NPR Rough Cuts is a new NPR program, aimed at younger listeners, being developed in public. The site’s been up for five weeks. This is a new level of transparency for NPR. Lee Hill from the show is at the meeting I’m at and just said that the show’s staff keeps referring to the listeners as “users,” which I take as a good sign… [Tags: npr radio media roughcuts transparency ]

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Much as I love Wikipedia — and I love it so much that I’m giving it candy hearts on Valentine’s Day — its policy of neutrality sometimes forces resolution when we’d rather have debate. Yes, competing sides get represented in the articles, and the discussion pages let us hear people arguing their points, but the arguments themselves are treated as stations on the way to neutral agreement.

So, there’s room for additional approaches that take the arguments themselves as their topics. That’s what Debatepedia.org does, and it looks like it’s on its way to being really useful.

Like Wikipedia, anyone can edit existing content. Unlike Wikipedia, its topics are all up for debate. Each topic presents both sides, structured into sub-questions, with a strong ethos of citation, factuality, and lack of flaming; the first of its Guiding Principles is “No personal opinion.” Rather, it attempts to present the best case and best evidence for each side.

Debatepedia limits itself to topics with yes-no alternatives and with clear pro and con cases. To start a debate, a user has to propose it and the editors (who seem to be the people who founded it…I couldn’t find info about them on the site) have to accept it. This keeps people from proposing stupid topics and boosts the likelihood that if you visit a listed debate, you’ll find content there. It also limits discussion to topics that have two and only two sides, which may turn out to be a serious limitation. But, we’ll see. And it can adapt as required.

Will Debatepedia take off? Who the hell knows. But it’s a welcome addition to the range of experiments in pulling ourselves together. [Tags: politics wikis wikipedia debatepedia everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Handelsblatt’s Mario Sixtus has posted a video interview with me we did at Le Web 3. I blather on about Cluetrainy stuff, plus how to explain Net neutrality to “Aunt Tilly.” And because there are German subtitles, you can have the illusion that you are now fluent in that language. [Tags: video net_neutrality cluetrain handelsblatt]

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Personal Democracy Forum has launched a terrific blog — techPresident.com — on how the presidential campaigns are using technology. For example, Joshua Levy blogs about Fred Stutzman’s post about my.barackobama.com, Obama’s “private-label social network.” Here’s a bit of what Fred says:

In reality, 2008 is going to be about the enmeshing of networks. Some of the action that goes on in the networks will be centrally maintained, but some (as in the example of the Facebook group) will be produced by people external to the campaign. Should candidates put their head in the sand and act like the external work doesn’t exist? Absolutely not. The simple reality is that by embracing social media, communities are going to play a significant role in the creation of the candidate. Like it or not, some of Obama’s online identity is going to be created by the Facebook group, over which he has no control. The millions of users who embrace Obama in one way or another will get their messages from a number of different sources, so central control is effectively impossible.

The TechPresident feed is going straight into my aggregator… [Tags: personaldemocracy democracy techpresident fred_stuzman obama politics everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Micah eloquently makes the case for cutting ourselves some slack. At issue is a blog trying to make a stink over some previous posts by Amanda Marcotte in her Pandagon blog now that she’s been hired by the John Edwards campaign. Says Micah, political operatives and journalists

seem to now want to play “gotcha” over whether something someone said in the past when they were a free citizen of America exercising their free speech and under the employ of no campaign is now the equivalent of an endorsement of that specific speech by a presidential candidate.

If we adopt this standard, then the internet is just going to be a tool for an even tighter straight-jacketing of politics, where no one who ever imagines they might go into politics some time in their life will be willing to ever take a position on anything controversial for fear of damaging their political viability. Yuck! Who wants to live in that world?

Right on.

(Disclosure: I’ve done a little volunteer work for the Edwards campaign.) [Tags: politics forgiveness john_edwards media micah_sifry ]

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Actually, not every happy community is the same. And the unhappy ones are at least as diverse. So, it’s good to read HorsePigCow’s reminder that communities aren’t always just a bunch of fluffy bunnies snuggling together. Sometimes what we’re calling communities are in fact arguments, or conversations, or people who happen to like the same brand of orange juice.

It’d be good if we could have preserved the term “community” for actual communities, i.e., people who care about one another more than they have to. But it looks like that linguistic battle is over and done. Oh well. [Tags: communities horsepigcow tara_hunt everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Stately, plump Penguin Books is off on an experiment that is likely to fail in delightful, unpredictable ways…for which my hat is off to them. They’ve started a wiki and given us—any and all of us—six weeks to write a novel. The wiki has a blog (but does the blog have a wiki?), and the Penguin blog talks about the experiment as well. (But does the Penguin wiki blog about the wiki’s blog? No? That’s so Web 1.27! :)

Anyway, a novel seems like an unlikely venture for a wiki. Too many dependencies. Change “Carlo” to “Conchita” in Chapter 1, and who’s going to make the updates throughout all the chapters? Add a penguin who invents pockets in Chapter 2 and now Freida in Chapter 9 actually does have a place to put the souvenir shot glass from Las Vegas. Not to mention that Wikipedia has reality to hold a page together (or at least a settled criterion for resolving disputes), while a novel has nothing but the sensibilities of a million penguins at keyboards. (Penguin Books has sicced some MA students on the wiki to seed it. )

So, I’ll be surprised (and delighted) if a novel emerges from this. But two caveats: 1. If you’d asked me four years ago if Wikipedia would work, I would have guessed wrong. 2. A novel is not the only worthwhile result that could emerge from this experiment.

I’m impressed Penguin Books is doing it. I look forward to seeing if the writing gets better or worse, if the discussion page is more interesting than the novel, what the sexy parts of the crowd are like, if good triumphs or gets into an edit war with irony…

[Tags: wiki fiction novels collaborative_writing penguin_books publishing books everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I came in at the end of a discussion of marketing to the “IM Generation.” The part I caught was good — you can’t lie, you can’t tell them what’s cool, you have to be transparent. “There’s a lot of top-down marketing that will be roadkill in this environment.” One says that we’re only at the beginning of the development of grassroots videos as an art form.

The panelists are Tom McInerney (Guba ), Steven Starr (Revver), Justin Townsend (IGA Worldwide ) and Jeremy Verba (Piczo). Sorry I missed most of it. [Tags: onmedia07 media ads marketing alwayson ]

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Eric Scheid (in an email) notes that LinkedIn now is enabling users to pose questions to their social network. Only members can respond. They’re also limiting how many questions you can ask per month. Interestingly, you’re only allowed to give one answer to any one question. Lots of interesting results may accrue… [Tags: linkedin social_networks everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Lee Rainie and John Horrigan of the Pew Internet & American Life Project have released a report on a study of the Net’s role in the 2006 elections. Here’s the summary:

Twice as many Americans used the internet as their primary source of news about the 2006 campaign compared with the most recent mid-term election in 2002.

Some 15% of all American adults say the internet was the place where they got most of their campaign news during the election, up from 7% in the mid-term election of 2002.

A post-election survey shows that the 2006 race also produced a notable class of online political activists. Some 23% of those who used the internet for political purposes – the people we call campaign internet users – actually created or forwarded online original political commentary or politically-related videos.

The full report adds a lot of context to this, of course. For example, 31% of Americans gathered info about the races online and talked about the elections via email. And for those under 36 who have broadband, 35% said the Internet was their main source of information about the races. And Republicans and Democrats were equally likely to rely on the Net for campaign news…

Fascinating study, as we’ve come to expect from Pew. [Tags: politics pew ]

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