Blog Posts About: news

Jay Rosen has written article that I could quote 1000 times.  It's called National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News.  It focuses on the huge success of an episode of "This American Life" called The Giant Pool of Money, which serves to explain the US mortgage crisis.

This episode has been downloaded 50,000 times more than any other episide.  Why?  Because the producers (Ira Glass and Alex Blumberg) focused on explanation instead of information.

When we talk about our videos, we often say things like "Our goal is to make people care about something.  That's the hard part.  If they care, they'll go learn the specifics.  It's not about how it works, its about developing an interest."  It was exciting to this same sentiment about The Giant Pool of Money. 

Rosen writes:

I noticed something in the weeks after I first listened to “The Giant Pool of Money.??? I became a customer for ongoing news about the mortgage mess and the credit crisis that developed from it... ‘Twas a successful act of explanation that put me in the market for information.

He continues with an example that I think frames exactly what's happening with Web 2.0:

For there are some stories—and the mortgage crisis is a great example—where until I grasp the whole  I am unable to make sense of any part. Not only am I not a customer for news reports prior to that moment, but the very frequency of the updates alienates me from the providers of those updates because the news stream is adding daily to my feeling of being ill-informed, overwhelmed, out of the loop.

Sound familiar? People are feeling left behind everywhere and it's because we are assuming too much and not thinking about the masses that need what Rosen calls the "scaffold of understanding" - the big picture that gives people the context they need to be interested. This is our goal and one that I hope others adopt.

Thanks to Jay Fienberg for the pointer!

 

The whiteboard he used on election night 2000 (not the one above) is now a part of the Smithsonian. 

Tim Russert has been a staple of our Sunday mornings for years.  He is someone for which I had a great deal of respect. Not only was he very, very good at his job, but it was obvious that he loved it and looked forward to it everyday. His enthusiasm was infectious. May we all be so lucky.

R.I.P. Tim Russert, you were a huge inspiration. 

Over the past 3 weeks or so, I've fallen for Facebook. It has continually impressed me with it's innovation, social design and growing dominance of its space. Facebook does a lot of things well, but the one thing that impresses me most is how it exposes the actions of my friends on the site. I can see it when Kris Krug joins a group or Duncan Rawlinson updates Twitter . It brings the online and public world of my friends closer to me.


I can't help but think about the whole idea of stocks and flows, borrowed from the field of systems dynamics. I wrote a series a while back about it - but the basic idea that online communication has two states - active and static. For instance, when a blog post is posted, it's active - it flows through the blogosphere, through rss readers, etc. After a while, it becomes archived and static - stocked for future reference. Online content flows and then becomes stocked.


We're surrounded by flows in the online world all the time - headlines, stock prices, web stats, weather, email - these all flow by us over the course of the day. Watching these flows is addicting - every day there is something new. In a lot of ways, it's all just news.
Will Pate recently asked about what makes social network sites (like facebook, flickr, etc.) addictive and I think it's related to the same flows that keep us wrapped up in the news. Only, in social networking, the news isn't coming from the stock market or the associated press, it's coming from your sister, or co-worker, or hero.

What Facebook and other sites like Flickr do so well is to enable us to engage in a flow of personal news that is being created by our network of friends. We're drawn to it, and become addicted because we're wired for news - for looking for trends, for stories, for a bit if voyeurism. The new news comes from our friends.

For example, it's news to me when Will adds adds a friend in Facebook - it adds to what I know about Will. The thing is, and this is essential, these parts of my friend's world are now visible to me - and they weren't before. I can see that Will is friends with Lyal Avery. It's apparent to me what my friends are doing, saying or creating thanks to the flow coming from social networking sites and that, my friends, is the new and amazingly addictive news to me.

Last week I participated in a Seattle Blogwalk (which I haven't yet written about- but soon!) one of the questions we asked was who had blogged about Hurricane Katrina. I raised my hand and talked about using my personal blog to let people know that our friend David Stitcher made it out of the city. I wondered at the time if there was any chance that someone who knows Dave, besides a regular reader, would be able to find that post.

Since, I've been following some of what Nancy White, Alexandra Samuel and many others are doing around building awareness, volunteerism and community participation in the aftermath of the devastation.

When it comes to testing the online tools we talk about so much, few things can compare to how they are used in these types of situations. Like people and agencies, they get tested.

I was interested to see that Alexandra has provided a guide for how people can use tags to increase the discoverability of vital information through tagging-- related to Katrina.

With the Katrina tagging guide, she is lowering the barriers to understanding how people can participate in the recovery online, in plain English. She even includes code that can be used for the Technorati tags.

In the face of this disaster, I hope that the blog world can collectively play some part in the recovery by increasing access to vital information. I applaud the community that has risen to the challenge.

I really enjoyed reading the BBC interview with Tim Berners-Lee. But, I was in awe at how Mark Lawson kept trying to get him to say that he felt responsible for the bad elements of the web...

But do you feel responsible? You say humanity will do whatever it does with it, do you feel responsible for what happens?

You must reflect though on the law of unintended consequences because it wasn't remotely ever your intention when you started on this that so much of the web would be given over to sexual exhibitionists masturbating in their bedrooms with webcams. Do you ever have bad moments about that?

And you've never had a sleepless night over that?

Could he not come up with anything better? This isn't freaking Oppenheimer.

I write that title with tongue firmly in-cheek. I do work with a couple of Fortune 500s, but Steve is reacting to the survey results that show that Google Results = Bad PR and referring to a case study I wrote a while back about using blogs to get better search results. He says:

Fortune 500 companies need to tear a page out of Common Craft's Google playbook. They boosted their Google rankings by defining a niche for their blog, targeting search phrases, naming categories for each phrase, and writing effectively about subjects related to each category.

I'm flattered, but I think it is an odd comparison to make. Here's an excerpt from the comment I left on the entry:

From my perspective, what Coke needs is the ability to have a voice in the "conversation". By having (something like) an authoritative blog on the soft drink industry, they can become a more powerful voice among the negative press. They can stand up for themselves and perhaps earn better Google rankings in the process.

They should be doing the same thing that brought me to this post -- listening to what the blog world is saying and responding like a person.