Jon Udell suggests the government have an opt-in $3 Citizen Media Fund (to complement the already-existing Presidential Campaign Fund) to pay for the aggregation and tagging of raw video footage of the candidates so that citizens can “slice and dice what politicians and pro pundits say, by candidate and by issue, across venues, recombine that material to support a whole new level of scrutiny and analysis.” Every question and every answer ought to be tagged, as Jon suggests elsewhere.

I of course like the prospect of having a huge pile of well-tagged candidate videos — it’s so miscellaneous! — but I think there’s zero prospect of this coming through the government. Nor should it. We’ve got the pile, thanks to YouTube and the candidate’s own sites. If we get it tagged well enough, someone will build a site that lets us search through them and cluster them. And if someone builds a site, we’ll tag ’em well enough. It could be a citizen group, a media site, or YouTube or Technorati. One way or another, this is likely to happen no check-off boxes required. [Tags: elections politics campaigns jon_udell everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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The totally brilliant Hillary 1984 ad is so effective because it highlights the gap between her calculated rhetoric about her campaign being “a conversation” and the tight top-down control the campaign exerts. Her campaign is no more controlled than every other campaign in the past 50 years — since TV became the single best way to reach voters — but that level of control is no longer acceptable, thanks to the Web. This ad marks the day that the old style of campaigning looks its age.

But her response today was good. She made a self-deprecating joke: “I’m just happy if it is taking attention from me singing,” she said at a press conference…thus, of course, diverting attention to her singing. Which is to her benefit. The fact that Hillary can’t carry a tune only makes her more fallible and thus more likable. The Internet will expose every foible. Candidates that can’t deal with that are doomed.

From now on, we will never elect a president who is not at least a little bit goofy.

[Disclosures: I will happily vote for Hillary if she’s the nominee. There’s lots I like about her. At this point, I’d more happily vote for Edwards or Obama. And I’m doing a little volunteer advising to the Edwards campaign on some policy stuff. End o’ disclosures.] [Tags: hillary_clinton politics fallibility 1984 barack_obama]

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The FTC has posted comments on its workshop on Net neutrality held on Feb. 13 and 14. Here is a pdf of Jay Sulzberger’s lucid explanation of how the Net works — ports ‘n’ protocols — and exactly why the Net is essentially different from cable TV. (The PDF is 280 pages long, but Jay’s comments are are a mere 12 pages of typescript — easy and fun reading.)

Also of special interest: eBay‘s comments and joint comments by Senators Dorgan and Snowe [Tags: net_neutrality jay_sulzberger ftc ]

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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.

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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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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Terry Heaton and Steve Safran discuss the news that MySpace is getting into the news biz. Fascinating. This could be a big way we put front pages together for one another (where front page = feed, aggregator, outcome of any recommendation engine, or a vague handwave in a particular direction).

Today for me basically consists of a few hours at home between planes, but I did have a chance to poke at the USA Today networked journalism foray. It’s definitely getting there, although only having “thumbs up” buttons for articles, and no “thumbs down,” I suspect will doom that feature to irrelevance. But, we’ll see. And they can always add opposed thumbs if they want to. [Tags: media msn news journalism myspace everythin everything_is_miscellaneous terry_heaton]

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Susan Crawford gives a talk about our inability to communicate outside this room

Imagine there’s an easy-to-assemble toll booth. We drive into the gray world of the Land of Low Expectations. We’re getting what the current providers give us.We can then go to the Land of Glittering Generalities that attempt to maintain the incumbents in power.

How do we get reason back? “Communications regulation should be about optimizing human communication.” We have to persuade people that economic growth comes from new ideas, that the Internet is the greatest source of new ideas we’ve ever seen and that the telecom policy has to put the Internet at its core. We should claim that the Internet is different. “People are very uncomfortable when we say that, but we have to say it.”

To help reason, we should be showing pictures. E.g., a chart of the market plummeting recently, and a chart of the weakness of the US economy. “If the rate economic growth in the US over the next 45 yrs were to increase by 0.5% per year, it could resolve all of the budget difficulties associated with the aging of the Baby Boom generation” with plenty left over. So, how do we continue growth in the US? “We need more meta-ideas about the generation of new ideas.”

Aha! The internet – a source of new ideas.” It’s group-forming attributes and the chance to fail quickly are vital, too.

Policy outcomes: Universal service. Divestiture, separating services from content [i.e., the people who supply bit transport should not provide content.]

We need to professionalize, with better comparative data to show the effect of the Net on economy, the effect of Net neutrality, etc. And we need serious leadership.

We’re running out of time. The future of the Internet hangs in the balance.

[SC for FCC!]

[Tags: fcc susan_crawford net_neutrality f2c ]

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USA Today, a newspaper I like more than do most of the people I respect, is going conversational. I haven’t had a chance to poke around much — the f2c conference is all-consuming — but I like the way they’re talking, anyway. Digg-like recommendations. Feeds from other news sources. Selected blog posts. Comments. I hope they get it right. (Features list.) [Tags: news msm blogs journa journalism everything_is_miscellaneous]

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jonathan Krim of WashingtonPost.com is leading a panel. On it are: The Dan (Gillmor), Mark Tapscott of The Washington Examiner, Bill Allison of The Sunlight Foundation.

Dan begins by saying that some types of stories, particularly ones that can be broken into small pieces, lend themselves to distributed journalism. He points to a story done by Talking Points Memo and to the possibility of opening up the WSJ’s current series on options back-dating. [From the chat, Jerry Michalski points to a Chicago crime map mashup. Steve Crandall points to a map of Iraqi casualties by US geography.]

Bill talks about citizen investigations of House corruption.

Mark says he’s “Dan Gillmor’s bastard child.” He read We the Media and was struck by Dan saying “My readers know more than I do.” At the Washington Examiner, he suggested making readers part of the staff. They set up the Washington Examiner Community Action

Jonathan asks whether distributed journalism undermines the notion that journalism is a craft. Does it undermine professionalism? Does it have a negative impact, in addition to the positive impacts?

Mark says that that’s the big question. “I call them collaborative networks rather than distributed.” “Distributed” has a whiff that it’s distributed from on high, he says. Bill says that it results in better journalism. Dan says that if more institutions used these techniques, it would make them more credible. Dan says he thinks it’ll be good for journalism, although it may not be good for the traditional institutions of journalism.

Q: (Steve Crocker): This is exciting. What’s the reaction going to be?
A: (Jonathan) The sea change will be tremendous at the corporate level, if these changes evolve as we hope.

A: (Dan). Privacy is likely to be the lever by which government shuts down access to data.

Q: Journalism has received the most friendly of challenges, compared to what we’ve said about other gatekeepers such as the telcos. at DailyKos, there’s some media bashing, but more often people will point to stories, or complain that journalists haven’t lived up to journalistic standards.

Q: (Yochai Benkler) What you’re experiencing is not unusual. College teachers worry about their kids reading Wikipedia. Many companies have been worried about using open source software. All sorts of authorities are worried. The mainstream media itself contributes to the undermining of science by treating everything as 50-50. There’s pushback now on this.

[Tags: f2c media msm journa journalism everything_is_miscellaneous]

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