also comment on any of the questions proposed by other people.

Blog from the debate. If you're a blogger who can figure out a way to get to Des Moines for December 4, please feel free to request media credentials for the debate. NPR hopes to have some bloggers participating at the event, liveblogging the debate and interviewing people in the spin room afterwards. Of course, you're more than welcome to liveblog it from anywhere else, but if you can get to Des Moines, it's an amazing experience to observe the spin room first-hand.

Discuss the debate as it happens. NPR news blogger Tom Regan will be liveblogging the debate as it plays out, along with a group of NPR reporters who will work to fact-check claims of the candidates. You can dive right in to the scrum by posting your own punditry in the blog's comment threads. Or, if you're a blogger, create a post of your own and tag it nprdebate so Tom and others can follow the conversation.

Mash it up! Following the debate, NPR will post the audio online. If there's anything creative you want to do with it, go for it, as we won't be placing any licensing restrictions on how it can be used. Again, it'd be great if you could tag anything you do with it nprdebate - I'm sure I and others will be eager to check it out.

I'm not sure when the Republican debate will be - they were shooting for the same week but the candidates had scheduling conflicts. Hopefully it'll be sorted out soon. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 7:28 PM

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October 28, 2007

Martin Luther King III on Blogging, the Media and the Jena 6 Protests

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Martin Luther King III talks about the role that African American bloggers and media outlets, particularly urban radio stations, played in raising the profile of the Jena 6 defendants, leading to the massive protests that took place last month in Jena, LA.

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Tags: bloggers | civil rights | Jena 6 | Martin Luther King III | protests

Posted by acarvin at 10:30 PM

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Martin Luther King III Discusses Media Ownership

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On October 24th, IFOCOS and United Press International hosted a conference about journalism, activism and social media. Among the guest speakers was Martin Luther King III, son of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and a veteran civil rights activist in his own right. During the Q&A, MLK III talked about how ordinary Americans are generous and very willing to offer assistance during times of crisis such as Hurricane Katrina, but the media often allows important stories to fall away from public consciousness, impacting the public's attention on the crisis. He continued by expressing concern regarding the impact of media concentration and cross-ownership at the local level, but the moderator then steered the conversation in another direction. So when the moderator opened the Q&A to the audience, I asked MLK III if he would like to elaborate on media ownership and its effects on the quality of local journalism. In this video, you'll see both his initial comments on media concentration, followed up by his answer to my question. -andy

Formats available: mp4, iPod, mobile

Posted by acarvin at 6:48 PM

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October 22, 2007

Questions I'd Ask Mitt Romney

Michael Arrington of Techcrunch is going to be interviewing presidential candidate Mitt Romney later this week and he's asking for your help. Michael's looking for questions he can ask Romney, and he's open to engaging the candidate on issues related to education technology and the digital divide.

Here are the questions I've thrown into the ring:

- Do you support the federal E-Rate program, the initiative that subsidizes Internet access in low-income schools and libraries? Why or why not?

- No Child Left Behind mandates that all students must be "technologically literate" by the eighth grade but doesn't expand on the subject. In your mind, what technology skills should every eighth grader possess, and why?

- The U.S. continues to struggle when it comes to producing enough college graduates who major in disciplines related to science, technology, engineering or math. What reforms would you make in K-12 education in order to increase the number of students who go on to college to study these disciplines?

- What do you think of MIT's so-called $100 laptop? Do you see it offering any benefit to US students?

- Congress is currently considering legislation that would block access to online social networks at schools and libraries that accept federal E-Rate funding. Do you think this legislation would help protect kids against online threats, or does it undermine educators' abilities to use the Internet creatively in their classrooms?

- How do you personally define the term "digital divide"? Do you believe there is still a digital divide in this country? Would you use that term to describe it, if you were president? What would you do as president to alleviate it?

If you've got any questions of your own, feel free to post them on Techcrunch . You're more than welcome to share them here, too, but I can't guarantee that Arrington will read my blog with much frequency. :-)

Posted by acarvin at 10:26 AM

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October 10, 2007

Jay Rosen's Six Lessons from NewAssignment.net

Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.net is talking about some of the lessons learned from their first networked journalism experiment with Wired News, which focused on trends in crowdsourcing. He said there were six lessons, but he threw in a seventh for good measure.

1. Division of labor is key in distributed reporting projects. You need to think about what task, and what size of task, you expect people to do.

2. You have to get the motivations right. If you don't understand participants' motivations, you can't figure out how to define the work.

3. Watch for rising coordination costs. More users=more costs, ie answering questions, giving out instructions, etc. You can get your project run into the ground by succeeding with lots of people.

4. If I go off and do something for you, now I have to come back and give you that data. When this happens, people need to see how their contribution fits into the puzzle.

5. Share background knowledge. The more background they have, the easier it'll be to find data that's significant.

6. Existing communities already know how to interact and work. They're better than starting from scratch.

7. The one percent rule - only about one percent of users will actively get involved in creating content, while 10 percent might be involved in peripheral activities like commenting.

Posted by acarvin at 12:03 PM

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It's Your Newsroom

Dan Barkin of the News & Observer is on stage at the Networked Journalism Summit talking about Your Newsroom, a collaborative news space for North Carolina residence. They've basically handed over the editorial reins to the public, so users can submit their own content relevant to the local community. Photos seem to be a big hit, and they're highlighted prominently at the top of the page. You can also submit your own event listings, blog posts and discussion forums. I remember when the News & Observer was one of the most innovative online newspapers back in the mid-90s, but frankly I lost track of what they've been doing more recently, so I'm looking forward to digging into Your Newsroom to see what they've been doing lately.

Tags: citizen journalism | netj | News & Observer | Your Newsroom

Posted by acarvin at 9:31 AM

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At the Networked Journalism Summit

Today I'm in New York to participate in the Networked Journalism Summit. The day-long event is focused on collaborative journalistic activities in which professional journalists work with members of the public. This would include forms of citizen journalism, as well as Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.net. There are almost 200 people in attendance.

I'll try to blog about the event later. I'll also be posting on Twitter, so be sure to check that out as well. -andy

Tags: citizen journalism | Jeff Jarvis | netj | networked journalism

Posted by acarvin at 9:21 AM

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August 28, 2007

Behind the Scenes at NPR: the Talk of the Nation White Board

IMG_2560, originally uploaded by Blog of the Nation.

I was pleasantly surprised this afternoon when I saw that Talk of the Nation had posted a photo of their "board" on Flickr. For those of you who've never visited NPR, each of our shows utilize a white board to display what's on tap for each day of the week. Text written in a black marker identifies a specific program segment, or "slug." To the right of each slug, you'll see the initials of the producer that's handling that segment. Any name written in blue represents a confirmed guest, while the red text adjacent to each name identifies the time they'll be on air, and their physical location, such as NPR West in Los Angeles or in studio 3A with host Neal Conan here in DC.They also blogged about today's show, in case you're looking for more details on each topic listed in the photo.

What's really cool about this photo is that it gives you access to the same daily summary that the rest of us see at NPR headquarters, whether you go to the show's offices or look it up on our Intranet. (Actually, the automatic photos of each white board displayed on the Intranet - the "boardcams," as they're known - are generally a heck of a lot harder to make out than this particular photo.) I'm not sure if my friends at TOTN are planning to do this on a regular basis, but I hope they do. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 1:51 PM

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August 2, 2007

Journalist Shield Legislation Amended to Cover Only Commercial Bloggers

The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee yesterday approved an amended version of HR 2102, also known as the Free Flow of Information Act. The purpose of the legislation is to create a federal shield for journalists so they could not be compelled to reveal their sources except in extreme cases, such as emergent national security situations and the like. Advocates of bloggers had fought hard to extend the bill's coverage to the blogosphere, but the amendment passed yesterday might not please everyone who might feel they should be covered.

The bill defines journalism as "gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public." By this definition, many bloggers could easily argue that they, too, would be covered if the bill were signed into law. The intention of this language was to get away from the notion that journalism is solely an occupation in which one works for a media entity of some sort, has an editor, etc. Instead, it defines journalism in terms of actions rather than as an occupational status.

Yesterday's voice vote, though, complicates matters a bit for some bloggers. The Bush administration, as well as some members of Congress, expressed concerns that the bill's original language could be used to create an enormous loophole for people engaging in criminal behavior. For example, someone who participated in a crime or assisted a criminal could point to a hastily crafted blog and claim that they were researching a story to obfuscate the fact they were engaging in a criminal enterprise or obstructing the law.

As a compromise, members of Congress decided to refine the definition of who would be covered as a journalist. To be covered, you would have to derive "financial gain or livelihood" from your journalistic activities. In other words, if you could prove that you use your blog to generate income, you would qualify as practicing journalism and thus fall under the shield law. But if you published a blog without any financial benefit, you wouldn't be covered by the law.

I'm not surprised that Congress would offer this up as a compromise. But I also won't be surprised if some advocates of citizen journalism take this compromise as exclusionary, since it favors those bloggers who are in a position - or make the decision - to blog commercially. I would surmise that the vast majority of bloggers make no income from their activities. Granted, many of these same folks would never consider themselves as engaging in acts of journalism, but where does that leave those who do? I know many bloggers who choose to keep their blogs advertising-free so they don't appear to have any conflicts of interest. Does this make their acts of journalism less deserving of protection than those who decide to make money off their blogging activities?

I keep wondering how this provision would apply to me, for example. I wear a variety of blogging hats. I get paid by PBS for my contributions to learning.now, for example, but I don't derive any income from my personal blog. And while not all of my writings on my personal blog qualify as journalism, other posts certainly do. Would I not be covered by this legislation regarding any acts of journalism I conduct for my personal blog?

More generally, will this bill lead to a wave of bloggers adding advertising to their blogs just to be covered? And if all it takes is for a person to derive some income from their blog, even if it's paltry, won't that mean the loophole hasn't really been closed?

This is definitely gonna be an interesting debate. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 7:29 AM

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July 23, 2007

Michael Moore Visits NPR

Michael Moore and the Ladies of TOTN, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Documentary maker and all-around provocateur Michael Moore came by NPR's DC studios today for an interview on Talk of the Nation. The show invited me to shoot some video of him and take some pictures, too. This pic shows Moore posing with executive producer Sue Goodwin (top left) and other members of the TOTN crew. (I just love the grin on Barrie Hardymon's face in the center of the photo.)

Moore was at the studio with two of his assistants for about 30 minutes. I got to hang out with them and Sue Goodwin in the green room prior to the on-air interview. While I'd hoped to shoot some casual footage of everyone hanging out, Moore requested I didn't. "Look at me," he said, slouching on the couch. "Seven weeks straight of this - exhausted." He was very nice about it, though, and I didn't want to start things on the wrong foot. So I put the cameras down until Barrie and the others came in to introduce themselves and pose for few quick pictures with him, which he was happy to do at that point.

In between, we all talked about all sorts of things, including the upcoming 40th anniversary of Who drummer Keith Moon crashing his car into the Flint, Michigan Holiday Inn swimming pool. Moore asked me if I'd seen Sicko yet, and I convinced I hadn't, explaining I was waiting for it to play at our local theatre as a matinee for those of us who have to bring screaming infants along with us. "I know what that's all about," he said, telling a story of all the evil eyes he and his wife would get when they'd bring their baby girl to DC's Uptown Theatre in Cleveland Park, when they couldn't afford to pay a baby sitter for the night.

When the time came for him to go on-air, I took off my shoes and followed him into the studio. Since I'd be moving around while shooting video of him, I didn't want my shoes to make any noise while I walked around the studio. Thankfully, the 20-minute interview passed without any major incidents. No one mention Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and I didn't accidentally collide into any furniture.

Once it was over, Moore said his goodbyes to the production team, signed an autograph for an intern, then headed out to another studio for an interview with News & Notes.

Right now I'm still exporting the footage I shot. I'll let you know when it's ready for viewing. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 4:43 PM

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July 18, 2007

Presenting at the JFK Presidential Library

Tomorrow morning I'll be heading to the airport at the crack of dawn for a quick daytrip to Boston. I'll be giving a speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on the impact of Web 2.0 and social media on journalism, particularly coverage of election 2008. Here's a draft of the powerpoint presentation I plan to share with the audience. I wish I could stay longer, particularly because the Open Society Institute is convening a forum on youth media in Cambridge, with some of my favorite people and thinkers, including Ethan Zuckerman, Dina Mehta, Jennifer Corriero and Danah Boyd. Unfortunately, as soon as my speech is done, I need to bury my head in proposal writing and related meetings. Such is life.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 7:43 PM

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July 1, 2007

Waiting in Spin Alley

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Following the Democratic presidential debate at Howard University, the candidates and their proxies were expected to visit "spin alley," where hundreds of journalists were assembled to take their questions. Until the candidates showed up, though, spin alley is nothing more than a really crowded waiting room.

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Posted by acarvin at 7:15 PM

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June 28, 2007

You'll Get No Smokes from PBS, Thank You Very Much

One thing I've noticed while hanging out with the media posse here at the presidential debate is that the media center is healthier than the last time I attended a debate. Way back in 1992 I talked my way into a press pass for the third general election debate between Clinton, Bush Sr. and Perot at Michigan State University. The media center isn't that much different in terms of desk space, lots of coffee, fax machines, etc, but there's one thing that's missing.

Free cigarettes.

Now mind you, I don't smoke, nor did I smoke back in '92, but at that first debate, I couldn't help but notice the table of free swag from Philip Morris. You see, they were one of the main sponsors of that debate, and along the side of the media center room they set up a table with free stuff for the journalists. And the two things I remember the most were the packs of free cigarettes and the bowls full of Kraft carmel chews. The chews lasted the night; the cigarettes did not.

Thankfully, the good people at PBS are clearly looking out for our teeth and our lungs. At most, I'll go home somewhat caffeinated and full of protein (grilled chicken and salmon for dinner). And if anyone here wants to smoke, by God, they'll have to supply their own habit. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:52 PM

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June 25, 2007

Supreme Court Rules Against "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" Kid

This morning, the US Supreme Court ruled 5-4 against an Alaska high school student who unfurled a banner with the words "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" across the street from campus as the Olympic torch relay took place. The student, Joseph Frederick, claimed the message was intended as nonsensical, but that didn't stop his school principal from suspending him. Today, the highest court in the land agreed with the principal's decision.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said that even though the action took place off-campus, the school was justified in suspending Frederick because he was displaying what could only be interpreted as a pro-drug message. "The message on Frederick's banner is cryptic," Roberts wrote. "But Principal Morse thought the banner would be interpreted by those viewing it as promoting illegal drug use, and that interpretation is plainly a reasonable one." -andy

UPDATE: I've posted an in-depth analysis of the ruling on my PBS blog. The majority opinion basically says that the school could punish the student because the student's actions took place at a school-sanctioned event, even though it was off-campus, and that his speech condoned illegal drug use. Based on the ruling, I make the argument that schools that block student access to blogs and social networks would have a hard time using the ruling in their favor, since blocking access is basically the opposite of sanctioning these websites. In contrast, schools that allow access to social networks in an educational context might be able to argue that drug-related student content, even if it takes place off-campus, is punishable, because the websites were indeed sanctioned.

Posted by acarvin at 10:53 AM

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June 22, 2007

Ask a Presidential Candidate

If you had a chance to put a question to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or any of the other Democratic presidential candidates, what would you ask them? If something comes to mind, please tell my NPR colleague Michel Martin. She's one of the moderators at next week's Democratic presidential debate at Howard University on June 28th. I suggested to her that she ask the public for potential questions on her blog and she took up the challenge:

Yours truly will be one of the questioners at the PBS-sponsored presidential debate next week at Howard University.
We want your questions. Do you have one...or three?

We are particularly interested in key domestic and international concerns that have NOT been showcased in the other debates.

What's on your mind? We'll be asking every day from now until next THURSDAY, June 28.

So if you've got a potential question for the candidates, please post it on Michel's blog. (You're welcome to post it on my blog as well, but be sure to post it on hers as well, since I can't guarantee she'll read it here.)

Speaking of next week's debate, I'll be blogging from the event, thanks to my colleagues at PBS, who are sponsoring the debate. PBS is now working with the Media Bloggers Association to credential bloggers who want to cover the event. I'll probably be in the media center with everyone else, but hopefully I can snag some time with some of the candidates or their proxies in the post-debate chaos of the spin room. This will be my second presidential debate - I covered the last of the three general election debates that took place between Bill Clinton, Bush Sr. and Ross Perot in 1992. I'm really looking forward to the debate, so please check out the blog on the evening of Thursday, June 28th to get the skinny on what's taking place there. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:39 AM

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June 19, 2007

Ask a Technocrat

Later this week in Geneva, the International Telecommunications Union will be hosting a high-level UN conference on digital content delivery and the future of the Internet. Thomas Crampton of the International Herald Tribune will moderate a panel this Friday on the role international organizations should play in a world of converging media. His panel will feature leadership from entities such as WIPO, UNESCO, the ITU, the EU parliament and the European Broadcasting Union.

Thomas has put out a request for bloggers to submit questions for the panelists. If you'd like to offer your two cents, you can post your questions in the discussion thread on his blog.

Don't think you have any questions? Think a little harder. These folks are playing a major role in issues ranging from bridging the digital divide to who controls intellectual property on the Internet. I'm sure we can come up with some good questions, right? -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:03 AM

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June 13, 2007

Josh Wolf on The Colbert Report

Video blogger Josh Wolf was on The Colbert Report yesterday talking about the reasons he spent 228 days in jail on contempt charges for refusing to turn over footage he shot at a public protest. Colbert argues with Josh about whether he should be considered a member of the press, among other topics. -ac

Posted by acarvin at 12:52 PM

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June 12, 2007

Nobody Expects the American Inquisition!

Wish I'd come up with this... -andy

Hat tip: Tom Regan

Posted by acarvin at 12:30 PM

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June 8, 2007

Change.org: Using Social Networking to Raise Money For and Against Politicians

This week I had the chance to chat with Ben Rattray, co-founder and CEO of Change.org, one of the most interesting up-and-coming social networks on the Internet. They're using social media tools to bring together like-minded people to raise money on issues they care about. And thanks to a recent relaunch of the site, users can now work together like an informal political action committee (PAC), targeting their collective donations to support - or unseat - politicians.

Originally, change.org was set up to allow you to band together with like-minded people and raise money for causes, like pooling together money for a targeted donation to an organization specializing in malaria eradication or supporting public broadcasting. With the relaunch of the website, change.org lets you connect with people to give money to politicians to influence specific policymaking.

For example, let's say you want to work with other citizens to tell politicians you favor network neutrality on the Internet. (There's already a change.org group working on that goal.) Prior to the relaunch of the site, that group could raise money for nonprofits representing this particular interest, like Free Press. Now, though, users can actually target their giving to specific politicians, or against politicians that oppose their viewpoint. Supporting specific politicians is straightforward. First, you identify who the politician is and manage an online campaign to raise the money. Then change.org sends that politician a check with a letter saying that the money is on behalf of a group of citizens, showing who gave what and why.

More interesting, though, is that the site lets you give money against politicians. Continuing with the example of network neutrality, supporters of are often critical of Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska because of his stance on the issue. Change.org lets users target their money to Stevens' eventual Democratic opponent in the next election, even if that person hasn't been selected yet. Until his opponent is nominated, change.org will hold the money in escrow. At that point in time, a check gets cut for the candidate opposing him. And if your group identifies any politicians opposing your policy - in this particular example, Sen. Stevens - they too will receive a letter saying that X number of dollars have been raised for their opponent because of their position on that policy.

Ben explained that influencing politicians doesn't necessarily take hundreds of thousands of dollars. "Spend just 10 or 20 thousand - or just threatening to spend it - is usually sufficient to shut them up," he said. "It may seem counterintuitive, but it works as out countervailing force."

Because Change.org allows users to behave like a PAC, it raises questions as to whether they would be held to the same financing rules. Ben noted that his website is simply working as a vehicle for people to organize and transmit money that they would otherwise give as individuals, so users aren't forming actual PACs in the literal - and legal - sense of the term. This made me wonder whether he was concerned there would be a political backlash of some sort, with people arguing the website lets people get around current campaign financing rules. "I think that could be the most interesting outcome we could get," he said, laughing. Howeer, they've designed the features on the site with current campaign financing laws taken into account. "We're playing in the game that's available," he continued. "these are the rules."

When you look at the site, Change.org appears to be dominated by causes that one might describe as left-of-center. So I asked Ben if the site had any partisan aspirations. "We are agnostic and people could provide whatever content they please," he said. "Right now, the name [Change.org] may turn off some conservatives.... But lots of Republicans want change as well. But the left is often an early adopter of social media, if you look at MoveOn and that kind of stuff. Though conservatives are catching up."

"What we're trying to do," he said, "is doing [political giving] in transformative ways, changing the world of philanthropy and politics - literally. The system is very broken.... The experience of giving is not the rich experience it can be. It's not that it's hard to give - it's actually really damn easy. The problem is that it's not engaging. You want to get people more engaged in social issues, participating in the process."

Taking the conversation in a different direction, I asked how Change.org might interface with other social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace. "We're about to launch our facebook app soon," he said, without committing to a specific date. "It'll basically be a build of our entire app. Facebook apps have become truly transformational - forward-looking. If you take Facebook at their word, it's not a platform for little features, but full-fledged applications. We want to be the nonprofit, political social activism feature in Facebook. Not an add-on, but a seamless experience."

"Myspace has a limitation in that it has a more distinct culture," he continued, "while Facebook gets used more openly, for a broader variety of activities." Having said that, he wouldn't rule out integrating with them if the opportunity became available.

Ben also described a new widget-based tool they plan to launch in a few weeks. The widget could be embedded in any website, from a personal blog to a politically-focused online community. Users would type in their phone number into the widget. The widget would then activate a call to your phone, then connect you to your member of Congress. That way, the widget could be used to facilitate contacts with members on Capitol Hill in connection to whatever political cause you assign to the widget. Meanwhile, the widget tracks the number of calls generated to each member of Congress, so the people running the campaign can get a sense of how much the public is using it to make their voices heard.

Despite the fact that Change.org is designed as a social network, Ben doesn't see it replacing online political sites. "It's not about replicating the political communities on the Web. It's about translating the passion of the people on those sites into real political power."

"I don't want to diminish what [Daily] Kos has done," he continued, "but the translation [of online discussion into political influence] is clearly limited. If you get 500,000 uniques a day, and then raise around $1 million. That's not a lot of money, in terms of conversion of readers to donors. If I want to donate, I have to go there, then go to a third-party site.... And I don't have a profile of my political influence. So we're building a suite of widgets to empower bloggers and blogging communities to more efficiently translate their passion into real political power."

"We're not about fundraising," Ben reiterated. "Giving to politicians is not exciting. People want to change the world, stop global warming, undercut the influence of the NRA, whatever you issue might be."

"People want to be a part of a community who come together, engage, and have collective decision-making" to impact the political process through donations, he said. "It's really unexciting to give 25 bucks to your local politician. It's hard to give to a single politician. We've transformed that into, 'I'm giving to save network neutrality.' It's an important psychological shift - not about getting someone elected, but getting my personal issue taking seriously." -andy

Posted by acarvin at 1:58 PM

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May 18, 2007

MySpace: Balancing Business with Democracy

Eli Pariser of MoveOn: While it may make sense from a business perspective for MySpace to not allow embedded videos from competitors like Revver, it doesn't make sense from a democracy perspective.

Jeff Berman responds: This is a democratic platform and it needs to be, but democracies have rules. YouTube was built upon MySpace, and we generally don't block them. But Revver monetizes their videos at our expense, though, and that's problematic for MySpace.

Tags: MySpace | PDF2007 | Revver

Posted by acarvin at 2:07 PM

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Steve Urquhart: The Extremes of Politics are Rotting Our Core

Utah State Representative Steve Urquhart, founder of the political wiki Politicopia, spoke about the reasons he created his site, which allows the public to collaborate on debating and crafting policy. Some notes:

"The extremes dominate the political process and the core is rotting," he said. The extremes have the money and the rock star status. Solutions evade us because this is at odds with democracy. "Democracy requires comprise - and that takes place in the middle, not on the extremes." The bulk of Americans get discouraged and disgusted because they're disenfranchised by the extremes. People of good will enter the system and get eaten alive. Imagine if everyone in this conference took over power in government. Within two years we'd be doing the same thing people in power do today. So it's not a matter of changing people - it's about changing the system.

So at first I launched a blog, then a wiki called Politicopia.com. I put up issues pages, as can anyone else, and we debate issues facing the Utah legislature. On one issue, the argument brought things to the right; on another one, to the left. But in both cases, the discussion moderated the policy outcome. What I want politicopia to become is some networking function, so it's easier for people to talk directly to each other.

"We need to engage the smart mob in the middle, not the fringes."

Tags: collaboration | partisanship | Politicopia | politics | wiki

Posted by acarvin at 2:00 PM

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Previewing the Next Edition of Tom Friedman's The World is Flat

Tom Friedman returned to the stage to read excerpts from three new chapters he's adding to the next edition of his runaway best seller, The World is Flat. I took some notes, though struggled a bit to keep up with his fast-paced reading. -andy

Here's a quick sampler of the new chapters I'm adding to the next edition of The World is Flat. The personal computer, the Internet and workflow software is allowing people to create, share and collaborate in ways that have truly made the world flat. I see it wherever I go.

The first chapter I've added is "IF it's not happening, it's because you're not doing it." I came into the office, turned on my PC and got 5000 emails with the same complaint. A group in Canada called A Dog and 10,000 Dollars had organized it. What do I have to do to make them go away?

Okay, this isn't true, but this happens to CEOs every day. The Internet lets even the smallest groups organize their activism and expose multinationals. If it has merit, they can get these companies to change behavior or beg for mercy. And the praise these companies win when they do the right thing has real benefit.

A few years ago, TXU announced they would create some more energy plants, which would pollute the environment, and they'd do it anyway. So stoptxu.com was formed, creating a national constituency against their plans. All of those efforts paid off when a buyout group offered to buy TXU. But they didn't want to fight the environments, so they invited the protestors to work with them and figure out a way to make the deal climate-friendly. The world's biggest buyout rode on the approval of the only two people at the table who had no money at the table - the environmentalists.

I asked a lobbyist about this. She said: "We were operating under the old rules and the rules changed, but no one bothered to put up a sign."

The people changing the world are online activists, environmentalists, biz school students with a green soul. They have a burning desire to make a difference, and that the flattening of the world makes this possible more than ever before. So I would tell today's people, if it's not happening, it's because you're not doing it.

Next chapter: I traveled the world and looked at social entrepreneurship. "What happens when we all have dogs' hearing?" I flew to France and Germany. I was met by a driver, a young guy of African descent, taking to himself in French through a Bluetooth headset phone. He picked me up and kept talking. He had a movie playing while we drove, and he kept talking on his phone. I was trying to write on my laptop and could barely concentrate, so I put on my ipod, while he drove and talked on his phone. We were together for an hour, doing six different things, but we never talked to each other. He probably had a lot to tell me. A friend of mine at Le Monde said, "I guess the era of foreign correspondents quoting taxi drivers is over."

Tech can make the far feel near, but it can make the near feel far. He might have been talking to parents in Africa, but we didn't talk at all just a few feet from each other. We're so accessible we're inaccessible, another friend has told me.

Before going to Paris I was in San Fran, and a guy w/ the ipod almost got hit by a car driven by a women talking on a cell. The first postmodern news story.

These are downsides. No, I don't mean terrorist websites. You and me, our strangers and friends, and how it's affecting our interactions, dividing us. These tools also interrupt us more than ever before, coarsening our language and discourse. What happens when we can all upload our own content and read what everyone is reading about each of us. Suddenly we can all hear everything about us. What happens when we all have dogs' hearing?

Millions of people are producing content. If you're a public figure, chances are someone is blogging about you. Just check google or technorati. In 2003, there were 60 million references to The World is Flat. Some are praiseworthy, others vitriolic. I don't check it anymore. What happens when all of your neighbors or students have blogs? How thick is your skin? We all become public figures, fair game, newsworthy. What if they upload embarrassing pics of you. What if you dropped some dishes, breaking them, and your neighbors blog that you had a fight with your wife?

School officials see myspace as a real problem. An assistant principal is suing a family because their myspace page suggested she was gay. The students set up a page in her name, said she was gay though she wasn't, then had other students commenting abusive things. Now she's suing the kids and the parents because they weren't supervising the kids. The police determined the computers used were in the home. This is just the beginning of what happens when we get another billion people on the Web.

In the old days, you had to be a moviestar to worry about what was said about you in the National Inquirer. Now we all need to be thinking about our own bad press. Though the Inquirer often crossed the line, they were a company that could be held accountable. Now fast forward. We're all potential journalists and paparazzi, yet lacking the lawyers to protect us. Once it hits the web, it goes worldwide. The dialogue is also two-way and multi-dimensional.

I spent a lot of time in the Mideast. There, often the less benign sides of the flat world that get circulated. I did a film for Discovery, and I was in an Indonesian medressah, interviewing students. I asked them who they supported. A woman stood up. "We don't like Bush, we'd like to vote for Gore, but he's Jewish." But he's not Jewish. "Yes, he is. No. "Yes." Where do you get your news? "From Arab websites."

The rumor about Jews being warned about 9-11 isn't taken seriously here but it's considered fact in many parts of the world. The Internet makes rumors more believable to people. "I read it on the Internet." Like that should settle it. I like to warn people about the Net: "Judgment not included."

One last point: a third chapter. When the world is flat, whatever can be done, will be done - but will it be done by you or to you? In my travels I've seen amazing business models. We were in Peru in June, and our guide told us about a friend who sold dishware on the Internet near Cusco. But he's thinking about having his dishes made in China. And he needs to do it before his neighbor does it. Then I went to Budapest for an event, and a taxi driver told me, if you ever come back, please tell people about my driving service - just go to my website. It showed his entire fleet, his area covered, and it was in three languages, with music. James Baker once said you know you're no longer in power because your limo is yellow and the driver speaks Farsi. And the world is flat when your taxi driver has a website.

The most competition going forward is gonna be between you and your own imagination. Your ability to act upon it has never been more powerful and important. What people imagine - what individuals imagine - not governments or companies. I'm positive about America today. Washington is brain dead - beeeeeeeeeeeeeep - but the country is really alive, particularly in education and energy. Because we have a free market system in those areas. They say China will own the 21st century. Not so fast. We may not dominate, but we won't lose by default either. Like my grandma told me, "Tommy, remember. Never cede the century to a country that censors Google." Thank you very much.

Posted by acarvin at 11:29 AM

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Thomas L. Friedman Interviews Eric Schmidt of Google

For the last hour or so, Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times has been interviewing Google president Eric Schmidt, and taking questions from the audience. Here are my notes, the vast majority of which are not verbatim quotes, so please don't treat them as such. -andy

Tom: I'm Tom Friedman, from the Flat World. As a newspaper reader, it seems like google is in the news every day. Where are you guys going? What is the new, new thing for google, and what is the macro frame around it?

Eric: The news this week, of course, is that we're integrating our search works into a common set of answers called universal search. People wanted to be able to ask the right question and get the right answer in one place, not in separate search tools.

Tom: Some people say the Net is the dialtone of the 21st century, and that access should be free and a right, that it's essential to how we think and collaborate.

Eric: I don't know if it's as important as healthcare, but it almost is. If you don't have access, you really don't have access to the modern world. There's hope, though. Unlike other industries... we live in a world of rapid tech improvement and deflation in prices, thanks to Moore's law. It's improving by a factor of 10 every five years. A lot of the things we're talking about now, weren't broadly available five years ago. Prices are falling, fiber is spreading, wireless is opening up.

Tom: Is there a Moore's law for search?

Eric: Most people would call it the network effect, with more people putting knowledge in and adding value to it. An easy way to understand it, is that you can use a personal version of google, and we can tailor your results based on your interests. Ten years from now, it might say, good morning, you're like, like you're always late. Like it can mimic the way you think.

Tom: Right now people in the room are searching and creating content.

Eric: It's like a google meeting - no one is paying attention. (laughs)

Tom: My motto is that I want to see all 10 fingers on the table.

Eric: It's a battle we've lost. And it's a permanent change.

Tom: What's the political impact of this instant access, and to author content, and globalize content?

Eric: let's talk negatives first. A very small group can analyze the foibles, mistakes and errors that happen in life and exploit them. I can't imagine you're perfect. Our politicians aren't, and if they make a single make, they get excoriated, because someone is trying to take them down. As for the positives, most people understand it in terms of before and after tv. Once politicians are in front of a camera, their personality changes. The same thing might occur with personalized media. People want a specialized message, so a politician might have to record 50 different greetings so users get personalized responses. As for loftier goals, people who care about truth can use the medium to fact check. We need a truth detector. It's easy to have a compendium of every word and deed. But it could also be used to identify truth and lies. It also means people will be skeptical in believing something the first time they hear it, because they're getting bombarded from so many angles.

Education will have to change, and students will be taught to confirm their biases, learn the truth - learn how to search and navigate.

Tom: A friend of mine has a book coming out about how you live your life. It'll be more important now because life is so transparent. Bush couldn't get elected if he were in Yale now with a profile on MySpace.

Eric: And what of Tom Friedman? (laughs)

Tom: Now, potential bosses can google you, find your facebook site, etc. How do you at google handle it?

Eric: At the age of 21, I think it should be okay to change your name. Anything you do before that can go away unless there's a court order. (laughs)

We're developing a lifetime of memories that not everyone would want to know. As you get older you understand your actions are consequential. My daughter calls this too much sharing at a young age. We're beginning to see a backlash in schools. Kids want friends, and expose themselves too much to fit in... The other consequence is that people are always in the media. Everyone has a phone with a camera. You're all, if you will, digital agents of photography. If there's an accident outside, you'd all be able to document it. It can all be online and searched. So you then have another problem - info that was once hard to get to is now easy to find, and stuff people try to hide gets out there. It's a matter of living with a historical record, and people are going to be more careful of how they talk to each other, and what they offer of themselves.

Tom: You and I knew each other when the world was round. How does life change now that you're a public figure?

Eric: One scenario is that we could all adopt a lifestyle of Paris Hilton. Every hour being completely in the media, and it doesn't matter what people say about you. Most public figures are affected by what's said about them, and sometimes what's said is false. We tend to find stories where there are not, and an isolated incident happens a couple of times, and people conclude those incidents define your entire being, even if the info about those incidents are sketchy. And once biases are set in peoples' minds, they're hard to unset. Once you have a view of Bush or Clinton, you don't change your mind. It's called confirmation bias. Everything you hear gets interpreted to support your pre-existing viewpoint.

Tom: In the Bahrain election, they were using Google Earth to take pictures on what was going on behind the walls of property owned by the ruling family. It became a big issue as people learned about it. What happens if a king somewhere says to google, "Your google earth is a national security threat." How do you handle it?

Eric: On a case by case basis. In Bahrain, we one that one. Kings and other leaders need political support, and they will respond to political pressure. In Bahrain, when they shut google earth, there was such a backlash, they had to turn it on again. And the backlash made it a bigger deal than if they'd just let it be. Unless the censorship has a moral basis, or is a huge invasion of personal privacy, most people will say, Why can we see this pictures? Google earth has brought a third dimension of information to people. Unless you fly a lot, you don't get to see the world from above, and it's pretty phenomenal.

More recently, the Thai govt blocked YouTube because of content that lampooned the king and the government. Google agreed that the content related to the king should be blocked because it was a clear violation of local law, but the other videos were political speech and were kept online.

Tom: And what about China?

Eric: Let me explain a little bit about how the Chinese structure work. There's something that's often called the Great Firewall, and it prevents some info from entering China. To enter the country, we had to be subject to their media laws, and there are a specific set of terms involving political expression. It's perhaps the hardest question we've had to face, the most difficult one. So we decided to enter the country, and if we decide to omit some result - about one out of 10,000 searches - we tell the user that the content was blocked. And you can imagine what they do next- they find away to go around the firewall and access it. So far, that structure hasn't broken yet. The arrival of the Net in China is changing politics - around 140 million Internet users there. You have to believe that the arrival of broad access to info has to be good for the evolution of the eventual state of democratic China.

Tom: should Google be a regulated utility?

Eric: There are plenty of governments globally trying to regulate us, trying to manage access to knowledge, and we certainly wouldn't encourage it. The company faces many of the issues we're talking about now. Two years ago, these weren't top of list. I wasn't as familiar with the legal structures in all of these countries. Now we're trying to do that, trying to be more transparent. And if you don't like what we're doing, you don't have to use it. We then purchased youtube and use it much as we can to document what we're doing. Smart people will try to learn what we're doing and then criticize us, which is healthy.

Tom: What did you learn from youtube:

Eric: We knew what we were getting into, but we're learning the incredible complexity of the media world: rights, production management, etc. It can slow down decisionmaking. People can get much more upset about a video than just words - it has a stronger impact. If I told you presidential candidate spend X to have his hair blown dry, it's one thing, but a video would change it. Or when Senator Allen said Macaca on video, it might have been a component in what happened to him. Youtube is different than what happened in TV. The average person watches a few videos, and curates their own. It's not programmed by professionals. It's user-programmed. Some day mobile phones might have an upload to youtube button so your life gets uploaded there instantly. And highly important info can be delivered to a community quickly.

Tom: So if I wanted to get hired by Google, how do you do it?

Eric: We have hundreds of recruiters globally. Though you and I could just have a direct conversation.

Innovation is the greatest strength of America. The Net is the best platform now for people to innovate. And the cost of innovating has gone down dramatically, so the barrier to becoming an entrepreneur is low. On the Net, all avenues get tried, and the best ones will often succeed.

Jeff Jarvis: I cover the election and YouTube on Prezvid.com. What should candidates be doing?

Eric: We've got YouChoose, where we're highlighting their videos. One of the Democratic presidential debates will also be on youtube, which I'm proud to announce, and I'm hoping we'll do one for the Republicans as well.

Andrew Rasiej: Candidates don't always seem authentic on youtube.

Eric: It's a generational shift. Perhaps the next generation of candidates will be more comfortable with it. Online video tends to need more humor, excitement, perkier, for it to be effective. People lose interest when they see a long monotone on their screen.

Q: What about the military's blocking of sites like Youtube and Myspace?

Eric: We would prefer that they not. (laughter) People are pretty good at deciding how to spend their time, so we're not in favor having access limited.

Steve Pederson: About personalized search... You want to provide the most relevant results, but at what point do you worry it could be used to provide info based solely on your political view and doesn't challenge their world view?

Eric: I think that's why we need to invest more in education. As a company we're not going to make a value judgment on how to search. I would hope that people would know not to have a narrow point of view. People who are searching are learning, and learning is always part of a good life.

Posted by acarvin at 9:59 AM

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Google Announces Democratic Presidential Debate on Youtube

Jeff Jarvis asked Google president Eric Schmidt about what the presidential candidates should be doing on YouTube. Schmidt used the opportunity to announce that YouTube will host a presidential debate among the Democratic presidential candidates and hopes to do the same with Republican candidates. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:51 AM

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Lessig: Fair Use is "The Right to Hire a Lawyer"

Jeff Jarvis just mentioned to Larry Lessig that when he asked Fox News about whether they'd release their debates for public use, he was told they considered the debates under fair use. Jarvis asked if bloggers could feel safe with this.

"Fair use means years of litigation," Lessig replied. "It's nothing more than the right to hire a lawyer." He said he's been a supporter of fair use all his life, but when it comes to the presidential debates, debate organizers should just release it and make the rights known as clearly as possible, whether in the form of Creative Commons or the public domain. "Just make them open.... Not by reforming copyright law. But by saying, "For this [content], we release this." That way, he said, no one has the shadow of copyright litigation hanging over their head. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:01 AM

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At the Personal Democracy Forum

Right now I'm at the 2007 Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan. The annual event focuses on the role of Web 2.0 in politics, so it's no surprise it's practically standing room only here at the auditorium at Pace University. Larry Lessig is giving the opening keynote right now, talking about the importance of media outlets releasing recordings of the debates for public use. (Glad NPR went public prior to his speech.) It's an amazing group of people here; Jeff Jarvis and Steve Garfield are obscuring my view of Lessig, and so far I've spotted Danah Boyd, Esther Dyson, Lee Ranie and even Will Richardson, whom oddly I've never met in person before.

This should be a fascinating event. Coming up are Thomas Friedman, Eric Schmidt of Google, Seth Godin, Arianna Huffington and Yochai Benkler - and that's just the morning session. I'll do my best to liveblog what I can. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:40 AM

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NPR to Release Debate Recordings in the Public Domain

Good news - NPR and Iowa Public Radio have decided to release the recordings of our upcoming presidential primary debates in the public domain, so they may be used by anyone. We're scheduled to co-host a pair of debates in January of next year, and now the public will have full access to the broadcast so they can share it or do mashups with it. Jeff Jarvis has more details on PrezVid. I'm really thrilled that NPR is so supportive of the idea. From my perspective, organizing a presidential debate is an important civic duty, and making the results available to all truly serves the public interest.

I'm all smiles this morning.

-andy

Tags: debates | election | Iowa Public Radio | NPR | public domain

Posted by acarvin at 8:15 AM

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April 24, 2007

How Can Public Broadcasting Make a Real Difference in Election 2008?

Today is the second day of the NPR annual membership meeting, and yesterday afternoon I got to facilitate a group discussion on how public broadcasting should use social media tools to engage the public during the 2008 election cycle. Following the meeting I wrote up some notes while riding on the train home, in order to prep for a summary presentation to the whole group this morning. I wanted to share these notes, which I've cleaned up to make them more readable, to help catalyze a broader conversation on the subject.

First of all, it's not a matter of talking about using social media just to improve our election coverage. Yes, we need to improve our technological capacities to create and share high-quality content about the election - no doubt about it. But we need to take it a step further. Several steps further.

It's about using our capacities as broadcasters, journalists and community conveners to facilitate a more participatory democracy. Creating an enabling environment for civil, civic discourse - achieving consensus whenever possible, but remaining respectful of each other's beliefs and values when we can't. Providing tools where we can work in conjunction with the public to help everyone make their vote - and our journalistic coverage - as informed as possible. Curating knowledge and data about issues and candidates so the public can hold candidates accountable before and after the election.

No matter what we do, we need to remember the election is about all of us, so all of us should have an opportunity to participate in public debate. An informed citizenry isn't achieved through lecturing to them, or only giving them a choice of partisan talking heads as the sole perspectives on a given issue. It's achieved by creating an ongoing, thoughtful conversation not beholden to soundbytes. To paraphrase Dan Gillmor, the public knows more about what's at stake than any single institution within public broadcasting ever could, and we need their help to make this conversation happen.

We must not neglect undeserved audiences - on the contrary, we should embrace them, providing platforms for participation, including activities on air, online, and on location. The voices in public radio and within the Web 2.0 world need to reflect the diversity of constituents who will be pulling the lever in November 2008. Whether it's young people or the elderly, chronic nonvoters, people of color, people with disabilities, people with limited Internet access or tech skills, etc, we must strive to give all stakeholders a stronger voice - one that political candidates recognize, respect and take seriously. Our work is to serve the public interest through public media - and what can serve the public interest more than strengthening our democracy by creating new, sustainable opportunities for all people to have their say?

We should strive towards common branding of all public broadcasting election activities. Common branding will allow us to connect the dots, from a rural station organizing an on-air debate for county commissioner candidates, to countrywide social media projects coordinated at the national level.

We need to recognize the challenge of encouraging local innovation while embracing national coordination, and strive to reconcile this paradox. It's a matter of fact that local initiatives will often utilize different social media tools. It will be difficult, if not impossible, to dictate to everyone that they need to use Gather.com, they need to use Public Interactive, they need to use some tool created by NPR, etc. Multiple tools will probably be used no matter what, so we must promote open standards for aggregating content - consistent tagging protocols at the station level, heavy use of RSS to pull content together, distributed content modules that can exist simultaneously on local and national websites, etc - to allow all us to mix and mashup these resources so they can surface at the local and national level. Simultaneously, we should explore open, distributed tools for social networking, such as Explode and Elgg, as a way of creating a more seamless, transparent social media experience. For example, if New Hampshire Public Radio organizes an e-debate, residents in Spokane or Sarasota shouldn't have to jump through hoops if they want to participate. IF NPR hosts an online discussion, ideally that discussion could be reflected on station websites, allowing the public multiple points of entry. Again, dictating a single platform for all activities is probably impossible, but promoting open standards and principles of implementation to give the public better online right-of-way will make things a lot more productive.

What are some examples of some projects that could take place during the election cycle? Here are some I've been batting around.

This I Demand. Create a social networking tool that allows the public to speak truth to power and spell out why they're going to vote, and what they expect of their elected officials. A place where people can share and discuss what they demand of their policymakers. I believe this idea came up in February while eating Indian food with Dave Winer and others from Harvard's Berkman Center, but I could be wrong. If someone remembers where I first started talking about this and with whom, please let me know. :-)

A national video clearinghouse of candidate statements. Inspired by Dan Gillmor's work in California during the last election cycle, the idea would be to create a framework in which members of the public would capture candidates' statements on video every time they appear publicly. The goal isn't to capture macaca-like moments, but to get everything the candidates say on the record. Participants would then volunteer to transcribe and tag content based on the policy issues discussed, creating a distributed video database of candidates' positions. And for those who are elected, the archive could be used to gauge whether they've kept to their positions or not.

Community mediamaker partnerships. Every public tv and radio station in the country should invite local bloggers, podcasters and vloggers over for beer and pizza. Seriously. There are countless members of the public creating smart, insightful content about the election, both locally and nationally, and we could work with them so their voices are heard beyond the blogosphere, while new voices are also injected into the conversation.

Town hall meetings with local ethnic press. Not all of this can occur online or on air. What can we do on location? Events like town hall meetings are useful, but we need to reach out to new audiences. And that often means going directly to them rather than waiting for them to come to us. For example, many communities have a strong ethnic press, either offline or online. What partnership opportunities exist between them and public broadcasting? What other community-based orgs would be well suited for working with us and creating local dialogue that's meaningful and productive?

More mobcasting! I've been arguing for two years now we need better open source tools that make it possible for people without Internet access to listen to and create podcasts simply by using a telephone. There are commercial tools and open source systems like Asterix that can do this, but should make it easier for any station to do. The election provides us with an excellent opportunity to make this happen.

Things we need to coordinate local and national social media projects:

An election 2.0 toolkit - evolving collection of best practices and tools to help stations unfamiliar with Web 2.0 to experiment at the local level. This might also include recommended approaches for creating social media projects, common editorial principles and copyright principles for user content (Creative Commons, etc), how to involve users in moderation/curation, etc. The toolkit would exist and develop online but be portable so any station could have it in hand when they need it. It would emphasize turnkey tools with low barriers to entry, including open source tools.

An election 2.0 clearinghouse and knowledge sharing network. We need a way to keep track of who's doing what in public broadcasting related to the election. We need better tools that would track projects, tools, who's partnering with whom, discussions for coordinating activities, etc. It would serves as an enabler of initiatives, partnerships, help us avoid reinventing the wheel. We'll also have to figure out how content gets shared as well, local-2-national, national-2-local and local-2-local. That's a probably a dissertation in its own right, let alone a humble paragraph in a blog entry.

A public broadcasting election 2.0 strike force. The truth of the matter is that there isn't enough time to form a committee and create a white paper on what we might want to do, then report back in six months. Or even three months. With each week that passes, we fall further behind. And we can't think of this as a one-off taskforce that comes up with a plan, then walks away while expecting someone else to implement it. We need an Election 2.0 SWAT team, a strike force that can literally pull together the vision in a matter of weeks, not months, then evolve into the team that pulls it off over the next 18 months. A small group of people from across the system tasked to lay out the details, building upon the ideas many of us have been working on, in conjunction with new ideas from the system and the public. This team needs to be able to dedicate their time fully to this cause, while having the standing within the system to achieve a critical mass of consensus - then implement it, asap.

Again, time is running out, and the stakes are high. This is an opportunity to public broadcasting to shine. We can't do it on our own, and we can't do it without public involvement. It's their civic duty, but it's ours as well. It's about all of us. Public broadcasters, community partners and the public working together. Our voice, our vote. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:33 PM

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April 12, 2007

Lost in Cyberspace?

"I've got a teenage kid in my neighborhood that can go get 'em for them."

- Sen. Patrick Leahy, in response to White House claims that emails related to the firing of those federal prosecutors have been lost and cannot be retrieved for congressional review.

Tags: Alberto Gonzales | email | Patrick Leahy

Posted by acarvin at 2:10 PM

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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

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February 5, 2007

Bush 2008 Budget Would Cut NTIA Funds in Half?

President Bush has just released his proposed fiscal 2008 budget, and I can just tell all of you are just drooling to get your hands on it. It's not exactly great bedtime reading - okay, maybe it is depending on your bedtime goals - but if you want to get a sense of the president's spending priorities, there's nothing like going straight to the horse's balance sheet.

From what's been published on the Whitehouse website so far, one thing stands out from my perspective as an observer of things technology-related. If you take a look at the section regarding the Department of Commerce, it's hard to find a mention of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). They're the folks that advise the president on telecom policy issues, from spectrum management to US competitiveness in the technology sector. The NTIA was also home to the Technology Opportunity Program (TOP), which awarded grants on digital divide initiatives, and they still manage the Public Telecommunications Facility Program (PTFP), which helps public broadcasting cover the cost of its infrastructure.

If you look at the budget text related to the Department of Commerce, the NTIA is only mentioned once, and it's in the section that lists the line items for each division of the department. In this document, NTIA would get only $19 million, down from the $40 million appropriated to it in FY 2006.

Since the year 2000, there's been a back-and-forth fight with Congress over NTIA's budget, as has been charted by the Federation of American Scientists:

Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2000: $ 72.3 million
Appropriated by Congress: $ 52.9 million
Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2001: $ 423.0 million
Appropriated by Congress: $100.4 million
Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2002:$ 73.0 million
Appropriated by Congress: $ 73.0 million
Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2003: $ 44.0 million
Appropriated by Congress: $ 73.6 million
Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2004: $ 25.4 million
Appropriated by Congress: $ 51.1 million
Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2005: $ 27.6 million
Appropriated by Congress: $ 38.7 million
Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2006: $ 23.5 million
Appropriated by Congress: $40 million

Given all the flak the White House has gotten from critics about US telecom infrastructure and competitiveness slipping further and further behind much of the rest of the developed world, I was surprised by the line item drop for NTIA. In contrast, just two weeks ago, Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and Ted Stevens (R-AK) introduced a bill that would give the NTIA some direction on how to spend more than one billion dollars appropriated to them for emergency communications measures around the US. (Yes, the NTIA does that too.) Meanwhile, the White House offers the same agency $19 million.

Is there more money out there somewhere in another budget document that I'm missing? No doubt the new Congress will have some interesting opinions on the matter. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:26 PM

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January 26, 2007

Name That NPR Show!

As some of you may know, I've been working on a project at NPR called Rough Cuts, in which we're using a blog and podcast to invite the public to preview a new radio show that we're designing and help us develop it. So far the feedback has been tremendous, with over 400 comments posted to the site this month. Now we're asking for your help on a related matter: we need a name for this new show.

Michel Martin, the host of the unnamed show, describes it like this:

We don't have a name yet. We really want one. Just a little name. A name all our own. Is that too much to ask?
It's not like we haven't been trying. We have. But we haven't been able to come up with one that satisfies us, and perhaps more important, our legal department (it can't already belong to another radio show, for example). A group of us is having a meeting on Monday, when Marie and I return from Los Angeles, to brainstorm some more.

But then the obvious thought occurred. Why not ask you?

This is not really a contest because there is no prize -- but you can best believe that if we pick your name I will take you out to dinner if you get yourself to Washington. And we'll put your picture on the Web site. Fair enough?

Sounds like a pretty cool offer to me. But time is ticking away - we're having that naming meeting on Monday, so you have between now and then to suggest a name. One suggestion: be sure to listen to some of the podcasts first so you can get the gist of what we're doing, then maybe the name will write itself. We can only hope. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:28 PM

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January 22, 2007

DOPA's First Hatchling Begins to Crack Its Shell

It didn't take long for at least one member of Congress to reintroduce legislation aimed at further restricting Internet access at schools and libraries. As reported by ZDNet and Linda Braun of the ALA, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska has introduced what they describe as "identical language" to DOPA, the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006. If DOPA had become law, it would have forced schools and libraries receiving E-Rate subsidies to block access to commercial interactive services, including online social networks and blogging tools. But the bill expired when the Dems took over Congress.

Stevens re-introduced the bill the first day of the new session, and he added some new twists to it, according to ZDNet:

Stevens didn't stop there, packaging his reincarnation of DOPA with another failed proposal that would require all sexually explicit sites to be labeled as such, according to a copy of the bill obtained by CNET News.com. Although it has encountered opposition from civil libertarians, the idea gained bipartisan support within Congress, passing unanimously as an amendment to a massive communications bill that ultimately died.

From what I can tell, DOPA Jr. doesn't have a title yet, nor any cosponsors, though it's referenced as Senate Bill 49, or S. 49. The Library of Congress hasn't posted the text of the bill yet, but it has this brief summary:

Title: A bill to amend the Communications Act of 1934 to prevent the carriage of child pornography by video service providers, to protect children from online predators, and to restrict the sale or purchase of children's personal information in interstate commerce.

I'll blog about it as soon as I hear more. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 4:31 PM

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January 17, 2007

New Report Dissects Impact of Web 2.0 on Election 2006

The good folks at the Pew Internet Project have come out with a report analyzing how the public used the Internet and other media during the 2006 election cycle. While the percentage of Americans relying on newspapers and magazines for political coverage declined dramatically over the last decade - from 60% to 34% for newspapers and from 11% to 2% for magazines - the percentage of Americans relying on the Internet grew from 3% to 15%. (Radio remained stable, hovering at around 17%.)

Altogether, nearly half of all Internet users, or 31% of the general population, say they went online to gather political information and exchange it via email. This group, which Pew refers to "campaign Internet users," adds up to 60 million Americans. Nearly one-quarter of these campaign Internet users (23%), appear to be forming "a new online political elite." By this, Pew means these Internet users were actively engaged in online political discourse, including publishing their own political commentary online, sharing someone else's commentary, creating political audio/video, or sharing other people's audio/video. So if you blogged about politics, created a political YouTube video or circulated a political video you found on blip.tv, mazel tov - you're among this new online politirati. Granted, only one percent of these folks posted original audio or video online, but this is the first political cycle in which these tools were readily available to a broad public. But that one percent managed to bring us the Macaca Moment and Conrad Burns imitating a narcoleptic - and this probably contributed to the Dems regaining the Senate. So if you thought YouTube was influential this time around, imagine what'll be like in '08.

In case you're wondering if Democrats and Republicans consume political media differently, it appears they do, but not by much. The Pew data shows no difference among Dems and Repubs when it came to the Internet or newspapers. Democrats were more likely to rely on newspapers as a source, along with CNN and MSNBC. Republicans, on the other hand, were more likely to watch Fox News and listen to the radio. Take note, my NPR brethren! -andy

Posted by acarvin at 5:13 PM

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January 8, 2007

Understanding the Meaning of "The First 100 Hours"

When the Democrats took over Congress last Thursday at noon local time, I had assumed that this would be the beginning of the so-called "First 100 Hours" in which Democrats would push through a range of bills they'd promised during the fall campaign. Little did I realize that the meaning of "first" was open to interpretation. That, and the meaning of "100 hours."

If you'd treated the First 100 Hours as literally beginning at noon on Thursday, we would have reached the 100 hour mark about 30 minutes ago - 4pm today. Do the math: four days at 24 hours each, plus another four hours, and there you go.

Alas, I should have never assumed that the First 100 Hours actually began at the very first hour they took controll of Congress. No, there were too many press conferences and parties scheduled, so they decided to make a long weekend out of it. This would suggest that the First 100 Hours would have begun sometime this morning, right? Wrong. At least they offered a good excuse for delaying it for another day: tonight's Florida-Ohio State game.

"There is a very important event happening Monday night, particularly for those who live in Ohio and Florida," said House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer.

Some Republicans disagreed. "We all know the big national championship game is on Monday night," retorted Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Price. "But taking an entire day to watch the game isn't what we should spend part of our five-day work week doing."

(Full disclosure: I'm proudly wearing orange and blue today in support of the Gators.)

Then there's the tricky issue of what "100 Hours" means. Again, if taken at face value, assuming the hours started ticking away at 10am tomorrow - let's give them some time to get to the office - they'd have until 2pm on Saturday to pass their legislation. Right? Wrong again. Turns out they meant business hours, according to Hoyer:

We said to the American people, 'if you elect us, if you put us in charge, this is what we are going to do and we are going to do it in the first 100 hours,' which is essentially two weeks if you have a 40-hour working week, and that is what we are going to do.

So, if my math is correct, they've got until 2pm on Thursday, January 25th to wrap up their First 100 Hours. So what if it's literally 506 hours after the start of the congressional session? I mean, what's 400 or so extra hours among friends? -andy

Posted by acarvin at 4:35 PM

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November 9, 2006

Tuesday's Election and the YouTube Effect

A few days ago, Micah Sifry and Josh Levy of the Personal Democracy Forum invited me and other Internet types to offer some quick thoughts (200 words or less) on the role of technology in this year's election. They've just posted the first batch of responses, including comments from me, Danah Boyd, David Weinberger and Ethan Zuckerman. I decided to focus on the role of user-generated video.

YouTube, Blip.tv and other video-sharing sites have forever changed the way the public participates in the election process. With legions of camera-toting partisans following around candidates 24/7, there's no way a politician can get away with saying something foolish or nodding off during a hearing.
Video-sharing sites may now be the ultimate platform for gotcha journalism, but we can do better than this. Just as political blogging is evolving beyond simply tearing down politicians, video sharing needs to evolve beyond exposing political gaffes. For example, Minnesota's e-democracy.org invited the public to upload videos in response to an online gubernatorial debate. Meanwhile, VoteGuide aggregated videos of speeches made by candidates in California's 11th congressional district to make the candidates' positions as transparent as possible, capturing and tagging everything the candidates said on the record.

User-generated political video is only in its infancy, but the macaca kerfuffle demonstrates it can have real impact. The question remains, though, whether it will evolve beyond gotcha journalism and allow citizens to have a stronger grassroots voice while keeping politicians honest. Early signs are positive, and we should expect to see nationwide initiatives similar to e-democracy.org and VoteGuide during the next election cycle.

Given the fact that the two closest races in the Senate - the ones that eventually turned the chamber over to the Democrats - featured losing candidates that got lambasted on YouTube, you have to wonder if the video sharing site tipped the balance of power. Sens. Conrad Burns and George Allen both lost their respective races by a relative handful of votes. Videos critical of them were seen by tens of thousands of YouTube users, who blogged about the videos until the mainstream media started playing the videos as well. Think that swayed a few votes? How could it not? -andy

Posted by acarvin at 4:58 PM

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November 8, 2006

Inside the Control Room

Inside the Control Room, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Today I got to spend my second day at NPR West, arriving around 4:30am this morning to watch Farai Chideya and her colleagues record today's episode of NPR News & Notes. Incoming House Ways & Means chairman Charlie Rangell was today's special guest. I got to watch part of the show from the control room. As they were wrapping up, I also got to meet Renee Montaigne of Morning Edition. Her work day begins around 11pm, and when I met her just after dawn, she was still going strong. Suddenly I felt very guilty about being so cranky about getting up at 3:30am today. I'm such an amateur at this. :-) -andy

Posted by acarvin at 7:57 PM

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Early Morning at NPR West

On Air sign outside of one of the studios at NPR West

It's just after 5am here in California, and I'm at NPR West in Culver City. A group of us arrived around 4:30am to observe the taping of today's episode of News & Notes. Given the election, it's going to be a busy morning, including interviews with some of last night's winners. (Sorry, I won't squeal on who it's going to be, but feel free to take an educated guess.)

Once the show is in the can, I'll be presenting a brownbag to NPR West staff on Web 2.0 and networked journalism. I did a similar presentation for staff at NPR headquarters in DC a couple of weeks ago, so now I'm taking it on the road.

Looking forward to having my mind elsewhere today, even if it's just for a few hours. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:09 AM

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November 2, 2006

FCC Slaps Massport Over Wifi Policy

Yesterday the FCC ruled that MassPort, which governs Boston's Logan Airport, cannot prevent individual airlines from offering their own wifi services at the airport. When I first moved to Boston in 2004, I always had ample access to wifi there, particularly in several of the airline lounges. The Air France lounge, for example, offered free wifi, while others offered competitive pricing from different wifi providers. A year later, Massport ordered the airlines to shut down their wifi so the could roll out their own overpriced wifi service across the whole airport. Airlines complained bitterly that they had the right to offer wifi to their customers, but Massport played the security card, claiming that multiple wifi services would interfere with their other telecommuncations networks - something that was totally unsupported by reality.

Eventually, Continental Airlines got sick and tired of the rules and petitioned the FCC, which just ruled in their favor. FCC commissioner Michael Copps issued the following statement on the decision:

Today's declaratory ruling reaffirms the Commission's dedication to promoting the widespread deployment of unlicensed Wi-Fi devices. It clarifies that American consumers and businesses are free to install Wi-Fi antennas under our OTARD rules - meaning without seeking approval from their landlords - just as they are free to install antennas for video programming and other fixed wireless applications. Wi-Fi is one of the Commission's greatest wireless success stories. The genius of this unlicensed technology is that no central authority controls or manages how and where these networks spring up. Instead, any private or commercial operator who sees a need for a local Wi-Fi network may build and operate one. The price that Wi-Fi users pay for this freedom is that they, like all Part 15 users, must accept interference from other devices in the unlicensed bands. But the nation's half- decade of experience with this new technology has made it quite plain that this trade- off is more than worth it.
When it comes to providing broadband over the unlicensed bands, the airwaves are truly the people's airwaves. So while I certainly support strong licensing regulation in some contexts, I think it is equally important that we leave other portions of the spectrum open to unlicensed uses. Today's decision ensures that the Wi-Fi bands remain free and open to travelers, who can make productive use of their time while waiting to catch their next flight in an airport. They will be able to choose from among multiple providers, including members-only airport lounges as well as coffee shops or businesses that may choose to attract customers by offering Wi-Fi service at lower prices than the airport authority offers. I do want to note that I approve of today's decision only because the record is clear - in fact, uncontested - that allowing multiple Wi-Fi operators in the airport will cause no interference to the safety- of- life communications that the airport authority conducts on its dedicated, separate, and licensed public safety channels. In the unlikely event that technical developments change this balance, I would of course support swift and forceful remedial action from this Commission.

So the next time I fly up to Boston - probably in February, I think - hopefully I'll be able to have some choice of wifi providers and won't have to bow down to Massport's overpriced, overslow service.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:17 AM

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October 26, 2006

Political Attack Ad Mashup

Jaime Holguin of the Associated Press asap service has put together an amazing mashup of this year's most obnoxious political campaign ads. And yes, you can dance to it. Enjoy.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 6:14 PM

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October 25, 2006

The Wrong Man: Ed Humphrey and the Gainsville Murders

I've waited 16 years to tell this story publicly. Every couple of years I edited this essay, tweaking this and tweaking that, but I didn't want to post all of it until the time of the execution. It seems that time has come - just a few minutes from now.

Over a three-day period in August 1990, the mutilated bodies of five young people were found scattered across Gainesville, Florida. With the whole state in panic, police quickly apprehended a student named Edward Lewis Humphrey. The police, the media boldly announced, had caught the Gainesville Murderer.

Or so they thought. Eventually - over a year later - the actual perpetrator of the crime, Danny Rolling, was charged with the murders while serving a life sentence for armed robbery. In late February of 2004, Rolling changed his plea to guilty.

Tonight he will die for his crimes. But this probably won't change the image most Americans have in their mind from that horrible summer: an image of Ed Humphrey, paraded in the courtroom in an orange jump suit, looking, so we thought, like a serial killer.

The horror began on Sunday, August 26, 1990, when the bodies of two University of Florida freshmen were found murdered in their apartment. Sonja Larson, 18, and Christina Powell, 17, were found in Williamsburg Village, a popular student residence, both apparently strangled. But the killer did not stop there: both were skillfully slashed open from pelvis to thorax, and parts of their breasts had been chopped off. At first, police hoped that this was a case of a botched burglary gone terribly wrong and would remain an isolated incident. But the next day, the corpse of 18-year-old Christa Hoyt was found in a nearby apartment. The murder scene was even more grotesque: the killer, after completing the same ritual slashings, decapitated the young woman, placed her head on the mantelpiece above the fireplace with her eyes pried open, and finally cleaned the apartment with Windex, leaving behind the bizarre, yet gruesome display.

Gainesville was in a state of absolute panic. As thousands of students left town to return home, thousands others bought up the city's supply of mace, stun guns and pistols. And though Alachua County Police mobilized over 300 officers from around the area, they were still unable to stop the killing. The next day, two more young bodies were found. Tracey Paules and Manuel Taboada, both 23, were found dead in their apartment. The scene was relatively calm compared to the other two sites - neither body was mutilated, though Taboada had been stabbed no less than 30 times (police suspected that Taboada, a six-and-a-half foot football player, probably surprised the killer as he was murdering Paules, and was probably stunned with a taser gun before being killed himself, thus distracting the killer from his routine).

The biggest manhunt in the history of the Southeast was now in full swing. All of Florida was caught in a state of history-repeating-itself shock, hearkening back to the year 1978, when Ted Bundy rampaged through the Florida State University Chi Omega sorority house, killing several women. But as suddenly as the murders began, the killings abruptly stopped. While families buried their children and university students practiced their shooting skills, the nation began to ask the inevitable rhetorical question, "Why?" The state and county police, as well as the FBI, were obviously under enormous pressure to apprehend the murderer or murderers.

On Friday, August 31, the state police received a possible lead. Ed Humphrey, a University of Florida student with a recent history of mental problems, had just been arrested my hometown of Indialantic, Florida, 100 miles southeast of Gainesville. He had apparently hurt his grandmother in an argument and was now ranting about the Gainesville murders to the local police. The state police announced it would question Humphrey before his arraignment at the Brevard County Juvenile Correctional Facility. During the questioning he babbled about the murders, Satan, and someone named John (psychiatrists believed this may have been a reference to John the Baptist). Ed's attorney, Ed Lykkeback, protested the proceedings: "He was a medical patient at the time [of the questioning] who was not being treated. He said a lot of grandiose things that caused him to become a suspect. He was rambling." Upon the completion of the interrogation, the police officially labeled Humphrey as a prime suspect, and the bond for his petty assault charge was raised from $10,250 to one million dollars, about 200 times higher than the typical assault bond.

I had been in my room packing for school when my mom told me to come downstairs. I assumed she wanted to know whether I had heard from any of my friends in Gainesville. Since the murders had started, about half said they were heading home, while the other half decided to stay together in large groups. Either way, there was nothing truly extraordinary to report, so I thought I'd be back to work in a moment or two. When I finally entered her room, she had a strange, almost quizzical look on her face. Before I could say anything, she spoke.

"I just got off the phone with Trudy, and she says she heard that they've arrested someone." Jesus, I thought, getting ready to joke and ask whether it was anyone I knew. Before I could open my mouth, she completed her thought.

"It's Ed Humphrey."

I stared blankly at her. Ed? He had emotional problems, but he was no Ted Bundy. Her friend Trudy must have screwed up the local gossip. Nah…. Couldn't be.

I completely shrugged off the possibility and eventually went to bed.

The next morning I woke up rather early and was the first person up and around. Not even considering the conversation from the night before, I turned on CNN to see what was new in the world. The first image to greet me was a picture of Ed Humphrey, scarred and overweight, being led away by bailiffs at a hearing. I was utterly amazed. How in the world could this be happening? I had known him since first grade, and this made absolutely no sense. The reporter explained, "The city of Gainesville, Florida breathed a collective sigh of relief as Edward Louis Humphrey of Indialantic was questioned and held on a lesser charge." He hadn't been arrested for the murders, yet, but this was close enough.

Ed Humphrey was the headlining story for every news program and paper in America. His image fit the media's requirements for the perfect serial killer: at 220 pounds and over six feet tall he was an intimidating figure, but his scarred face and disheveled hair, results of a recent car accident, gave him the appearance of a madman. Though he answered the judge's questions quite lucidly, he would mug for the TV cameras, making faces and crossing his eyes. The media, so it would seem, had captured the quintessential psychopath.

The media did not focus on the police's evidence linking Humphrey to the crime (since there was none, not including his manic, but nonspecific ramblings about the murders). Instead, they keyed into Humphrey's bizarre background. He was better than the stereotypical loner, sketched out by the neighbors as "a nice, but quiet young man." Instead, Humphrey was depicted as the all-American kid gone sour. He played varsity soccer and easily had a 3.0 average or higher. For years Ed was always the one to say hello to you first when you passed him in the hall, his teeth gleaming and gait bouncing. Then, in my junior year, the transformation began. After a severe case of mononucleosis which required months of heavy drug use, Ed began to change. He would go around school in army fatigues, playing "Rambo" by himself in the halls, without warning or provocation. He also stopped doing his work on time. Finally, one day while driving down a highway with an older brother, Ed jumped out of the car as it was traveling at over 50 miles per hour. Though only suffering mild scrapes and bruises, Ed was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for three months.

After treatment, Ed eventually graduated and moved to Gainesville with his brother, George. He didn't stay for long, though - he was arrested for wielding a knife at a group of students, though he claimed he had only done so because they said they were going to beat him up. Ed returned to Indialantic, but was quickly rehospitalized after a bizarre car accident which left his legs broken and his faced slashed in dozens of places. Police classified the crash as a suicide attempt. I was not able to visit him in the hospital, but one of my friends did, and what he told me still haunts me. "Ed says he blanked out from all the medicine, and did not want to kill himself. He says that he's sick but the doctors and his parents ignore him."

By August of 1990, Ed's physical wounds had healed (though his face was deeply scarred) and he enrolled in classes at the University of Florida. But he also had quit using his lithium and his manic behavior reappeared. The week of the murders, he returned home to Indialantic, where his grandmother (with whom he had lived) accused him of being high on drugs, not realizing he was having another manic fit. A fight ensued and Ed shoved her, smashing her face onto the tile floor.

The local papers had a field day with the story. "Local Teenager: Murderer?" and other profitable headlines graced the pages. Suddenly, I was seeing images of Ed I had never dreamed of -- Ed the Loner, Ed the Mental Patient, Ed the Grandmother Beater -- this was absolutely ridiculous. Outside of high school photos, police reports, and interviews with "friends" who barely even knew the guy, the paper provided very little information. Ed had been arrested in Indialantic for punching his grandmother, and within hours the police somehow had reasonable cause to consider him as their Number One Suspect.

His was a story the media could not resist. It had more bizarre twists and turns than even the best screenwriter's murder mystery. Of course, the state police had assembled other suspects - seven men, to be exact - but their stories were largely ignored, usually mentioned in passing as part of the breaking story on "the prime suspect." One of the suspects, Warren Tinch, was a 58-year-old Ohio man wanted for the murder of an elderly woman. Another man, Stephen Bates, had just been arrested in a neighboring county on a theft charge. And another suspect, Danny Rolling, was just picked up for armed robbery. But these men, along with the four others, were passed over by the media due to their lack of interest, or, perhaps more accurate, the enormous wealth of interest in the Humphrey case.

But the Florida police and FBI quickly realized they had a possible problem. The only evidence linking Humphrey to the crimes was his manic ranting about the murders. He never claimed to have committed them, though he appeared to enjoy talking about them when he wasn't on his lithium. Beyond that, the police only had a general positive semen match between Ed and the first murder site - a match which could have occurred between the murderer and over 7,000 other men in Alachua County, though. Lacking the proof to even charge him with the murders, the police recommended that, if convicted, he should receive the maximum sentence for beating his grandmother. By late October, Ed was convicted of the assault, despite his grandmother's pleas that the charges be dropped. Ed received 21 months in solitary confinement for a crime which usually resulted in probation. While in jail, FBI genetics experts determined that pubic hair found on the scene did not match his, but other genetic material from another cite matched identically with that of another suspect, Danny Rolling. Over a year after the murders, a grand jury indicted Rolling for the murders, but they refused to indict Humphrey due to an overwhelming lack of evidence.

After serving 15 months of the sentence (mostly in the Chattahoochee State Prison Hospital), Ed was released.

"I thought the media was really unfair. It sucked, man."

-Ed Humphrey

There is no doubt that much of social persecution that has become a mundane reality for Ed Humphrey was catalyzed by the media's sensationalistic coverage of the murders and its lack of sensitivity to the facts of the case. Not unlike the Richard Jewell case six years later, the media selectively emphasized Humphrey's troubled background and failed to acknowledge the police's inability to connect him to the evidence.

The Florida Today, the largest paper in Brevard County, had a field day with the Humphrey case. The day after his bond hearing, the front-page headline for the Today announced "SUSPECT'S BOND: $1 MILLION." A large color photo below the headline depicted a disheveled Humphrey, sporting chains, shackles and red prison garb, being escorted by an equally huge police officer. Two articles filled the top two thirds of the page: on the right, "BREVARD TEEN NAMED IN UF SLAYING PROBE," and below the picture, "YOUNG MAN 'HAD HIS HIGHS AND HAD HIS LOWS.'" A small blue graphic announced a "Special report, 4A-5A."

Brevard County and the Florida Today had not seen a story as juicy and as shocking as this since the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, whose debris scattered across the county beaches only four and a half years earlier. The Today took advantage of this new-found attention with its sensationalist front page that morning. At first glance, the headlines on that page seem typical enough: they inform the reader that a local teenager has become a suspect in the murder investigation, his bail was set for a million dollars, and he was troubled and strange young man, as can be expected in such serial killing cases. But with these statements begins the societal damnation of Humphrey.

The headline and article acknowledging the police's suspicions is factual enough - it states what the police believe and discusses the details. But the other two parts of the page are quite alarming. The headline "SUSPECT'S BOND: $1 MILLION" is rather confusing for it implies that Humphrey, the suspect, has been arrested for the crime and is now stuck with a bail that mirrors the heinousness of his actions. But Ed was not arrested for the murders; he was in jail for the assault on his grandmother. But none of the headlines explain this important fact - instead, the reader is left to assume that the bond is in relation to the murders, for at this point, the reader knows absolutely nothing about the assault.

When one explores the page a bit further, one finds the paragraph "An Indialantic man named among suspects in the University of Florida slayings was ordered held on $1 million bond Friday on an unrelated assault charge." For the newspaper, this paragraph at the beginning of the article explains in basic detail the circumstance surrounding Humphrey's bond sentencing. This may be true, but for the reader of the newspaper, the first thing she might do is read the large headline, and perhaps look at the picture. Next, she would probably read the subheadlines. Before she even begins to read the article (assuming she is interested enough to continue), the tone of the story has been set. Humphrey is a murder suspect and his bond is enormous. Even though the reader realizes through reading the story that the bond was in reference to "an unrelated assault" and not the murders, she is already left with the psychological impression that Humphrey is the murderer. The general term suspect is equated with the evidence-backed concept of a suspect who has been charged with the crime. And once a reader has felt that a suspect has become the suspect, she may assume his guilt, though no evidence has been presented in a court of law to even charge him with the crime. This assumption, unfortunately, is based solely on the newspapers incompetent attempt to disseminate the news properly.

The other headline, "YOUNG MAN 'HAD HIS HIGHS AND HAD HIS LOWS,'" sets the pace for an embarrassingly damning article which chronicles the rise and fall of Ed Humphrey. After noting his previously unknown, yet tragic high school years, the article paints an ugly picture:

That fragile shield of anonymity was shattered forever Friday with news that he had become a suspect in the brutal slayings of five students in Gainesville. Now the nation knows his name: Edward Louis Humphrey, Cub Scout, Eagle Scout, the youngest in a family of four. . . . Edward Louis Humphrey, Key Club, Spanish Club, a solid B student who always had his homework in on time. And finally, Edward Louis Humphrey, in Brevard County Jail on $1 million bond in the assault of his grandmother - and a suspect in the slayings that have stunned two college campuses and the Gainesville community surrounding them.

The article, which continued in the "special report" spread several pages later, then focused on his friends discussing how Humphrey would run around on "combat missions," dressed in camouflage, sporting a non-existent rifle and shouting various military terms. His high school principal noted that he wasn't "very gregarious." The article portrays the image of a very disturbed young man, the sort you might expect to go on a murderous rampage. To make matters worse, the article is juxtaposed with several related stories, including "APARTMENT COMPLEX RESIDENTS STRUGGLE TO COPE WITH TRAGEDY," "HUNDREDS MOURN FOR VICTIMS" and "TIP FROM FRIEND GIVES UF REPORTER INSIDE TRACK ON TEEN SUSPECT." In the center of the page appears a photo of a crying pallbearer at one of the funerals. Below that is a picture of Humphrey's grandmother, her eye bruised and swollen.

What does this spread tell the reader? The pages go into great depth discussing various events surrounding the case, yet only one suspect, Ed Humphrey, is emphasized. We read these inside stories about his dubious history, yet we also see and read about the grief of those who knew the victims. The reader is provided with the same profile usually attributed to alleged serial killers after they have been charged with the crime in court. The term suspect is thus used in a more official capacity in such cases. But the Florida Today's blurring of the line between potential suspect and officially charged suspect blurs the understanding of the reader, leaving her with the impression that the police finally have their man.

For their September 10th issue, the first to go to press after Humphrey's arraignment, Newsweek placed the Gainesville murders on a spread at the beginning of their National Affairs section. It is a rather active layout: the headline "THE SIGNATURE OF A SERIAL KILLER" boldly asserts itself across the left page. Below that is the subhead "FIVE GRISLY MURDERS TERRIFY A FLORIDA COLLEGE TOWN - AND FBI EXPERTS CONSTRUCT A PROFILE OF THE PSYCHOPATH." Approximately two inches directly below the subhead is a picture of Humphrey, the poor camera light accentuating his scars to the point of making them fresh and bloody. To the right is a large picture of the police rolling away the body bag of Christa Hoyt. Directly below that is a picture of mourning friends displaying a sign with Christa's name and large heart symbol. And hovering above the whole scene are the high school class photos of each of the victims.

The image sends a rather harsh message to the reader. The victims are represented in three distinct ways: as the living, as the dead, and as the loss of loved ones. It is a bitterly tragic triumvirate which evokes both compassion and rage in the reader. But perhaps the most damning visual image is that of Ed Humphrey: it may be the worst picture of him ever published, his face and hair a wreck, his stare cold, all encompassed by a restraining chain around his neck. And directly above that we have the aforementioned line, "FBI EXPERTS CONSTRUCT A PROFILE OF THE PSYCHOPATH." Newsweek literally presents us that profile in the form of Ed's psychotic picture. Even the most casual reader of the spread is obliged to make the connection. Ed is not merely a suspect - he is the FBI's psychopath.

The article itself is as brutal as the imagery. The piece emphasizes the brutality of the murders, noting gruesome gossip such as "Hoyt's body had been sliced open from the pelvis to the upper chest and. . . the women's breasts had been slashed." Eventually, the article brings up Ed Humphrey, and not unlike the Today stories, it presents no actual connection between Ed and the murders. The article leaves no mention of the other suspects, too. The only new information provided is that Ed had once lived in the same apartment complex as two of the victims. For all intents and purposes, Ed is only mentioned as a possible sidenote to the story, but the inclusion of his picture would suggest otherwise.

But the most damning part of the story appears in the last column. While presenting us with a description of the University's new-found paranoia, Newsweek includes the following sentence:

Frightened students cowered behind locked doors in their apartments, and scores left school until the killer was caught.

Until the killer was caught? This, obviously, would suggest to the reader that the killer had been apprehended! And this killer, according to the article (by default, since no other suspect is mentioned), is Edward Louis Humphrey. The sentence could not be interpreted any other way - it is written in past tense, suggesting that students no longer cowered behind locked doors because the killer was now in custody. Such a statement would probably not be reconsidered by the casual viewer. The only thing it could possibly accomplish is reinforce the unfounded belief that Ed Humphrey was the Gainesville Murderer.

I don't want to be on TV. I don't want people to read about me. I don't want people to know who I am. I mean, it's just a really bad feeling -knowing that wherever you go people are judging you, and they don't even know you. They've never even talked to you. And people do it to me all the time. . . . You know, I really don't like reporters.

-Ed Humphrey

In the case of Ed Humphrey, the people and the state of Florida simultaneously panicked. The media, understandably, gave the murders a great deal of coverage, but in doing so added to the fear and suspicion on all sides. So when the police finally identified a legitimate, albeit weak, suspect, the weight of societal anger and frustration was then dumped onto the back of that suspect. Ed Humphrey did not have to become a name which evoked dread in the hearts of Floridians. But the media, more set on getting the biggest and fastest story instead getting the most accurate story, presented his tale without the caveats needed to remind the public that he is merely a suspect and nothing more. Even Humphrey openly talks about the media's role in his character assassination, as he did in an interview in the Florida today many years later:

I feel 100 percent sure that the media is the main reason our country is the way it is. I mean, people watch too much TV - five, six hours a day. Well, they're influenced so much by what they watch and they think, 'Oh yeah, I saw they got the suspect. Glad they caught him.' They don't even think about what the word 'suspect' means. They just think, 'Well, he probably did it because there is is on TV.' And then, as far as newspapers go, half the things that [they] deal with are just negative things about people. When I got out of jail and got a job, when I got good grades in school, they weren't calling me. What are they going to say when I get off probation?

About six months after he was released from jail, I ran into him on at our local mall, one of only two occasions where I've seen him since the murders. He was with two young women, smiling, and had lost a lot of the weight. I'd grown a beard and was now wearing glasses, but he recognized me immediately and gave me a hug.

Ed was Ed again; he still had lots of problems to overcome, but he was no longer the monster of Gainesville. He was living with his brother in Orlando, working, and taking night classes.

I asked him if he was bitter about the way he had been treated. He said no.

"And if I had been a newspaper publisher," Ed concluded, "I would have done the same thing." -andy

Posted by acarvin at 5:50 PM

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August 6, 2006

Mitch Kapor: The Case for Wikifying Politics

Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus 1-2-3 and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, gave a great presentation this morning at the last day of the Wikimania conference about the potential of using wikis to transform political discourse and reaching greater consensus. I've put his direct quotes in quotes, though a large amount of the rest of the notes are close to verbatim, because Mitch speaks at a perfect pace for liveblogging. :-) -andy

Mitch's training started as a 1960s flower child - a disc jockey and a teacher of meditation, along with being a mental health worker. He bought an Apple II in 1978, and it changed his life - "My first experience with a disruptive technology."
The technology adoption curve - showed the famous bell curve of early adopters, pragmatists, conservatives and laggards. He shows himself as several places to the left of early adopters, being very early in using disruptive technologies, from PCs to the Net to Second Life and social production, like Wikipedia. "Massively distributed collaboration... has enormous implications that go far beyond the current set of projects" out there.

"Wikipedia is too interesting to not be involved in it." He's be evangelizing it among nonprofit organizations like the World Resource Institute - why aren't these groups editing articles that represent their areas of expertise? At the Level Playing Institute, founded by his wife, he's been asking them the same thing. They then created a weekly (wikly?) meeting in which they add to articles, from homophobia to affirmative action. They're non-technical people, but they care about these issues passionately.

People tell him all the time that Wikipedia cannot possibly work - but it does. Then they get skeptical again. They keep changing their minds, like it's a zen koan, an insolvable riddle, which they have to answer not in a literal fashion, but use it to examine their way of thinking. It challenges a fundamental set of assumptions that in order to have useful information you need somebody "in charge," people who are experts and certified by a higher authority. They come to realize that the view they had of how the world has to work is just wrong.

It's not that odd that people would find Wikipedia unbelievable. We're products of the cultural condition we grew up with, and we don't even know what are implicit assumptions are. Take urban graffiti. One thing we know about it is that it's difficult to remove - takes specialized equipment. It's an instance where instant vandalism has long-term effects. They take this idea and apply it to Wikipedia - if someone writes something wrong, it's like permanent vandalism, rather than something that can be corrected easily by the community. So some of the strangeness is a transitory effect.

Let's talk about blogs vs. wikis. What's special about a wiki? Blogs are hailed as a very, very big deal initially. They've become an important medium for personal expression, and some bloggers are now very influential. But I find blogs, especially political blogs, disappointing. They're the talk radio of the Internet. They're a series of individual ideas one after another, like billiard balls bouncing around. The culture of blogs focus on individual expression. They reinforce the partisanship that people already have, so it's hard to turn to them for thoughtful deliberation - it's a fundamental limitation.

Wikis, on the other hand, are fundamentally collaborative. Rather than producing a series of 100 comments, a wiki will have a series of 100 edits that improves the content. This is something appreciated by Wikipedians, but others don't see this difference. There really is a secret sauce to Wikipedia. I've learned this from Jimmy Wales. As a techie, I had some unlearning to do when it came to Wikipedia. I didn't like these tools very much. Then I heard Jimmy talk. It's not about the technology - we could almost do this on bits of paper. The secret sauce is the community that's bound together by shared values and practices. It's the unity that comes from the sharing of values and practices that keeps the community together, like "We believe in neutral point of view," or "we believe in being bold."

I really thought that it was heartening to hear Jimmy talk about Wikipedia's challenges and opportunities. This turn towards quality is important - it's not just about the number of articles. More quality would be good. The drive to linguistic diversity is very important.

Hobbit vs. Africa. During Wikipedia's early years, there was more content about Lord of the Rings than all of Africa combined. That's because the early community knew more about Tolkein than the Transvaal. (my words, not his.) So Wikipedia does need to make active efforts to recruit editors that represent a broader, more diverse view. That's why we're able to brag about the Nature article - Wikipedia does well with science, but probably would have lost a matchup if it were comparing humanities.

Right now I'm working with a group that's creating an online social network for African American professionals. We were having a meeting, and it happened to be on a day when we had some high school students in the office working on a project. We invited one of the students to join the meeting, to meet some potential role models. He came to the meeting and he sent an email afterwards. He said, he understands that the business targets the black middle class, and that they should expand the business to help less successful black families as well. Content about scholarships, learning opportunities, etc. If he hadn't been at the table, this idea would have never come up. If you're not inclusive, the realm of possibilities is limited by who you have at the table.

Mitch then showed two edits two the entry about him on Wikipedia. People who spend a lot of time working with Wikipedia's markup codes, but aren't necessarily good writers. Wikipedia needs to lower barriers to entry so people with other skills can participate. But this may have some pushback by current Wikipedians. "No, that's not right. Mark my words about inclusion. If you want Wikipedia to success, we must find ways to lower barriers to participation, and improving user interaction at all levels is important.... We have to step it up, step up the game, and if it were up to me, I'd make it a major priority... Sometimes change is painful, but we need to step up."

Let's talk politics. What does this have to do with politics? He shows a poster for Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. People who see the movie come out transformed because they see the world isn't in great shape, and it's not a partisan issue. The scientific consensus is clear. Meanwhile, we have growing economic inequities. We've gone tragically off-course in terms of America's role in the world. We really are leaving the world a worse place for our children, and that's not the legacy I want to leave behind.

Politics here in the US is broken. What's the problem? Partisanship and negativity are high, from Ann Coulter to the Daily Kos. There aren't many opportunities for finding consensus, and ordinary people don't like the political choices they see. This is actually really serious, like having serious disease but being in denial about it. We're in one hell of a mess. Democracy is a grand concept, and it's at risk.

Wikipedia is a kind of existence truth of the power of a self-governed, decentralized community making a positive impact. And it's an inspiration for doing something like it in politics. It has certain key attributes. It needs to be participatory and hands-on - nothing happens on Wikipedia unless it's like this. The product - Wikipedia - and the process of creating it are inextricably entwined, and it can't be separated. It's a wiki that uses itself to produce itself. The same mechanisms of transparency and accountability about article develop apply evenly to the authors of those changes. People are known for what they do and don't do. Any movement for democratic reform would have to operate by the values and processes it seeks to achieve in society. It has to be the thing it's trying to bring about. In every stage, Wikipedia aspires to practice what it preaches. This could be a pretty bold thing for a political movement.

There has to be a high aspiration for respectful dialogue that brings out our best selves, not our worse selves like blogs. And we don't have to turn over our fates and destinies to experts. Any person can participate as an equal - in the case of a politics wiki, formulating policies to help improve the world.

Is this absurd? I guarantee that in 99 percent of the audiences I speak to as completely absurd. But the PC was absurd in the 70s, the commercial Internet absurd in the 80s. Politics is not known for respectful collaboration. "We need a political movement that doesn't practice politics as usual just as Wikipedia doesn't practice Britannica as usual." "It's not going to be about talking - it's going to be about doing."

I do think that some new tools will be very helpful. "If I had one idea to offer, I think we need to have tools and software that help us argue better." I think it as an extension of Wikipedia culture. A fair idea is central, and you don't want to use unfair tactics to make you point. You don't hide info, you don't use selective evidence. Having fair arguments and having communities where people can constructively disagree is really important.

The final point I want to make is this. There are no panaceas or easy solutions. Trying not to be naïve, I don't want to suggest any technodeterminism, or that Wikis will save the world. But sometimes difficult decisions have to be made, and facts alone aren't enough to make those decisions. Wikipedia's best article on the war in Iraq doesn't make a conclusion about whether the US should withdraw. Wikipedia goes out of its way to avoid being drag down by arguments about what we should or shouldn't do. Facts alone aren't sufficient to guide decisions. So what would this political movement stand for? It'll only work if people come together around commons values. You could apply wikipedia to a particular ideology, but what about for reaching consensus. So I wanted to share my thinking and my struggle for solving this. I think Wikipedia can be a key inspiration, though, and there's much we can learn from it. "There's so much work to be done from that inspiration to make the world a better place."

Posted by acarvin at 10:16 AM

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August 4, 2006

Larry Lessig: Fighting for Free Culture

Here are my notes from Larry Lessig's talk at wikimania2006. These notes aren't verbatim; please listen to the podcast for the whole megillah. -andy

Lessig hass spent the last nine months talking about read-only cultures vs. read-write cultures. In 1906, John Philip Sousa went to Congress to talk about "talking machines." These talking machines - record players and the like - were going to ruin artistic culture because they will discourage people getting together in person to make music.
Read-write culture is where people participate in the creation and re-creation of culture. Sousa feared that recording devices would take away from the creative process - a world of consumers only.

Looking back at the 20th century, it's hard not to conclude that Sousa was right. The production of culture became concentrated and professionalized.

Historically there are lots of aspects of culture where we've stopped being read-write. The free labor movement is an example. Free as in free to engage your capacities as a laborer. Autonomy - the capacity to use the means of production to own and create content.

The 21st century is seeing this idea return. Read Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks. It's the lesson of the free software movement. They are empowered to produce - doing it because they want to and love it. Read-write labor, just like Wikipedia.

19th century federalists were elitist aristocrats. They didn't really like democracy. That elitism was killed by Jefferson's Republicans, that got people participating in civic dialogue. This was then killed by broadcast politics - the 30-second commercial. Now the 21st century is giving us a chance to revive Jefferson's ideas.

Political blogs - places where people are forced to explain their reasoning, transforming them from couch potatoes to activists. Read-write politics.

All of this shows how the 20th century was weird, totalitarian. Centralizing institutions controlling how culture, labor and politics developed. (Shows pics of Stalin and Bill Gates - big laugh). Read-only society - profoundly weird.

That century is now over - it's passed. The 21st is the revival of the old way to organize and participate - freer, read-write.

Read-write culture and free culture - demanding freedom in what we create, like Richard Stallman. The internet has enabled this new read-write culture. It's not just one culture, but two, both very different. One is a new version of read-only - massively efficient to sell and consume mass culture created elsewhere. Apple is the poster child for this: iTunes only lets you play stuff you buy from Apple, only for the iPod. Trying to perfect the copyright of content being consumed at a mass scale. Then there are those companies that exist to empower people to share their own content.

He shows anime clips edited to music - mashups of anime films to new music, including anime muppet hunter D- mahna mahna. Brilliant examples of remix culture - (I've got to find that).

White album inspires Jay-Z's Black album, mixed together by Danger Mouse as Grey Album.

Remixing religion - Jesus Christ, the Musical. Jesus video of "I Will Survive."

Remixing politics: atmo.se video of George Bush and Tony Blair performing "Endless Love."

We need to recognize that writing words is the Latin of our modern times. Video and sound are the vulgar languages of the common people, tools for speaking with power - a new potential to speak, learn, a new literacy that's reviving the read-write culture.

Two cultures, both products of the Internet, both different. The law's attitude towards them is different. Copyright law loves read-only, hates read-write, weakens it, in the current way it's architected. Using content digitally creates new copies of it, and that requires permission from the owners, so say the law. That conflict would be bad enough, but it's exacerbated by the war to protect the read-only business model. It could kill the potential of read-write culture. That's why many of us are resisting this, fighting this.

How do you resist? Let's litigate, file lawsuits. Tried that, but congress can do what it wants, so going to court to defend free culture was just simply wrong. Instead, we needed to incite a public movement to cause justices to understand the value of free culture, so the political system will wake up to it.

Two steps:

Practice free culture, show its value in 1000 different contexts;
Enable free culture, make it possible everywhere, beyond the hacker world.

The practice of free culture is what Wikipedia is all about. This would have been impossible to do in a 20th century mindset. There are lessons that we should learn about how this is all made possible. If you look over the last 50 years, there's a repeated pattern. Look at interoperability - a proprietary instinct is natural, but freedom is a more important value. Consumers reject the idea of control. It's much better for society and innovation that there's interoperability and free standards encouraging the widest range of competition and the widest number of participants. That's the lesson of the last generation.

But we also need to enable a platform of free culture. We have to make it possible for this infrastructure to grow, and there's a threat to this freedom, a clear and present danger. Jack Valenti calls it a terrorist war - except the terrorists are kids remixing media. When they build the locks to protect the read-only internet, that will lock out the potential of the read-write internet. So we need to join Free Software Foundation to fight DRM, support free culture and free software, because they enable each other. There as important steps that all of us should take to facilitate free culture.

We need to enable a legal platform that protects free culture. We came up with the Creative Commons movement, stealing the ideas of Richard Stallman to use copyright law to carve out a space for freedom. Shift the default from all rights reserved to some rights reserved. They have a human element - a simple common deed, a legal element for lawyers, and a machine-readable element that computers can understand. Google and Yahoo use this machine-readable element to integrate CC into search engines. Now we're porting the legal layer for different jurisdictions around the world. There are now 140 million linkbacks to CC licenses as of last June. Content that explicitly says, We're free for you to use - and protects it in the legal code.

But the legal code is not free culture - you are free culture. The legal code is just plumbing, like tcp/ip. The culture is built on top of it, taking real work by real people. Licenses are nothing more than tools to minimize the harm of outdated legal systems. We need to make it seamless for people to do what they want to do in a simple way and make the lawyers as small as possible. You have ignited the imagination of the possibilities more than anyone in the world. Yochai's book pours all sorts of praise on Wikipedia. He's not a guy who gets obsessed but he's obsessed with you, in how the network is enabling creativity. You should feel his praise and feel proud of. That's why I'm here too.

But I'm also here to plea with you to see what power you have and use it to do good, to enable free culture. Help others spread the practice that Wikipedia exemplifies. PD-Wiki project is doing this. It'll launch in Canada, where the company with the database of all public domain Canadian content, then invite the community to build content around it - critiques, bios, lesson plans, etc. On top of this Wiki, there will be an API to let anyone figure out what's in the public domain and what's not. It'll excite more people to the idea of free culture.

Then, demand a useable platform for freedom. I was talking with Jimbo Wales over bad coffee, walking in a park, about the lack of interoperability between free culture projects - islands of freedom. But they can't talk to each other. They can't interact. You can't take Wikipedia and mix it with a CC sharealike license. It's bad design. My first instinct was control - convert everyone to a CC license. But as I listened to Jimbo and his ethic, I realized that was a mistake. You don't need a monopoly. You need a layer, like the tcp/ip layer, that allows content to move to and fro, find equivalents of similar licenses. Connect the FDL license with CC-BY-SA license. Derivatives from one license currently can't be used under another license. But a solution would be to facilitate an infrastructure where content licensed under one license can be distributed under another license in derivative form. An ecology of legal code to facilitate the functionality of different licenses. No one architecture would control everything, no single point of failure if a license is overturned by a court. And it would create a market signal of what licenses are valued by people. That signal is a discipline to the people who provide this plumbing to make it as good as it can be. A legal layer that would allow people to do what they want.

Creative Commons isn't the entity to run this structure. Instead, invite license authors to add a clause to allow derivatives under equivalent licenses. Someone like the software freedom law center could be the ones to do it.

Sometimes I'm optimistic, sometimes I'm not. But you have influence over this. You can help decide what's the best system and demand it. It's not just good for you, but good for all people who want to support free culture. The good you could do here is extraordinary. If we don't solve this soon, it's an environmental problem we'll face in the near future, where islands of creativity can't interact. You could do good here; you should do good here.

Tom Brokaw says my parents generation was the greatest generation, but they lived in the weirdest century. But there were a few people who got it. David Clark said "we reject kings, presidents and voting- we believe in rough consensus and running code." Richard Stallman then said, "If we don't want to live in a jungle, we must change our attitudes, that a good citizen is one who wants to cooperate when it's appropriate."

It's an honor to address you, but I plead with you to use your power to do good beyond Wikipedia in the name of free culture.

Posted by acarvin at 2:56 PM

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July 22, 2006

Lebanon's Daily Star: Stop Linking "Piles of Rubble" to Hemorrhoids Ads

screen shot of hemorrhoids ad in Daily Star article

Screen shot from the Daily Star showing a hyperlink to a hemorrhoids ad when referring to "piles of rubble."

For the last couple of years I've read Lebanon's Daily Star newspaper, which I've found to be an excellent source of opinions and editorials on the Middle East. But their recent decision to integrate an advertising revenue generator called ContentLink into their website is beginning to give me pause.

ContentLink is a form of "in-text" advertising. Rather than placing traditional ads adjacent to an online article, it embeds hyperlinks into words found within an article, pointing to an advertiser based on what it believes to be the meaning of that word. For example, if an article contained the sentence "Prosecutors declined to indict San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds this week," the phrase "San Francisco" would link to a website about San Francisco tourism. Using this system, an online newspaper like the Daily Star would receive income every time a person clicked a link to one of these advertisers.

For starters, I'm not thrilled with the idea, because when I click on a link in a news article or blog entry, I expect it to link to more information about that topic, not to an advertisement. Rather than adding to the value of the content contained in the news source by linking to relevant information, as is the norm with most hyperlinks, in-text advertising devalues it, sending the reader to an unexpected sales pitch. If I were David Ignatius, Rami Khouri or an other regular contributor to the Daily Star, I'd be troubled to see my writings link to these ads, because it gives the appearance of the author's endorsement, just like a blogger would link to pages he or she wanted readers to visit for one reason or another.

Unfortunately, ever since the conflict with Israel erupted over a week a go, I've noticed that many of the in-text ads contained in the Daily Star have often been surprisingly undignified, apparently based on incorrect or inappropriate interpretation of the keywords contained within the articles. Here are some examples of sentences contained within current Daily Star articles and the in-text ad links connected to them:

The logjam may break up quickly or only after several weeks, and it could produce a major setback for Hizbullah or a symbolic victory. ("Break up" links to "Breakup Advice for Moms: Moms, get divorce advice & connect with other moms. Free to join.")
Much of the country over which Siniora's government now presides has been reduced to holes in the ground and piles of rubble. ("Piles" links to "Piles or Hemorrhoids: Western and Eastern remedies for this common malady piles or hemorrhoids.")

At this point, there is little reason to believe that either the mainstream Hamas leadership or the Abbas [government] has any real control over Shalit's fate. ("Abbas" links to "Free Ringtones - Abba: Get your free Abba ringtones here. Works with all Cingular, and T-Mobile phones. US residents only. Subscription services required.")

The challenge for the Bush administration as the Lebanon war explodes into its second week is just that - to keep faith with Siniora and his "Cedar Revolution," even as it stands by its close ally, Israel. ("Bush administration" links to "Bush Administration Shirts and Gear: "W the President" and more - Celebrate Bush and American values with attractive stickers, buttons, T-shirts, mugs, and other gear. Perfect gifts for friends and family.">)

Wrapped in blankets and plastic bags bound tightly with tape, the bodies were lowered from the truck into simple pine-board coffins doused with a chemical spray to mask - without much success - the cloying odor of death. ("Odor" links to "Reduce Pollutants & Improve Indoor Air Quality! Now you can purify the air you breathe by reducing & improving your indoor air quality with these air purification & ozone generators. Odor & mold removal! Please call for quantity discounts. For healthier breathing order today!")

There's no telling where a Daily Star article will link, as ContentLink appears to generate new links each time you reload a page. But each time I check my RSS feeds and see an interesting op-ed or article coming from the newspaper, I cringe at the thought that the ensuing article will link to something wildly inappropriate, particularly in the context of the current violence.

I understand the Daily Star's need to generate revenue. But I would hope they might reconsider using this advertising service, particularly during this conflict. At minimum, they should at least re-tune it so it doesn't produce such absurdly embarrassing results. Seeing hyperlinks to hemorrhoids ads when referring to "piles of rubble" - particularly when innocent civilians are lying under those very piles - is an insult to every family suffering on both sides of the border.

I think I'll just have to stick with reading my friend Mustapha's blog, Beirut Spring - I sincerely doubt I'll see him linking to hemorrhoids ads anytime soon. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 1:06 PM

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July 15, 2006

The Mideast vs. the Northeast

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Watching all the coverage of the fighting in Lebanon this week, i was curious to know exactly the scale of the distances involved between northern Israel and Beirut. I'd been to the region before but not where the fighting was going on. So I decided to take a screenshot of the war zone from Google Maps and overlay it with a map of part of the northeast US, using the same scale for both images. The result is this short video. Once you've downloaded the video, slide the scrubber back and forth so you can see the two maps overlap each other. For Americans who are used to countries being thousands of miles wide, it's quite astonishing to realize what a compact area of land is affected by the fighting. For example, the distance between Haifa and Beirut isn't much difference than the distance between Providence, Rhode Island and Lowell, Massachusetts. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:50 PM

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July 11, 2006

RIP Syd Barrett: Shine On, You Crazy Diamond

Public domain photo of Syd Barrett, taken in 2002.

This morning I heard the sad news that former Pink Floyd singer and guitarist Syd Barrett had passed away at age 60. Many people who were familiar only with Pink Floyd's hits from the 1970s never got around to listening to their earliest work, when Syd was the group's frontman. A brilliant, eccentric songwriter, he set Pink Floyd on the course from obscure English acid rock band to one of the greatest music groups of all time.

Unfortunately, Syd himself did not get the chance to experience the band's later commercial success. Tormented by the effects of mental illness and drug abuse, Syd had his will to perform sucked out of him just as the band was heading towards greatness. Pink Floyd associate Joe Boyd recounted the summer of 1967, when everything seemed to fall apart for Syd:

He was very lifeless. He'd always been very witty, kind of twinkly, very appealing to girls - a dark-eyed, handsome sort of guy.... By that summer, he would very often spend time on stage with the Floyd, standing with his arms at his side, not playing, not singing. Eventually Dave Gilmour was brought in to provide support for those times when Syd didn't feel like playing, and in the end he took over and replaced Syd, and Syd left the group.

But the stage had been set. Without Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd would have never gone on to create such classics as Dark Side of the Moon, The Wall and Wish You Were Here. (And we probably would have never had Robyn Hitchcock either, but that's another story.) I still look back fondly to seeing Pink Floyd live in high school, playing their epic song, "Shine On You Crazy Diamond," which was a tribute to Syd. Later in college, I remember the countless evenings where several of us would open the doors to our dorm rooms to perform the song. One of us would slowly turn up the volume and begin playing a recording of it. At the proper moment, I would come in on my guitar, playing the song note-for-note, while a little while later my neighbor Mike Bultman would jump in doing his part with his saxophone. And all the while, Syd lived as a recluse in Cambridge, residing with his mother, refusing interview requests, coming outside only to buy painting supplies and work on his modest garden.

Shine on, you crazy diamond. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:20 PM

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Hao Wu Released!

Hao Wu Wonderful news coming out of China today. The family of blogger Hao Wu reports that he has been released by the authorities after several months of detention. The entry is written in Chinese, but here's a rough translation:

Just received a phone call from home. Hao is released from detention. Thanks for everybody's concerns but Hao wants to be alone and calm down for a while. Anything new about this matter would be updated on this blog.

This news is a huge relief to his family, friends and all the bloggers around the world who rallied in support of him, particularly his colleagues at Global Voices. He was originally detained in February after shooting documentary footage of a secret Christian group in China, and was held until today. More information is available on the Free Hao Wu blog set up by Ethan Zuckerman. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:40 AM

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June 19, 2006

Why Danger Mouse Will Take Over the Known World

Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo of Gnarls Barkley, paying tribute to A Clockwork Orange

One of my favorite rock critics, Chuck Klosterman, has an amazing interview with the biggest music star you've probably never heard of: Danger Mouse.

Danger Mouse, aka Brian Burton, is a hero to many in remix/mashup culture. Two years ago, he was flipping through his music collection and found copies of both the Beatles' White Album and an a capella version of rapper Jay-Z's Black Album. After a bit of fiddling on his computer, he realized he could mix a song from each album and make a new song out of them. Soon enough, he had an entire album of mashups - The Grey Album. The album developed a cult following on the Internet, with hundreds of thousands of copies downloaded. While Jay-Z explicitly wanted his music to get remixed, the Beatles' record label, EMI, saw things differently, and sent out their suits on a mission to quash the album. Ultimately, there was nothing they could do to stop peer-to-peer sharing of The Grey Album. And even though it was never officially released, it was named album of the year by Entertainment Weekly and The New Yorker, among others.

Now, Danger Mouse is back with a new album under a new name: Gnarls Barkley. (And no, it's not intended to be a play on the name Charles Barkley, so he claims.) His album, St. Elsewhere, is a collaboration with rapper-soul singer Cee-Lo, and it's the most brilliant musical work I've heard this year. (Though I must admit I can't stop listening to Wolfmother, the heaviest band in decades.) A brilliant mix of soul, hip hop, psychadelic 70s rock, and a few other random styles (including Klezmer of all things), Gnarls Barkley is reminiscent of both Outkast and Gorillaz, but without the gimmicks. It's intelligent, thoughtful music that's constantly full of surprises - absolutely a refreshing way to start the summer.

Here are some quotes from Klosterman's interview with Danger Mouse. It's clear that he has a whole other way of looking at music production, seeing himself as a movie director, an auteur, not unlike one of his idols, Woody Allen:

What changed everything was when I got into Woody Allen.... When I got to college, I saw 'Manhattan' and 'Deconstructing Harry.' I thought to myself: Why do I relate so much to this white 60-year-old Jewish guy? Why do I understand his neurosis? So I just started watching all of his movies. And what I realized is that they worked because Woody Allen was an auteur: he did his Thing, and that particular Thing was completely his own. That's what I decided to do with music. I want to create a director's role within music, which is what I tried to do on this album....
...I have to be in control of the project I'm doing. I can create different kinds of musical worlds, but the artist needs the desire to go into that world. I won't fight with people to try and make the sounds I hear inside my head. What I want is for the leader of a group to come to me, and then I lead that person. Because even with some of my favorite bands, I only like 30 or 40 percent of what they do. I'd want to make that 30 percent into the whole album....

...Musically, there is no one who has the career I want. That's why I have to use film directors as a model. But I think there are other people who could do what I do, and maybe 'St. Elsewhere' will open things up. Like, Jack White was able to take control of Loretta Lynn, and the result was a great record" ("Van Lear Rose," which came out in 2004). "And that's cool. That's the goal.

On creating The Grey Album:

One day I was cleaning my room and listening to the Beatles' White Album. I was kind of bored, because the other hip-hop work I was doing was really easy. Somebody had sent me an a capella version of 'The Black Album,' but I was already doing stuff with Cee-Lo and Jemini and Doom, so I didn't want to waste my beats on a remix record.... So I'm listening to the White Album and I'm putting 'The Black Album away, and I suddenly have this idea: I decide to see if I could take those two albums and make one song, just because of the names of the two albums and because they're perceived as being so different and because I've always loved Ringo Starr's drum sound.
I sat down and tried to make one track, and it happened really fast. Then I tried to make a second song, and it took a lot longer, but it still worked. And I thought, Wow. What if I can do the whole album? It was almost this Andy Warhol moment, where I made a decision to do something artistically without a clear reason as to why, except to show people what I could do. And I could never do an album like that again. I still don't know where I found the patience to make those songs. It took me about 20 days in a row, and those were all 12- and 13-hour days. And the whole time I was doing it, I was terrified someone else would come up with the same idea, which would have ruined everything. Because really, the idea is pretty simple.

I thought it would be a weird, cultic record for techies to appreciate, because they would be the only people who would understand how much work was involved," he says. "But then it was taken into this whole different world, where a million people were downloading it at the same time. At best, that record is just quirky and odd and really illegal. I never imagined people would play those songs in clubs. I also think the people who love it tend to love it for the wrong reasons, and the people who hate it tend to hate it for the wrong reasons. I think some people love it for what it supposedly did to the music industry, which was not my intent. I did not make 'The Grey Album' for music fans. I made it to impress people who were really into sampling.

On the influence of (yes) Pink Floyd:

I remember hearing Pink Floyd's 'Wish You Were Here' in a bar," Burton says. "This was around 1995. And I remember thinking it was so beautiful. It just put me in a daze. I asked someone what it was, and they were like: 'You don't know? This is Pink Floyd.' Now, I had heard of Pink Floyd, but I never really knew what they sounded like. I had never actually played Pink Floyd records. And I suddenly found myself wondering, Why have I spent all these years never listening to this music? And the reason was that I was afraid to do anything that would have seemed socially unacceptable. I was afraid that people wouldn't think of me as this hip-hop guy, because hip-hop was my Thing. So then I went out and bought every Pink Floyd record.

Anyway, if you're interested in good music, mashups and intelligent musicians in general, check out the article.

The summer just got a little more interesting. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 6:28 PM

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Jay Rosen on How the Media is Beginning to Get It

Today's WashingtonPost.com has an excellent essay by Web 2.0 media critic Jay Rosen. Published as part of the site's 10th anniversary celebrations, the article addresses how mainstream media is slowly beginning to understand how the Internet changes the fundamental laws of journalism.

"A decade after major news providers such as The Washington Post began publishing on the Internet, they are finally beginning to ask the right questions about what the Web can do for them and their readers -- and to realize how disruptive web technology is to traditional journalism," Rosen writes. He quotes AP chief Tom Curley : "When the Web was born as a commercial content enterprise back in the mid-'90s, we thought it was about replicating -- that is, 'repurposing' -- our news and information franchises online," Curley said. "The news, as 'lecture,' is giving way to the news as a 'conversation'." This, of course, is something that millions of bloggers have understood for a long time, but it's taken a while for traditional media to embrace this new reality.

Rosen goes on to cite several reasons why the Internet has altered journalism:

The "closed" system of gates and gatekeepers has been busted open. "Yesterday there were a few dozen providers," he writes. "Today news, views and attitudes stream through millions of gates.

The new balance of power between producers and consumers. Quoting Mark Thompson of the BBC Rosen says new media "empowers those audiences, transfers control from us to them, lets them consume what they want, when they want, lets them create content, lets them participate."

Sources have more power to sidestep journalists. Example: Dot-com millionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. Rather than letting journalists dictate when his voice gets heard in the media, he created his own blog to serve as a platform for sharing ideas and addressing controversies.

The Net exploded the universe in press criticism. Before the Net, a newspaper was lucky if it got a handful of letters in response to an article. Now, they get hundreds, even thousands "It's not just the volume, but who is speaking up," Rosen writes. "Today there is much more criticism of the press from outside the club of mainstream journalists."

The Net has exposed group think in journalism. Rosen raises the possibility of media outlets serving as a form of opposition to the White House, as away of counterbalancing yes-men-like coverage.

Disrupting the legacy media's overconfidence. "On the day the Indian Ocean tsunami struck, Reuters had 2,300 journalists and 1,000 stringers positioned around the world, according to the firm's chief executive, Tom Glocer. But none of them were on the beaches to witness the disaster, he told the Online Publishing Association." Meanwhile, websites like Tsunamihelp filled in the blanks, posting accounts from survivors in various media formats. Bloggers from all over the world served as de facto stringers while the media scrambled to get its act together.

It's a worthwhile read; Check it out when you get a chance. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:04 PM

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May 25, 2006

MoveOn.org, Christian Coalition Unite to Save the Internet

I never thought it would happen in my lifetime. No, I'm not talking about peace in the Middle East. I'm talking about Moveon.org and the Christian Coalition partnering to save the Internet.

I'd been hoping this would happen for months. A few years ago when the FCC tried to roll back the regulations on media cross-ownership, there was an amazing coalition of protesters ranging from the Consumers Union to the NRA. The campaign had many successes because it bridged the yawning gap between liberals and conservatives. We need the same kind of bridge to ensure that network neutrality on the Internet is protected.

So I was amazed when I received the email that Moveon.org and the Christian Coalition had teamed up on an advertising campaign to support network neutrality. They're trying to get the public to donate money for a full-page ad (PDF) that would run in the New York Times. Internet providers, who are trying to get rid of network neutrality and worsten the digital divide, have been spending upwards of a million dollars a day in advertising, particularly in Washington DC, to get their way on Capitol Hill. While it may be impossible to compete with the telcos at that level, this new ad campaign is a heck of a step forward. All they need is 2,000 people to donate $35 each. I'm gonna go find my credit card as soon as I'm done writing this. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:23 PM

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May 24, 2006

A Day of Out(r)age

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Video I shot for Rocketboom from today's rally at the Massachusetts State House in support of community access television and network neutrality. The US House and Senate are considering legislation that would take away local oversight of cable franchise agreements, making it harder for communities to get cable providers to invest in community television and local efforts to bridge the digital divide. The legislation would also allow Internet providers to favor their own content and discriminate against content produced by others. This means accessing content that isn't owned by the Internet provider could be slower, more expensive or both. Protestors argue that this is a violation of free speech and that the network underlying the Internet should remain content-neutral.

Posted by acarvin at 6:52 PM

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May 23, 2006

Dan Coughlin Discusses the COPE Act

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Dan Coughlin of Manhattan Neighborhood Networks gives an excellent summary of the COPE Act and how it would adversely affect public media.

Posted by acarvin at 8:54 PM

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Alyce Myatt, Public Media Activist

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Alyce Myatt's presentation at last week's public media meeting.

Posted by acarvin at 7:05 PM

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Public Media - An International Perspective

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My remarks at last week's Boston public media roundtable, focusing on public media and the digital divide from an international perspective

Posted by acarvin at 5:30 PM

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Public Media - Fred Johnson's Intro Remarks

Video of opening remarks by Fred Jonson at last week's public media roundtable in Boston.

Posted by acarvin at 5:09 PM

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May 22, 2006

This Wednesday: Day of (out)Rage

On Wednesday I'm planning to take part in the Day of (out)Rage, a day of national protest against the COPE Act. For those of you who haven't been following the debate on Capitol Hill, the COPE Act would allow telecom companies to ignore the basic Internet principle of network neutrality, letting them charge users more for complete access to the Internet, while peddling their own content instead. It would also take away local control of public access TV channels. And for those of you who are worried about the digital divide, the bill would let telecom companies conduct redlining, which is refusing to build out broadband access in low-income neighborhoods simply because the residents are poor.

In protest against this legislation, there will be protests in NYC, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. I'll be at the Boston rally, which starts at 1:30pm in Boston at the State House grand staircase. To learn more, visit saveaccess.org or listen to this podcast. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 7:23 PM

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May 18, 2006

Public Media Podcast Part 3: Dan Coughlin

The third and final podcast from yesterday's public media community meeting in Boston. Dan Coughlin of Manhattan Neighborhood Network gave a fantastic presention about the COPE Act in Congress that's threatening public media and network neutrality. The audio also includes group discussion, with comments from myself, Fred Johnson, Nettrice Gaskins and others. A Windows Media version can be found here:

http://www.andycarvin.com/podcasts/publicmedia3.wma

Posted by acarvin at 11:59 AM

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Public Media Podcast Part 2: Alice Myatt

This is the podcast of the second part of yesterday's public media community meeting. It features commentary by longtime public media advocate Alice Myatt. Here's a link to text notes from the session as well. A Windows Media version can be found here:

http://www.andycarvin.com/podcasts/publicmedia2.wma

Posted by acarvin at 11:47 AM

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Public Media Podcast Part 1: Fred Johnson and Andy Carvin

Here's a podcast of the first part of yesterday's public media community meeting. It includes opening remarks by Fred Johnson and an international perspective on public media and the digital divide from me. Here's a link to text notes from the session as well. The podcast is in mp3 format; sorry about the static from the compression process. A Windows Media version can be found here:

http://www.andycarvin.com/podcasts/publicmedia1.wma

Posted by acarvin at 11:36 AM

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Public Media: Apocalypse Soon?

Fred Johnson listens to Nettrice Gaskins as Danielle Martin liveblogs the event.

Last night I participated in a fascinating community meeting in Boston's Chinatown about the future of public media and its current threats in Congress. Organized by Fred Johnson of UMass/Boston and his Tactical Media Group, the panel included media advocate Alice Myatt, Dan Coughlin of Manhattan Neighborhood Networks and myself. I talked about public media and the digital divide at the international level, while Alice and Dan respectively addressed the issue from a national and local perspective.

Danielle Martin liveblogged the event, so I encourage you to read her detailed notes from the gathering. Meanwhile, I'm currently compressing the audio of the event into three separate podcasts that I'll post shortly. And word has it that video of the event will soon be available - I'll share that too when I get ahold of it. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:25 AM

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May 15, 2006

On-Air BBC Mixup Brings New Meaning to "Instapundit"

As someone who's had the opportunity to be interviewed by news outlets like the BBC and CNN on a few occasions, I've always been proud of the fact that all of my hard work researching the digital divide, education technology and Internet culture is paying off. I mean, it's not like any John Q. Public can walk off the street into a studio and become an instant expert technology, right?

Well, wrong.

Last week, the BBC's News 24 Channel was doing a live story on the recent court case pitting Apple Computer against Apple Records. During the live program, they turned to Internet expert Guy Kewney to offer some insight on the court ruling. Sitting on a stool in the TV studio, Kewney first appears to be stunned or confused. A moment or two later he gathers his composure and answers several questions, though it almost seems he's just mimicking the anchor's words:

"I'm very surprised to see... this verdict to come on me, because I was not expecting that. When I came, they told me something else, and I'm coming, 'you got an interview,' so a big surprise, anyway...."

When talking about how the ruling will effect the cost of downloading online music, he seems to make a reference to how the decision will be good for bridging the digital divide. "Actually, if you go can everywhere, you're gonna see a lot of people downloading through the Internet, the websites, anything they want. But I think it's much better for development and for poor people what they want to get on the easy way and the faster things they're looking for...."

After a couple more questions, the interview ends abruptly, cutting to a field correspondent.

Just another lackluster TV news interview? Not exactly, because "Guy Kewney" wasn't Guy Kewney.

the wrong Guy Kewney

Scenes from the interview with "Guy Kewney."
You can also watch the video or listen to a podcast.

It turns out the real Guy Kewney, a balding, bearded white man with a pinkish complexion, was waiting off-stage for his cue to go on the air, when the wrong Guy Kewney, the African man with the French accent, was brought onstage to shoot the live segment. From his expression, you could tell he had no idea what the heck he was doing on TV, but he just ran with it. After a few moments he actually seemed somewhat comfortable on camera, even though his answers didn't offer any earth-shattering insight on the court case.

Here's how the real Guy Kewney recounts the aftermath on his blog:

"I'm dreadfully sorry!" said the studio manager, wringing his hands as if he wanted to suddenly take the day off, retrospectively. "It seems I rang Reception, not the Stage Door, and asked if you were there. And they said yes!"
So he went down to reception, and was introduced to me. That is, not this pink me, but the other, black me. Until we find out who he actually was, it's a simple mystery how he persuaded BBC's receptionists that he was me, and that's before we ask "Why?".

But, having done that, he had Evidence: a security pass with his name on. And that, it seems, is the definitive article; it must be True! And any other evidence could be discounted.

"Well, to be honest, I did think it couldn't be you. I mean, I've seen your picture on your web site, and he didn't look like you. So I asked him who he was, and he said: 'Guy Kewney' and I said 'Are you really Guy Kewney?' and he said yes. And I asked reception if that was you, and they said yes!"

So that was that, and they took him upstairs and put him in front of the camera. Security passes can't lie.

But the question remains: who was this guy and how did he get himself on television? An Associated Press article about the incident claims that the man was a taxi driver, but doesn't elaborate how he ended up in the studio. Guy Kewney - the real Guy Kewney - reports on his blog today another account that makes a lot more sense:

His name is Guy Goma - which goes some way to explaining why he (and the BBC receptionist) assumed that someone asking for Guy Kewney was asking for him.
And he wasn't there to pick up a fare, because he's not a cabbie. He's a Business Studies graduate, from the Congo, and he was there in reception because he was applying for a high level IT job with the BBC.

Apparently the unflappable Mr Goma assumed the whole thing was some kind of initiation prank. His own speciality is data cleansing, and (my source inside the Beeb tells me) was "a little upset that nobody asked him about his data cleansing expertise."

Personally, I'm inclined to believe Kewney. I mean, he is an expert.... -andy

http://odeo.com/claim/feed/7aab579fc473a402 (odeo/7aab579fc473a402)

Posted by acarvin at 4:43 PM

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May 13, 2006

A Wet Morning at Beyond Broadcast

It's 9:15am here in Cambridge, and we're getting ready to start the second day of the Beyond Broadcast conference. Shawn van Every of NYU's ITP program is giving some opening remarks while Jennifer Myronuk, Kenyatta Cheese and Jay Dedman are at the panel table, getting ready to leave a group discussion about public media. Unfortunately the wifi is down right now so I can't post this in real time; hopefully it'll be working soon.

There we go. Wifi is up again. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:24 AM

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May 12, 2006

Radio Open Source: A Blog with a Radio Show

Notes from the talk by Brendan Greeley, Radio Open Source

Radio Open Source is a blog with a radio show. We want to have the blog come first - bring people in through the blog and use that to produce the radio show. Mary McGrath and Chris Lydon started the show Connections in the mid-90s, and used a lot of bulletin boards. The Internet was a major tool, but not the primary driver; now they're using Radio Open Source.

Blogs are the new talk radio; they're used for making decisions. Blogs have motion. Talk to many early bloggers and they'll say they were sick of yelling at some broadcaster on the TV and instead wanted to broadcast their own ideas. Blogs have motion - one post after another in rapid succession, also like broadcasting.

Open Source looks like a blog, using a common three-column layout. Without having to tell people, we wanted them to feel that they could use the site in blog-like ways. You can leave your mark. We act like a blog, using permalinks, technorati tags; we read blogs and encourage people to blog. We don't ask for links -we ask for opinions.

tag: beyondbroadcast

Posted by acarvin at 3:11 PM

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Ethan Zuckerman's 90-Second Tour of Internet History

Notes from Ethan Zuckerman's lightning-fast overview of Internet history at the start of the Online Community panel. -andy

The Internet's been around since 1969, but email was invented four years earlier - people were using it to talk on a shared computer. Communication has been a fundamental part of the Internet even if it wasn't what the network was designed for. The first email list was created in 1975. Later, it was BBSes - Bulletin board systems, starting in 1978. By 1979, we had USENET, the precursor to all of today's Web bulletin boards. MUDS - multi user dungeons, were invented in 1979. Minitel - France's national interactive TV system - 1982. Minitel's chess game happened to have chat - the first instant messaging.

1990 - the World Wide Web first designed by Tim Berners Lee at CERN. '95 - geocities and tripod allow everyone to create their own homepages. Same year Ward Cunningham creates the first wiki. '97 - the first weblogs. 2001 marks the beginning of wikipedia.

So why now? All of this stuff has been around forever. It's because we've reached a critical mass of users. Two-thirds of Americans are online, hundreds of millions worldwide. Of course now.

tag: beyondbroadcast

Posted by acarvin at 3:07 PM

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Jonathan Zittrain is Not a Rap Mogul

This afternoon's session about online communities got distracted somewhat by the real-time question and answer system used at the conference. As panelists talk, participants and virtual lurkers are able to submit questions and respond as the panelists are speaking.

The last panelist, Berkman co-founder Jonathan Zittrain, participated over a Web cam from Oxford, England. Ethan Zuckerman introduced him as "JZ," and this caused a long list of comments over whether the JZ in question was no other than rap superstar/business mogul Jay-Zee.

Here's a taste of the thread:

# Who is this "JZ"? (5 votes)
[vote that it be answered] [answer briefly]

* EthanZ: Jonathan Zittrain, law professor at OII and Berkman

* snoop: isn't he a rap mogul?

* Anonymous: A famous Rapper known his love of cyberlaw and hos

* duwop: a man sitting in very dark room. why?

* Anonymous: darker and rainier in oxford than cambridge (ma)

* Godess: JR realy is God - I know - look at how strong he looks

* Anon: JZ - God - just made the lights dim

* patrick duffy: JR? Wasn't he shot?

As Jonathan gave his talk, this chat went on back and forth on a large screen in the plenary room. What started as sporadic giggles became a vocal minority of participants who struggled to contain their laughter. (I must confess - I was one Snoop and Patrick Duffy in this thread.)

It was a fun little break in the seriousness, but it also demonstrates the risks of having wifi access and real-time chat during a conference. People are going to say what they'll say, constructive or not. But that's the beauty of Web 2.0 - letting go of the old rules and trusting in your fellow community members to do the right thing. Admittedly, I listened a little less to Jonathan's talk than I otherwise would have if I hadn't been reading or participating in the chat. I just hope they don't use it if I'm ever invited to speak here - someone, no doubt, would exact their revenge and find some creative way to make jokes about my initials. :-) -andy

tag: beyondbroadcast

Posted by acarvin at 3:05 PM

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Terry Heaton on the Nashville Experience

Notes from Terry Heaton's talk:

Glenn Reynolds says we're witnessing the triumph of personal technology over mass technology.

The reality is that the business models to succeed now isn't in the old way of doing things, it's in the disruption caused by opening up to the masses.

Media is unbundled at the point of origin and rebundled at the point of consumption. But if that's all you do, you're just a content provider, and that's economic suicide.

Mediated people make their own media. If you can't get your arms around that, you can succeed in this new world.

As Gordon Burrell said, what do you do when the deer have guns? That's what's happening in Web 2.0 and broadcasting. So you get into the ammunition business!

WKRN TV Nashville: they operate 15 websites, including two aggregators, blogs and a search site. We're aggregating 400 local bloggers and have a writer going through it and highlighting the best stuff - so you can access either all of them or a selection. We also provide them with advertising tools so they can make a little money. It improves ratings, revenue and the number of visitors.
tag: beyondbroadcast

Posted by acarvin at 10:29 AM

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Bill Buzenberg Talks Public Insight Journalism

Bill Buzenberg of Minnesota Public Radio, talking about Public Insight Journalism. Notes are summaries, not direct quotes. - andy

MPR has been obsessed with user developed content. We have 900k listeners in Minnesota, around 15 million national, four million newsletters... One of the new things we've started is a mini wiki- a free news and music culture encyclopedia for our local community. We use Gather.com for generating local news stories with the general public.

Now we're focusing on Public Insight Journalism - "On any given story, someone in the audience will always know more than we do," says MPR president Bill Kling. We've created a database of listeners willing to give us info - around 18,000 people now. We take our database and write to them on different issues, contacting health care workers on health care stories, etc. We get back hundreds of emails and give them to the reporters to help them create a good story. The reporters used to be skeptical - now they're not.

We write to our database and ask them to tell us their personal economic story - are you getting crunched? Hundreds of people write back, giving our reporters a map of what's going on across our economy. We can even take the data to economists to get their take on the situation. It's giving the newsroom story ideas of things they'd never thought about before.

We did a story on the education achievement gap. We asked people to share their thoughts, and hundreds of people replied. We get to use their stories while the public can rate the stories. All of this led to a townhall meeting. Same thing with the future of small towns - our listeners have lots of ideas, lots of expertise on the subject, so we're able to capture the public's collective wisdom. We also created a budget simulator, where users could go through the state budget and make choices, then show whether you balanced the budget or not, and what programs you ended up eliminating. Around 11,000 people used it, even though it takes about 20 minutes to go through and do it. They can then email their results to policymakers, who are amazed at how better informed their constituents are than they realized.

We're now expanding it nationally. We've generated over 130 stories that have been informed by public insight journalism. If we can get the foundation support, we want to see other broadcasters using these tools.
tag: beyondbroadcast

Posted by acarvin at 10:18 AM

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James Boyle of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain

Notes from the keynote speech of James Boyle of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, co-creator of the comic book, Bound By Law. My notes are rather incomplete because I was video editing some clips I shot in Second Life, so they don't really capture what a dynamic, funny speaker he is. It was a great keynote. Most of the notes are not direct quotes, just summaries. -andy

"We are in the middle of a somewhat scary and exciting flowering" of online creativity, he said. "Most of it is still to come - that's incredibly exciting. My talk is on how to not screw it up."

Two propositions:

1. We are extremely bad at predicting the future of any kind of tech innovation. The FCC predicted cell phones would be a "niche market." They once thought the telephone would be a one-to-many broadcast system rather than a person-to-person medium. We need more technological humility.

2. There is a blindness regarding the ability for commons-based media to generate interesting kinds of content. We are blind at every level of network policy as the opportunities that commons-based production can lead to. At every level of the system we have to have a balance between property, control, ownership, etc, and openness.

We tend to undervalue the open side of things and focus too much on its dangers. We have a bias against openness in the system.

WIPO is now discussing a "broadcasters right" which gives broadcasters a slice of the copyright simply by broadcasting it. So they can veto future uses of it rather than just the content owner. Some telcos say they shouldn't spend more money building out the network unless they get a broadcasters right as well. So now they want it to apply to webcasts, which could effectively destroy nascent Web 2.0 citizen journalism. "This is dumb in a rich, patterned, complex way - a fine dumbness."

The way we train young lawyers today is all about control. We never tell them to prepare a client to let go over their content, or let the public create their own content. There's a major cultural gap between lawyerly thinking and Web 2.0 culture.

We need to make sure we leave an open process for whatever you're doing. Allow a constant feedback loop and push back on just how much control is needed. Don't give up on net neutrality. Don't give up on the power of the commons. But this isn't a religious question, it's an empirical question.

Let's say it's 1992 and you want to create the Encyclopedia Brittanica on steroids. The lawyers will want strong copyright control and editorial control, so hire only the experts that'll be best at and fire them if they don't perform well. And we need to protect the brand so no one else will copy it. Fast forward to today. When was the last time you used an encyclopedia? You google instead. But in 1992, it's ludicrous - yet it just happened to be true.

tag; beyondbroadcast

Posted by acarvin at 9:50 AM

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April 20, 2006

Taking Hao Wu's Detention to a National Audience

Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices has an excellent essay in today's Washington Post on the plight of Hao Wu, the blogger and documentary maker who has been detained by the Chinese government for almost two months. Quoting Rebecca:

About a month before his abduction, Hao (his first name) also took up the part-time role of Northeast Asia editor for an international bloggers' network that I co-founded, Global Voices Online ( http://www.globalvoicesonline.org/ ). He was excited about introducing the perspectives of Chinese bloggers to an English-speaking audience. He also kept an English-language blog at http://beijingorbust.blogspot.com/ . While his writings were considerably more honest and edgy than those in the China Daily, he was by no means a dissident and often defended his government against Western criticism.
Hao turned 34 this week. He personifies a generation of urban Chinese who have flourished thanks to the Communist Party's embrace of market-style capitalism and greater cultural openness. He got his MBA from the University of Michigan and worked for EarthLink before returning to China to pursue his dream of becoming a documentary filmmaker. He and his sister, Nina Wu, who works in finance and lives a comfortable middle-class life in Shanghai, have enjoyed freedoms of expression, travel, lifestyle and career choice that their parents could never have dreamed of. They are proof of how U.S. economic engagement with China has been overwhelmingly good for many Chinese.

Problem is, the Chinese Dream can be shattered quickly if you step over a line that is not clearly drawn -- a line that is kept deliberately vague and that shifts frequently with the political tides. Those who were told by the Chinese media that they have constitutional and legal rights are painfully disabused of such fantasies when they seek to shed light on social and religious issues the state prefers to keep in the dark.

Rebecca, Ethan Zuckerman and other members of the Global Voices community have worked tirelessly to raise awareness of Hao's plight. I only wonder if President Bush mentioned it today while meeting with Chinese leader Hu Jintao. He certainly should have. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 4:54 PM

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April 17, 2006

Did a Randomly Generated Blogger.com Question Add to the Hype Around Kevin Underwood?

The blogosphere is abuzz with the story of Kevin Underwood, the confessed killer of Jamie Rose Bolin. Much has been made of the fact that his blog's profile included a question and answer about cannibalism: " If you were a cannibal, what would you wear to dinner? The skin of last night's main course." (I even mentioned it yesterday on my blog.) Authorities have pointed to this quote as a piece of the criminal puzzle.

Today, though, the Wikipedia entry about Underwood mentioned that this question was actually randomly generated by Blogger when Underwood filled out his profile. I did a quick search to see if this was the case; lo and behold, many other bloggers have the same question on their profile, including Cerce, Kajun Beth and Phil, just to name a few. None of them, as far as I can tell, are indeed cannibals. Instead, they seem to be students, construction workers, stay-at-home mothers and other occupations.

A quick search of Google News shows more than 250 stories quoting this question in their stories about Underwood. So for all of you Blogger users who may ever get covered in the media for one reason or another, I'd suggest you check out your blogger profile and see what your random question is.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:45 PM

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April 14, 2006

Petition to Free Hao Wu

Update: Global Voices contributing editor Hao Wu is still being detained by the Chinese government. As I reported last month, he was working on a documentary about underground church groups in China when he was picked up by the authorities in February. There's now a petition demanding his immediate release. Please sign the petition and show your support. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:53 PM

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April 9, 2006

At Least It's Not A Vlog...

You know that video blogging has hit the big-time (not to mention podcasting) when it gets mentioned in a Sunday comic strip:

(And for those of you who are wondering, yes, I have permission - UClick lets you share their work for noncommercial purposes.)

Posted by acarvin at 12:40 PM

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March 31, 2006

Post-Game Summary of My Appearance on Radio Open Source

Chris Lydon live on Open Source last night

Last night I had the pleasure of being a guest on Christopher Lydon's public radio program, Open Source. The focus of the show was genetics and genealogy, which has been a hobby of mine for six years now.

I arrived at the studio just before 7pm, when the program airs live. I sat in the studio with Chris, who was busily jotting down notes for the show, peppering me with interesting questions about the subject. I'd met Chris once or twice at Harvard Berkman events, but this was the first time we'd ever really chatted. You can tell he's done thousands of interviews in his long career; he really makes you feel comfortable. I think it was particularly helpful that I was with him in person. Sometimes I've done radio interviews in which I'm over the phone or checking in via another studio, and the lack of eye contact can affect the rapport of the conversation. So it was great being able to sit at the same table with Chris, microphones bobbing six inches from our noses; it would make for a very comfortable, casual conversation.

I didn't come on for the first 40 minutes; Chris interviewed Spencer Wells of National Geographic and John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin first. This allowed me to observe his interview style and take notes. During music breaks, Chris would talk simultaneously with the control room as well as with me, taking advantage of every moment to prepare for the next segment.

Eventually, it was my turn to appear on air. Chris opened things up by asking me how I started my own family tree odyssey, and the brick wall I hit in terms of a lack of a genealogical paper trail beyond my great-grandparents. I talked about how I learned about genetic genealogy in early 2000 and tracked down the founder of Family Tree DNA, which was just getting off the ground as one of the first commercial providers of DNA tests for genealogical purposes.

From there, we talked about some of the findings I had, including the connections on both sides of my family with the Middle East and northeast Africa. I also talked a bit about my father-in-law, Dave Cornwall, who got tested last year and ended up connecting with other DNA customers who happened to be named Cornwell and shared a similar story of how their families came to America. Chris wrapped it up by asking me what I plan to tell our first child about our family's history and what we've learned from the DNA testing. I said I hoped that it would give them an appreciation of how we're connected to people from all over the world, and that we're all one large human family, all equally deserving of dignity and respect.

The hour was over quite fast - it's amazing how these things fly by when you're into it. Chris said he'd be getting tested soon; I can't wait to see the follow-up show and learn what he discovered.

In case you didn't catch the show, here's the podcast of the full hour. It's about 24 megabytes, so it may take a while to download. My segment is about 40 minutes into the show - not that you should skip ahead or anything. :-) -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:37 AM

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March 17, 2006

Name that Name: Web 2.0 vs. Star Wars

Wedge, meet Qoop.
Qoop, meet Wedge.

In case you think the term "Web 2.0" isn't beaten to death already, here's a fun quiz. The goal of the quiz is to distinguish which word is the name of Web 2.0 dot-com business and which one is a name from Star Wars.

Here are a couple of freebies to get you started: Wedge is the name of a Star Wars character. Qoop is not.

The other 41 words in the quiz, including barada, kiko, bossk, brakiss, trumba, eskobo, callista, favoor, nuvvo, jango, meebo, pando, jarjar, nilo, oola, lulu, padme, agatra, sebulba, oyogi, renkoo, watto, yedda, greedo, django, zoto, panaka, riya, dooku, reddit, tarkin, daala, congoo, ning, thrawn, lando, squidoo, wicket, collectivex, tagyu and goowy, are up to you.

Full disclosure: I managed to get 32 of them right, though I have a feeling it's more due to my hyper-absurd knowledge of Star Wars movies than an award-winning expertise in Web 2.0 esoteria.

Hat tip: Heather @ Blogspotting

Posted by acarvin at 2:52 PM

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March 16, 2006

Fighting Copyright Ignorance with Comic Books

The new comic book Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law?, produced by the Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

For those of you who produce podcasts, video blogs, documentaries or any other type of creative work, stop everything you're doing right now and go read a comic book.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain, in an effort to educate content producers about the realities of copyright, have published an amazing comic book called Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law? The comic book, available in various digital formats as well as on paper, is an entertaining, highly informative about the often-confusing world of copyright law.

The book follows the story of a documentary maker putting together a film about life in New York City. ("Trapped by a STRUGGLE she didn't understand.... By day a FILM MAKER... By night she fought for FAIR USE!") As she's gone around and captured scenes for her film, she's also picked up incidental uses of other people's work - a saxophonist playing a song, a sign in the background with a company logo, public TV screens showing images of Bart Simpson. These scenes are a reality of modern life, yet they're a nightmare for documentary producers. As the comic book notes, one producer was forced to remove footage that featured someone whose mobile phone ringtone happened to be the theme to the movie Rocky because they couldn't afford to pay the song's publisher $10,000 for including it. In other cases, important works like the civil rights documentary Eyes on the Prize get locked away for years because the producers couldn't afford to pay for the clearance rights of incidental music. (Thankfully, Eyes on the Prize will finally air again on PBS this fall, after years of fundraising to pay for clearance fees.)

The question is, who's in the right? When does the incorporation of someone else's creative work into a new work constitute fair use, and when does it cross the line?

Page after page, the comic goes through examples of producers who've found themselves in difficult circumstances because they allowed themselves to get pushed around by big-media lawyers - even when their use of someone else's content is justifiably fair use. It's intended to give producers confidence when it comes to using someone's content in a fair use context, explaining when the law is on their side and when it isn't.

The comic book also practices what it preaches by being publish under an attribution-noncommercial-sharealike license from Creative Commons, which is also explained during the course of the story. This particular copyright license means that anyone can redistribute or re-work the comic book as long as it's for noncommercial purposes, they cite the producers of the book, and that they pass along the same basic copyright rules to their own license. My blog uses this same license, so that allows me to share some pages from the book without having to ask permission or worry about interpretations of fair use:

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain is doing a tremendous public service by publishing this comic book and making it available for free over the Internet. Perhaps Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals, whom they quote in the book, said it best: "Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain.... Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture." -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:53 PM

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March 7, 2006

Is Creative Commons Broken? Hardly.

Alex Bosworth recently posted a provocative essay about Creative Commons, the online initiative attempting to simply licensing options for original works published on the Internet. Bosworth argues that Creative Commons isn't working for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there are too many versions of the license and that no one ever makes use of them.

He makes some interesting points, but I don't buy his argument that no one can actually make use of the licenses. Countless people use the licenses for adding someone else's media to their work. I've lost track of the number of times I've utilized CC music in my videos and podcasts, not to mention reprinting CC-licensed essays on my digitaldivide.net website. And rarely a day goes by where I don't hear from someone wanting to use my stuff and reconfirming if something is CC licensed.

The fact that you can customize your license is a major strength, in my mind, rather than a drawback. It's not like there's an infinite number of licenses combinations that would make the whole thing meaningless. Sure, there are 18 licenses availalbe, but some are media-specific (like the sampling license), and others, like the Developing Nations license, are country specific. I think it's important for people to decide whether or not they want others to share alike, or if they should cite you, or if you want to be notified if they would like to use your work commercially. Putting together the combination of rules that's right for you is what makes CC so powerful.

I'm also puzzled about this mystery as to what "commercial use." Isn't commercial use simply any kind of use intended to make a profit? That seems rather straightforward to me. If a school or museum contacts me and says they want to use one of my videos, I tell them they don't have to ask, since I've already licensed them so they can be used for noncommercial purposes. Meanwhile, I regularly get contacted by PR firms and graphic designers who want to use my photos in a pamphlet or poster or something. Their interest is clearly commercial, and my CC license informs them they'll have to negotiate with me directly.

If you haven't read his essay, read it. I would have posted excerpts here on my blog, but Alex doesn't use Creative Commons - his blog states "© Copyright 2003-2005 SourceLabs, Inc. All Rights Reserved." Technically, this means I would have to get his permission to post anything of his on my blog. If he had used a Creative Commons license, that wouldn't have been the case.

Creative Commons broken? Hardly. I think it's just getting warmed up.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 1:17 PM

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March 1, 2006

Wikipedia Surpasses One Million Entries

A few minutes ago, Wikipedia reached a major milestone, surpassing one million articles for the first time. As it turns out, I was logged in working on some new Wikipedia articles, including the Buduburam refugee camp, the Tunisian Berber village of Ksar Ouled Soltane, and ghorfa, the Berber term for a vaulted granary cell. Unfortunately, I missed posting the one millionth article by a few seconds; it seems my ghorfa entry was somewhere around 1,000,005, give or take.

Either way, it's amazing to see Wikipedia reach this important milestone. And I'm proud to have authored around .0003 percent of it today. :-) -andy

Posted by acarvin at 6:16 PM

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More People Know American Idol Judges than the First Amendment

A new survey by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum suggests that more Americans are able to identify the judges on American Idol than remember the five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment of the US Constitution. Only about one in four Americans (28 percent) was able to name more than one of the five fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. Meanwhile, more than four in 10 Americans (41 percent) could name two of the three Idol judges and one in four could name all three. "Unfortunately," they noted, "just 8 percent of Americans could name at least three of their First Amendment freedoms."

(Before you read any further, test yourself and see how many you can remember. I nailed all five - guess I can thank Mr. Deppner's American History class for that.)

Which one is more familiar to you?

Americans were also better versed at identifying the main characters on The Simpsons. More than half of those surveyed - 52 percent - could ID at least two Simpsons charactes. " And while more than one in five (22 percent) Americans can name all five of the fictional Simpsons family members - Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie - just one in 1,000 people surveyed (.1 percent) were able to name all five freedoms granted under the First Amendment," they said.

Most people - more than two out of three in the survey - were able to remember that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech. But it's all downhill from there, as respondents struggled to remember the other freedoms. Here are the percentages of respondents who remembered each freedom:

Freedom of Speech (69 percent)
Freedom of Religion (24 percent)
Freedom of the Press (11 percent)
Freedom of Assembly (10 percent)
Freedom to Petition for Redress of Grievances (1 percent)

"These survey results clearly demonstrate that many Americans don't have an understanding of the freedoms they regularly enjoy. The Freedom Museum is designed to inspire people to understand and value their freedoms," said Dave Anderson, executive director, McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum. "The Freedom Museum will present freedoms in not merely a historical context, but in modern day examples, allowing people young and old to relate to modern day freedom debates."

Additionally, the researchers through in a few other "freedoms" just to see if people thought they were part of the First Amendment. "About one in five Americans (21 percent) agreed that the First Amendment granted them the right to own and raise pets, something that isn't discussed anywhere in the U.S. Constitution or Bill of Rights. One in five also believe that the right to drive is guaranteed by the First Amendment, although the car was not invented for another 100 years."

Something is most definitely wrong with this picture. Yet I wonder how many Americans can name all the First Amendment freedoms and at least five of the current American Idol finalists? Let's see - there's Ayla, Kinnik, Ace, Brenna.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:27 PM

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February 27, 2006

Yahoo! Puts the Allah Back in Callahan

John Oates of The Register reports that Yahoo! will no longer block people from creating user IDs with the word Allah in it. The debate began last year when a man named Ed Callahan was blocked by Verizon from registering an email address for his mother because their surname, Callahan, contained the word "Allah" in the middle of it. Verizon was using Yahoo! for its mail system, apparently, and any variation of the word Allah was blocked automatically when you tried to register it, even if Allah was just a row of letters in the middle of a surname.

As noted by Haitham Sabbah last week, versions of the word Allah were banned in Yahoo! email accounts, while words such as god, jesus, buddha and yahweh were acceptable. Apparently, complaints by the Callahans and Muslim bloggers were effective, because Yahoo! has changed their policy:

We continuously evaluate abuse patterns in registration usernames to help prevent spam, fraud and other inappropriate behavior. A small number of people registered for IDs using specific terms with the sole purpose of promoting hate, and then used those IDs to post content that was harmful or threatening to others, thus violating Yahoo!'s Terms of Service.
'Allah' was one word being used for these purposes, with instances tied to defamatory language. We took steps to help protect our users by prohibiting use of the term in Yahoo! usernames. We recently re-evaluated the term 'Allah' and users can now register for IDs with this word because it is no longer a significant target for abuse. We regularly evaluate this type of activity and will continue to make adjustments to our registration process to help foster a positive customer experience.

So Mr. Callahan's mom can now have her Yahoo! email address, as can anyone else who'd like to express themselves with the word Allah in their user name. I'm sorry to report, though, that any login name containing the word "Osama" still cannot be registered on Yahoo!. Perhaps there was a concern that Mr. Bin Laden would try to register as himself so he could keep up with colleagues, like Ayman Zawahiri and Abu Zarqawi. (Ironically, if you're name is Zarqawi or Zawahiri, you're more than welcome to register; I just tried registering ZarqawiStud and ZawahiriBaby, and Yahoo! congratulated me that both names were available.)

As a test, I tried registering some Osama variants, including osamalamamama63, 4osamarama874d and bigosamashazbot. None of them was available, and I cannot imagine the names were actually taken already. Osama, of course, is simply the Arabic version of the name Samuel, so all the innocent, law abiding citizens of the world who just happen to be named Osama are out of luck when it comes to selecting a personalized Yahoo! email address. What's puzzling, though, is that my friend Osama Manzar uses a Yahoo! address with his name in it. He must have been grandfathered in by Yahoo! when their anti-Osama policy was created.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:22 PM

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February 12, 2006

Dick Cheney Shoots Fellow Hunter?!?

Just when I thought the day would be solely dominated by coverage of today's blizzard, words comes through the AP wire saying that Vice President Dick Cheney shot a fellow hunter with a shotgun during a hunting trip today. Says the AP:

Harry Whittington, 78, was "alert and doing fine" after Cheney sprayed Whittington with shotgun pellets on Saturday at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.
Armstrong said Cheney turned to shoot a bird and accidentally hit Whittington. She said Whittington was taken to Corpus Christi Memorial Hospital by ambulance.

Obviously, our first thoughts must be with the wellbeing of this poor man (Whittington, not Cheney). But what will this mean for Cheney? So far, it's not being mentioned on the TV networks that I've seen; the Olympics are still running on NBC. But Yahoo and CNN both have it as breaking news on their homepages; someone's already updated Cheney's entry on Wikipedia.

So surreal.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:53 PM

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February 10, 2006

If Only More TV Characters Were Bloggers

Stephen Baker of Blogspotting pointed out today that Dwight Schrute has a blog. For those of you who don't know Dwight, he's a character on the NBC comedy The Office. It's pretty funny stuff, but as Baker notes, it would be funnier if the studio execs would let Dwight and other TV characters have blogs that could go in any direction, independent of the main story line on the show, and interact with the rest of the blogosphere.

How great would it be more TV characters had their own blogs? (Preferably the actors themselves, that is - blogging in character, rather than a committee of staff writers.)

Just to get things started, here are some TV characters I'd like to see blogging.

Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Anyone who watches this show knows that Larry is one of the most self-absorbed, insensitive characters on television. And that's just when he opens his mouth. Imagine what's really going on in his head?

Horatio Caine of CSI Miami. A control-freak if there ever were one, Horatio would no doubt moderate his comment threads with an iron fist. "Now here's what I want you to blog about, ma'am..."

AJ Soprano of The Sopranos. Don't tell me that AJ doesn't have a blog on MySpace.com.

Sol Star of Deadwood. The most thoughtful and introspective character on Deadwood, Sol only talks when he has something important to say. Yeah, I know, it takes place in 1870. That doesn't mean the guy can't keep a diary for God's sake. Sheesh....

Cassidy Mackey of The Shield. She's gotta know her dad's corrupt.

John Munch of Law & Order: SVU (and half a dozen other shows). John's got an opinion - and a conspiracy theory - for everything.

Randal Pinkett of The Apprentice. Oh, wait a sec.

Paula Abdul of American Idol. Corey Clark is so dreamy.

I wonder who would be on their blogroll? -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:03 AM

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February 9, 2006

I'll Order My TV Programming from the A La Carte Menu, Thank You Very Much

We're fast approaching the 10th anniversary of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, an omnibus overhaul of US telecommunications law. Many politicians and industry reps argued at the time that the act would be consumer-friendly, increasing competition and choice of services, which in turn would help lower prices.

According to my latest cable bill, that ain't the case.

While the cost of Internet and mobile phone services have generally come down, we've seen a steady hike in monthly cable charges. According to the research firm TNS Telecoms, cable costs have risen 35.7% for the average American consumer since the year 2000. Much of this increase can be associated with the sheer number of new channels added to cable subscription packages. It's now not uncommon for subscribers to receive 200-300 channels, despite the fact that the average consumer watches only 17 channels on a regular basis.

The logical conclusion one would draw from this would be to demand the option to purchase your favorite channels a la carte - in other words, if you only watch ESPN, the Weather Channel and Spike TV, you should only have to pay for ESPN, the Weather Channel and Spike TV. In 2004, the FCC put out a report on the a la carte option, which concluded that it wasn't economically feasible nor in consumers' interests. FCC Chairman Kevin Martin was skeptical of the conclusions, though, so he asked for a re-examination of the data, which had been supplied by - cough - the cable industry. The follow-up report is now out, and Chairman Martin's hunch was correct: the conclusions weren't supported by the data.

According to the new report, consumers could cut as much as 13% from their cable bills through a la carte pricing.

"Today, the [Federal Communications] Commission issued a further report, which concludes the earlier report contained mistaken calculations, relied on unsupported and problematic assumptions, and presented an incomplete analysis," Martin said in a statement. "According to today's report, a careful analysis reveals that a la carte and increased tiering could offer consumers greater choice and the opportunity to lower their bills. Indeed, in recent months more consumer choice has proven to be technically possible and many companies have begun offering the kinds of tiers the previous report found to be infeasible."

"Increasingly, consumers are saying they don't want to pay $10 more for 10 more channels," Chairman Martin added in an interview with the New York Times.

Not surprisingly, cable programmers warn that a la carte pricing could hurt the diversity of programming currently available. "Implementing pay-per-channel rules will mean the end of smaller networks that currently provide consumers with such a wealth of diversity in programming," said Rod Tapp, an executive veep for Inspiration Networks, as quoted by the Times.

The FCC apparently disagrees. "Some type of a la carte option could prove better than today's bundling practices in fostering diverse programming responsive to consumer demand," they write. "A la carte could make it easier for programming networks valued by a minority of viewers to enter the marketplace." Senator John McCain has also come out in support of a la carte; he's just announced he'll introduce legislation to make it possible.

The Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports, wasted no time in applauding the FCC and Senator McCain.

"Consumers should praise FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and Senator John McCain for striking at the heart of the cable industry's flawed pricing scheme which forces consumers to buy packages of television channels they don't want and shouldn't have to pay for," said Jeannine Kenney, Senior Policy Analyst for Consumers Union. "Today's action kick starts the national effort to give consumers' wallets a break and allow them more control over their television programming choices and cable bills."

Personally, I can't wait to cut my digital cable bill down to size; I probably watch only 20 channels of the 200+ I'm currently paying for. Consumers Union has a lot more to say on the subject and other important media policy issues: visit HearUsNow.org to get the facts.

Posted by acarvin at 4:32 PM

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Going Once. Going Twice. Sold to Starfinder5!

For the last week or so, the good folks at Rocketboom have been pushing the video blogging advertising envelope, one bid at a time. Eager to experiment with paid advertising on the video blog, they set up an eBay auction to offer advertising to the highest bidder. With more than 100,000 viewers per day, Rocketboom has become a hot commodity as of late. (Full disclosure: I'm an occasional correspondent for them, but you already knew that.) So Rocketboom co-founder Andrew Baron decided to test the advertising waters.

According to the auction, Rocketboom would create five original video ads for the winning company, ranging from 15 seconds to one minute each. They would then air over five successive days in March at the end of each Rocketboom episode. Bidding began at $500 and quickly rose to the 10k-15k range, then stalled out for a few days. As the bidding period came to an end, the bids picked up again, jumping to $40,000 in the final bid, submitted by an eBay user named Starfinder5. So far I'm not sure what Starfinder5 will want to advertise, though it does seem they're a regular buyer/seller on eBay. I guess we'll just have to stay tuned to Rocketboom and find out.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 1:40 PM

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February 4, 2006

Airline Magazine, Children's Game Publish Anti-Gay Slur - Accidentally, I Hope

Late Thursday night Susanne and I flew down to Florida visit my parents for the weekend. On the Atlanta-Melbourne leg of our 11:30pm flight, operated by Delta Airlines, I was perusing the carrier's official magazine, Delta Sky (mostly because I was too exhausted to handle the lofty prose of my latest Aubrey-Maturin book). The magazine usually contains short, light pieces for frequent travelers that are accessible to a general audience.

Flipping through the pages I eventually reached the section known as Style+Value, which features blurbs and pictures of trendy places and hot shopping buys. One blurb, titled "Card Carrying," contained what should have been an innocuous description of "NamIts," a game you can play with your kids on long drives:

Name things that fly—or swim, or run. . . . For some reason, calling out lists within specific categories has universal appeal, as Barbara Jerome discovered. This mother and mother of invention strung together flashcards asking kids to name various items, and voilà: NamIts was born. Each deck (Regular, Travel and Junior editions) sells for $9.95. Info: www.namits.com.

NamIts game I then glanced at the picture of NamIts, which is basically a collection of cards on a plastic ring. At first glance, it looks like a typical kids game. The card on the left shows a cat and highlights the words "CAR PET" while the card on the right has a pizza and the word "MUNCHER."

At first I didn't think much of it and turned the page. But something didn't seem right, so I flipped back to it and saw to my horror that the picture's words, when read collectively, appeard as "CARPET MUNCHER."

Perhaps this phrase isn't in everyone's vocabulary, but I associate it with a derogatory slur against lesbians and a misogynist insult against women in general. Was it merely a localized Florida insult I'd heard while growing up - and thus an innocent, unfortunate coincidence - or was this a more universally recognized slur, at least in American culture? I handed the magazine to Susanne, who grew up in the midwest, just to see if the phrase meant anything to her.

"Notice anything wrong with this story?" I asked.

"No, not really - OH MY GOD!" she replied. "I can't believe they published that!"

Me neither. Part of me knows I should be offended but I can't stop laughing, either.

How could this slip through the editorial process? What on earth was Delta Sky thinking? And perhaps more troubling, how is it possible that a children's game could get away with this? It's one thing if the game's cards were randomly shuffled into this order by the photographer, but the cards are strung together on a ring, suggesting that the game always has these two cards next to each other. Perhaps the cards are ordered randomly in the assembly process. Perhaps not. I also don't know if the photo in question was taken by the magazine or supplied by the game company. I checked the game's website and saw no sign of the photo, but at the moment it's still on the Delta Sky website.

I can only imagine the emails Delta is gonna get about this. Too funny.... -andy

UPDATE: Feb 10, 2006, 11:15am

I just got some new comments on the blog posted by John Kuczala, who says he was the one who took the photo in question. Here's what he wrote:

I'm the photographer that took that picture. It was totally accidental that those cards ended up together. The sole reason for choosing those cards was one was the last orange card and one was the first blue card. It's unfortunate that I didn't pay more attention to reading the cards and that no one at Sky Magazine caught the combination, but it was not supposed to be a joke or an insult.

Thanks for clarifying things, John - I appreciate you taking the time posting your perspective and shedding light on the situation. -andy,

Posted by acarvin at 11:07 AM

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February 2, 2006

Boston.com's Photo Blogging Tool: Give-it-away, Give-it-away, Give-it-away Now

Flipping through the homepage of Boston.com I stumbled upon its new YourPhotos photo blogging tool. It bills itself as a place for people to store and display unlimited photos for free. Nice idea - until you read the fine print:

By submitting your photo(s) to Boston.com, you agree that such photo(s) and the accompanying information will become the property of Boston.com and you grant Boston.com, The Boston Globe, Boston Metro and their sublicensees permission to publicly display, reproduce and use the photographs in any form or media for any and (all editorial and related promotional purposes) purposes.. You also warrant that (i) the photo is your original work, or is properly licensed, and does not violate the copyright or any other personal or property right of any third party, and (ii) you have obtained any and all releases and permissions necessary for our intended use. Your submission also allows Boston.com to edit, crop or adjust the colors of the image(s) on an as needed basis.

In other words, you're more than welcome to host your entire catalog of family photos on the Boston.com website, just so long as you're willing to give away ownership of said photos and let Boston.com make a profit off of them. I can understand sending in photos for a Boston.com photo contest, for example, and giving them the rights to reproduce them exclusively, but it seems thoroughly selfish and un-Web 2.0 to demand that photo bloggers give up their ownership of their own work. No alternative, no Creative Commons licenses, no exceptions. I seriously wonder how many people have posted photos on YourPhotos and not realized they'd done just that.

Thanks for the service, Boston.com - but I'll stick with Flickr, my Creative Commons licenses and - most importantly - ownership of my own photos, thank you very much. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:41 PM

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January 13, 2006

Half of All Ashkenazic Jews Descend from Four Women; Just Not Me

CNN.com has an Associated Press story today about a major scientific study about DNA and Jewish genealogy. According to the researchers, more than half of all Ashkenazic Jews - those of us tracing our Jewish roots through Central and Eastern Europe - descend from just four women.

The research examined over 11,000 DNA samples from around the world, looking specifically at the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), a type of DNA we all inherit from our mothers. One generation after the next, a person gets mtDNA from their mother, who got it from their mother, and so on. The new research suggests that millions of Ashkenazic Jews have mtDNA so similar, they can literally trace their roots back to four individual women, each with a unique mtDNA pattern, or haplogroup. This may sound impossible, but it's not really that surprising. If you go back over the centuries and millennia, there were periods of time where large numbers of Jews died off, while others were able to flourish. So more than half of all Ashkenazic Jews today can trace a direct line back to these four women, each representing genetic clans, so to speak, that managed to flourish better than others.

Interestingly, I know for a fact that I'm not a direct matrilineal descendent of one of these four women. Looking at the research study, I noticed that the four haplogroups in question were K1a1b1a, K1a9, K2a2a and N1b. (These are just the code names designated by scientists to the four genetic clans analyzed in the study.) I had my DNA tested for genealogical purposes almost six years ago - in fact, five years ago next week marks the US News cover story that featured me and my genealogical DNA adventure.

As part of that research, I discovered that my genetic clan, or mtDNA haplogroup, is called pre-hv1. It's a very uncommon haplogroup among Jews; in fact, it's more common in Arabia, Ethiopia, North Africa and southern Spain. This doesn't mean I'm not an Ashkenazic; it just means that my particular family history has a direct line that's more easily traceable to modern middle eastern populations. The haplogroup has even been found in suprising numbers among the Kalash tribe of Pakistan, whose oral history traces its roots back to Greek and Syrian soldiers of Alexander the Great. Perhaps they picked up some women along the way who happened to be cousins of mine..... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:43 AM

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January 4, 2006

Pete Townshend Warns iPod Users to Watch Their Ears

Pete Townshend, from his Blogger profile

Legendary guitarist and blogger Pete Townshend, who damaged his hearing after years of performance with The Who, is now warning iPod users to turn down the volume.

"I have unwittingly helped to invent and refine a type of music that makes its principal components deaf," he said on his website. "Hearing loss is a terrible thing because it cannot be repaired. If you use an iPod or anything like it, or your child uses one, you MAY be OK ... But my intuition tells me there is terrible trouble ahead."

I remember when I was a kid, I spent countless hours blasting Who albums using various mobile devices, including cassette walkmans and portable CD players. (Pete's right; he definitely helped create a genre of music that demands to be played really, really loud.) But it seems that each time there's been a new generation of mobile audio, there have been warnings from experts about the effect of these devices on our hearing. I have no doubt that my hearing was affected by walkman use, not to mention guitar playing and countless concerts, but I honestly don't know by how much, since my hearing remains pretty good. Haven't there been longitudinal studies about fellow Gen Xers who grew up with the Walkman? If so, it seems that warnings like Pete's would be more powerful if they happened in conjunction with the publishing of research showing what happens to our ears after years of mobile audio use.

Granted, I still listen to my iPod all the time. (Sorry, Pete, haven't uploaded Quadrophenia yet.) But I definitely am more aware of the audio levels I use, particularly when compared to my teenage years, when no volume could be too loud. I just wish the iPod would start to vibrate or flash or spew noxious fumes each time I accidentally turned the volume too loud.

Anyway, thanks to Mr. Townshend for the public service reminder - we should all be more sensitive to our iPod use. Wonder if he plans to make a podcast warning as well; if so, hope he doesn't record it too loud. :-) -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:33 PM

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December 24, 2005

Grandpa's Latke Recipe Takes the Nation By Storm

Grandpa. The asap article identifies the pic as an AP photo; if some suit in New York wants to sue me for reproducing one of our own family photos without permission, they can take it up with my grandmother first.

One of the nice things about having a brother working at the Associated Press is that it's possible to manipulate Big Media into force-feeding our family's cherished traditions into countless households across the nation.

Case in point: My brother Eric has just published a hilarious, yet heartfelt tribute to my late grandfather, Simon Kaplan, that spreads the gospel of his glorious latke recipe. Latkes, of course, are potato pancakes made by Eastern European Jewish families here in the US. (As Eric notes, they're not a big tradition among Israelis - just those of us in the States who can connect our family trees back to Barbra Streisand, David Berkowitz, Monica Lewinsky and Woody Allen if you go back far enough.)

One of the fondest memories for both of us growing up was helping Grandpa make heaping mountains of latkes on special occasions, particularly around Hanukkah. Though Grandpa died almost exactly 15 years ago, we've managed to keep his glorious latke recipe alive, in no small part thanks to the Internet. For around 10 years now I've had a copy of his latke recipe on my website, and I've shared it on countless online discussion forums. Now, Eric has benevolently (and lovingly) used his almost irrational influence over mainstream media to publish the recipe through AP's asap news service. (That's pronounced A-S-A-P; don't think of calling it "ay-sap" unless you want to get verbally cudgeled by asap staff.)

Some quick snips of what Eric wrote:

Born in Boston in 1912 to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, Simon Kaplan never became a master chef, but he knew how to take the world's blandest vegetable and work a Hanukkah miracle.
Starting when I was old enough to eat solid food, I ate Grandpa's latkes every year -- ate as many as I could get my greedy little hands on. Somewhere along the way, I started helping out in the kitchen, savoring the sizzle I created when I pressed down a pancake with my spatula. Tssssssssss. The soundtrack to a growling stomach.

Grandpa was a man who believed in family traditions -- not so much the mechanical rites that go along with religious observance, but the little things that make life so enjoyable that they must be repeated. As for so many other things, we loved him for this, and after he died when I was 17 we made sure his latkes would outlive him.

My brother Andy -- the unofficial keeper of the recipe, mostly because I keep forgetting to write it down -- continued making Grandpa's recipe during the Hanukkah season. Some years I made them too, inviting friends over for latke parties in my New York apartment at least a couple of times. The tradition lives on, with new people and in different places.

Since Eric's written the recipe in a very detailed fashion, I'll refrain from posting his version lest I open myself up to an AP lawsuit. (Grandpa would roll over in his grave, no doubt.) Instead, I'll include the text of my recipe as I've kept it for the last decade. Nonetheless, I encourage you to read Eric's version for the sheer pleasure of it.

Grandpa Simon Kaplan's Latkes

Ingredients:

Twelve medium Idaho potatoes, thoroughly washed
two eggs or egg substitute
vegetable oil
one large onion
matzah meal
salt and pepper

Begin by peeling the potatoes if you desire. Personally, I don't bother, but if you want to, it won't hurt. Then, grate the potatoes with a medium-size grater into a plastic bowl. You'll notice a lot of liquid in the process - that's starch, and you'll want to get rid of it. After grating three or four potatoes, strain out the starch through a fine collander or similar strainer, discarding the starch. Put the drained potatoes in a large plastic bowl. Continue to grate and strain the potatoes until they're all done.

In your large bowl of potatoes, add two eggs, breaking the yolk with a fork. Grate the large onion into the bowl. Add one tablespoon each of salt and pepper to the mix. Blend with a large spoon or spatula (don't bother to use a machine to do it - it's too thick and it'll taste goyish if you try). You'll notice the mixture will be somewhat soupy - add about half a cup of matzah meal and blend. Continue to add meal by the teaspoon until mixture is thick, though not necessarily dry.

Coat a large skillet with a small amount of oil and bring to medium/high heat. Test your batter by frying up a tablespoon's worth until a golden brown on both sides. If you like the taste, continue to make the rest of your latkes, using about a tablespoon per latke. If you don't like the taste, adjust batter with salt and pepper. If you still don't like it, go find another recipe, you little complainer, you.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:08 PM

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December 15, 2005

Nature's Wikipedia-Britannica Death Match; Adding By-Lines & Trust Rankings Next?

The latest round of the Wikipedia accuracy wars turns out to be a tie. According to an investigation by the science journal Nature, Wikipedia fared well when compared head-to-head with Encyclopedia Britannica on science-related entries.

The magazine asked experts in various scientific fields to review 42 topics in both Wikipedia and Britannica. The result: both sources had a similar number of mistakes. On average, Wikipedia entries had four errors or ommissions, while Britannica had three. When you add these up with misleading statements, 162 were found in Wikipedia, while 123 appeared in Britannica.

"People will find it shocking to see how many errors there are in Britannica," Nature quotes information scientist Michael Twidale. "Print encyclopaedias are often set up as the gold standards of information quality against which the failings of faster or cheaper resources can be compared. These findings remind us that we have an 18-carat standard, not a 24-carat one."

The most error-prone article? Dmitry Mendeleev. If you go to the Wikipedia entry, there's a note at the top saying that Nature identified certain problems with it and they're working to correct the article. But when you access the Britannica version, there's no mention of any dispute. Perhaps it's because Britannica's online entry for Mendeleev is so brief there's little room for error, and the errors are only in the most recent paper version of the encyclopedia. There's no way to tell. With Wikipedia, at least, there's a paper trail you can follow to see who change the entry and how it was changed.

My guess is that the Nature study will do more to harm Britannica's rep than improve Wikipedia's. Chances are, there will be another instance similar to the Siegenthaler controversy that led to so much bad media attention for Wikipedia. They've change the rules so that anonymous participants can only edit articles rather than create new ones. But to me, that doesn't go far enough. While I'm concerned about protecting the anonymity of Wikipedians posting on sensitive topics, particularly from countries that oppress free expression, this issue only affects a very small minority of entries. Isn't it more important for Wikipedia to build confidence among the online public? If that's the case, the anonymity policy needs to be assessed more radically. I love Wikipedia, but I'd feel a hell of a lot more comfortable with what I read if there were also a transparent paper trail for the Wikipedians editing articles.

Perhaps a solution would be to strongly discourage anonymity. For those entries that have edits posted by an anonymous Wikipedian, place an icon prominently on the page warning us that the entry was edited anonymously, so readers can make an informed judgment. For those that have been edited by people willing to log in with their names, have those names appear on the entry's page as a by-line, with links to their biographies. I know that all of this information can be found in the entry's history page, but the average Internet user who doesn't know the inner workings of Wikipedia won't realize this. By placing the names of the contributors on the marquee of each entry, the authors are forced to stand up and take credit for it - for better or worse - just like a scientific journal.

Then, perhaps we need to add an eBay-like rating system for Wikipedians. For Wikipedians whose work is judged as accurate, let readers award them a point, or perhaps 1-10 rating system (ie, a perfect 10 for stellar wikipedians with strong credentials who cite primary source materials obsessively, and a 1 for those whose work is clearly incompetent). That way, when you go to a wikipedia entry, you can judge it on the rating of the Wikipedians. You could even do the same for the articles themselves: wouldn't it be useful to know if 83% of the readers of one particular entry found it lacking in one way or another?

On eBay, I'd rather buy from someone with a high trust ranking; wouldn't we all want to find the same level in trust among those who are creating the knowledge we're consuming?

Anyway, it's just an idea.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:58 PM

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December 14, 2005

The Orhan Pamuk Trial: Turkey's Free Speech Test

The BBC has a story today about the upcoming trial of celebrated Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who faces three years in jail for "insulting Turkishness." His alleged crime? Making the following statement in public: "Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands [ie, Turkey] and nobody but me dares to talk about it."

Despite the many reforms Turkey has enacted to increase the odds of getting into the EU, free speech continues to face many challenges, particularly on issues related to Turkish involvement in Armenian deaths during World War I. Armenians and countless historians worldwide regard these deaths as a genocide, but refering to them as such can get you thrown in jail. Journalists and authors have protested the trial; most recently, a group of international prize-winning authors including Gabriel García Márquez, Günter Grass, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Carlos Fuentes, John Updike and Mario Vargas Llosa have issued their support of Pamuk.

EU governments, no doubt, will follow the trial closely, given their negotiations with Turkey surrounding membership in the continental club. No matter how the trial goes, it saddens me to no end to see one of my favorite authors on trial in a country I love dearly for merely stating the truth. If countries such as Germany, South Africa and Rwanda can come to terms with eggregious human rights abuses made in the past, why can't Turkey?

I personally support Turkey's bid for EU membership. But foolish show trials such as this seriously cause me to question whether they're ready for it. Economic reforms are just one criteria for membership; freedom of expression and human rights must be respected and taken seriously as well.

And don't expect to see many people blogging about the case, except perhaps foreign nationals; Turkish bloggers, conceivably, could get arrested just for covering the trial and the statement in question. So far, I've only found one Turkish language blogger talking about it. I wish my Turkish weren't so rusty.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:57 PM

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October 6, 2005

Text of Al Gore's We Media Speech

The text of Al Gore's speech at the We Media conference is now online at TomPaine.com. Interestingly, they titled it "Our Democracy is Hollowed Out," which was the same quote I used while blogging his speech in real time. It's a long speech - 4,600 words - but worth a close read, in case you didn't get a chance to listen to the podcast or see the video highlights I posted yesterday.

Meanwhile, a few people emailed me and asked if Gore really talked about a guy with a chronic hiccup problem. Here's the text in question:

One morning not long ago, I flipped on one of the news programs in hopes of seeing information about an important world event that had happened earlier that day. But the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years. And I must say, it was interesting; he had trouble getting dates. But what I didn't see was news.
This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of "The Daily Show," when he visited CNN's "Crossfire": there should be a distinction between news and entertainment.

And it really matters because the subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: it leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.

tag: We Media

Posted by acarvin at 2:09 PM

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October 5, 2005

Craig Newmark on Trust

Notes (not direct quotes) from remarks by Craig Newmark (yes, that Craig, as in craigslist) in a panel on trust:

We're a community in the sense that a flea market is a community. People want to connect for all sorts of reasons - commerce, socialization, what have you. We're kind of a marketplace on the ancient model - rude and chaotic, but vital. And through customer service, we've created a culture of trust. The central issue is trust, and that's the only way we know how to do things. We don't say it; we practice it.

People talk about trust, and try to inspire trust, but they fail to provide customer service. It just destroys all their attempts at credibility. And you see that happen in the news - I'm considering starting the Helen Thomas Fan Club because she's the only one willing to ask the tough, unpopular questions.

We have checks and balances built into the site, such as a flagging system so you can flag things for removal. If you flag something and other people agree with you, it disappears. Most people are trustworthy and moral, but there are a few bad guys out there, so checks and balances are necessary at all levels. We're talking about something that affects our lives; trust is important whether you're looking for a good dry cleaner or deciding which politician to support.

tag: We Media

Posted by acarvin at 3:30 PM

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We Media, Politics and Activism

Notes from the We Media session on activism and democracy, featuring Rebecca MacKinnon, Nicholas Kristof, Brian Reich, Seth Green, Marcus Xiang, and - quite surprisingly - me. -andy

Rebecca MacKinnon: The exciting thing about "we media" isn't what mainstream media is doing with online tools; it's what individuals, organizations and activists that are doing that's really what we need to be discussing.

Brian Reich: It shouldn't be a surprise that moving from online discourse to real activism requires getting away from your computer and actually doing something in your community. For example, when reaching out to Latinos, for each person you try to reach online, you need to reach out to several others offline in real-world circumstances. For most people, walking into a campaign office and volunteering is a really scary thing. But more and more people are using technology to get involved, and those numbers are just going to increase over time.

Reich sidebar: Daily Kos promotes 14 candidates, all fourteen lose. Is he really great at pulling people into politics, or is he really bad at understanding politics?

Seth Green, Americans for Informed Democracy: Our goal is to take the group that's reading online media and figure out a community service model where they can raise awareness in their community among people who are less politically informed. There's a small community that's really, really involved, but as a nation, we're not having a discussion about our role in the world. We're setting up townhall meetings about things like western-Muslim relations, bringing together imams with homeland security officials. A lot of people who protested the war didn't feel they had a big impact; there's a real sense that if I can cause real change in my community instead, I can see an actual impact and become inspired.

MacKinnon: So when you've got things going on online, you need to work hard and fast to make sure things mobilize in terms of offline activism.

Green: Online media is only so effective; lots of people get that email but don't read it. Human, real-world connections are sometimes undervalued. Look at the role of faith based orgs in the midwest; we often forget how close-knit and politically engaged they are.

MacKinnon: let's talk China. While China may not have democratic elections, the growing use of social software is increasing a culture of democracy within China. Ordinary Chinese are getting to pick their own equivalent of an American Idol; may seem trite but it's a major change from how business is usually done in China.

Marcus Xiang, who runs a Chinese mobile blogging community: We sign up ordinary Chinese people to establish their own personal medium. We aggregate content from everyone into portals based on their interests, so people can congregate with people around interests they share. We now have more than one million mobile phone users interacting in this community. The behavior patterns of mobile users are different from Web users. Early adopters are housewives, farmers, students, workers; they don't own a PC so they embrace their mobiles. They're pretty much attached to them, and like to interact through them. Some are illiterate or of low economic status; they don't care about politics. What they talk about are they pains they've gone through in child birth, daily struggles, life experiences...

They're actually doing a form of self-therapy. AOL says 50% of blogs are used as a form of self-therapy, and I think that's true based on what I've seen. Blogging is like a language, a universal tool. We use it a social medium. We Media is more than journalism; but only 10% of blogs are journalistic, according to AOL. So we want to go for the other 90% - and people are willing to pay for it. We see it as an opportunity.

Nicholas Kristof: We often hear about bloggers holding politicians and the media accountable, but they're not doing a good job at holding themselves accountable, such as the dirty tricks used to doctor photos of John Kerry or spread rumours about him and a supposed girlfriend. It was harder to do way back when they didn't have photoshop. Now it's easier, and people will see stuff and believe what they want to believe. A Chuck Colson-like figure would be empowered today in ways he couldn't have been back during Watergate.

Columnists want to have an impact, cause people to do things differently. But I don't expect Bush to read my column and say, Gosh, I better change my policy. But look at how students have responded to the Darfur crisis. Or the Pakistani rape victim who was essentially kidnapped by President Musharraf. Blogs did a much better job at promoting her cause than anything I could have done, with people going to march at Pakistani embassies. It was very effective. It did seem that when you can email around good personal stories that inspire passion can light the spark that causes a political fire.

MacKinnon: Let's talk digital divide. The online community is basically a bunch of elites. How do you bring in the rest of the population? Is it through PCs, mobile phones or something else? (Not only do we have bad broadband penetration, we have poor mobile phone signals - what does this reality mean from a policy standpoint?)

At this point, Rebecca turned to me and asked what can we do to get more underserved groups engaged. I summarized some of the things I said last night about encouraging young people to volunteer and teach people how to use technology for positive social change. You don't approach them and teach them tools in a vacuum - instead, you need to ask them, what is it in your community that ticks you off?, then show them the ways different tools can be used to create a voice for themselves and hopefully get the attentions of the powers that be. So it's not showing them how to use the Internet to become consumers; it's showing them so they can make a positive difference and channel their political frustrations into something good.

Seth: it's also a psychological divide between Americans and the rest of the world. Most Americans don't follow international news or travel, so they have myopic views of how the world works. When you show them positive examples of things going on internationally, they brush it off as something that NGO types do. They don't feel like they have anything at stake with what goes on internationally.

Brian: We've elevated political leaders and columnists as the only people who have something expert to say. But real people are experts too. Anyone using ICTs can instantly become a thought leader. If you're a thought leader, rather than doing all the talking, start doing the listening. People are concerned about their families, their personal safety, etc. They have real life experiences that makes them just as much of a thought leader than so-called experts.

Seth: There's still a big divide between those of us who think all of this technology stuff is what the world is doing, and the rest of us who don't have access or aren't plugged into public discourse.

Tim from Free Press: MoveOn has been successful, but it's flagging. People are beginning to ignore the flood of emails. What's the next model?

Brian: I don't think it's really successful at politics. Their candidates keep losing. But what they're good at is fundraising and aggressive online marketing. We glorify things that get big numbers - wow, 500,000 people on their mailing list - but did they actually achieve their goal of getting policies enacted or people elected? We glorify things with big numbers but we don't scrutinize their actual success. A better example are the Ohio Republicans who organized workers who never voted before. They got the job done. Meanwhile, people donate to MoveOn but didn't vote in the numbers needed for Kerry to win.

Marcus on the digital divide: In China, the most popular devices are TVs and mobiles, not computers. Families in villages have them. They watch TV, play with mobile phones. So in terms of the digital divide, people are choosing different technologies. Meanwhile, in terms of a psychological divide, many people don't understand why people blog and expose themselves. It's scary to them. An in terms of politics, Americans and Chinese have different understandings of what democracy means. We think more about having a harmonious society. First you need to be able to eat, then we can be able to speak. Speaking is an afterthought. It's a different point of view.

Posted by acarvin at 2:13 PM

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Is It the Role of Journalists to Advocate Voting?

A (paraphrased) exchange between Farai Chideya and Dan Gillmor. Sorry I couldn't type fast enough to get it verbatim.

Farai Chideya: It's not my job as a journalist to ask the public to vote.

Dan Gillmor: Why not?

Chideya: My job isn't to tell the people "vote no matter what, vote if you don't understand the issues." Voting is important, but sometimes you have miserable choices. So it shouldn't be my role to advocate voting. What if you don't know how to read, let alone what to vote for? I'm not saying don't vote; I'm just not here to advocate uninformed choice. It's up to voting orgs to get the people to the polls.

Me (in my head, not to the group, as the microphone gets whizzed away to someone else): Wish Dan had been given the chance to follow up....

Posted by acarvin at 1:58 PM

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Al Gore on the Destruction of the Marketplace of Ideas

Al Gore

"It is the destruction of the marketplace of ideas that accounts for the strangeness that continues to haunt our efforts to reason together," said former Vice President Al Gore, who's now speaking at We Media. He continued by saying it was once open to all individuals with no barriers of entry except for being literate. Moreover, the fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended on an emergent meritocracy of ideas - those ideas that were good rose to the top. But now, television has basically squeezed the public out of the national conversation.

Ironically, television programming is more accessible than any other media, he added, but it's only accessible in one direction. There's no conversation and no interaction.

The absence of a two-way conversation of ideas in TV also means that there's no meritocracy of ideas. Getting philosophical, Gore quoted Jurgen Habermas and his "refeudalisation of the public sphere." The power of controlling the media has the potential of damaging our democracy, Gore continued. Public interest standards like the fairness doctrine were once enacted by the FCC to prevent this, though these standards have almost all been overturned, allowing a free-for-all of hate on the radio airwaves.

News divisions, which once served the public interest, "are now seen as profit centers," Gore lamented. They've shrunk staff and news bureaus left and right, despite the fact that this generation of journalists is "the best skilled" perhaps of all journalists. Gore described "digital brownshirts" put out by the White House to go after anyone who dares to write things online against the president. He lamented "the climate of fear" that exists at universities where "facts become battlegrounds."

"The subjugation of news as entertainment" has become a threat to our democracy, particularly when it prevents journalism from investigating leadership who are "corrupt or incompetent."

More later... Shooting video and other good stuff.... -andy

tag: We Media

Posted by acarvin at 10:36 AM

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October 4, 2005

Tunisian Activists to Ben Ali: Enough!

A Tunisian woman protesting against President Ben Ali

Right now there's an extraordinary online protest coming out of Tunisia. The website, Yezzi.org, is a collection of photos of Tunisians holding up signs in various languages, each with a message directed to Tunisian President Ben Ali. Though the phrase they use, "Yezzi, Fock!," may appear to be a misguided attempt to curse out a certain swear word in the English language, it roughly translates to "General Ben Ali, enough is enough!" in Tunisian Arabic. In the words of the protest's organizers:

This expression in Tunisian dialect intends to transmit a clear message to the dictator in order to give up power, because we consider it is enough. For us Tunisians, who are always banned from freely reaching independent information and who are violently forbidden from any peaceful demonstration; this kind of demonstration is a new form of peaceful protest.

The site, launched yesterday, contains dozens of photos of Tunisians venting their frustration at President Ben Ali. They note that free expression is technically protected under Tunisian law, though not in practice, so they're using the website to exercise that right:

[T]here's no Tunisian legislative provision prohibiting the right to express our opinions. Absolutely not, this demonstration is covered by the fundamental guarantees provided as well by the Tunisian Constitution as by the International Conventions ratified by Tunisia. All the demonstrators on Yezzi.org make use of their right to express an opinion in saying to the General Ben Ali "It is enough!"

The Tunisian authorities, not surprisingly, see the matter differently. They've already started blocking the site, so only those of us outside of Tunisia can see it. One can only imagine what might happen to these cyber dissidents if they were caught by the Tunisian police. No matter the response, though, it serves as another reminder of the ackwardness of having the World Summit on the Information Society hosted in Tunisia. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 1:31 PM

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September 28, 2005

Tom DeLay Indicted

Meanwhile, breaking news from the world of politics, courtesy of CNN: " House Majority Leader Tom DeLay indicted on one count of criminal conspiracy by Texas grand jury, according to Travis County clerk's office."

Posted by acarvin at 12:54 PM

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September 5, 2005

CNN, Katrina and the Rhetoric of the War Zone

Has anyone else noticed how CNN has mobilized its best war correspondents - Christiane Amanpour, Nic Robertson and Jeff Koinange, most notably - to cover Katrina? I've watched reports from Amanpour and Robertson, and heard some of Koinange's reportage; for all intents and purposes, they're covering it as if they're embedded in a war zone. Robertson patrols a neighborhood, describing harrowing accounts of Hurricane victims fighting for survival; Ananpour wears a khaki vest that feels as if it's one fashion step away from a flak jacket.

News anchors like Paula Zahn have described reporters trailing national guard troops as "embedded" - a term that previously was reserved for reporters caught in the thick of it in Afghanistan and Iraq. Meanwhile, we hear of police going out "on patrol," with lead members "on point." First responders go out on "recon" missions, not just search and rescue. Citizens and law enforcement have been killed by "friendly fire." And perhaps most ubiquitous, survivors of the storm now exist as "refugees."

The rhetoric of Katrina is that of a war zone, not a natural diaster. We may not want to frame it using the language of war, but we lack the language to frame a disaster of this magnitude otherswise. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:22 PM

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August 29, 2005

FTP Comes to the Rescue for CNN's Hurricane Katrina Coverage

Just a few moments ago on CNN, reporter John Zarella filed a story from New Orleans, which is currently being hammered by Hurricane Katrina. The footage was somewhat grainy, as if it had been shot live via videophone, but it featured cutaway footage from various parts of the city, so it was clear it was an edited package.

When the story ended, CNN's Daryn Kagan explained that network executives had given the order for TV crews not to use satellite trucks - they could get blown over on top of the crew - so reporters in New Orleans could no longer use live satellite feeds to connect to the network. Instead, she said, "CNN is now using a technology called FTP" to get footage from New Orleans. John Zarella and his team uploaded the video package over the Internet so they wouldn't have to file it outside with a satellite truck.

The way Kagan explained it, she almost seemed to be suggesting that CNN was embracing some bleeding-edge tool that's making connectivity possible for reporters in the middle of the storm. Rather, they're using one of the oldest tools available to Internet users. FTP, or file transfer protocol, has been around for decades. It's simply a tool that allows a person to upload or download a file between their computer and a server located somewhere else on the Internet.

Not unlike the way ham radio became a major tool for people caught in the middle of last December's tsunami, journalists are now reverting to some of the most basic Internet tools to ensure they can file their stories in a timely - and safe - manner. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:12 AM

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Che Guevara's Family Threatens Lawsuits over Photo Use

Che-emblazened berets for sale in Havana

There's a Reuters story today about that famous photo of Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. A pop culture icon in its own right, the photo was taken in 1960 by Cuban fashion photographer Korda. He didn't published the photo, but gave away copies of it to an Italian publisher seven years later, who went on to print millions of posters upon Che's death.

Since then, the photo has become one of the world's most famous t-shirts. It's been lampooned in a New Yorker cartoon, depicting Che sporting a Bart Simpson t-shirt. Reporters Without Borders used it in campaigns protesting the treatment of journalists in Cuba. Supermodel Gisele Bundchen modeled underweared stamped with the famous pic.

The families of both Che and Korda are not amused. Over the last five years they've filed successful lawsuits to block the use of the photo in ways they feel run counter to the spirit of Che, and now they're planning to file more suits around the world.

I wonder, though, if they will attempt to curtail the sail of Che-ware in Cuba. When Susanne and I visited four years ago, Che souvenirs were everywhere. The crafts market in Old Havana was dominated by Che chic - berets, china plates, posters, postcards, medallions. I can understand Che's family been upset about liquor and lingerie companies using his image as part of their capitalist marketing campaigns. But do they feel the same way about the Cuban government using the image to collect US dollars from Che-crazy tourists?

Posted by acarvin at 8:38 AM

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August 26, 2005

Get Me a New Wire Service, ASAP!

Does he look like a news editor to you? Believe it.

Yesterday, E&P ran a story about the Associated Press and its plan to launch a wire service targeting the 18-to-34-year old demographic. The new service, called asap, will take advantage of the AP's massive infrastructure to put out stories in various media formats, including text, photos, audio and video.

"Nobody else is already everywhere," asap head Ted Anthony told E&P. "We have all these people doing interesting things all over the world."

Along with the obvious fact that this is a newsworthy development, it gives me the opportunity to play proud big brother, as asap's news editor will be none other than Eric Carvin, who until recently was the overnight news supervisor at AP headquarters. (I've known about this for a little while, but being a good brother I resisted giving into my inner blogger and spilling the beans before they were ready to talk about it.)

Way to go, Eric. Knock 'em dead and take no prisoners. Unless they ask nice - otherwise it might upset Mom. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 5:17 PM

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Pat Robertson and the War Criminal

In the days since Pat Robertson said he'd like to see Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez whacked by the US, I've heard a few commentators mention connnections between Robertson and former Liberian president and notorious war criminal Charles Taylor. I was curious to learn more, so I started poking around and quickly found a CBS News story from 2003 in which Robertson slams Bush for asking Charles Taylor to resign. (Taylor is now a fugitive in Nigeria, hiding from the UN Tribunal he deserves.) Here are some snippets from that story:

Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson accused President Bush of "undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels" by asking Liberian President Charles Taylor, recently indicted for war crimes, to step down.
"How dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down,'" Robertson said Monday on "The 700 Club," broadcast from his Christian Broadcasting Network.

"It's one thing to say, we will give you money if you step down and we will give you troops if you step down, but just to order him to step down? He doesn't work for us."

(snip)

Robertson told The Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that he has "written off in my own mind" an $8 million investment in a Liberian gold mining venture he made four years ago, under an agreement with Taylor's government.

"Once the dust has cleared on this thing, chances are there will be some investors from someplace who want to invest. If I could find some people to sell it to, I'd be more than delighted," he said in the article.

(snip)

A U.N.-backed tribunal indicted Taylor on June 4 for war crimes in neighboring Sierra Leone.

Robertson told the Post that the war crimes indictment "is nonsense and should be quashed."

Want more? Read this Washington Post piece about the Pat Robertson/Charles Taylor connection.

Lesson learned: if you subscribe to the Pat Robertson School of Thought, it's okay to support a world leader who's an indicted war criminal when you've invested in gold and diamond mines in his country. But if another world leader sticks in your craw and you haven't invested millions of televangelism dollars in his country, you can send a hit squad after him.

Pat Robertson's ethical compass points only in one direction - at himself. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:44 PM | Comments (1)

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August 23, 2005

Pat Robertson Issues Fatwa Against Hugo Chavez

Waking up this morning, I saw a headline on the Yahoo homepage saying that an American religious leader was calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. Before I could click the link, images of Pat Robertson flashed through my mind. Soon enough, the link opened, and there he was - a still photo of the televangelist, with a wire report outlining the gory details of Robertson's rant.

"We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability," Robertson said.

"You know, I don't know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he thinks we're trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it," he continued. "It's a whole lot cheaper than starting a war ... and I don't think any oil shipments will stop."

Robertson's comments are obscene on so many levels. I find it extraordinary that any religious leader whose beliefs supposedly advocate turning the other cheek would actual come out and suggest that we should send a hit squad against a world leader. Granted, Hugo Chavez is hardly a saint, and there's much to be said about having a more favorable government in Venezuela. But a television preacher suggesting we should rub him out? It's just disgusting. No matter what religion you represent, any leader of the faithful who comes out and says someone should be killed is doing a disservice to humanity. Pat Robertson is sounding more and more like Mullah Omar of the Taliban rather than a good Christian. (Just imagine it: what would the world be saying if an Islamic leader suggested the same thing about a world leader? We probably would have called in Delta Force before lunch.)

Meanwhile, I'm both shocked and fascinated by the fact that Robertson added the aside "and I don't think any oil shipments will stop." What exactly is he trying to tell the world? That it's good for the US government to use force against any oil-possessing government it has a grievance with? Next thing you know, Robertson will be calling for air strikes against Nigeria because President Obasanjo just criticized extrajudicial killings and the use of torture by police. It's just insane.

A few hours ago, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld issued rather tepid criticism of Robertson's rhetorical shenanigans. "Certainly it's against the law. Our department doesn't do that type of thing," he told the press. "Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time." A State Department spokesman said basically the same thing.

This is unacceptable. The Bush administration as well as religious leaders of all persuasions need to stand up and repudiate Robertson's foolish statements. His behavior is reckless and should not be tolerated. Simply saying "private citizens say all kind of things all the time" is not a condemnation. Pat Robertson's remarks should be condemned by everyone who believes in diplomacy and the rule of law. Ignoring Robertson's ugly behavior is tantamount to condoning it. - andy

tags: pat robertson

Posted by acarvin at 4:13 PM

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August 18, 2005

An Evening with a New Yorker Cartoonist

Susanne and I had quite the social evening tonight. First, I swung by a gathering of Boston-area video bloggers hosted by Steve Garfield, where a group of us enjoyed some beers while chatting about video blogging, community media and other topics interesting to us media geeks. I then grabbed a cab and headed to Cambridge, where I met Susanne for an evening with New Yorker cartoonist Drew Dernavich. The event, hosted by the magazine and Grand Marnier, was an opportunity to sample a range of Grand Marnier cocktails on someone else's dime (their margaritas were wicked strong) and snack on as many crab cakes and asparagus fritters you could shove down your gizzard.

After 30 minutes of lounging, Drew Dernavich took the stage, which in this case was just the front of the bar. Unfortunately, the bar was configured as a long, thin space, so unless you were within 15 feet of the cartoonist or the PA system adjacent to him, it was almost impossible to hear a word he was saying. I made out a few random facts, though, such as it took him 12 years before he got published in the New Yorker, and that he studied sculpture in Italy.

After his presentation, he invited guests to chat with him and make requests for drawings. I had my digital camera with me, so I figured we could sneak back to the front, observe him in action, and maybe ask a question or two. One aspiring cartoonist asked him some questions about the biz, but after that, Dernavich started taking requests. After drawing a picture of a man covered in grass cuttings from his neighbor's lawn mower, Chewbacca-style, he made eye contact with me and paused to see if I had a drawing request. I drew a blank for a moment, but then asked him how he would portray Boston's notorious problem with bad street signage. (If you want to get lost in Boston, follow the signs and it's inevitable.) Dernavich smiled, paused another moment, and got to work, drawing a "Welcome to Massachusetts" sign almost completely obscured by a giant tree:

Video of Drew Dernavich drawing a cartoon of Boston's infamously poor street signs.

Before leaving, I asked Dernavich about the New Yorker's habit of running cartoons in which generic individuals are portrayed, rather than caracatures of famous people, as often seen in newspapers. Was this practice a challenge to him as a cartoonist, or did he find it liberating?

"I like it, because from a standpoint of being timeless, in a newspaper, what you find are cartoons being published about a specific politician or a specific event," he replied. "The New Yorker publishes ones that are... Well, even if you know it's in the news, still a lot of people will see it and say, 'I don't get it.' But if it's not about a specific event or a specific person, that way it can still be funny on its own, five or 10 years down the line, once that person's gone from the news. So I consider this more of an opportunity."

With that, Dernavich ripped the cartoon of the street sign off his drawing pad, rolled it up, and handed it to me. eBay, anyone? -andy

Posted by acarvin at 8:10 PM

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August 12, 2005

Bhutan, Globalization and Stone Cold Steve Austin

Bhutan's Paro Valley

There's a post on Global Voices this afternoon linking to a story asking "if it makes sense for Bhutan to not broadcast Indian Television programmes."

Before reading the actual story, my first thought was, "Perhaps they should start blocking US programming too so Bhutanese kids don't get enamored with pro wrestling." Then I read the blog entry and saw that it actually dealt with this very problem, along with the issue of Indian TV programming.

When I was in Bhutan in May 2002, I was amazed at how many young boys were walking around with t-shirts bearing the likenesses of Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock. Meanwhile, on the main athletic field in the center of Thimpu, kids were practicing wrestling moves on each other while other boys in traditional Bhutanese dress focused on their archery skills.

Perhaps there's more going on here than meets the eye. Anyone care to begin a PhD dissertation on Bhutanese culture and its attraction to American pro wrestling? Then again, perhaps not. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 2:45 PM

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A Bad Week for Google Gets Worse

This week is probably one that the folks at Google would soon forget. For starters, they've caught a stunning amount of flak for their decision to refuse to cooperate with reporters from CNET for an entire year because a CNET reporter used Google to dig up background information about their CEO. Rather than make that one reporter journalista non grata, they publicly announced that Google would no longer cooperate with any CNET reporter.

Bloggers and newspapers alike have piled onto Google for the decision. Meanwhile, CNET has added a little snippet to any story they publish related to Google, going beyond the usual "XYZ declined to comment," as you can see here:

Google declined to comment. (Google representatives have instituted a policy of not talking with CNET News.com reporters until July 2006 in response to privacy issues raised by a previous story.)

Next, we get word via Google's blog in a post ironically titled Making Books Easier to Find that they've decided to suspend their library digitization project until they can make nice with a number of publishing houses.

Google is trying to put a positive face on their decision. "We think most publishers and authors will choose to participate in the publisher program in order (to) introduce their work to countless readers around the world," they write on the blog. "But we know that not everyone agrees, and we want to do our best to respect their views too."

But CNET, perhaps eager to insert their new "We're not welcome at Google" boilerplate into as many stories as possible, notes the ongoing ire of book publishers:

Google's move apparently did not satisfy all publishers' concerns regarding the project. "Google's procedure shifts the responsibility for preventing infringement to the copyright owner rather than the user, turning every principle of copyright law on its ear," Patricia Schroeder, CEO of the Association of American Publishers, said in a statement.

Interesting to note that Google's stock, previously edging back towards $300 per share, has dropped to around $285 as I write this over my chicken salad and Diet Dr. Pepper lunch this Friday afternoon. Let's just hope their website doesn't crash next. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 1:40 PM

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Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

The Media & Politics Archive

October 24, 2008

Sneak Preview Tour of NPR's Election Studio

June 20, 2008

Discussing Twitter, Liveblogging and Journalism at the Guardian in London

May 23, 2008

Impromptu Interview with Jacob Soboroff of Why Tuesday?

March 20, 2008

Lessig Launches Change Congress: Political Reform a la Creative Commons and Wikipedia

March 12, 2008

Get My Vote: NPR's User-Generated Political Commentary Initiative

March 5, 2008

Let's Play Stump Speech Bingo!

February 8, 2008

Amy Winehouse and Media Concentration: Why Going Back to Black in the US Radio Market Ain't Easy

February 5, 2008

Super Tuesday Election Returns, Courtesy of Google

Following Super Tuesday Results on Twitter

February 4, 2008

Attention Political Podcasters: Wanna Contribute to NPR's Weekend Edition?

January 26, 2008

A Charge to Keep, A Horse to Steal

January 15, 2008

Widget Fest: CPB Grant to Foster Public Broadcasting Collaboration & User Engagement for Election 2008

January 10, 2008

The Potential Impact of Polls and Punditry on the New Hampshire Primary

November 21, 2007

Four Ways to Participate in NPR's Democratic Presidential Debate

October 28, 2007

Martin Luther King III on Blogging, the Media and the Jena 6 Protests

Martin Luther King III Discusses Media Ownership

October 22, 2007

Questions I'd Ask Mitt Romney

October 10, 2007

Jay Rosen's Six Lessons from NewAssignment.net

It's Your Newsroom

At the Networked Journalism Summit

August 28, 2007

Behind the Scenes at NPR: the Talk of the Nation White Board

August 2, 2007

Journalist Shield Legislation Amended to Cover Only Commercial Bloggers

July 23, 2007

Michael Moore Visits NPR

July 18, 2007

Presenting at the JFK Presidential Library

July 1, 2007

Waiting in Spin Alley

June 28, 2007

You'll Get No Smokes from PBS, Thank You Very Much

June 25, 2007

Supreme Court Rules Against "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" Kid

June 22, 2007

Ask a Presidential Candidate

June 19, 2007

Ask a Technocrat

June 13, 2007

Josh Wolf on The Colbert Report

June 12, 2007

Nobody Expects the American Inquisition!

June 8, 2007

Change.org: Using Social Networking to Raise Money For and Against Politicians

May 18, 2007

MySpace: Balancing Business with Democracy

Steve Urquhart: The Extremes of Politics are Rotting Our Core

Previewing the Next Edition of Tom Friedman's The World is Flat

Thomas L. Friedman Interviews Eric Schmidt of Google

Google Announces Democratic Presidential Debate on Youtube

Lessig: Fair Use is "The Right to Hire a Lawyer"

At the Personal Democracy Forum

NPR to Release Debate Recordings in the Public Domain

April 24, 2007

How Can Public Broadcasting Make a Real Difference in Election 2008?

April 12, 2007

Lost in Cyberspace?

March 1, 2007

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

February 5, 2007

Bush 2008 Budget Would Cut NTIA Funds in Half?

January 26, 2007

Amy Winehouse and Media Concentration:
Why Going Back to Black in the US Radio Market Ain't Easy