Philipp Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped shows the results of a tool that “checks Google for the longest occurrences of strings from a text on the web, and then turns it into a link.” I.e., if you run your page through it, it finds any phrases that have a significant number of hits in Google, and links each phrase to its top return. (I think.) Cool idea. Alas, Philipp writes that the tool is too slow to be made public, although he offers to run it by hand if you send him email, which I hope for his sake vast numbers of people don’t. [Thanks, Hanan, for the link.] [Technorati tag: google]

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Jack Shafer’s piece in Slate misrepresents what went on at the WebCred conference. The piece says the bloggers in attendance “declared blogs the destroyers of mainstream media.” (Notice Jack’s use of the term “declared” instead of “said” or, say, “ruminated,” btw.) That’s a long way from what I thought happened. I thought we had a useful, interesting, and many-sided discussion about how blogs are already changing journalism and how they might in the future. Yes, the bloggers thought the change is going to be more radical, inevitable and unpredictable than the mainstream media folks did. (Note: I’m generalizing.) And, sure, there were moments of conflict. But Jack presents his insight — “the alleged divide between the old media and this new whippersnapper media of blogs has never seemed real to me” — as a corrective to the conference when in fact it was the subject of the very first (and very excellent) presentation at the conference by Jay Rosen, which then served as the premise of the discussion.

Shafer’s piece, which contains good thoughts, irks me because he is letting himself play the hard-headed realist at the cost of making others look foolish. Ed Cone in his column today, IMO not only presents the conference more accurately, but also learns from the conversation.

Two notes:

1. Jay Rosen, who was among those singled out by Shafer’s article, responds personally here.

2. There’s such a thing as premature realism.

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From the TimesOnLine, by Alexandra Blair:

A SCHOOLBOY with a fascination for Poland and wildlife has uncovered several significant errors in the latest — the fifteenth — edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Lucian George, 12, a pupil at Highgate Junior School in North London, was delving into the volumes on Poland and wildlife in Central Europe when he noted the mistakes.

The first was the assertion by the internationally acclaimed reference book that the small town of Chochim, in which two battles were fought between the Poles and the Ottoman Empire, now lies in Moldova.

“Wrong,” said Lucian, who attends the former hall of learning of Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary. “Chochim is in Ukraine.”…

Bogus contest: Write your own tag line for the Britannica, preferably containing the word “Wikipedia.” For instance:

“Encyclopaedia Britannica…It’s like Wikipedia, but slower!”

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Benjamen “Theory of Everything” Walker has moved the mp3 of my after-dinner speech to a new home.

Download

Stream

Thanks, Benjamen, for recording it and posting it.

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David Berlind posts a photo of what could be the start of ZDNet’s podcasting empire. You saw it here (uh, there) first!

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Jimmy Wales, at the BJC conference’s backchannel, has pointed out that Wikipedia has broken news that has not yet been picked up by the media: Unrest in Belize. Fascinating.

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One of the differences between the journalists and the rest of us: Journalists have a tiny vocabulary for expressing incredulity: “alleged,” “reportedly,” “claimed,” “suspected.” The rest of us have a rich rhetoric of semi-belief, starting with a simple “I think that…” and going all the way to “I find it really hard to believe anything that lying fathead says, but…”

Part of the value of traditional journalists is that they only tell us what they know. But that’s a more fragile credibility. And it forces uncertainty out of stories, or, worse, allows it only in what isn’t said.

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Dan Gillmor, who I think we ought to start calling The Dan, is interviewed by Halley at IT Conversations. (I haven’t heard it yet because I’m at a conference, but how could it be bad?)

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This coming Wednesday I’m holding another in a series of open sessions on, well, ideas I’m interested in. This time will be a little different because I want to try out a presentation I’m giving at the TTI Vanguard meeting in SF in a few weeks. The title is “Everything Is Miscellaneous,” and I’m really not yet settled on what I’m actually going to say. But here’s the blurb:

For 2,500 years, knowledge was shaped like a tree. It had a root,
branches and leaves. Now that we’re digitizing all the information we
can lay our mitts on, it’s becoming clear that trees make sense within
the constraints of the real world but are far too limited when it comes
to organizing information in the digital world: Trees assume a leaf
really should be on only one branch, favor neatness over mess, are owned
by the people who own the knowledge, and assume the universe can be
known ahead of time. We are instead rapidly inventing new principles of
organization, from faceted classification to bottom-up
folksonomies. If we change the most basic principles of organization,
what will happen to knowledge and to the institutions that take their
shape from knowledge?

The session is open to anyone. It runs from 6-7:30pm at the Berkman Center’s Baker House in Cambridge (map). Best of all: Free pizza.

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A few days ago, I got an email from a reader outraged that I hadn’t commented on Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ discouraging remarks. I replied to her that I hadn’t had anything interesting to say and I don’t feel obligated to comment on every issue of note. From her point of view, because I’m paid (a little bit) by Harvard, my failure to blog was a failure of courage. (I eventually did blog about it, but my affiliation with Harvard is temporary and so far below Summers’ radar that it took 0.0 pounds of courage.)

Then Jay Rosen blogged about the silence of PR bloggers about Ketchum’s sliminess in the Armstrong Willilams affair. Jay points to an exception: The CEO of Edelman PR, Richard Edelman, blogged twice in no uncertain terms about Ketcham’s culpability. In the comments, Jay asks me if I think the existence of Richard’s blog altered the way he responded. Although I know Richard a little, I obviously can’t speak for him. Nevertheless, it seems to me that in cases like this — if it’s a PR scandal and you head a PR agency, or it’s a Harvard scandal and you work at Harvard — if you have a blog, not addressing the issue is itself a presumptive moral statement. Of course it’s not clear how to take that statement: Maybe you had nothing to say, maybe you’re on a plane, maybe you just don’t feel like it, maybe you’re feeling too confused or too sick at heart. Even so, the blank blog is staring back at you.

Blogs call forth moral presence.

[To disclose yet again: I’ve started consulting to Edelman PR but had nothing to do with Richard’s blogging about Ketchum. I wish that I did.]

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