Here’s the second in a series of chapter drafts of the Mediactive book. (Here’s everything I’ve posted so far.) Remember, this is a draft, not the final version, though my editor and I believe we’re fairly close. Feel free to chime in with ideas about what I’ve missed and especially what I have gotten wrong, or send email. The chapter begins after the jump. (Note: Some of the HTML is weird, and the footnote links aren’t working right.)

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Pearltrees is a web-based social bookmarking application with a unique visual approach. Compared to other sites in the same vein (Delicious, Xmarks), Pearltrees offers a unique visual approach.

Bookmarked sites are represented by circular thumbnails called “pearls.” These can then be dragged around and arranged into a branching hierarchy or “tree.” Pearls can be added while browsing via a Firefox plugin or a bookmarklet. Browsing a tree and placing pearls runs smoothly and it’s an enjoyable experience.

Things get interesting as my pearls begin to co-inside with others’ pearls. A pearl will flash blue when another user adds the same link and orange when a pearl receives a new comment. In time, one gets a visual impression of bookmarks popularity and attention. As another links to my pearls, tracing back through their trees offers new discoveries and taxonomies I wouldn’t have arrived at on my own. This is not an experience exclusive to PearlTrees, but I believe the representation offers something different.

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I talk a lot about ecosystems in my work. Here’s why I think the word is so important for the future of journalism.

Humanity has learned that diverse ecosystems are more stable than ones that are less diverse. The dangers of monocultures are well understood despite our reliance on them in, among many other things, modern farming and finance. When society relies on a monoculture that fails, the results are catastrophic.

A diverse ecosystem features ongoing failure and success. Entire species come and go, but the impact of losing a single species in a trulty diverse ecosystem — however unfortunte for that species — is limited. In a diverse and vibrant capitalist economy, the failure of enterprises is tragic only for the specific constituencies of those enterprises, but what Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” assuming that we have fair and enforceable rules of the road for all, ensures the long-term sustainability of the economy.

The journalistic ecosystem of past half-century, like the overall media ecosystem, was dominated by a small number of giant companies. Those enterprises, aided by governmental policies and manufacturing-era efficiencies of scale, controlled the marketplace, and grew bigger and bigger.  The collision of Internet-fueled technology and traditional media’s advertising model was cataclysmic for the big companies that dominated.

But is it catastrophic for the communities and society they served? In the short term, it’s plainly problematic, at least when we consider Big Journalism’s role as a watchdog, though the dominant companies have served in that role inconsistently, at best, especially in recent years. But the worriers appear to assume that we can’t replace what we will lose. They have no faith in the restorative power of a diverse ecosystem, because they don’t know what it’s like to be part of one.

Today I’m starting to post chapter drafts of the Mediactive book. (Here’s everything I’ve posted so far.) Remember, this is a draft, not the final version, though my editor and I believe we’re fairly close. Feel free to chime in with ideas about what I’ve missed and especially what I have gotten wrong, or send email. The chapter begins after the jump.

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More than 10 weeks since it published an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake.

Then again, the same editorial page routinely publishes op-ed columns that are not truthful. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when the people who write the unsigned editorials do the same.

In any event, the Post’s refusal to even address this error — I’ve expressed my disgust to the newspaper’s ombudsman, who says the editorial page is off limits for his reviews — is disgraceful.

Like many other people, I have a Facebook account. One reason is to keep track of what’s happening in the planet’s largest social network, including what application developers and users are doing there.

Another is that some of my friends — actual friends — are using the site. Facebook helps me stay in touch.

But the privacy fiasco of the past few days has left me feeling that I really can’t entirely trust Facebook, even with the limited amount of things I’ve said and done on the site since I got an account several years ago. Maybe I’m over-reacting — and I continue to admire the company’s accomplishments in many other ways — but that’s just the way it is.

Why don’t I feel safe and sound in their benevolent hands? Because although some of the changes they’ve made in their privacy settings are actually helpful, they are suggesting that users share much more of their data and other information, much more widely than ever. Facebook’s extremely smart leaders know perfectly well that the majority of users are likely to accept these suggestions, because most people say yes to whatever the default settings are in any application.

I wasn’t very happy with my Facebook situation in any case. Early on, I said yes to just about everyone who asked me to “friend” them, including people barely knew and some I didn’t know at all.

The privacy changes — and my continuing uncertainty, given the number of pages you have to look at to modify your settings — made me realize I’d rather take fewer chances. So I’ve made a fairly drastic change.

This morning, I deleted my account. Then I started a new one.

Actually, I scheduled the old one for deletion several weeks from now, which is all Facebook allows. The company figures, perhaps correctly, that some people will have made this decision rashly and wants to give them a way to reconsider. And it’s clearly in Facebook’s interest to avoid as many cancellations as possible for business reasons.

It wasn’t easy to figure out how to delete the account, which no doubt is part of the company’s strategy, too. If you go to your Settings page, the only option in this realm is to “deactivate,” not delete.

But a little searching on the site turns up this Facebook Group called “How to permanently delete your facebok account” (more than 35,000 members) — which in turn reveals this link to a delete-account form.

Before I did the actual deletion, however, I went to my Account Settings and opened up the Username option. I’d previously set my username to “dangillmor” so my Facebook URL would be facebook.com/dangillmor, and wanted to be able to use that again. I changed the username to something else, and only then did I delete the account.

Then I started a new account, using a different email address, and set the username to match the old one.

Next up was a check of the default privacy settings for new users. They’re pretty un-private, in my view, sharing way too much with people you don’t know. I systematically went through the various screens — Facebook makes this chore both annoying and obscure, perhaps on purpose — to ratchet down the settings to something I can live with.

Look, we all know what is Facebook’s best interest: exposing to search engines and advertisers the largest possible number of pages by among the largest number of people willing to create stuff and make it all public. Marketers drool at what they can do at Facebook if the company will only let them, and Facebook’s entirely rational goal, like almost every other Internet company’s, is to make profits in almost any way it can. What’s in the corporate interest, however, doesn’t necessarily match what’s in my interest, or yours.

So I’m still at facebook.com/dangillmor — though my real Web homebase is dangillmor.com — with just two Facebook friends at the moment. I’ll be adding more, but not in any hasty way.

UPDATE: Wired News explains How to UnFacebook Yourself.

And Jason Calacanis asks, “Is Facebook Unethical, Clueless or Unlucky?” I vote mainly for the first.

More than nine weeks since it published an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake.

Then again, the same editorial page routinely publishes op-ed columns that are not truthful. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when the people who write the editorials do the same.

UPDATED

Today’s Washington Post editorial pages feature an “op-ed” column entitled Sarah Palin on the politicization of the Copenhagen climate conference. Never mind that the column is full of falsehoods; the Post and most other papers often run letters, op-ed columns and editorials that contain falsehoods. (Sometimes they correct the errors; often they don’t.)

My issue here is with the column’s tagline:

The writer was the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president and governor of Alaska from 2006 to 2009.

Does anyone who understands media and PR really buy this — the notion that Palin wrote the column in question? Of course not.

Op-ed pieces that run under the bylines of famous politicians, celebrities and business people are almost never written by those people, just as they rarely write their autobiographies, even first drafts, by themselves. They don’t have time. Their staffers and PR people research and write the pieces.

Society has a serious blind spot about this kind of thing — and applies a pernicious double standard. If we catch a student paying someone to write his or her paper for a class, we give the student an F. Or, in some cases (like a journalism school), we might even ask the student to leave.

So why do newspaper editors think it’s fine to wink at obvious deception? They could put a stop to the fiction tomorrow, but probably won’t. The continuing lure of “free content,” especially with famous names at the top, is an ingrained habit, however wrong.

Ghost-written op-eds are often compared with speechwriter-written speeches. Since we all know that most famous people don’t write their own lines for speeches, goes this logic, we should assume the same with a byline — whether on a book or an op-ed.

Call me naive, but I’d like to hold journalists to a slightly higher standard. Newspapers have given away enough of their credibility in recent times. Maybe this is a place to regain a little.

UPDATE: A Twitter commenter asked, essentially, what’s the harm if everyone knows it’s happening. First, not everyone does know. Sure, media-savvy people are well aware of the fakery. I’m not certain that everyone takes for granted that these are ghost-written, however.

Again, the point is not that celebrity politicians are going to stop doing this. It’s that newspapers, which should care about little things like credibility, should stop being complicit in the deception. Even if it turns out to be true that everyone knows, it’s still wrong.

Users of the iPhone in the U.S. have been plaugued by AT&T’s lousy network, but now the telecom company is crowdsourcing what it hopes will help identify the worst parts of the network. It can’t tell if your call has been dropped on purpose — that is, you hung up — or whether it dropped because of the crappy network. So it’s asking users for help, according to Wired News.

There’s a media point to this. AT&T understands the value of its customers’ collective knowledge. Journalists are still missing it, for the most part.

More than eight weeks since it ran an editorial based on a false premise, the Washington Post has neither acknowledged nor corrected its mistake. Shameful.