Today’s Dilbert is destined to be shown during the introductory remarks at every Web 2.0 conference for the next two years. And it uses the phrase “tag-based folksonomy,” albeit it as a phrase so technical it’s suppose to scare us. It

And today’s Doonesbury is destined to be shown during the introductory remarks at every “Future of Media” conference for the next two years. Along the way, the strip mentions DonorsChoose.org, a cool site that will get a boost from the plug, thus inadvertently showing the power of the mass media that the strip questions. (I blogged about DonorsChoose here.) [Tags: dilbert doonesbury donorschoose web2.0 media everything_is_miscellaneous]

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The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and MTV announced today the Knight News Challenge “Young Creators Award,” a new digital journalism grant program for young people age 25 and under anywhere in the world. The contest will award up to $500,000 to young creators with compelling ideas for using digitally delivered news and information to enhance physical communities – improving the lives of people where they live, work and vote. The new award is a component of the Knight News Challenge, an annual competition awarding $5 million for innovative ideas using digital experiments to transform community news. [source]

The site also allows entrants to gather public discussion so they can improve their proposals. Cool! [Tags: media citizen_journalism knight mtv journalism ]

Also from the world of press releases, this one from the NYT:

NEW YORK, Sept. 6, 2007 – The New York Times introduced today a new online
initiative that pairs Times content with faculty course material for both
credit-bearing and continuing education courses. Educators will now have
the opportunity to select Times articles, archival content, graphics and
multimedia content, including videos and Webcasts, gathered around specific
subjects, and make them available to students online, along with other
course materials. Students will benefit from access to thematic content
that is drawn from the vast array of Times reporting on a countless number
of issues.

Aren’t we all students, after all? Wouldn’t we all benefit from t

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Just because I think it’s sort of interesting, here’s the form Dartmouth wants you to fill out if you want to get press credentials to cover the Democratic presidential debate they’re hosting in September.

Ok, so I added that last one…

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Terry Heaton explains and evaluates in some depth the Yahoo! Consortium deal that has them partnering with 400 local newspapers:

I come away with the conclusion that the newspaper companies get something, but Yahoo! gets more. The gamble that the industry is making is that their piece will be sufficient to justify what they’re giving to Yahoo!, and on that question may rest the future of the industry as a whole. It’s a gamble, because Yahoo! is actually a competitor, so it is a very big question indeed.

That’s just the overall conclusion. Terry makes the details lucid.[Tags: yahoo newspapers terry+heaton media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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This morning if you search Google for “Enron,” the top hit is Enron.com (the creditors’ recovery page) and the second is the Wikipedia article on Enron. The first listing from NYTimes.com is about 45th and it’s a TimesSelect (= pay) page that doesn’t even actually reference Enron. That’s an example of what’s on the mind of the Times’ ombudsman (um, “public editor”) Clark Hoyt when he begins his column. He finds the Times’ “business strategy” of getting “its articles to pop up first in Internet searches” — well, at least not at #45 — responsible for the quandary the Times finds itself in when it comes to the errors in its archive. I don’t quite see it that way.

Hoyt takes as his example an article abot Allen Kraus, who “once led a welfare office praised for its efforts to uncover fraud.” The Times first reported he resigned under pressure after a bribery investigation without including Kraus’ side of the story and later published a more balanced follow-up. Kraus says his boss eventually publicly sided with Kraus’ version. The details don’t matter much, although I must say it’s a relief for a change not to be talking about John Siegenthaler. The point is that Kraus is understandably upset that searches on his name turn up the Times’ faulty story. If that’s all you read, you’d think he’s a crook.

Hoyt then considers several solutions to this problem, seeming to favor the suggestion that the Time expunge faulty articles from its archive.

Nooooooo!

In fact, the solution is already in place. If you google “allen kraus” (in quotes), the #1 hit is a Times topic page about him that lists first the corrective article and then the faulty one. Perfect! We get the context we need while preserving the record. Topic pages are in fact the Times attempt to move its content up the Google results page. They give us a single, persistent URL that aggregates everything the Times knows about a topic…including what it got wrong.

Jeez, if the Times expunged from its archive every article about Iraq Judith Miller wrote, we’d think the Times slept through the whole run-up to the war. And future researchers would never understand how culpable the Times was for getting us into that miss. Bloggers get this right-er than Hoyt when we use strikethrough font to indicate an error we’ve corrected. We need the full archive.

Topic pages are a great solution to the problem of providing context, as well as advancing the Times’ search engine optimization desires. Removing articles from the record destroys the value of the record. You shouldn’t write history by rewriting the record.

So, rather than setting “time-outs” for articles based on how important the Times’ judges them, which is Hoyt’s suggestion, do more topic pages. And harvest the power of the crowd to create more topic pages and more context. [Tags: nytimes wikipedia newspapers journalism history archives everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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I enjoyed AJ Fortin’s post that trains a Mortimer Adlerian eye on blogs and those who make extravagant claims about them. (I seem to be his main example of the latter.)

And John Eischeid, who worked with NewAssignment, is starting a crowdsourced project addressing broad questions of the effect of crowds and crowdsourcing. It’s called “The Cult of the Rebuttal,” a reference to Andrew Keen’s book (which I’ve tried to explain and evaluate here), but it’s really focused on the topic, not the book. [Thanks to Andy Angelos for the link.] [Tags: everything_is_miscellaneous andrew_keen]

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Paul Graham‘s Y-Combinator has come up with a variation on the Digg theme. Y-Combinator was the incubator for Reddit.com, a Digg-like site that was bought by CondeNet about a year ago, and Y-Combinator has been maintaining a site focused on news about start-ups. Paul — who is a superb writer and thinker, as anyone who has read his stuff knows — is now opening up its topics to news of interest to startups and hackers, which is a much wider range.

What’s most interesting (well, to me, anyway) are the changes the site is making in the social dynamics. Reddit, says Paul, became of less interest to hackers like him as it succeeded with a wider public. Since the readers determine what make it onto the site, that’s the price of mainstream-ish success. To keep HackerNews focused on news of interest to hackers — and presumably, to exclude the sort of tech tabloid stories that show up at Digg that may be of interest to hackers but irrelevant to hacking &mdash a team of techies will “train” the system on what are relevant stories and what are not. (Since Paul is directly responsible for the widespread use of Bayesian spam filters, the word “training” makes me think there’s an element of that here.) People who thumbs-up stories that the system thinks are relevant will gain authority within the system (their thumbs up and down will count for more), and those who thumbs-up irrelevant stories will lose authority.

In addition, the site’s comments will be moderated to maintain “civility,” i.e., not ad hominem arguments.

I suppose there may be purists who think this is a betrayal of the wisdom of the crowd. But there is no such thing as untouched crowdal wisdom. In every case, someone has made decisions about how to gather the crowd’s input, who counts as a member of the crowd, how much authority the crowd will have, whether and how the wishes of the minority are respected, what the means of redress are, what typeface should be used to announce the crowd’s decision, and a thousand more factors. No single crowd mechanism works for every issue. We need lots and lots of ways of creating collective understanding. HackerNews sounds like a very interesting experiment at the least, and quite possibly much more than that. [Tags: hackernews digg reddit paul_graham media news everything_is_miscellaneous wisdom_of_the_crowd ]

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According to Wendy Davis in MediaTimes:

The New York Times plans to scrap its two-year-old TimesSelect subscription service and once again make all of the newspaper’s columns available for free online, according to a report in today’s New York Post.

The move comes amid speculation that under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership, The Wall Street Journal will stop charging for content in favor of an ad-supported business model.

…

Speaking at an industry summit in February, Nicholas Ascheim, the company’s director of entertainment, video and audio products, said that younger users might never read the paper’s columnists if they had to pay for them. “New generations will never get exposed,” he said.

Now if they just opened their archives, they could hold down a unique, persistent, useful and beloved spot on the Web. [Tags: media new_york_times everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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It occurred to me this morning that my interview of Kos take on new relevancy in light of the current O’Reilly bashing of Kos. [Tags: kos dailykos bill_oreilly ]

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Why have we never seen a photo of George W. Bush as president without his shirt on?

In 2005, when Bush interviewed Judge J. Harvie Wikinson III as a possible nominee for the Supreme Court, not only did he ask him how much he exercised, but when the Judge said he ran 3.5 miles a day, Bush urged him to start doing some cross-training. [source]

The Washington Post casually refers to “Bush’s two-hour midday exercise sessions” [source].

He runs a 7 minute mile. At least he did when he became president. [source]

Laura says he exercises at least five days a week. [source]

Bush’s physician explained that Bush fainted while choking on a pretzel because his resting heart rate is 38-49 beats per minute. [source] A normal rate for an adult is 60-100. [source]

So, what is Bush hiding under his shirt (other than a mysterious rectangular piece of equipment)?

We saw President Clinton shirtless.

We saw President Reagan shirtless.

Why haven’t we seen President Bush shirtless?

Could it be because the American public isn’t ready for just how many crunches per day it takes for Bush to exorcise his inner demons?

Come, on W. We demand to see you shirtless! The public has a right to know!

[Tags: bush politics humor]

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