Category: Mediactive Project

Tools and Techniques of Consumption: Prior Writings

As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Tools and Techniques of Consumption”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

Continue reading Tools and Techniques of Consumption: Prior Writings

Principles of Consumption: Prior Writings

As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Principles of Consumption”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)

Continue reading Principles of Consumption: Prior Writings

Collaborative Editing Possibilities

The Book Oven is a collaborative space “where we help each other make better books.” I’m considering whether to use it or another site like Smashwords — or, of course the Open Feedback Publishing at O’Reilly, which is publishing the book — for part of this process.

I do want to find a way to involve folks more fully in this process. Comments on blog posts are fine but plainly not sufficient. Ideas welcome, as always…


Site Problems

You may have noticed some site problems — so have we, and they appear to relate to the WordPress theme we’ve been using. We’ve disabled it for the time being until we figure out WTF has been happening to make the site slow to a crawl, so badly that it was affecting other sites on the server.

UPDATE: Looks like some of the old theme remains in the cache, which is preventing some comments from becoming visible. Arghhh… We’re working on that, too.

FURTHER UPDATE: Still working on the comments issue.

My apologies to the other customers of the ISP. We’ll be careful to bring this back up in a way that doesn’t hammer them or the server so badly.


Archiving the News: Auto-Preserving Blogs


A common belief holds that once something gets onto the Internet, it’s there indefinitely. This is true, no doubt, for some things. Does anyone believe the Paris Hilton sex video will ever not be out there?

Not everything does last, however, including some creative works that matter a great deal. Many of the works we should want to keep around disappear all the time, for a variety of reasons.

With work that’s born digital, this need not happen. Blogs and other material are a perfect example of digital material that never be lost — and it would take a relatively small number of people in the right positions to jump-start this idea.

Consider, for instance, the “place blogs” that have become a valuable part of local lore, sites on which citizens talk about what’s happening in their own communities. These blogs depend, for the most part, on volunteer efforts. As anyone who works with volunteers knows, however, their ardor for the task tends to flag over time. Bloggers start and stop, and when a blogger gives up his or her work can disappear. Links die along with what they’ve created.

At the Library of Congress this week, where members of a workshop were discussing how to preserve digital news in this networked era, there was little dispute that blogs are serving an expanding role in the news ecosystem. But as an archivist for the state of Wisconsin said, he has enough trouble keeping an archive of community newspapers without having to deal with the place blogs that have sprung up in town after town and city after city.

The blogging software I use, WordPress, has a Tools menu in the administration settings. Among other things, I can import, export and upgrade the blog. When I export, WordPress saves a full archive of the blog — everything I’ve created and uploaded online — into a package that I can move to another WordPress blog or even a site created with competing software.

Suppose we could convince the makers of all common blogging software platforms to expand this option, by giving users the ability to easily send what they’ve been doing, ideally on a regular schedule, to the Internet Archive, Library of Congress and/or other repositories willing to save these collected works.

The blogger should be able to select from a number of archiving options. For instance, I’d suggest a setting under which the blogger could tell the archivist that if the blog went “off the air” the archivist could restore it to the Web (albeit under a different URL hierarchy in most cases). Another useful element of this auto-save system could be as a way to have a rescue plan after a data loss. An export to the archive should also offer the possibility of an import from it. (Would we need an option to let the user remove the material from the archive if he or she decided it should not remain public? I’d guess we would, and should.)

We could make this happen if a small group of people agreed on some basics. The conversation would need to include blog software companies including WordPress, Movable Type, etc., plus potential storage services including the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress and others.

Assuming we could make this happen, the next step would be to lobby bloggers, to persuade them that saving their work to public archives would be a good idea. They could know that their work, if they chose, would be around for some time.

Any site running on a reasonably standard content-management system could be made to work this way, though the more customized the site the harder it may be. And eventually we’d want to have the big database folks — talking to you, Oracle (especially now that you’re going to own MySQL; yike) — in the conversation.

There are other ways to go at this. A workshop group led by Vijay Ravindran, chief technology officer at the Washington Post, came at the overall issue from the “pull” side of the ledger — with an ear toward the demands of the traditional media companies that will cede even a small amount of control over their content about a month after hell freezes over. They suggested a much better system of website notifications (using HTML tags) to notify crawlers that use robots.txt of what’s available in what ways. This would definitely be an improvement over what we do now, but only a partial solution. We want to preserve the entire hierarchy of the site along with everything that’s appeared on it, in full.

Nothing I heard in Washington begins to solve a more interesting problem, which is that so much of what we do (as opposed to view) these days comes from hyper-dynamically generated pages. Look at Everyblock, for example. How can we archive what the various pages that users create on the fly? (Should we? My belief is that, yes, we should know for posterity, in at least an aggregate sense, what was being created by the people who used the site.)

Right now, the blog idea seems like the low hanging fruit, though. I’m getting in touch with Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive to see if he’s interested, along with several of the folks who do the blogging software, and will let you know what they say.

The bottom line for all this is, I hope, obvious. If you are creating things, you should not just own them, but preserve them. This is one way to keep our work alive.


Moving Along: Mediactive

I’m declaring victory. I’m moving on, into a new project to help persuade passive consumers of media to become active users.

And, once again, I hope you’ll help.

A few years ago I wrote a book called We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, suggesting that we were on the verge of an evolutionary leap. Amid the democratization of media tools and access, I said, the lecture mode of journalism was giving way to conversation; and that stemmed, in part, from the simple fact that the audience always knows more than the person telling the story.

This evolutionary shift is still in its relatively early days. We are in a period of immense disruption, especially notable in the demolition of the business model that has paid for most traditional journalism for the past half-century or so.

Like everyone else, journalists have always been publicly preoccupied with their own situation. Unlike almost everyone else, they’ve owned a higher podium and a louder megaphone.

So we’ve been bombarded with angst, recriminations and, lately, panic emanating from an industry in jeopardy — a business that can no longer rely on the monopoly and oligopoly profits that spun off some occasionally brilliant journalism during the industry’s fattest era.

But look around. The messy process of reinvention is well under way.

Not a week goes by without a new announcement of an experiment in journalism. Today’s news regards a project, featuring finance writer Jane Bryant Quinn and her husband, aimed at helping local news reporting find a business model. Good luck to them — and the thousands of other folks who are working on these problems.

Last week’s news was from an Aspen Institute conference where a high-powered group of folks publicly agonized about the future of journalism. From a distance, the highlight looked to me to be the New Business Models for News project from Jeff Jarvis and company at City University of New York.

More recently it was GrowthSpur, a consultancy created by digital media pioneer Mark Potts and some colleagues, and aiming to “provide tools, training, services and ad networks that will help local sites grow and become successful businesses.”

And True/Slant; Huffington Post; Journalism Online LLC; Spot.US; EveryBlock (sold to MSNBC); and countless others (including our terrific media-entrepreneurship students at Arizona State University) who are proving out Clay Shirky’s observation: “Nothing will work, but everything might. Now’s the time for lots and lots of experiments.”

So I’m declaring victory, albeit early, on the supply side of the equation. Democratized media are giving voice to everyone who has something to add to the emergent global conversation, and the same tools are enabling smart people to experiment with sustainability models for tomorrow’s news and information. We will have plenty of quality news and information — though sorting the good stuff from the sludge will be just one of the huge issues we’ll have to deal with as we move forward into this new era. And, of course, we’ll need to help people creating that supply do a better job at all levels.

But that doesn’t solve what may be a bigger issue: crappy demand.

We have raised several generations of passive consumers of news and information. That’s not good enough anymore.

The media of today and tomorrow require us to become active users. And that’s a prime focus of this new project, Mediactive, the title of this website and an upcoming book. (Here’s the early chapter outline.)

My publisher, as with We the Media, is O’Reilly Media, the only company of its kind that truly gets this stuff. We’re going to be experimenting, in part, with the very nature of what a book is in a Digital Age.

Indeed, this entire project is about experimentation. Some of what we try will not work. Some of it will. But in the end, I hope to have created a solid user’s guide to news and information, for people who realize that they have to take some responsibility for knowing what they’re talking about.

Being active users of media is not an “eat your spinach because it’s good for you” exercise. It’s definitely good for us, but it’s also interesting and/or fun — and in the end truly satisfying.

As with We the Media, I’m not working in a vacuum. Lots of other people are thinking about these questions and trying to come up with answers, too. As always, we’re in this together.


Leveraging Pro Talent for Better Journalistic Digging

One of the fun events at the Knight News Challenge conference at MIT this week has been spur-of-the-moment ideas for new projects, products and services. The project ideas are listed here — and the list is proof that good ideas are in surplus these days.

Bill Buzenberg, executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, and I came up with the following proposal:

Circuit Rider Project: Community accountability via circuit-riding forensic accountant.

Using Arizona and metropolitan Phoenix as a test bed and template, we will hire a forensic accountant. (Forensic accounting is to accounting as investigative journalism is to journalism.) He or she will dig into state and regional governmental spending, with the help of crowd-sourced tips from citizens and bureaucrats, to spot any malfeasance (and to prevent it by virtue of watchdog deterrent effect).

We will bring this person together with journalists and potential media partners — while making findings open to all — to promote coverage that members of the community will see and act on. This fills a growing gap in Arizona and, if this test works as envisioned, in other states, metro areas and non-metro regions.

This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and Bill’s support means that we’re a lot more likely to try it. I’ll let you know if and how we proceed.