I’ve been playing with Instapaper.com a little, and liking it a lot.

It’s a free site built by Marco Arment, who works at Tumblr (if I’m reading this right). You put the Instapaper “Read Later” button in your button bar, and click it if you’re on a site you want to read later. Go to Instapaper.com and you’ll see a list of what you’ve clicked. Simplicity itself.

There seems to be just one more feature: Any text you’ve selected on the page your instapapering is taken as that page’s description.

That takes care of my temporary bookmarking needs, a feature I’ve wanted for a while. But I wonder what would happen if my instapaper page were public and pointable. Could we start to use instapaper to build a collaborative newspaper that pulls together the recommended reading of people you respect?

[Tags: instapaper media del.cio.us tagging digg everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Says a Center for Media Research Brief:

According to a recently published market report from AccuStream iMedia Research, user Generated Video (UGV) scored 22.4 billion views in 2007, up 70% over 2006.

[Tags: media video participatory_media ]

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As we we’ve continued to talk about citizen journalism and citizen media, I’ve come to think there may be a class of citizen journalism that could be an important part of the new ecosystem: Accidental journalism. Or possibly it should be called incidental journalism. Or may be accidental/incidental coverage. Anyway, the idea is that journalism may come to rely on coverage of events by cialis 20mg citizens who are writing them up not to provide coverage but for their own more personal reasons.

This has already happened at times. Will it become an important and semi-reliable part of the ecosystem? I dunno. Maybe.

[Tags: journalism citizens_journalism ]

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The New York Times has proclaimed Twitter a phenomenon in a piece redolent with all the smug, self-referential authority it can muster. Journalists are using it! One twittered something that made it into the NY Times! Twitter therefore matters!

Why is journalistic innovation happening last at the newspapers? [Tags: twitter media newspapers journalism nytimes citizens_media ]

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Everything Is Miscellaneous is indexed, searchable, and previewable at Google Books. Yay!

Interesting to see the metadata Google extracts and assembles, sometimes guessing wrong. (Vermes in my book is an animal category, not a place.)

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Global Voices has produced a great intro to citizen’s media, under the guidance of David Sasaki. It’s clear, friendly, and full of heart. And, needless to say, it’s not US-centric. It’s available in English, Spanish, and Bengali, with more on the way.

Well done, David and team. [Tags: gv global_voices citizen_media david_sasaki journalism ]

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From Pew Internet:

One Quarter of Teens Are Super Communicators

The Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 93% of teens use the internet, and more of them than ever are treating it as a venue for social interaction — a place where they can share creations, tell stories, and interact with others. 64% of online teens ages 12-17 have participated in one or more among a wide range of content-creating activities on the internet, up from 57% of online teens in a similar survey at the end of 2004.

Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation:

* 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys
* 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys.
* 19% of Online boys post video content online, compared to 10% of online girls who have posted a video online where others could see it.

47% of online teens have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least “some of the time.” Many teens, however, limit access to content that they share.

[Tags: teens media digital_natives participation collaboration blogs everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I was quite pleased when I read in a posting to a mailing list that the British government was no longer going to use the phrase “war on terror.” [SPOILER ALERT: The posting was wrong.] The post pointed to an article in the Daily Mail quoted at length by Military.com). It said:

The words “war on terror” will no longer be used by the British government to describe attacks on the public, the country’s chief prosecutor said Dec. 27.

Sir Ken Macdonald said terrorist fanatics were not soldiers fighting a war but simply members of an aimless “death cult.”

The Director of Public Prosecutions said: ‘We resist the language of warfare, and I think the government has moved on this. It no longer uses this sort of language.”

London is not a battlefield, he said.

“The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers,” Macdonald said. “They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way.”

His remarks signal a change in emphasis across Whitehall, where the “war on terror” language has officially been ditched.

Ah, someone speaking sense! Except it seemed odd to me that the Director of Public Prosecutions would get to decide how the British government is going to characterize issues of defense. So, I checked the Daily Mail site and the best I could come up with was an article from last January in which Sir Ken talked about the language he thinks the government should use, not a decision by the government about the language that it will use.

If you can come up with an actual source for this, I’d be very happy to be acknowledge your superior googling skills and celebrate this one small step towards a sensible approach to peace and security.

(BTW, I think the Military.com article got to posted to the mailing list I’m on via Dave Farber’s high-visibility mailing list.) [Tags: war_on_terror ken_macdonald uk politics marketing blogs journalism citizen_journalism berkman ]

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Sorry to be such a Tim O’Reilly fanboy — see my post from a couple of days ago — but now his company has posted all of Esther Dyson’s famous, influential and uniformly excellent Release 1.0 issues for free. Release 1.0 was quite expensive when it was extant. Now all the great ideas an information in it have been set free.

Thanks, Tim! And most of all, thanks, Esther. [Tags: tim_oreilly release1.0 esther_dyson ]

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According to a post by Wendy Davis at Just an Online Minute (citing the WSJ), the Nielsen company (not Jakob) is going to start fingerprinting content and reporting violators. Oh, yay. Yet another soulless company that prefers cash to freedom and control to art is going to protect us. [Tags: nielsen copyright copyleft drm google ]

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