Memex 1.1

The Manaing Editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer has sent a memo to all staff. It reads, in part:

Colleagues – Beginning today, we are adopting an Inquirer first policy for our signature investigative reporting, enterprise, trend stories, news features, and reviews of all sorts. What that means is that we won’t post those stories online until they’re in print. We’ll cooperate with philly.com, as we do now, in preparing extensive online packages to accompany our enterprising work. But we’ll make the decision to press the button on the online packages only when readers are able to pick up The Inquirer on their doorstep or on the newsstand.

For our bloggers, especially, this may require a bit of an adjustment. Some of you like to try out ideas that end up as subjects of stories or columns in print first. If in doubt, consult your editor. Or me or Chris Krewson…

This has caused quite a stor in the blogosphere. For example, Jeff Jarvis writes:

Let me make this very clear to Inquirer ownership and management:

You are killing the paper. You might as well just burn the place down. You’re setting a match to it. This is insane. Even the slowest, most curmudgeonly, most backward in your dying, suffering industry would not be this stupid anymore. They know that the internet is the present and the future and the paper is the past. Protecting the past is no strategy for the future. It is suicide. It is murder. You should be ashamed of yourselves…

Yep.

… is now available on the Web. Very good it is too. Make some coffee, draw up a chair and enjoy it.

In the chapter on publishing in his forthcoming book, Jeff Jarvis writes this:

So here’s the question: Why shouldn’t books have ads to support them as TV, newspapers, magazines, and radio do? Ads in books would be less irritating than commercials interrupting shows or banners blinking at you on a web page. Would it be any more corrupting to have ads in this book than next to a story I write in Business Week? Well, you’d have to tell me. If I were to have had a sponsor or two for this book, who would it have been and what would you have thought of my work as a result? If Dell bought an ad—because, after all, I now have nice things to say about them—would you have wondered whether I’d sold out to them? I would fear you’d think that. What about Google itself? Obviously, that wouldn’t work. Yahoo? Ha! Who might want to talk to you and associate themselves with the thinking in this book while also helping to support it? I’m not sure. Let’s discuss that for the paperback I hope gets published. Come to my blog and tell me what you think.

In an interesting blog post he asks

Do you think I should take a sponsor or two for the book (I’m not saying it’s an option; this is a discussion)? If so, who would make a good sponsor? Who wouldn’t? Would it affect your thinking if a sponsored book cost less? Should I then wish for a sponsor not only because it reduces the risk for the publisher and me but because it means more books could be sold at a lower price spreading the ideas in the book farther?

It’s worth reading the post in full because it attracted a good many thoughtful comments from readers, most of whom were sceptical.

The ads on Jeff’s blog at the time constituted such a nice counterpoint to the discussion in the text that I just had to clip the image!

From BBC NEWS…

A US study of text messages suggests the theory that we are all linked by six steps to anyone else may be right - though seven seems more accurate.

Microsoft researchers studied the addresses of 30bn text messages sent during a single month in 2006.

Any two people on average are linked by seven or fewer acquaintances, they say…

Wonder if this is the first study to be done on a global rather than a society-wide basis? Also, it rather undermines the conjecture — which I first saw, I think, in the Economist — that electronic connectivity was reducing the Milgram coefficient.

From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Randy Pausch, the popular computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon whose appetite for life was only sharpened by a diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer in September 2006, has died.

Pausch’s inspirational “Last Lecture” a year later, titled “Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” was posted to YouTube and became an unexpected sensation, viewed millions of times. It evolved into a best-selling book, and Pausch used his sudden celebrity to be an advocate for both cancer research and savoring life. Randy Pausch died this morning at his home. He was 47. In the “Last Lecture,” he said, “I mean I don’t know how to not have fun. I’m dying and I’m having fun. And I’m going to keep having fun every day I have left. Because there’s no other way to play it. You just have to decide if you’re a Tigger or an Eeyore. I think I’m clear where I stand on the great Tigger/Eeyore debate. Never lose the childlike wonder. It’s just too important. It’s what drives us.”

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.