Memex 1.1

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has produced an interesting report on “the changing newsroom”.

Meet the American daily newspaper of 2008.

It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.

The newsroom staff producing the paper is also smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web. The staff also is under greater pressure, has less institutional memory, less knowledge of the community, of how to gather news and the history of individual beats. There are fewer editors to catch mistakes.

Despite an image of decline, more people today in more places read the content produced in the newsrooms of American daily newspapers than at any time in years. But revenues are tumbling. The editors expect the financial picture only to worsen, and they have little confidence that they know what their papers will look like in five years…

Thoughtful piece of work. Worth reading in full.

In his Manitoba lecture, Mike Wesch mentioned a survey which suggested that 88% of the material on YouTube was original, not the copyrighted stuff the mainstream media (and Viacom) obsesses about. Here’s a great example of creative use of the platform. It’s the second of a series of four short movies about the creepier implications of Google Street View.

Thanks to Tony Hirst for spotting it.

Bill Thompson on The importance of being there…

On Monday I went to see author and thinker Clay Shirky talk at a lunchtime seminar hosted by the Demos think tank.

I travelled in to London earlier than I needed to on a crowded train, sitting on a slow bus across town and then squeezing into a bright but too warm room to sit on a hard seat in order to listen to something which was being recorded and will later be available as a podcast.

Clay was charming and intelligent and funny, and I got to hear him thinking out loud about the impact of social tools on international politics, which was fun, but I could have done all that by listening in online, or even by watching the stream of brief reports appearing on Twitter, the communications service that is currently taking the net by storm…

Well, maybe…

Viacom has “backed off” from demands to divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched a video on YouTube, the website has claimed.

Google had been ordered to provide personal details of millions of YouTube users to help Viacom prepare its case on alleged copyright infringement…

En passant, I think I heard Mike Wesch say in his Manitoba lecture that a suvery he and his students did found that 88% of the stuff on YouTube is original material — i.e. not copyright-infringing.

From The Register…

Flickr fanciers will soon be able to make cash out of the photos they post online following a secret deal inked with the world’s leading photo agency, Getty Images.

The two firms agreed yesterday that high-quality images posted on Yahoo!’s Flickr service could be cherry-picked by Getty editors searching for interesting photographs.

If Getty spots an image it likes the relevant photographer will receive an email inviting them to join a Flickr-branded photo group on gettyimages.com and become a paid contributor to the company’s library.

Under the deal, which will be rolled out in the next few months, selected Flickr users will be paid the same rate as Getty’s paid contract-holding photographers.

“We believe that Flickr will be an important addition to the mix that we have,” said Getty co-founder and chief executive Jonathan Klein.

He added that Flickr’s contribution will increase the depth of the firm’s photo catalogue and bring an element that he reckoned professional photography often lacks, according to the Wall Street Journal: “Because the imagery is not shot for commercial services, there is more authenticity. Advertisers are looking for authenticity.”

Flickr claimed it gets 54 million worldwide visitors each month and stores more than two billion photos for 27 million members.

Getty’s partnership with Flickr is the first of its kind for the company, which was bought by private equity firm Hellman & Friedman for $2.4bn in February this year.

Interesting to see these symbiotic relationships develop.

This interesting graph (compiled from Technorati data) comes from a BusinessWeek piece. I came to it via this meditation on the phenomenon, which says,

Perhaps we’ve realized that blogging every day isn’t as fun as it sounds. A happened-upon red swirl of autumn leaves before a backdrop of unusually artful East Vancouver graffiti may very well be a blog-worthy topic. Life’s minor muses are perhaps what inspire the pleasure blogger to pick up a keyboard in the first place, but it actually takes work to develop new material on a regular basis. No, writing never becomes easy no matter how long you do it.

Some difficult truths have been brought to light by the personal blogging blitz of the last few years. One such revelation is that most of us aren’t as interesting as we think. Waking up every day and jotting down some deep thoughts about breakfast is a difficult way to sustain any kind of readership. A creative writing teacher once told me that everyone has lived one novel-worthy story. One being the operative word, I think.

It’s as if we’ve gone through a few generations of blogging natural selection. The ones left are the big alpha bloggers, well suited to the harsh — and fickle — web environment. Said alphas have learned how to make money from their wordslinging, transforming what was once a very grassroots medium into something much more commercial. The pleasure bloggers just didn’t have the genes, nor the capitalistic instincts, to survive.

The writer goes on to speculate that the energy which originally powered the growth of blogging may simply be dissipating into other media — microblogging (like Twitter, Jaiku), social networking (FaceBook updates), etc. He also reveals that Google has acquired Jaiku, which is something I had missed. Hmmm…

Rory Cellan-Jones has an uneasy feeling.

The YouTube case seems to show that, despite those promises, we have no real control over our data once it is lodged on a corporate server. Every detail of my viewing activities over the years - the times I’ve watched videos in the office, the clips of colleagues making idiots of themselves, the unauthorised clip of goals from a Premier League game - is contained in those YouTube logs.

All to be handed over to Viacom’s lawyers on a few “over-the-shelf four-terabyte hard drives”, according to the New York judge who made the ruling. I may protest that I am a British citizen and that the judge has no business giving some foreign company a window on my world. No use - my data is in California, and it belongs to Google, not me.

The other troubling aspect about this case was that it was only the blogs that seemed to understand the significance of the ruling when it emerged on Wednesday night. Much of the mainstream media ignored it at first, seeming to regard it as a victory for Google, because the judge said the search firm didn’t have to reveal its source code.

“I’ve never worried too much about the threat to my privacy”, Rory continues.

I’m relaxed about appearing on CCTV, happy enough for my data to be used for marketing purposes, as long as I’ve ticked a box, and have never really cared that Google knows about every search I’ve done for the last 18 months. But suddenly I’m feeling a little less confident. How about you?

Charles Arthur pointed me to a really interesting idea. Here’s how BBC News describes it:

The UK government has launched a competition to find innovative ways of using the masses of data it collects.

It is hoping to find new uses for public information in the areas of criminal justice, health and education.

The Power of Information Taskforce - headed by cabinet office minister Tom Watson - is offering a £20,000 prize fund for the best ideas.

To help with the task, the government is opening up gigabytes of information from a variety of sources.

This includes mapping information from the Ordnance Survey, medical information from the NHS , neighbourhood statistics from the Office for National Statistics and a carbon calculator from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

None of the data will be personal information, the government is keen to stress. Ho!

Bill Thompson has a post about this.

Thoughtful post by my colleague Martin Weller. He and I are members of the OU’s Broadcast Strategy Group, the deliberations of which have led to the university advertising for a Director of Multi-Platform Broadcasting. In his post Martin reflects on what he’s been doing last week. The list includes:

* Record a talking head piece for the launch of the OU’s YouTube channel
* Record and synch the audio and upload a slidecast of a talk I gave last week
* Upload an educational video I had created to YouTube and add annotations
* Write two blogs posts
* Finish off a Camtasia video for a project

Reflecting on this, he writes:

I was never much of a fan of the term ‘digital literacies’ - to me it seemed like an excuse to say people needed training and development in using new tools, rather than just encouraging them to use them, e.g. we needed to create courses on becoming digitally literate before we would let our students use them, and then we could tick a box saying this was covered, like basic numeracy. I still think encouraging people to play is the best approach, but my recent dabbling with making videos has made me appreciate that this may be approaching a digital literacy.

This is about more than technical or design skills, more significant is the mental shift to thinking of iCasting as the route for distributing ideas. We have so long been subject to the tyranny of paper, that to conceive of an output in any other form takes a real effort. In fact, we often mistake the production of a paper artefact for the actual output of a project. So my message to the incoming Director is this - help us become iCasters.

One of the most intriguing things about YouTube is that it isn’t over-run by porn. I’ve often wondered why — after all, every other unmoderated publishing opportunity on the Net seems to have succumbed. This thoughtful piece in the NYT explains that YouTube’s founders shrewdly anticipated the danger and installed sophisticated filtering software that spots and refuses porn — with interesting effects.

By keeping obscenity in check, YouTube teems with video of near infinite variety, stuff that thrives when pornography, which is hard to contain once it takes root, has been banished. YouTube risked losing millions of viewers when it made rules against pornography. But it has gained radical variety, the kind that defines the most robust ecosystems. YouTube’s dizzying diversity, in fact, now makes online porn sites that purport to cater to a broad range of tastes look only obsessive and redundant…