Reading and Writing

A few things I’d like to see local news sites publish

(author unknown) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:33:50 -0800

Shared by Chris
Yes, do all of this. Actually, none of it should be that technically daunting or expensive. It's mostly a change in stated goals, from "news" to "resource".

Here are a few things I’d like to see local news sites publish. I’d like to see them not just because they’re interesting, and not just because no news sites are publishing them now, but because publishing this information would:

Provide context about the exact place that I live. Context makes information actionable.
Make accessible and linkable historical information about the place that I live. News sites are a community resource — time to start acting like one.
Give news sites exponentially more entry points to the information they’re already publishing. More entry points makes information more findable.
Make local political news and information more accessible. This makes politics more approachable and actionable to those not already disposed to follow it.

1. An index of all the facts included in the articles they publish

This means a list of facts, as well as a means to link directly to the part in the article that fact exists.

Example: McDonald’s buys more than 3 billion pounds of potatoes annually across the globe. This nugget of information is more interesting than the article’s headline, McDonald’s seeks better ‘tater for its French fries, yet it was left embedded in the article body for only the most curious to find.

Indexing facts does more than provide new and engaging entry points to existing content. Facilitating easy citations with facts and links to facts can improve the quality of conversations on news-site article comments, and it can also encourage wikipedia users to cite the news site with the tools that make it easy to cite.

2. News archives. Not just from the last month — from the last year, ten years, fifty years, century.

Every local news-dot-com publishing with a newspaper is sitting on a goldmine of archived content. The New York Times hired reCaptcha to help digitize their archives — sure, the NYT’s web strategy doesn’t always align with that of local news-dot-coms, but in this case, they’re onto something.

3. Indexes of news and information by zip code

Denver’s a decently big city. We’ve got 72 neighborhoods and xx zip codes. If there were a place I could go to get all the news, calendar events, and classified listings in my zip code, I would. Not only that, I would tell my neighbors about it. Indexing by zip codes gives a hook for loyal readers to introduce your site to the people that live around them that may not care for your publication, and it gives the non-loyal readers, the non-news junkies a compelling reason to visit.

4. Indexes of information on local politicians, organized by politician.

I don’t care about your catch-all “local politics” category. I care about about the politicians that represent me, and I want an easy way to find out everything they’re doing. That means not just local politicians either — that means the people repping me in the statehouse, my U.S. House representative and my U.S. senator.

Looking at “local” as a catch-all bucket rather than a collection of specific and distinct pieces is a superficial approach to publishing.

The New York Times’ Represent application approaches local politics in a mature and fully fleshed manner.

Here are some examples of catch-all local politics buckets:

5. Indexes of major crimes, by date, with crime stats aggregated by month, year and every type of location that’s available (county, zip code, neighborhood, street, block etc.).

Yes, this is the type of information you see Everyblock and Adrian Holovaty pushing online. I’m not saying publish data-driven presentations of all crimes — I’m saying start with the big ones, see how that works, and go from there. Publishing per-capita rates for violent crimes opens a window on urban vs. suburban living, on what’s happening in the places we call home and work, and how these incidents trend over time.

I’m going to repeat that: How these incidents trend over time. Crime drives a large part of the news truck, but so often it’s crime without context. Now that local news is online, it has the opportunity to give context to the information it publishes. What would this context do? Turn crime news from the hand-wringing / rubberneck activity and make the crime information actionable. If arson has increased 200% in my zipcode (80204) in the last year, that’s worth asking my police department and local government about.

Recovery.gov's Success

Clay Johnson — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:18:14 -0800

Primary sources on the Senate bill

Ezra Klein — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:00:06 -0800

Some advice to designers of news websites

(author unknown) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 07:35:23 -0800

Shared by Chris
Wish I'd read this post a year ago. Or six months ago. Or last month.

This morning I ran across a note at drupal.org from a beginning designer asking for a critique of his attempt to design a news site. The attempt led me to focus on some weaknesses that are common to many professionally designed sites.

There are too many "redesigns" of news sites, and the typical redesign process is set up for failure. It goes like this:

A new entity takes over the site. Maybe there's a restructuring that places the site under the control of the newspaper editor. Maybe it's a change in new-media directors. Maybe it's a designer. The goal of "make this work for the user" is inadvertently eclipsed by "put my mark on my territory." That's the wrong reason to begin with. You are at high risk of replacing one set of design errors with another, and needlessly pissing off your users in the process.

A committee is formed. You always need to pull all the stakeholders into any design process, but you have to have a more clear structure than is provided by a committee in which everyone has a different idea of how decisions are going to be made. You need to be absolutely clear about who plays what role: Sponsor, Facilitator, Contributor, Designer, Builder, Passenger, and most especially, Decisionmaker. Some people may play more than one role. Lack of clarity about roles, responsibilities and process sets you up for failure.

The wrong skillsets are put into play. Designing a news website requires a deep understanding of the content that is being displayed. If you're not a hands-on production editor, you may not realize that the proposed design is ultimately unsustainable because the available content won't support it. And design committees tend to contain many opinionated executives who want to argue about fonts and color, and no actual line editors. Keep in mind, too, that art and illustration are not design, and that someone who's good at building mockups with Photoshop may not necessarily be any good at information architecture or envisioning the interactive experience or delivering a usable system.

Somebody has to build this, and the real world needs to be considered before you get carried away. If your design process isn't informed by a full understanding of the CMS you're using, you may conjure up something that costs you far more to implement than it's worth. Real design is a process of compromise. Don't get surprised by that at the wrong stage in the process.

In many redesigns, the unstructured and underskilled committee engages in a painfully drawn-out process that leads to round after round of debate and argument about personal preferences, color choices, font sizes, etc., while underneath it all there's a process of jockeying for political advantage in the newsroom. All of this happens around a consideration of just one page -- the home page, the Web's equivalent of the holy Front Page, the focus of all power and glory in any newsroom.

Eventually the exhausted combatants grudgingly agree on a "design" and slink back to their offices and leave the field of battle to the builders.

But the job isn't done! In fact, it's not even begun. You haven't really built a news site design; you've just modeled one display page.

When you build a news site, you have, at a minimum, three radically different types of displays to design:

The home page, which focuses on recommendation and navigation. Depending on your information architecture, you may need several similar section pages.
Simple list pages, which display collections of similar things and allow the user to burrow down and make choices. The "river of news" or "headline/teaser" view that Drupal provides at /node and /blog is an example of such a page. These pages have a different mission than the home page and section fronts, and the designs should reflect that.
Story pages, which present a single story and all of its assets, but also entice a reader to explore contextually related resources on the site (or elsewhere on the Internet). Many designers fail to recognize that a story page is every bit as important as the other two primary types, and as the proportion of traffic coming from search engines and links continues to grow, the importance of designing a great story page begins to eclipse the rest of the project.

These are just the beginning, of course. The system we put in place last year at the Florida Times-Union has more than 30 content types.

When you design pages, keep in mind that you also are designing a site, which means that you need to make it clear how pages hang together into a coherent whole.

The primary tools for creating a sense of hierarchy are not limited to the taxonomy or menu system and breadcrumb trails; you also need to consider the choices you make in font sizes and other graphical elements and how those choices suggest a membership in a broader collection of information.

Take a good look at http://www.nytimes.com/ beyond the homepage. Study how each page type uses a template that helps reinforce its position in a larger sense of order, as well as how the choice and arrangement of typographical elements within a page conveys a sense of order within the pageview.

Tracking Twitter reponses to Obama’s Town Hall in China

(author unknown) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:04:11 -0800

Shared by Chris
Rick does a masterful twitter round-up using an old tool I built in two hours a year ago.

Earilier today Barack Obama had one of his famous ‘Town Hall Meetings’ in Shanghai, where he took questions from Chinese youth in attendance and from questions posed on the internet. Naturally, there were some interesting responses to all this on Twitter. As a sort of exercise in ‘Twitter coverage,’ I tried experimenting with Chris’ TwitBlog tool to copy some of the responses here:

Photo: Reuters

On Sister Cities, Shanghai & Chicago

Sannri: Rt @808lika #ObamaCN Obama answers that Shanghai/Chicago sister cities have mutual interest in clean energy and reducing carbon footprint.

(strangely not many people tweeted on this softball question.)

On Women and ‘Universal Rights’

comradewong: #ObamaCN Interesting that he didn’t mention “human rights.” It’s “universal rights” now.

jstauffacher: #ObamaCN Obama cleverly uses example of children & women to underline idea of “universal values

cankles: Obama talks about universal ideals and values - Child labor and women’s rights #ObamaCN

blogdiva: OMG! did Obama just smacked the Chinese and their cultural practices against women? #ObamaCN

melodymuses: RT @natthedem: Obama: if you look at development around the world, one of the best indicators is how it treats its women #ObamaCN

kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN Forced labor for children - “may have taken part in many countries, including the United States.” Then women, also safe territory.

@baratunde: “i think it’s important that the united states affirm the rights of women around the world” - #ObamaCN.

On US stance on Taiwan

asia6667: Cut the feed! Cut the feed!! Taiwan #obamacn

davidonformosa: Obama states support for One China policy and improved cross-strait relations. Doesn’t state support for Taiwan’s democracy. #ObamaCN

@chungmedia: Obama’s answer on Taiwan question cut to black screen on our CNN at home #obamaCN

kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN He ALMOST said “…between Taiwan and the rest of [China],” then caught himself and said, “…er, the People&aposs Republic of China”

texinchina: #ObamaCN definitely didn’t fully address the Cross-Straits question, but the $ part of the answer was a clever piece.

alexco: Obama skates around directly saying if they will continue to sells weapon to Taiwan. #ObamaCN

natthedem: Obama: Hope that we will continue to see improvement in relations between Taiwan and the People’s Republic. #ObamaCN

mikekwan: On cross-straight relations btwn Taiwan & China: We support One China policy, we don’t want to change it #ObaMAO #ObamaCN

bokane: Audience applause for question about US support for arms sales to Taiwan. #ObamaCN

ThePhoenixSun: Internet question from Taiwan draws applause from students. #ObamaCN

Tortue: One China Policy rules #ObamaCN

On the Nobel Prize and the ‘recipe for success’

bjsunlove: “I don’t know that there’s a recipe or curriculum for how to win the Nobel Prize.” A CN student wants the formula…of course. #ObamaCN

kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN Zhu Yuetian from Fudan School of Management asks about education experiences that lead to Nobel Prize. Hmmm…

natthedem: Obama: All of us have an obligation to promote peace in the world. It is not easy to do. #ObamaCN

clemtan: Hmm, why is Obama alternating between guys and girls when taking questions? Stupid question on recipe for Nobel Prize “success” #ObamaCN

raykwong: Lots of smiles in the audience as young coed asks Obama about Nobel Peace prize. #ObamaCN

zsazsa: ha! student asking Pres Obama about receiving the Nobel Prize for peace. #Obamacn

tomsp: #ObamaCN Ha ha - Chinese student: “Why did you win Nobel prize for peace?” It&aposs getting warm out there…

shanghaiist: Apparently there’s no curriculum or course of study that guarentees you a nobel peace prize in the future. #ObamaCN http://ow.ly/CDao

blogdiva: to the wankpublicans: “i don’t think i deserve the (Nobel) prize” but he accepts it as symbol of the world’s renewed view of US #ObamaCN

OurManinSH: Obama asked about campus life during his time at university #ObamaCN - How to be successful? — Be curious, be open to new ideas #ObamaCN

On the ‘Great Firewall,’ Twitter, and Information Freedom

tomsp: #ObamaCN Q delivered by US ambassador to China - “Have you heard of great firewall & should people be able to use twitter?” Ha ha.

ttmh: RT @aimeenbarnes: NICE. “Do you know of the Firewall? Should we be able to use Twitter freely?” #ObamaCN

@mranti: CNN Sucks. It just stops live when Obama answering Internet freedom question. #ObamaCN

dankee817: Obama says his thumbs are too clumsy and never used Twitter but believes in free flow of information #obamacn

@gadyepstein: #ObamaCN CNN is doing its own self-censoring now, cutting to commentator instead of president. #CNNFail

gadyepstein: #ObamaCN CNN still talking over this answer by Obama about the Internet.

tomsp: #ObamaCn interesting that White House is broadcasting Obama uncensored but CNN, supposedly the media, is censoring stuff on internet freedom

ShanghaiTWTR: obama doesn’t use twitter! how many people are unfollowing @barackobama right now? #obamacn

bryaneder: Obama extols the virtues of internet access saying it promotes Democracy, business and understanding in the world #ObamaCN

gonzeinstein: Obama not even swinging — much less swinging and missing — on the Great Firewall question. #ObamaCN

jaredrhall: #ObamaCN Predictable Internet openness question, but surprisingly unpolished answer

dufffader: #ObamaCN am I right if I assume chinese censors are having a busy time pressing the “block/unblock” button this afternoon?

davesgonechina: #ObamaCN better answer to GFW question: “Everyone should be able to read @shitmydadsays” (which has a sitcom deal now).

cankles: Answer: I believe in openness of information to hold governments accountable and encourages creativity. I support non-censorship #ObamaCN

isaac: eventually the embassador bypassed onsite censorship to ask out the censorship issue, how funny #obamacn

AnitaMedia: http://twitpic.com/pq83k - Obama: I have never used Twitter but I am an advocate of technology and not restricting internet access. #ObamaCN

baratunde: “as president of the united states there are times when i wished information didn’t flow so freely :)” #ObamaCN (smiley is part of quote)

tomsp: #ObamaCN “freedom of info makes it easier to hold govts to account and encourages free and original thought.”

natthedem: Obama says openness forces him to hear voices that he wouldn’t otherwise listen to. #ObamaCN

michetravi: RT @1rick: Obama fields twitter question. Twittersphere collectively begins masturbating. #obamacn

charlieflint: #obamacn Chinese audience: “Huh? Google? Vaguely rings a bell…”

@kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN Gets his Google timetable way wrong. 20 years ago Sergey and Larry were what, in junior high? Oh well.

LauraAndRudy: “More free information flows, strong the society becomes…think for themselves, encourages creativity” Obama re: Twitter, et al #ObamaCN

@bokane: OK, so these questions sucked, even the attempt at #GFW related 擦边球 with the Twitter question. Lame lame lame. #ObamaCN

natthedem: Obama: The more open we are, the more we can communicate. #ObamaCN

ursulas: RT @blogdiva: i’ve always been a great supporter of open internet, no censorship-unrestricted internet access should be encouraged #ObamaCN

On Afghanistan and Terrorism

yinh: #ObamaCN Student rep of “China’s youth netizens”: Is terrorism still the greatest security concern, esp. re: Afghanistan?

K_Ova: RT @baratunde: damn good afghanistan question for our president. Chinese kids are mad smart! #ObamaCN

StrandedMariner: RT @wikiwackywoo: Not exactly a softball question re Afghanistan and not a softball answer either. #obamacn

kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN “We also have to think about what motivates young people to become terrorists.” Culprits include “perversion of religion,” but more

Populista: Indeed. RT @natthedem O talking about a strategy that gets at the root causes of terrorism. Once again, so grateful that he’s POTUS #ObamaCN

natthedem: Obama: Part of what we want to do in Afghanistan is train teachers, improve schools and improve agriculture. #ObamaCN

gadyepstein: #ObamaCN Answering on terrorism, addresses question of what makes someone a suicide bomber

katherineUSC: #obamacn Terrorism? So outdated …talk about environmental / climate change idiots Shanghai students !! Ask sth related to your own govt

@raykwong: “One of the hardest things about my job is ordering young men and women into the battlefield.” #ObamaCN

tomsp: #ObamaCN come off it Obama - the US helped create the Taliban!

raykwong: Last question: What is the greatest security concern of the United States? BO answer: “Terrorist networks like Al-Qaeda.” #ObamaCN

socratic: Obama ties terrorism to lack of education and opportunity. Not just “evilness.” Great answer. #ObamaCN

kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN Implicit link between Shanghai and NY in potential victimization by terrorist. Interesting. Signaling continued GWOT partnership?

natthedem: Obama: The greatest threat to US security are terrorist networks like Al Qaeda. #ObamaCN

Miscellaneous Tweets

@kaiserkuo #ObamaCN “Power in the 21st century is no longer a zero-sum gain…. We do not seek to contain China’s rise.”

profpjm: the secret service agents at the event look menacing and tough #obamacn http://twitpic.com/pq926

kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN Wish they’d have filtered out for completely banal questions. Brings out that patronizing tone I find irksome.

@katherineUSC: he only good question was from the US ambassador. All questions from students were insane !! #obamacn

Populista: RT: @socratic: Obama exhorts Chinese students to think in new ways and not accept the conventional wisdom. Important, that. #ObamaCN

sairy: I hope these students know how incredibly lucky they are to have such an open dialogue with President Obama. #obamacn

@kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN Really interesting to hear Obama unscripted on China-related issues. No surprises thus far.

sheilazhao: Thinks the questions to Obama kinda sucks… #ObamaCN

socratic: The people Obama admires most are those who think beyond themselves. Liberalism ftw. #ObamaCN

get_bent: The bald white guy in front of Obama looks like he’s prepared to intercept a shoe #obamacn

profpjm: RT @edhenrycnn: http://twitpic.com/pq7ax - in red scarf keeps practicing her Q aloud. So excited she’s shaking said “so nervous” #obamacn

bokane: RT @blackChinahand: oh my god … it’s an audience of ringers Who chose them? #obamacn

natthedem: Obama closes the town hall by inviting students to visit the United States. Obama steps off stage and the Secret Service swarms. #ObamaCN

theambershow: American Chinese teamup/take over. IT BEGINS. #obamacn

blogdiva: bwahaha! #ObamaCN RT @almondjoi: Yup. It’s a shame. RT @TheInfamousE: these chinese students ask tougher questions than all of the US media

gadyepstein: #ObamaCN Now he’s asking them if they can use knives and forks.

austinramzy: Xinhua&aposs updates of Obama town hall mentions GFW, block on Twitter #ObamaCN http://bit.ly/2LyXwm

bryaneder: Obama says perversion of religion is one factor that motivates young people to become suicide bombers. #ObamaCN

get_bent: A lot of easy questions. Who do these students think they are? The Bush White House press corps? #obamacn

tomsp: #ObamaCN someone has to lob a shoe at Obama, surely, for form’s sake at least?

clemtan: Town Hall with China youths Obama’s way of cajoling Chinese people to greater responsibility on the world stage? #ObamaCN

808lika: RT @kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN Making money as a salve against ideological rigidity. Love it.

ChicagoDiane: Interesting! RT @Chinkerfly: There’s more women than men enrolled in college in China? I never would have guessed that #obamacn

cankles: When people want to make money they think less about ideology - very true. #ObamaCN

ShanghaiNathan: RT @kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN “The second highest number of foreign students come from China. 50% increase in study of Chinese by American stu …

@kaiserkuo: #ObamaCN Nice references to people-to-people cooperation during WWII, and to Ping Pong Diplomacy.

@aimeenbarnes not-so-positive tweets bout… 100,000 US students studying in China…Interesting #obamacn like5am outside propgda in wudk

gadyepstein: #ObamaCN On America’s diversity: “When you see family gatherings in the Obama household, it looks like the United Nations.”

blogdiva: the faces of the kids in the #ObamaCN town hall, they’re just eating him up

davesgonechina: Diversity question: did it have a point? Felt passive aggressive. #ObamaCN

gadyepstein: #ObamaCN That was it. Compliments everybody on their English. Yikes.

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More on Obama’s visit…

(author unknown) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:35:37 -0800

Shared by Chris
Sharing this mostly because it's a good round-up of the chatter about Obama's visit to China.

I’m up early on a Sunday morning watching college football and getting ready for a hike around the second ring road. We actually don’t hike ON the second ring road so much as I lead my students through a maze of hutongs starting around Xinjiekou and winding our way east than south finally emerging around Jianguomen. We were supposed to do this LAST Sunday but the numbers were a little light so we postponed it until today. I think we’ll have a better turnout today. We’ve added a stop at the Beixinqiao Grandma’s Kitchen…and I made it mandatory for my history class. Yes, I am evil.

In his blog for the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows argues that the most critical topic for President Obama and Hu Jintao is tackling the problem of global China change. While at the NGOChina blog, Shawn Shieh argues that as a former community organizer, the president knows first hands the problems of NGOs. Professor Shieh suggests that instead of hectoring the Chinese government about human rights, President Obama should instead use presence in China to lend support to grassroots organizations and NGO development in the PRC.

In the NYT, David Barboza offers the obligatory look at the paradoxes in China’s economic transformation. (One wishes William Shatner could be a China economics analyst: “Luxury BRANDS! but PoVERTY! They HAVE such a LaRge and growing eCONoMY, BUT per CAPITA income still LOW! WHAT! GIVES?)

By the way, did you know that China has lent us a lot of money? Really, it’s true!

The Guardian insists that the US and China are locked in an embrace from which neither can tear themselves away without harm. (China history checklist: Great Wall, Nixon goes to China, and, of course, Mao.)

Over at WaPo, professional China watcher John Pomfret looks at the new challenges and opportunities of China’s growing economic and cultural influence in the United States.

Back to college football. Looks like upsets galore, based on where the games are now it’s not inconcievable we could have Iowa over OSU, SC over Florida, and Stanford over USC.

ObaMao and Justin Timberlake: The state of the Sino-US relationship

Jeremiah — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:00:42 -0800

It’s a sunny day in the hutong, cold outside but the sun is shining nicely off the snow packed on the roof of our kitchen and bathroom and reflecting brilliantly into the living room. We moved our plants inside two weeks ago and they are enjoying the sun bath almost as much as the two cats, currently going at it UFC-style for largest patch of sunbeam on the couch.

Much happening in Beijing this week the arrival of two celebrated visitors. President Obama touches down later this week (more on this in a moment), and Richard of The Peking Duck makes his triumphant return to the city of snow and smog after his much lamented mid-summer departure.

Lots has also been made of Qin Gang’s ill-advised historical analogizing. Many Chinese netizens (the usual suspects) are applauding the Foreign Ministry spokesperson’s linkage of the CCP’s handling of the Tibet with the President Lincoln and the American Civil War. Others, perhaps with a little more nuance and perspective, are questioning the wisdom of Qin Gang. China watchers are used to daft historical statements made by cadres and officials for domestic Chinese consumption, but this was the Foreign Ministry trying to make a bid for sympathy from the international media, and it’s shocking that the FM, an increasingly slick operation, could take such a big swing and miss. I think it goes to show that in matters of borderland minorities the ideological blinkers remain firmly in place even among the more outward looking of Chinese officialdom.

(I will say, not so much in defense of Qin Gang but so as to avoid the appearance of piling on after the play has been whistled dead, that there IS a worthwhile history lesson to be drawn between CCP policy and the American Civil War..the next time somebody complains about the PRC refusing to rule out a first strike in the event of declared Taiwanese independence, just lean over and whisper “Fort Sumter.” I’m not saying it’s a perfect parallel, but it’s a helluva lot better than Qin Gang’s addle-minded example this week. For God’s sake, his words sounded like they fed him three bottles of Robitussin DM, spun him around three times, and then sent him out to do the briefing…OK, now I’m piling on.)

But looking ahead…President Obama’s visit is good news for the cottage industry of Sino-US relations experts as all the major media outlets prepare their “state of the relationship” pieces in advance of the three-day Hubama smackdown. For the record, Andrew Browne of the Wall Street Journal wins the “Chinese history cliché trifecta” for managing to squeeze Zheng He, Qianlong/Macartney, and Mao into the same think piece.

From my own perspective, the relationship could be better. Those who are advocating a “get tough with China policy” might want to consider the lessons of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. When they first hooked up, Timberlake was just one of several N’Sync’ers trying to make a name for himself beyond boybandom. You had no idea which way it was going to go…five years out he could be a pop superstar or he could be the second lead in the Orlando Community Theater production of Rent. She on the other hand, thanks to America’s latent schoolgirl porn obsession and a producer who had a deft hand with the autotune, was a global icon. Then she gets ideas, breaks his heart, and inspires him to single-handedly crush her spirit with the best kiss-off song in decades “Cry Me a River.” We all know how this played out over the next decade.

(By the way my alternative analogy involved Jon Gosselin. Let’s just say I’m not optimistic about the way the Sino-US relationship is going, especially for my side of the equation. Best I move on…)

Finally, the nuttiest sideshow to President Obama’s visit has to be the ongoing ‘controversy’ over the sale of ObaMao t-shirts in Beijing.* YJ and I had a little disagreement about the ObaMao t-shirts when she suggested we buy a few as gifts for when we go back to the US for Christmas. She thought they were cute and kitschy. I was worried about being mistaken for the kind of people currently wearing such shirts back in the US.

Mao aside, Good analysis of what Obama means for your average person in China comes courtesy of Adam Mintner (Shanghai Scrap) in the Atlantic.

As for me, I doubt I’ll get lucky enough to meet the President. (Why is it that whenever a Chinese official touches down overseas, Chinese students are bused in and allowed to greet their visiting leader like the Beatles at JFK circa 1964 but Obama’s being treated like the boy in the bubble?) One of my colleagues whose wife works for the US Embassy is trying to finagle a way to attend the Embassy reception next Tuesday afternoon. Hopefully, I’ll be able to restrain my inner bitterness and cover his field trip for him. We’ll see.

Until then.

—————

*The second silliest has to be the debate between the State Department and Xinhua over how to transliterate “Obama” into Chinese.

Get your act together, Data.gov

Clay Johnson — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:38:29 -0800

The future of the Twin Cities media ecosystem

Matt — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:56:44 -0800

This is the keynote address I gave last Saturday at the Twin Cities Media Alliance Fall Forum. Please excuse the bad audio quality, like the thumps every time I advance a slide. I might record a better-quality version when I’ve got a moment.¹ A transcript of the remarks is below the fold.

Transcript of remarks

Opening – The rise of mass culture

If you wanted to impose a narrative onto the 20th Century, you could do worse than telling the story of the rise and decline of mass culture. In industry after industry – telecommunications, energy, transportation, agriculture, finance – small, local companies spent much of the century consolidating into hulking behemoths, and then, as the century closed, began to crumble under their own weight.

Perhaps nowhere was this story more vivid than in the media industry. Minnesota began the century with almost 700 newspapers, three dozen of them daily, a thriving foreign-language and partisan press, journals for every trade you could imagine. A publisher in St. Paul owned the Farmer magazine and its necessary counterpart, The Farmer’s Wife. In Minneapolis, meanwhile, a journal for the milling industry had correspondents stationed in New York and London. At the turn of the century, seven daily papers served the Twin Cities alone.

And then the age of mass set in, and oligopoly became the order of the day. The papers that had been the Minneapolis Times, the Tribune, the Journal and the Star folded into each other, becoming the Minneapolis Star Tribune, fed by a fervor among advertisers to reach bigger and bigger audiences, the larger the better. When advertisers’ hunger for massive audiences outstripped the capacity of even the super-consolidated newspaper to deliver it, they leapt to broadcast media, which brought bigger numbers still.

Today, of course we sit amidst the burning wreckage of this ascent. But I don’t really want to dwell on what’s happening today; I want to talk about yesterday and tomorrow.

The transition from niche to mass

I started by talking about the 20th Century because I want to frame what’s happening and what I hope to see happen as in many ways a return, a homecoming, as well as a chance at a new beginning. And I want us to plumb the best lessons of the past as we construct the media ecosystem that will serve us in the future.

Most of us grew up right around the very pinnacle of the age of mass. It’s all we’ve ever known. We think of it as being the natural state of things. And seeing it changing, our first instinct is to worry.

But history tells a different story. The rise of mass culture wasn’t driven by our values or needs as participants in a democracy. It was driven primarily by a handful of boring economic and demographic factors almost outside our observation – the needs of advertisers, industrial efficiencies, urban sprawl.

And although today, our attention is concentrated on what’s being lost in the transition to the next media ecosystem, we forget that we lost quite a lot in the transition to the last one. As far as I can tell, we didn’t like it when the Minneapolis Times and the Journal and the St. Paul Dispatch and the Globe went away, even if the new superpapers that sprung up in their wake were a bit plumper than before.

In that flourishing cacophony of voices that existed before the rise of the mass media, there was something tremendously valuable. Coverage could be deep and rowdy and familiar. The coverage you followed said something significant about who you were, much more than being a Strib subscriber or a KARE-11 watcher does today. A vast variety of needs and perspectives and interests had consistent representation.

The pitfalls of niche and the value of mass

But don’t let me paint a picture rosier than the reality. This age of media had giant pitfalls as well. With many presses in the hands of rich and powerful men, information could be suppressed. Reading the newspapers of 1934, for example, you wouldn’t have read anything about the Citizens Alliance – the shadowy cabal of business owners that fought brutally against their workers’ ability to organize.

And there was much of tremendous value in the mass media ecosystem that followed. Perhaps the most precious artifact of that historical moment was the notion of the news commons – the Walter Cronkite broadcast – the voice popular enough to unite us and allow us to share a common truth. The further that voice reached, the more massive the organization behind it, the more powerful it grew.

In the late ’60s and early ’70s, as its own power and profits were beginning to crest, the press found a purpose as a check on the power of government and corporations. Metro newspapers could fund the types of lavish investigations that brought down a President. Well-staffed foreign bureaus could bring images of a faraway war into our living rooms, forcing us to confront the outcomes of our actions.

In your mind, you’re probably already forming the counterpoints to all the positives I’ve just laid out. This is good, keep doing that. Going forward, above all else, we need to be hopeful, we need to be skeptical, and we need to be knowledgeable about what’s come before us.

But having painted this historical backdrop, what I most wanted to address was what I hope we’re putting in place for tomorrow.

The three ages of modern media

If I could characterize the three ages of the media that my talk this morning covers, I might call the early part of the 20th Century (1) the Niche Media Era, the latter part of the century (2) the Mass Media Era, and I’d call the age we’re entering now the beginning of (3) the Networked Media Era.

A network is a terribly powerful idea. Kevin Kelly, the visionary co-founder of Wired magazine, gave us an elegant metaphor for that power in his 1997 book New Rules for the New Economy. (Note that I’ve adjusted the metaphor a bit to match my understanding of the underlying biology.) He describes the billions of years it took for unicellular life to emerge, and then the ensuing epochs it took for those unicellular organisms to bond together into colonies. In this second phase, all the cells stay close to each other, forming one monolithic sphere.

But then, after another ages-long interval, cells evolve the power to connect across a distance, and true multicellular life breathes into being. The cells within these organisms demonstrate two key traits that characterize all multicellular life – they specialize and they cooperate. And out of that simple linkage, that simple tie between cells in a network, the world as we know it is born. As Kelly puts it, “Butterflies, orchids, and kangaroos all became possible.”

In light of Kelly’s metaphor, then, let me recast my three ages of the media:

The Niche Media Era is akin to the unicellular stage of life. Each of those hundreds of news organizations was its own outpost, its own silo, broadcasting to its narrow community of interest.
The Mass Media Era folded all those cells into colonies - bulbous, all-encompassing organisms that can contain multitudes, but must remain monolithic.
The Networked Media Era, of course, is the beginning of multicellular life. No longer are we merely the narrow outposts or the monoliths. We are an ecosystem of organisms of all shapes and sizes. We specialize and we cooperate.

But what about the business model?

In my mind right now I’m hearing the voice of [MinnPost CEO] Joel Kramer saying, “Thanks for the history and the biology lesson, Pollyanna, but how do you propose we pay for this quote-unquote ecosystem?” Money is, after all, a major theme of today’s convening. So I’ll make a quick digression.

Of course, I don’t have a revenue model hiding somewhere in my brief speech. But I do have a wish. I would love it very much if we stopped talking about the content we provide and begin talking about the value we provide. What I mean by this is that the pieces of content that compose our media – our articles, our broadcasts, our images – have never been what we got paid for. What that content delivered over time – understanding, expertise, perspective, entertainment, and yes, eyeballs – these things are what have been the foundation of the media’s support.

At some point in the last few years, overpriced coffee became the next great hope for media producers. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “If people will pay four bucks every day for a cup of coffee, why wouldn’t they pay that much every month for our content?”

There are, of course, many reasons why that’s a flawed line of reasoning. But my favored point is this – of course people pay four bucks for a cup of coffee. They can’t imagine getting through a day without it. The product is that valuable to them. When we’re producing something so consistently valuable our communities can’t imagine going a day without it, I suspect we’ll be able to feed ourselves.

Among the major changes since the mass media era is this new reality: selling the slivers of the attention of a vast audience of people to advertisers is rapidly becoming a cruelly low-margin business. Meanwhile, the desire and ability of advertisers to reach more focused communities continues to grow.

Among the major similarities to the niche media era is this old reality: a diverse patchwork of various funding models will continue to support the media of tomorrow. The rich and idle will continue to produce media for the authority it confers, activists and partisans will supply some out of pure passion. Wealthier niches will lure advertisers and poorer ones will lure charities. Fantastic talents will find their patrons, and some of us will make our living selling tickets, t-shirts and advice. There will be gaps and pitfalls, just as there have always been. But there will be media, just as there has always been.

Which brings me, at last, to my beginning: what I’d like to see us create.

The future of the Twin Cities media ecosystem

I want to see a flourishing of deep and focused media outlets that makes the vibrant and robust cacophony of the early 1900s feel like a monoculture. We have the capacity to produce information and tell stories of previously unimaginable depths and we’ve barely begun to tap it.

Because of the two realities I described a minute ago, the incentives are changing. Depth in a mass media age makes no sense. When your goal is to capture the attention of hundreds of thousands of people, you want to aim for shallow and broad, not narrow and deep. You create a general-interest publication with little snippets of information to tease every fancy.

But if a seriously engaged community of even a few hundred people is your goal, your incentives are very different. How does this look? Let me show you an example.

Robin’s book

After a few previous publishing experiments went rather nicely, my co-blogger, Robin Sloan, wanted to see whether he could get a network of people to pay him $3,500 to write a novel. He set up a pledge drive on a website geared towards this sort of thing. If he could raise $3,500 in 90 days, he’d do it.

That’s not a lot of money for a book, sure. But I think Robin saw this as making a bit of a return off of a fun project he might have done anyway. After all, November’s National Novel-Writing Month, during which otherwise sane people spend inordinate amounts of time writing hobby books for free. Compared to this, Robin’s experiment seemed downright capitalistic.

Here’s the thing – Robin met his $3,500 target in the first week, and the pledges didn’t stop there. He kept promoting his project, and by the time the 90-day period ran out last week, he’d completed the novel, and ~~568~~ 560 people had kicked in almost $14,000.²

A fair sum for three months of work, sure. But when you throw in the fact that Robin now retains full and exclusive rights to his work, and he’s got 500-some enthusiastic marketing agents for it, that $14,000 begins to look better than your typical book deal.

I think it struck Robin that way too. Shortly after he began the project, he quit his job as vice president of interactive strategy for Current Television so he could work on his writing round-the-clock.

In the book publishing industry of the mass media era, 568 buyers denotes utter failure. In the networked era, 568 hardcore fans equates to pure possibility.

Specialists and curators

If we can supercharge the creation of this galaxy of niches, I want it to be connected by a system of curators – individuals and organizations that package the best of the specialized media and standout amateur content into delightful, serendipitous bundles, and trace connections between the stories others tell.

We already have the beginnings of this in sites like the Twin Cities Daily Planet and Bring Me the News. And Seattle will provide another early model of what this might look like. Already, the city has a thriving network of vibrant neighborhood sites and beat blogs – some are even scrapping out a living from advertising online – and now the Seattle Times has gotten foundation funding to partner with these smaller efforts in a networked news project.

The strength of these networks rests on the strengths of the nodes, the niches, within them. Before we can truly realize the promise of our multicellular moment, both characteristics have to be fulfilled. We must specialize, and we must cooperate.

If we do this right, we won’t merely be replicating yesterday’s model of the front page, the old news commons, where a select few set the agenda for the many. We’ll be exploring the possibilities of social curation evident in sites like Chicago’s Windy Citizen, where the community collaborates to highlight the most interesting information.

Conclusion and benediction

The upshot of it all is that we face a tremendous opportunity. Throughout this talk, I’ve stressed our agency – we really are engineering a media ecosystem. Gatherings like this give us the opportunity to reflect and share information so we do it right. And best of all, they give us a chance to confer on the endgame.

Hence, my hopes. May we carry with us the best of our history. May we create media so deep our communities can’t imagine going without it. And may the power of that media derive not from the vast numbers of people sitting in front of it, but from the vast numbers standing behind it.

Thank you.

Also, thanks to ScreenToaster, which I used to create this preso.
The total changed from 568 to 560 after I was compiling my preso.

The timing of local news cycles Howard Weaver writes a sweet, short paean to the dailiness...
McNiche: On the perils of scaling down a mass model @NicholasAllen asked me today what I thought about the Omaha...
There is only us As panic over the fate of journalism in America reaches...

Alexander Hamilton hip-hop tribute

(author unknown) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 15:47:08 -0800

Shared by Chris
Rick does some smart thinking out loud on what it takes to create a unique sense of place and serve a community.

Shorter, Maoist version: Serve the people.

Because Alexander Hamilton has always been my favorite Founding Father; because I am in the "actually writing" mode and otherwise away from the internet; because no one else on the Atlantic's team has yet called attention to this; and because it is a very diverting four-minute interlude, here is Lin-Manuel Miranda's tribute to Hamilton from the "White House Evening of Poetry, Music, and the Spoken Word" this past May. In case you have missed it.

For more, you can't go wrong with Ron Chernow's great 2004 biography. Now back to, ahem, work.

Some good news regarding unemployment numbers

Dante Chinni — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:46:50 -0800

The economy is at a tricky juncture. Things are clearly better if you look at some indicators – such as last quarter’s 3.5 percent figure for gross domestic product. But that jump has not manifested itself in a meaningful way – at least not yet.

Consider the unemployment figures for Patchwork Nation in September (the most recent month available for county-by-county figures). There are signs that things are getting better – in some places – but the changes are not the kinds of things you write home about.

Nine of our 12 community types saw small drops in the unemployment rate – emphasis on small. The average drop in unemployment in those places was 0.24 percentage points. Still, this means that the majority of our community types have experienced improvement in unemployment over the past few months.

Remember that unemployment is a lagging economic indicator: It will probably be among the last things to improve. So if we are in the early stages of a recovery, what does it look like where unemployment is concerned? We’ve found a few trends of note using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Urban areas are lagging

Only three of our community types did not see improvement in this set of unemployment numbers. Two of them are our most densely populated types – the big-city “Industrial Metropolis” counties and the wealthier “Monied ’Burbs.”

The numbers look particularly bad for the “Industrial Metropolis,” which had a rate of 10.6 percent in September. That’s the second highest among all our types.

Our thinking on the “Industrial Metropolis” locales, which are very diverse, is that they will experience a few different recoveries. The wealthy residents in these places will start to experience better times first as the stock market turns around – which it has been. It’s above 10,000 at this writing. The poor, on the other hand, will lag behind, waiting for a broader-based turnaround.

The numbers for “Industrial Metropolis” may look different for October. But these early figures suggest that even the upper-end recovery in these places may be slow in coming.

The flat 9 percent rate of unemployment for the “Monied ’Burbs” seems to indicate the same thing. These are the counties where many of those professional downtown office workers live. For the moment anyway, their unemployment number isn’t moving downward.

That could have significance for retail sales in the coming months. The “Monied ’Burbs” are full of people who spend the money that drives the economy, and these people may be cautious with their spending until things look better.

Agricultural America continues to thrive

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the rural and agricultural “Tractor Country” counties continue to thrive. The unemployment rate in these places was only 5.5 percent in August, and in September, the number dipped to 5.3 percent.

“Tractor Country,” which essentially functions in the framework of a different economy, may end up mostly avoiding the recession. However, farmers here are concerned about longtime drags on commodity and dairy prices.

Meanwhile, the small-town “Service Worker Centers” are showing improvement. Their unemployment rate fell by 0.3 percentage points to 9.5 percent for September.

Those communities have been rocked especially hard in the downturn, and the improvement is welcome news. But things aren’t completely sunny yet.

Last week, I traveled with a television crew from the “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” to Lincoln City, Ore. – a “Service Worker Center” on the Pacific coast. We talked with a lot of local business owners. Many were just hanging on, and now, the tourism off-season is approaching. They sensed an improving economy, but they had yet to see any real changes locally.

Longer term

When the economy does enter full recovery mode – which it will at some point – there are questions about what lasting impacts will follow.

What about the urban poor in the big cities? What happens to those who had jobs in the shrinking manufacturing industry? Maybe the biggest question: Will there be longer-term impacts on wages and the standard of living in the 12 community types – and in the nation as a whole? Many people in the communities we visit are concerned about that.

Those are questions we will examine.

• Since this is a blog, if you have ideas for ways to track data on these points, I’d be interested in hearing from you. Please leave comments below or feel free to e-mail me at dantechinni@gmail.com.

Alexander Hamilton hip-hop tribute

(author unknown) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:30:33 -0800

Shared by Chris
Yes!

Buying Into Computational Journalism

Derek — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:02:15 -0800

Update: Duke’s Sarah Cohen responds in the comments.

The intriguing title of a recent report from scholars at Duke is “Accountability Through Algorithm: Developing the Field of Computational Journalism“. Semi-related to CAR, Computational Journalism is defined as “the combination of algorithms, data, and knowledge from the social sciences to supplement the accountability function of journalism.” I take each of those – algorithms, data and knowledge from the social sciences – as separate elements, because while journalists do have plenty to learn from the social sciences, we also operate in an environment that is not quite academic (and sometimes not at all).

The report identifies four areas of potential exploration: techniques for data transformation and pattern discovery in investigative reporting; a digital “dashboard” for journalists; new social and technical structures for interactions among readers and reporters; and sense-making advances from other disciplines. All are interesting and worthy, but to me the first two are particularly so.

On the first, the best investigative journalists have been developing tools for extracting meaning from reams of information for years. The change now is that we have a greater platform for these tools in the Internet, and an effort like DocumentCloud is a clear example of that change. The challenge we face is that patterns are interesting to different people for different reasons; what an accountant finds interesting may not always be of interest to a journalist, and vice versa. The current deficit is not in the area of tools; it is the occasionally trickier area of adapting those for the task of journalism. That requires the guiding influence of people like Sarah Cohen, a newly minted Knight Chair at Duke, who is studying these issues right now. But it also requires the active participation of a wide range of news organizations and journalists. In the Internet, we have a leveling platform, but only if more journalists participate. That may be a greater challenge than the technical one.

One way to get there is the second idea – a journalist’s dashboard. This would provide reporters with a way to keep track of the deluge of information coming into newsrooms. But again, the technological side of that equation, as difficult as it is, is less of a concern to me than the implementation and adoption of the results. We know how to gather various bits of information in one place. We’re not that good at distilling the best of them, or even knowing where to start. The good news is that we have blueprints for this kind of thing: the people and companies who make great Web apps that distill masses of data into understandable results. The bad news is that we, as a business, work very differently. We don’t really share much, outside of experiences at conferences or over drinks, and particularly not at the institutional level. And we’re downright awful, in general, at adapting good ideas for our own uses.

For the idea of Computational Journalism to work, a lot is riding on a movement that is slowly growing but urgently necessary for the news industry: the increasing adoption, use and proliferation of open-source tools. The CAR community has seen an influx of use of various types of open-source software, from databases to GIS systems to web frameworks. More and more reporters and editors are embracing different styles of journalism. But the broader concept of opening up our newsrooms, both philosophically and in terms of our content and efforts, has been slow in coming. It requires not just the creation of tools, but also the development of journalists and readers who will use those tools most effectively. And that’s more than an algorithm – to say nothing of Twitter – can solve alone.

Oh, and Duke folks? Can we get a version of that report that embraces the Web as much as the concept? HTML will do fine.

Thank you, Rails

(author unknown) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 12:43:15 -0800

Shared by Chris
Let me endorse this with a journalism spin: We do better when we acknowledge what our competitors do well, and do our best to learn from it and share those lessons. Nice to see Jacob giving a nod to Rails.

It's fashionable, or perhaps inevitable, for tech communities to trash their competition. The Emacs folks like to mock vi users; Windows folk look down on us Mac users (and Linux users mock us both); and everyone likes to mock PHP despite PHP's dominance in the web world. We geeks make arguing over minor technical points into a kind of art.

This is all pretty understandable: it's easy to define community in terms of what we're not. A common enemy focuses and drives us. Competition can take a positive form: when it's friendly and constructive both communities benefit.

Lately, though, I've noticed the tone of the arguments in the Django community getting nastier -- especially when it comes to Rails. Again, I'm far from innocent in this regard: I've certainly done my fair share of Rails-bashing, and I regret it.

I think it's important to recognize that we in the web development community do in fact owe Rails and the Rails community a debt of gratitude. Rails helped reframe the way we think about web development, and even those who've never touched Rails nevertheless are probably reaping indirect benefits right now.

So I think we should all step back from our personal preferences and plainly say thank you, Rails, for all that you've done to move the state of web development forward.

Personally, I've learned two huge lessons from Rails:

Development should be fun

At PyCon 2009, while discussing some topics of interest, Ian Bicking mentioned that at times he worries that the Python community takes itself too seriously.

I worry about this, too. When I first started using Python, all eyes were on the Enterprise. Python needed to be a Serious Language used by Serious People at Serious Companies doing Serious Work. This was always a bit of strange goal for a language named after a British comedy troupe.

Then Rails burst onto the scene with a simple message: web development ought to be fun. In retrospect this seems like an obvious development: most geeks of my generation got into computers just because they're fun. But at some point we realized we could get rich programming, and when the money came in most of the fun drained out. Then came the dot-bomb. Suddenly there really wasn't a huge amount of money any more; just Serious Work.

But the Rails community turned this on its head. Why should we spend so much time trying to build Big Serious Software when we can build small, fun, light tools that actually make money, too? Turns out that those who enjoy their job are actually more productive -- fancy that!

I learned this lesson years ago when I left a my soul-sucking job in New York City for a move to Kansas and a 50% pay cut. It was the smartest decision I've ever made, but at the time dropping half my salary for a job that seemed "more fun" got me a lot of flack from colleagues. These days I doubt I'd get the same criticism, thanks in no small part to the ideals that the Rails community put forth.

These days, the Django community has its own special breed of sillyness which brings me no end of joy. There's some who find this stuff all a bit precious, and I sympathize, but laughter, play, and fun are vital aspects of a vibrant, healthy community.

Simplicity is a feature

My first foray into the CMS world came through Vignette and BEA (now Oracle) WebLogic. My first expose to a "web framework" was Struts 1. My second, Zope 2.

All these tools seem designed with those massive feature comparison grids in mind -- the goal seems to be to garner as many pretty √s as possible. CMS development is strongly strongly feature-driven: the goal seems to be to support as many use cases as possible.

Faced with BEA, I couldn't understand this impulse. Now, as a maintainer of a framework (with strong CMS-y leanings) I understand it perfectly: every single use-case has a real-world developer behind it, struggling to get his job done on time. Saying "no" to feature requests is incredibly hard. I don't do it as often as I should.

One of the most controversial tenants of "the Rails way" has been this idea of opinionated software. This idea that our libraries should make certain expectations about developers can seem pretty heretical. We've certainly taken a softer spin on things in Django-land; we talk instead about "sensible defaults." The basic idea's the same, though: make assumptions about common cases to help keep software simple.

This idea turned simplicity itself into a feature, and completely neutered the power of the feature grid. Instead of neat rows of checkmarks, now we're comparing who can accomplish some task in the fewest lines of code. Monolithic, massive features sets are out; minimalism is in.

So, once again, thank you, Rails. Even though we don't see eye-to-eye on everything, I'm glad to have you around. You've made these Internets a better place.

Stewart Spoofs Glenn Beck

(author unknown) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 05:09:57 -0800

Behind the Code: Times APIs

By MARCI WINDSHEIMER — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:36:16 -0800

China: Bridging the gap? Interviewing bridge bloggers in China

(author unknown) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:59:49 -0700

Shared by RickMartin
Nice to see more bridge bloggers emerge.

The Chinese blogosphere, as we all know, is booming. As one of the largest on the planet, it is constantly evolving and simultaneously being set back by the all-too-famous governmental censorship. According to Li Datong, the country’s civil society is being reborn online through the intense cyber-dissent and the breaching of the Green Dam last summer. In his view, not only is discontent with the Chinese government becoming more ferocious in an online setting, but such opinions are also receiving more official notice, namely in shaping the reporting of unrest in Tibet in early 2008.

But how does bridge blogging (the translation of Chinese blogs into English) fit into this online make-up? What is it they seek to achieve? and how, if at all, do they help foster a less black-and-white communication with the West? These are the questions I put to various bridge bloggers dotted around the People’s Republic this week.

chinaSMACK, an entertainment-heavy blog, rests on the premise that “translating and sharing the content that is most hot or viral on China’s Internet, and the comments of Chinese netizens themselves, will help foreign netizens better understand a part of China’s modern society and realize that Chinese people and foreigners are really not so different after all.” Fauna, the site’s translator, wants “to show that Chinese people are humans, too.”

This would suggest dissatisfaction with foreign audiences’ perceptions of China and the related media bias in covering the nation. Indeed, we are all too aware of the dominant Western discourse reiterating China’s systematic breaching of human rights, the controversial treatment of ethnic unrest in Xinjiang and Tibet, its ‘Great Firewall’, intense media censorship and the ramifications felt by media professionals who do not tow the party line (out of the 175 countries featured in Reporters Without Borders’ recent Press Freedom Index, China came 168^th). But however much this discourse hovers around us, it is rarely followed by a cultural understanding: we lack a more complex appreciation of China’s history of foreign imperialism, stark poverty, grassroots revolution and societal and cultural characteristics that would otherwise help us to better understand why such measures are in place.

For Jeremy Goldkorn, founder of Danwei, bridge-blogging allows the coverage of China to improve, if for no other reason than to make available a wider breadth of sources to a more well-informed outside world. This has

a normalising effect (…) blogs help to fill in more details about Chinese daily life and how it is lived.

Goldkorn founded Danwei in 2003 in order to chart what he considered the exciting change China’s Internet was witnessing through the blogosphere and BBS forums, much of which the West was not aware of. Equally, Chinese themselves are also becoming more aware of the West, its lifestyles and perceptions of China.

For some, however, the initial act of bridge-blogging was only partially in response to narrow Western media framing. Cheng Lingcao established Fools’ Mountain in 2006 due to frustration with Chinese media practices, namely the detaining of blogger Wu Hao, and Cheng’s own desire to add support to the online campaign to free Wu. But, like Goldkorn, Cheng also felt the growing online debate in China needed translating into English to reach a wider audience, with the aim of establishing dialogue, not confrontation.

Yet, for all of bridge-blogging’s attempts at deepening both Western and Chinese perspectives of each other, it has its flaws. ChinaGeeks founder Charles Custer claims

it’s dangerous to assert we offer anything more than ‘a taste’. The Chinese Internet is vast and there are millions of opinions out there. Time constraints alone force us to pick and choose what we translate carefully, so it's obviously not representative of ‘the Chinese perspective’ (I'd argue there's no such thing) and it is all being filtered through a foreign lens, i.e., it's non-Chinese people making the editorial decisions about what to translate and what not to.

The selection process behind choosing what to translate is not subject to strict guidelines. According to Goldkorn, much of it is based on gut instinct and what readers may not expect, all in the context of a changing China.

In the opinion of a blogger who wished to remain anonymous, however, this often ticks the box of “anti-China behaviour”. He cites the recent example of Atlantic Monthly’s James Fallows’ commentary on Chinese bloggers’ attitudes towards race after the participation of a mixed-race Shanghainese woman in a beauty pageant. Fallows cited many quotations collated on ChinaSMACK, which, in the anonymous blogger’s view,

were extremely racist and vicious (…) however, when I looked into this story, I found ChinaSMACK’s story not only incomplete, but extremely biased. While the few racist quotes were translated to help make the point, the majority of sympathetic comments in China's blogosphere against racism were completely ignored.

While we cannot generalise about the entire blogosphere through this one example, it does show potential problems the bridge faces. Fallows himself stated,

this is not a “blame China” episode but rather one of many illustrations of the differences in day by day social realities and perceived versus ignored sources of tension in particular societies.

chinaSMACK responded in agreement with Fallows. Fauna told me,

my post was about “Lou Jing Abused By Racist Netizens” (…) I do not think it is my “duty” to remind people that not all Chinese are racist. My post is not to “set the record straight”. My post is a translation of the story that is spreading on the Chinese internet.

Besides issues of this nature, there are also several practical problems: getting over the Great Firewall, financially maintaining these initiatives and involving non-English speakers in the dialogue make the bridge a relatively weak one. But, it is an effort in a progressive direction, fostering a deeper understanding on both sides of the globe and linking the crossroads both the West and China find themselves at today.

McNiche: On the perils of scaling down a mass model

Matt — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:38:13 -0700

@NicholasAllen asked me today what I thought about the Omaha World-Herald’s acquisition of the hyperlocal wiki site WikiCity.

When Gina Chen, who wrote up this bit of news on NiemanLab, first wrote about it in August, Perry Gaskill left a comment I think is still trenchant:

Sorry, Gina, but it strikes me that WikiCity could serve as a poster child for what’s generally wrong with the direction of hyper-local news efforts. Once again, what we’re seeing is a quasi-franchise business model based on selling low-CPM ads against freely generated content. Nothing special.

Spend any time wandering around WikiCity, and what you find is the same dog who doesn’t bark. No sense of each town’s quirkiness; no sense of place. Instead of a local cafe where the cook knows you like your eggs scrambled, you get an Egg McMuffin.

I’ll allow myself some snark here, ’cause I think it’s deserved. I would bet that most of what you need to know about this acquisition can be gleaned from this sentence in the World-Herald’s article about it: “WikiCity (http://www.wikicity.com) has more than 13 million Web site pages and is one of the largest ‘wikis’ in the world.”

How many of those millions of “Web site pages” do you think was ever touched by a real person? And how many will ever be seen by a single person?

WikiCity in its current state strikes me as a textbook example of a site built by robots. Such sites tend, in my experience, to appeal mostly to other robots.

Contrast it to Wikipedia, whose every page was built, word by work, link by link, on the actions of individual people. Or to Everyblock, whose pages run on powerful algorithms, lovingly engineered and hand-polished by a brilliant and careful team of makers. These are large sites built on millions of niches, but neither were built that way to start. Wikipedia began as a small collection of pages that became a massive collection over time. Everyblock started as a selection of data sets in a handful of cities, and has grown over the years to encompass hundreds of data sets in more than a dozen cities. They started small and built up, like every success story I know, rather than the reverse, which is the WikiCity approach.

“Scaling down” remains a problem for the Web, on site after site. Sites such as Wikipedia and Delicious function beautifully in domains where they can garner enough attention. If a Wikipedia topic is significant enough to draw the interest of even a dozen editors in a few months, chances are it will be pretty decent. But the more niche you get on Wikipedia¹, the shallower and spottier the pages become. Look for a popular topic like “usability” on Delicious, and you’ll find a wonderfully curated selection of links, courtesy of the wisdom of crowds. But for a significant topic outside the site’s core niche of designers and techies, Delicious underperforms.

Howard Owens has written passionate criticisms of approaches to “hyperlocal” news that start with a giant, anonymous maze of computer-generated pages, all alike, all imagining that users will spontaneously arrive to populate their pages with genuine, quality material. Everything I’ve seen tells me Howard’s criticisms are right. These efforts are attempts to bring a mass mentality to a niche world. I’ve never seen a successful wiki that wasn’t built like Wikipedia, from the bottom up, page by page.

If I were advising the World-Herald, I’d tell them to reboot WikiCity and start building a wiki just for Omaha. Better yet, start with just one of the city’s six regions. Build on what you can from Wikipedia – giving proper attribution, of course – but begin with the understanding that it’s not going to be very complete just yet. Assign someone to add as much information as they can to the site every day. Create a content plan to prioritize what information you’ll pursue first. Early on, create pages for the most trenchant issues affecting the neighborhood; diligently and prominently link to those pages when the issues appear in your coverage.

For months, I expect this exercise will seem like a neverending, pointless slog, and no one will join in. After a few months, your traffic will still be underwhelming, but you’ll notice a tiny stream of fellow-travelers who’ll timidly participate here or there. Keep at it, and in a year, you’ll have a small but dedicated community. And you will probably have built something more significant than you had realized. After two years, it will begin to seem like it was worth the investment.

Come to think of it, that last paragraph could probably be applied to most successful businesses on the Web.

That’s my neighborhood

Inverting the business model question Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm interviewed me yesterday for a good...
Why we’re not creating a wiki My research proposal was called “Wikipedia-ing the News.” I’ve spent...
Wikipedia-ing the News gets mentioned on US Senate floor OK, the mention wasn’t directly referencing my fellowship project, but...

Behind the Wall

(author unknown) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:37:53 -0700

F. Scott Fitzgerald Made $8,397 On Great Gatsby; His Daughter Gets $500,000 Per Year From It

Mike Masnick — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:27:00 -0700

No you can't have a pony

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:30:54 -0700

Really just saving this because I keep looking it up

Bubble, bubble toil and trouble: Juice Analytics

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:02:24 -0700

China's big day, the short version

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 16:50:55 -0700

China's 60th Anniversary national day - timelapse and slow motion - 7D and 5DmkII from Dan Chung on Vimeo.

There's a lot to like in this video: the shots chosen, the editing, the way it swings between time lapse and slow motion punctuated with moments of real-time. It also assumes, if you're watching this video, you probably already know the back story. It's not news. It's an exceedingly well-done illustration that shows me in three and a half minutes what China's 60th National Day parade looked like, which is exactly what I wanted to see.

(Via James Fallows)

Lessons from Gov2.0, and How I liveblogged it

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:51:52 -0700

For three days last week, I attended the Gov2.0 Expo Showcase and Gov2.0 Summit, liveblogging the entire thing here and cross posting to Twitter. Between Tuesday and Thursday, I posted nine entries and 550 updates. After the conference, I dumped the entries and updates into one document, amounting to 66 printed pages and 19,815 words, plus another page of notes from the event's press conference and two video interviews with Tim O'Reilly and Santa Cruz's Peter Koht.

This was, in effect, just my usual notes, except more thorough and done entirely in public. Doing it in full view of the internet gave me an added incentive to keep going, to write complete sentences, to spell-check and to include links. All of that has been useful in the follow-up stories I'm writing for the NewsHour.

Feeding through Twitter was good for promotion, but it was more like an alert system. I'd originally planned to simply live-tweet the event, then dump my tweets into blog posts using TwitBlogger, the tool I built back in January. But sometimes 140 characters (minus hashtags) isn't enough to get a whole thought in.

To do the actual live posting, I used a version of Aaron Bycoffe's django-liveblog, modified to cross-post updates to Twitter. My version is available here on GitHub.

There are certainly other tools available to do this, starting with CoverItLive. But CiL gives me more than I need and doesn't do everything I want. By using my own app, I got exactly what I wanted, and nothing more.

django-filebrowser - Project Hosting on Google Code

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:48:56 -0700

Would be nice to cut FTP out of the loop.

django-tinymce - Project Hosting on Google Code

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:48:22 -0700

Possibly useful.

Gov2.0 Summit, Day 2: Afternoon session

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 12:13:11 -0700

We're in the final stretch now. I'm coming late to the afternoon session following a press meetup with some of the conference organizers and key speakers. I'll have more to post on that talk soon, but for now, here's the last bit of Gov2.0 liveblogging.

Gov2.0 Summit, Day 2

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 07:02:02 -0700

It's the last day of the Gov2.0 Summit, and I'm back for another stretch of liveblogging. Today, we'll hear from Carl Malamud, Vivek Kundra and Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation early on. I'm expecting another fascinating day of talks.

As before, I'll be liveblogging below and cross-posting to Twitter. Feel free to leave comments any time.

Gov2.0 Summit, part 2

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:21:23 -0700

I came late to the after-lunch session (eating too slow), so this is a bit of catch up. The afternoon session goes more into the nuts and bolts of turning government as a platform. I'll have more ongoing updates throughout the rest of the day, here and on Twitter.

Gov2.0 Summit

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 07:19:15 -0700

Following up on yesterday's series of posts from the Gov2.0 Expo, I'm attending the Gov2.0 Summit today, which promises to go deeper and be bolder.

I'll be liveblogging again~~, though my Twitter account appears to be suspended for the moment~~. Follow @eyeseast for updates.

Gov2.0 Expo, Part 5: Government as Partner

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 13:21:31 -0700

The last set of talks today looks at Government as Partner, which I expect will bring together much of what we've heard throughout the day, and talk about how all the constituencies involved in this effort move forward.

The presentations in the Government as a PARTNER category showcase new partnerships forged with government that involve emerging technologies. Here both sides have a strong interest in creating the best outcome possible.

Gov2.0 Expo, Part 4: Government as Peacekeeper

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:59:33 -0700

"Give peace a chance," says Steve Ressler, introducing our next session.

The Government as a PEACEKEEPER category shows off how people are using emerging technology as a tool to make the world a better place. From humanitarian efforts overseas to influencing the world through public diplomacy, these entries demonstrate a new way of working.

Talks here focus on crime, safety and related efforts.

Gov2.0 Expo, Part 3: Government as a Protector

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:03:32 -0700

We're just getting back from lunch here, with the next panel about to start, looking at Government as a Protetor. "Government protects people, and the collaboration and teamwork needed to do this effectively dovetail naturally with Government 2.0 technologies," as the program description explains.

This series of talks includes the military, US Coast Guard, local police and the FDA.

As before, I'll be liveblogging below and on Twitter.

Gov2.0, Part 2: Government as a Provider

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 08:46:41 -0700

We're entering the next phase of Gov2.0. After the flood of updates during the first session, I've decided to break each cluster of lightning talks and follow-up panel into their own posts. LiveBlog updates below, or follow @eyeseast on Twitter.

Expel Trolls, Racists and Promote Good User Comments on News Sites

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:37:50 -0700

Good round up of lessons learned from Pat Thornton on how to handle comments

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:53:30 -0700

Narrate Your Work (Scripting News)

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 08:27:27 -0700

Dave Winer explains a good concept in modern storytelling here.

California Local Government Finance Almanac

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:39:36 -0700

Data, statistics, analyses, and articles on California city and county finance. This might be useful.

Joshua Benton speech at Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:59:37 -0700

Getting beyond "the Story" means talking about what a story really is.

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 17:12:21 -0700

Suddenly I understand my growing resentment of the afternoon news meeting.

Yahoo! Placemaker™ Beta - YDN

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 13:59:47 -0700

Yahoo! Placemaker is a freely available geoparsing Web service. It helps developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content – feeds, web pages, news, status updates – and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup.

Toy Movies

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:11:01 -0700

My childhood seeks revenge.

The Ideological History of the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) - TargetPoint

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:23:46 -0700

Great interactive graphic showing the leanings of Supreme Court justices since 1937

Feed Icons - Home of the Standard Web Feed Icon

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 20:10:47 -0700

For when you really need an icon for your feed.

Web2ExpoSF 09: Jeff Veen, "Designing for Big Data"

Tue, 26 May 2009 13:08:20 -0700

"Now, we can control what's on the screen." When dealing with big datasets, build tools to help users find stories and answer questions in the data. Don't assume you know how they're going to use it or exactly what they're looking for.

Reading and Writing

A few things I’d like to see local news sites publish

1. An index of all the facts included in the articles they publish

2. News archives. Not just from the last month — from the last year, ten years, fifty years, century.

3. Indexes of news and information by zip code

4. Indexes of information on local politicians, organized by politician.

5. Indexes of major crimes, by date, with crime stats aggregated by month, year and every type of location that’s available (county, zip code, neighborhood, street, block etc.).

Recovery.gov's Success

Primary sources on the Senate bill

Some advice to designers of news websites

Tracking Twitter reponses to Obama’s Town Hall in China

Photo: Reuters On Sister Cities, Shanghai & Chicago

On Women and ‘Universal Rights’

On US stance on Taiwan

On the Nobel Prize and the ‘recipe for success’

On the ‘Great Firewall,’ Twitter, and Information Freedom

On Afghanistan and Terrorism

Miscellaneous Tweets

More on Obama’s visit…

ObaMao and Justin Timberlake: The state of the Sino-US relationship

Get your act together, Data.gov

The future of the Twin Cities media ecosystem

Transcript of remarks

Alexander Hamilton hip-hop tribute

Some good news regarding unemployment numbers

Alexander Hamilton hip-hop tribute

Buying Into Computational Journalism

Thank you, Rails

Development should be fun

Simplicity is a feature

Stewart Spoofs Glenn Beck

Behind the Code: Times APIs

China: Bridging the gap? Interviewing bridge bloggers in China

McNiche: On the perils of scaling down a mass model

Behind the Wall

F. Scott Fitzgerald Made $8,397 On Great Gatsby; His Daughter Gets $500,000 Per Year From It

No you can't have a pony

Bubble, bubble toil and trouble: Juice Analytics

China's big day, the short version

Lessons from Gov2.0, and How I liveblogged it

django-filebrowser - Project Hosting on Google Code

django-tinymce - Project Hosting on Google Code

Gov2.0 Summit, Day 2: Afternoon session

Gov2.0 Summit, Day 2

Gov2.0 Summit, part 2

Gov2.0 Summit

Gov2.0 Expo, Part 5: Government as Partner

Gov2.0 Expo, Part 4: Government as Peacekeeper

Gov2.0 Expo, Part 3: Government as a Protector

Gov2.0, Part 2: Government as a Provider

Expel Trolls, Racists and Promote Good User Comments on News Sites

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Narrate Your Work (Scripting News)

California Local Government Finance Almanac

Joshua Benton speech at Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Yahoo! Placemaker™ Beta - YDN

Toy Movies

The Ideological History of the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) - TargetPoint

Feed Icons - Home of the Standard Web Feed Icon

Web2ExpoSF 09: Jeff Veen, "Designing for Big Data"

Photo: Reuters

On Sister Cities, Shanghai & Chicago