Jay Rosen’s well-thought-through project in citizen journalism has posted its first assignment. Jay doesn’t suggest that NewAssignment is the only way citizen journalism will proceed. Rather, it’s one attempt to take advantage of one of the opportunities a networked citizenry affords. Are there stories that a crowd could cover that an individual journalist could not? (But this is a well-organized crowd, with editors, assignments and collaborative tools.)

The first assignment is a self-referential one: What’s going on with crowdsourcing, and with peer production in general? If you want to participate by investigating, reporting or writing, Amanda Michel tells you how.

It’ll be fascinating to see if Jay and his group have gotten the weights and balances right to enable this thing to take off. If not, they can always nudge it this way or that. (Disclosure: I’m an advisor. It’s a non-profit.)

[Tags: newassignment journalism citizen_journalism media everything_is_miscellaneous jay_rosen news]

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On Monday, I gave the lunchtime keynote at the Cable Television Public Affairs Association meeting. About 400 people had assembled in the DC Ritz-Carlton to spend a few days discussing cable’s future and how to achieve it. It was quite an educational experience for me. And not just because I got boo-ed.

In the morning, I watched a panel discussion by cable industry executives. (I live-blogged it here.) I went to a breakout session on how the cable companies are covering the upcoming presidential election. (Yes, 600 days away has become “upcoming.”) I had a chance to talk with a few people outside of the sessions. But I came in as an outside voice, and I left surprised by what I learned…even though I should have known it going in.

My presentation was, at the request of the organizers, cluetrain-y. I talked about the rise of person-to-person communications, contrasting it with the assumptions of the broadcast era. (“Broadcast” to the cablers means “over the air,” so I had to explain at the beginning, and remind them a few times throughout, that “broadcast” to me means “one-to-many.”) I then talked about networked markets (have you heard that markets are conversations?) and mentioned Doc‘s other great line: “There’s no market for messages.” I spent the bulk of my time taking blogs as my example, going through about ten different common misunderstandings of them. I ended by saying that in the P2P era, we’re taking back our culture, pointing out very quickly some ways in which we’re making it ours, which has become a magic word for me. In the course of listing things that are ours, I had a slide that showed “Support Network Neutrality” sprayed onto a brick wall; in preparing, I thought that those 8 seconds would be all that I spent on the Net neutrality topic.

Well, it didn’t quite go that way. Since I had heard the morning panel, I ended up reacting to it as I went through my prepared presentation. E.g., when I introduced the topic of person-to-person vs. broadcast, I pointed out that the “10 megs down, one meg up” mentioned by one of the panelists assumes that we’re “consumers” rather than creators; we should have symmetric up and down. And for some reason I dragged Net neutrality into it early, and got hissed. But I’m not sure it wasn’t good-natured hissing, if you know what I mean.

But I really annoyed them when I complained about the panel’s whining about competition. I said that the cable market isn’t competitive. People yelled from the audience. I said that where I live, the town has franchised only one cable provider, although I think we’re letting in a second. But, people in the audience said, I could get the Net by satellite or DSL. A more gracious and honest person would have accepted that, and clarified: Cable competes with other forms of delivery, but generally doesn’t compete with other cable companies within a region…although they compete for franchises. I instead just got sarcastic. Yeah, real mature. In fact, cable is more competitive than I’d thought, and these folks do wake up every day worrying about competitors, as one of the panelists had said. On the other hand, it’s not like before the Supreme Court in the Brand X decision said that the carriers no longer have to rent out their lines to other ISPs. If Congress would roll back that decision, we’d see some real competition.

I also at one point poked at the panel for saying that they were up against big scary Google. “Google has two lobbyists!” I said, which I’ve since found out was once true but is no longer. They have maybe a dozen. (Whoops. Sorry.) Nevertheless, the Net neutrality folks are certainly out-lobbied by the carriers. But, as I found out later when talking with a friendly Time-Warner guy, the cable industry is used to thinking of itself as the upstart battling the entrenched telephone giants, so it was odd and unpleasant for them to hear me treat them as if they were an entrenched giant. I had no idea.

During the panel beforehand, and in a conversation with a different Time-Warner guy afterwards, they kept coming back to their concern that if Net neutrality passes, the cable companies won’t be able to raise capital. Oddly, the TW guy also argued that TW has absolutely no intention of violating Net neutrality. So, I said, TW ought to announce that and take the wind out of the NN sails. But announcing that, he said, would discourage investors. But, I said, it’s either part of their business plan or it’s not. We did not come to closure on that point. And I’m personally not convinced that that’s the real reason they oppose Net neutrality. It sounds to me like a supporting reason, as is the argument that since no one has violated NN yet, we don’t need a law forbidding people from violating it, as well as the “Google is getting a free ride” line of reasoning. I think — and I’m indulging my hunches here — that the real reason they oppose NN is that they want to ensure their subscribers have a “good experience,” where the criteria of a good experience are those that govern expectations for how television works. They’re thinking that users most of all want to be able to watch programs in high def and on demand, and so those packets need to get preference. They are frustrated by Web fanatics who want to hold back this rational load-balancing. The cable companies are in the business of selling us video content, and they see their ability to satisfy their customers being hampered by fanatics holding on to an out-dated architectural principle.

There are, of course, answers to this argument, but I think the primary response should be: No commercial entity should get to decide which experience needs to be optimized. Maybe I want to watch high def video, but you want to play video games, and someone else wants to download the high-resolution scan of the Bayreaux Tapestries. It’s not obvious that video should win. The decision should not be made by the people who have a vested, commercial interest in the outcome. IMO.

It was for me a fascinating glimpse. Plus, I got boo-ed twice.

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Susan Crawford has two especially fine pieces on her blog at the moment. The first explains the Universal Service Fund scandal. This is money that those with phone access pay to subsidize access for those whom the market would not reach. But it’s become a mess.

The second is a well-told vignette about a birthday concert she played for a friend. (She’s an accomplished violist. And she’s going to make a heck of an FCC chairperson.) [Tags: susan_crawford cable net_neutrality ctpaa telecommunications fcc ]

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Sebastian Keil of Speaking English Podcast reviews my halfings book, My 100 Million Dollar Secret. He likes it and recommends it to people learning English because the vocabulary isn’t too hard and the print size is good. And he wears a funny hat. What could be better! [Tags: my_100_million_dollar_secret books reviews young_adults sebastian_kiel]

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As an ace marketer, I probably should have mentioned that you can join the almost two dozen satisfied customers by buying it at lulu.com or Amazon.com, or you can read it online for free or download it as a PDF or Word file for free.

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Michael Hemment’s new blog, Research Forward, looks at the latest in how researchers are researching and sharing research. It’s chockablock with good stuff.

For example, there’s a post about a Harvard course using social tagging to build info about the Middle Ages, a consideration of the future of tag clouds, and Chinese political history as revealed by mapping data. See, I told you it was good stuff! [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous tags education research michael_hemment ]

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John Mayer, the Exec Dir of the Center for computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI), is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch talk called “Subclassing the Commons.” CALI is 25 yrs old, incorporated by Harvard and the U of Minnesota Law Schools. 204 US law schools and 23 international law schools are members. So are more than 100,000 law students. CALI makes lessons available on line. This year, there will probably be a million lessons run. [John Palfrey has blogged the session here.]

He points out that there are sites that aggregate material put into the commons via Creative Commons licenses. But there’s not a lot there for law students. The commons by itself isn’t granular enough for communities of users, he says. People post on their blogs, “I’ve posted a paper at SSRN and would appreciate any comments,” or “I’m working on a project and was wondering if anyone else had,” or “Where can I find…?” John says, “If we aggregated all answers to those question across all institutions, would that be a commons, and would it have amazing value?”

“We’re best known for our lessons,” he says. He shows a flow chart of a question. Law professors throw out a question, he says, knowing the ways the students will get it wrong. If one gets it right, the prof branches differently. It’s a “pruned tree.” CALI’s authors write questions as a tree. There are about 600 lessons. Their model is to get 5 profs to write 5 lessons (25 mins each) over 8 months; the profs are paid.

He describes another project: Classcaster , a blog network using open source software. It’s built on top of PBX software (!). “With classcaster, you can make a phone call, you can leave an hour message. Then it instantly podcasts it.” But it was expensive paying for the phone call and the recording quality is crappy. Instead, they gave authors $1000 and a free digital recorder. There are now 60 faculty members doing podcasts that way. They’re available for free as part of the commons. As a result, “students started to tell us that they have this crappy evidence teacher so instead they listen to this other evidence teacher’s podcast.” And faculty noticed in listening to themselves that they’re skipping over some things, so it’s helped them improve. Other faculty learned teaching techniques by listening to others. On the other hand, in some courses (e.g., family law) it can suppress class participation.

Lessons are tagged according to a “topic grid,” based on how faculty describe their lessons, the “elevator pitch” of what a course is. CALI took a first cut at the taxonomy by looking at syllabi and then letting faculty refine it. They’re now going back and tagging the podcasts.

Another project is Access to Justice. CALI designed an interface that asks one question at a time (audibly asks) to help people find the right legal forms. It uses avatars because otherwise you get hung up on providing avatars of every race and gender, in a wheelchair or not, etc. Instead, it provides a non-racial — “blank” — male or female avatar. [Looks pretty white to me.] It shows the avatar on a path to a hall of justice. There are people in eight states working on the navigators for all the forms, but they reuse one another’s work because the forms are generally 90% the same in the states. One of the federal courts is interested in doing it and sharing it with the rest of the fed courts. (It’s all XML data and is written in Flash.)

ScholarshipPulse is in alpha. On the left it shows a paper. On the right is a comment system. It distinguishes comments as peers, professors or students. They’re experimenting with having the font size reflect one’s standing in the system. “I know we’re playing in ego space here.” But, John says, why not let people comment on their own blogs? Press a button and it’ll take a capture of the paper and your comment, and post it straight into your blog.

eLangdell.org (named after Langdell Hall at Harvard Law, or maybe after whoever Langdell Hall was named after, which I’m guessing is someone named Langdell) pools syllabi, cases, podcasts, etc. so you can dynamically create case books and other course materials. You can print out your own materials via lulu.com AALS, CLEA and Counseling Central do something similar, he says.

Q: Are you doing anything to help people who are not in law school?
A: At CALI’s LearnTheLaw.org lets you pay for access to the CALI lessons. [It’s $50/yr.]

Q: What’s your business model?
A: 200 schools pay us $5K year. For that they get everything we produce, but I’m trying to give away as much as possible. Not the lessons. If gave them away, the law schools would stop paying us. Everything else, just about, is open and free.

Q: (Charlie Nesson) MIT’s open courseware opens up syllabi. They’ve just started videoing classes — 21 of them. They’ve raised the question for us about whether there’s an opportunity for Harvard Law to step into the video YouTube space, recognizing the Law School’s mission as offering a legal education — not necessarily for credit — to the world. You’ve been at this for a long time Somehow there’s a relationship between the profit and non-profit. Suppose a company came to you…
A: We don’t need profit but we do need sustainability. The case book market is about $90M. Suppose you came in with uber casebooks that you could mix and match. We’d pay faculty to write those. That would put pressure on faculty to use the free PDF (or $18 lulu version) case book. A $90M market would become a $20M. That’s what eLangdell is.

There are hard problems doing this, he says. One is metadata. “People just drop stuff in.” They’re going to have to make the contributors do it. “Maybe we can hire students,” but for now they have to make it easy. In addition to the taxonomy, they’ll allow tags. Charlie points out that tagging might be the fastest way to get it done and usable. I mention freebase as a model for mixing a starter-set taxonomy, a mechanical Turk approach, and a wiki for metadata schema. John says that with a critical mass, it’ll get done.

Q: (Gene Koo) Charlie, you have a paper-based text book. Would you switch?
A: (Charlie) I’d love to. Unfortunately, my publisher owns the copyright.

A: It’s a Clayton Christensen innovator’s dilemma. We’ll pick off the low-hanging fruit. And, maybe retiring professors will donate their teaching materials into the commons as part of their “legacy.” [Tags: cali berkman everything_is_miscellaneous law education teaching commons creative_commons]

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As of about 4pm (EDT), I have not been receiving mail sent to self evident.com. I am receiving mail at dweinberger gmail.com, however.

Almost certainly this is because of an upgrade to my server performed by my host. I should have it back sometime tomorrow (Tues.). Until then, please use my gmail account. Thanks.

(Note to spammers: The best way to reach me is by sending mail to me up your own butts. Thank you.)

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My email should now (= Tues., 8:30am) be working. The mail that wasn’t delivered should be delivered over the next 24 hours. Please go back to using self evident.com.

Sorry for any inconvenience. (And thanks to my host for fixing this the instant I reported it.)

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I’m at the Cable Television Public Affairs Association meeting to give a lunchtime talk to the marketing folks.

It’s in the Ritz-Carlton in DC, which tells you something about the industry. This is a well-dressed crowd. Maybe one-third are women. I’m the only one in the audience iwth an open laptop. (The Ritz provides wifi everywhere in the hotel for $10/day.)

I come in late to the morning panel. On it are Mark Robichaux (ed., Broadcasting & Cable Magazine), Mark Coblitz (SVP of Comcast), Laureen Ong (Pres, National Geographic Channel), Joseph Sapan (Pres, Rainbow Media), Michael Wilner (CEO, Insight Comms). Unfortunately, I don’t know who is who, except for the woman, and Robichaux, who is moderating. [As always, my live blogging is deeply flawed and more unreliable the closer to quotes and details it gets. Also, in the broad themes and characterizations. Also spelling.]

Blogs

In response to a question about negative blogs, one of the panelists says that some of their operators actually have blogs. “We embrace it.” Another writes them off as a few people who like to complain. “Everyone in this room should read blogs every day about their companies,” says another. “If we’re not listening as much as we’re speaking to our constituents, we’re not doing our job.” [Then how about symmetric bandwidth up and down, hmmm?] Mark Robichaux, the moderator, says “Sometimes bloggers are canaries in the coal mine.”

Laureen Ong of National Geographic says that bloggers and others online answer questions for them in a useful way.

A la carte tv

How about a la carte TV, asks Robichaux? Josh Sapan (Rainbow Media) praises the diversity of cable offerings, all the way from BET to National Geographic. “It’s a great diversity of voice.” [Hah!] Mark Coblitz agrees that’s lots of diversity. Each person may only watch seven channels, he says, but the seven channels vary from person to person. Michael (?) says we need to argue against a la carte, just as we have to argue against Net neutrality.

Net neutrality

“What’s Net neutrality?”

“That’s easy: People should be able to go anywhere they want to, attach any device, and know what the terms of their service are.” [He’s implicitly citing the FCC’s Four Principles, which isn’t what most people mean by Net neutrality. And I left one out because I couldn’t keep up.] “Isn’t that that the Internet is all about?,” says another. “Anyone get to do anything they want,” he continues, I think sarcastically. The first says “This is all about sharing resouces so everyone gets the maximum out of them.” The task, he says, is to communicate the technical reasons why Net neutrality is bad. “People said in the year 2000 that we need to save the Internet, but we don’t want the Net of 2000. I want the Internet that’s coming,” the one that lets people do the new things they want to do.” [The one that shows Time-Warner movies and requires a company to pay for competitively fast service? Or the one where anyone can create and innovate in any way she wants, on equal footing?]

They complain that they don’t have the anti-net neutrality sound bite. “We talked about Net neutering, but that doesn’t work too well. That’s our own internal, because that’s what it does.” [Cool! “Net neutrality” works! We’re so used to complaining that the anti-NN folks beat us at marketing that it’s great to hear the same sort of whining coming from them.]

“The Internet is beginning to show the strains of its technology,” says another. “We offer 10 meg down and one meg up, which is a lot.” [Only compared to the pathetic speeds in the US, and only down, not up.] The geeks who measure it don’t always get that.” “The infrastructure can’t handle what everyone’s idea of what the Internet is unless someone starts to build it out.” People won’t be able to make the investment to enable, say, Netflix, to use the Internet effectively so that it works all the time and people have a good experience almost all the time.

Robichaux: “So the government would be handcuffing you.”

“Exactly. And it’s not just the last mile. It’s all along the way.”

Another: “Back in the lat 90s, there was a lot of fiber put in the ground. And guess what? We’re using it up.” [Most of the fiber is unused. And see Bruce Kushnick on the $200B of tax money the incumbents took to run fiber to our houses, but then forgot to.] “Net neutrality says everone should be able to go where they want and be able to pay. We don’t diagree with the four principles. But as soon as you put them down in writing, they’re open to interpretation. And that interpretation changes everything.”

“You know who’s making the money and making the NN argument? Little companies like Google.” He cites someone who said that NN would kill innovation. “If you want Net neutrality, it should be Internet neutrality for all the elements.” E.g., Google is too dominant, eBay owns its means of payment. [This is equivalent to saying that if you want free speech, you really ought to enforce all points of view in your dinner time conversation.]

Competition

Mark Robichaux: Satellite?

Ong: Brand counts. Viewers know that the facts on our channel are triple-checked.

Sapan: It’s made us better via competitive pressure. E.g., IFC hosts small films, and we let you watch it on-demand simultaneously when it’s released to the theaters

“Congress says the problem with out industry is that we don’t have competitors. But we wake up every day thinking about how we compete in the marketplace. Every business we’re in is extremely competitive on the distriution side.” [Still, most of us don’t have much of a choice.]

“We’re all losing eyeballs to the Internet, and I’d go so far as saying you can lose your phone before you lose your video, and you can lose your video before you lose your online connection. It trumps everything. The younger generation is turning TVs off. They’re on the Internet. They’re watching the same content thanks to some of our friends [sarcastic] making it available.” [Wow.]

User-generated content

Robichaux: “What’s the best idea for using the Internet as a tool for your company?”

Ong: We have a tech savvy audience so the Internet is something we use to promote back to the channel, to put programming out that they can’t see on the linear channel, and we recognize that it’s making us rethink our business because no one is going to watch a full-length documentary on the Internet. [Maybe not, at least this month. But we’ll move it onto our iPod our TV, if we’re able.]

Sapan: The area we’re messing with right now is mixing user generated content with video on demand and linear television. Not much has been done with that.

Robichaux: why is ugc important?

Sapan: The history of TV is you make something, copyright it, put it on TV and the max number of people watch it. Now each of those is violated: There is no owner, there is no copyright. There’s all these people spending all this time looking at user generated content. From a purely mercantile point of view, if there’s a lot of time spent on it, that one way or another will be translated into money. What intriques is how to connect what people are making with video on demand. In the case of indie films, we’re asking people to submit their short films. We curate them. We would like to place those films on the servers of cable companies in the geographic areas from which they come, so there could be “the best of” films in that area, and the “the best of the best of” that would make it onto the channel. [Current.tv? Why do we need the cable companies to do this for us?] This is good because it gives them the fastest Internet connection to the video, video on demand, and a linear channel. We pursuing this on IFC and We TV.

Coblitz (Comcast): We’ve woven Internet into just about everything we do.

Q&A

Robichaux: Take-aways: Be honest. Keep it simple. It’s about relationships. For example, when you’re talking to a Congressperson… [And here I thought he was talking about talking with customers!]

Questions from the floor.

Q: What are you doing about Internet safety?
A: (comcast) We provide parental controls to people who want them. Our 12 yr old said, “Dad, block anywhere you don’t want me to go…but then don’t look where I go.”

A: (Insight) It’s up to the parents, but most parents don’t use the controls.The bad experiences are behind us [??]
A: (Rainbow) The computers aren’t in the kids’ bedrooms.

[Tags: ctpaa net_neutrality cable tv broadband blogs everything_is_miscellaneous media]

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The esteemed Henry Jenkins responds to an online discussion of whether Second Life has any political effect on first life.

Henry begins:

The last several decades of observation of the digital world teaches us that the digital world is never totally disconnected from the real world. Even when we go onto the digital world to “escape” reality, we end up engaging with symbolic representations which we read in relation to reality. We learn things about our first lives by stepping into a Second or parallel life which allows us to suspend certain rules, break out of certain roles, and see the world from a fresh perspective. More often, though, there are a complex set of social ties, economic practices, political debates, etc. which almost always connects what’s taking place online to what’s going on in our lives off line.

After all, we each really only have one life and there is really only one world

Henry concludes (but do no miss what’s in between!):

Often, real world institutions and practices constrain our ability to act upon the world by impoverishing our ability to imagine viable alternatives. This is at the heart of much of the writing in cultural studies on ideology and hegemony. SL offers us a way to construct alternative models of the world and then step inside them and experience what it might feel like to live in a different social order. I think there are some very real possibilities there for political transformation.

We do this as individuals on the Web, trying on roles and characters as if they were clothing, seeing which ones fit and which ones pinch under the arms. And Henry gives good examples of ways in which SL experiences can affect the first life politics of individuals. E.g., maybe you visit the SL Dafur Village and have your eyes opened, or you’re able to hang out with other gay people even though you live in a rural and repressed part of the world.

Henry’s piece clears out objections to SL as merely “masturbatory,” to cite the strongest criticism from the mailing list. This raises to prominence – and leaves us with – two basic questions, both of which are entirely familiar to workers in the field:

(1) The Internet overall enables people to get information they otherwise would not have found and to find others with shared interests. What do the specifics of SL enable that the other services of the Internet do not?

(2) Does (or will) SL affect the way we organize socially and politically, rather than “merely” affecting individual perception? If, for example, a particular SL domain works splendidly, will we be able to transfer the organizing principles to first life or will the virtual particulars of SL make that impossible? Suppose, for example, that the SL success depends on continuous anonymous bodily presence. That’s not something we can readily do in the real world. Are there examples already of a SL experience having an organizational effect on first life? Does collaborating (or bullying) in SL make us more like to collaborate (or bully) in first life? Are SL kibbutniks more likely to be real world kibbutniks?

I don’t know. But I’m glad Henry and the folks on the mailing list (among others) are working on it.

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By the way, on March 21, at 6 or 6:30 (I don’t remember which), I’m scheduled to hold a Berkman “Web of Ideas” discussion of how participatory culture encourages participatory democracy. It’s open to all. And I can tell you right now my answer to the question: I Don’t Know. But I bet the names Henry Jenkins and Yochai Benkler turn up in the conversation. [Tags: henry_jenkins second_life participatory_culture democracy politics ]

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Richard Edelman, having observed Barack Obama working a small room, analyzes his communications style and suggests it as a model for CEOs. From what Richard says, Obama’s character sounds like a model for a follower as well as a leader. (Disclosure: I consult to Edelman PR.) [Tags: barrack_obama politics leadership]

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Here’s a new footnote in the anals of petty totalitarianism.

A few minutes ago, the guy ahead of me in the airport security line got literally “Tut-tut”-ed by a jovial TSA worker because he had put a 2.5 oz bottle of Purell into a scanner bin, along with his jacket and change. “You have to have all fluids in a clear quart bag,” said the TSA guy. “You can go back through and get one at Hudson News or you can surrender the Purell.”

Facing the prospect of going to the rear of the line, the traveler told the TSA guy to keep the Purell.

“I thought the purpose of the quart bag was to make sure you’re not bringing too many three-ounce bottles,” I said. The TSA guy nodded with a minimum of commitment. “It’s pretty clear that this three ounce bottle is going to fit into a bag,” I continued, syllogistically.

“I don’t write the rules,” the TSA guy said, throwing the little bottle into a bin full of little bottles, presumably the most dangerous bin in the world.

I know the TSA guy doesn’t write the rules, and he was friendly when he could have instead become a martinet. Nevertheless, he confiscated a bottle that he would have let through if it had been in a clear bag, as if the quart bag defuses explosives.

“They ought to trust your judgment more,” I said, feeling lucky that our little interchange hadn’t resulted in me being taken into a small room and being asked to bend over.

On the other hand, I am feeling more secure, knowing that an evil-doer couldn’t get on board and sanitize us to death… [Tags: security airports tsa kafka politics]

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