Chris Boese's Weblog

Rebooting this blog

Hey, I've been away a while, but I'm starting a new project, and decided this might be a good place to track the ideas as they all come in quickly and connect in all kinds of unusual (and serendipitous!) ways.

I've got the RebelMouse post on the top, because I'm most active in social media and microblogging on Twitter.

But meanwhile, rationalizations, integrity, honesty, and authenticity is much on my mind. So let's kick it off right, with this great video while the moon is void of course. Signifying nothing.

Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking!

And look! The whole Errol Morris film on A Brief History of Time is up on Google Video! (I loved that movie...  just hearing the opening bars of the incredible Philip Glass score sets me off).

You know, this is probably awful, but you know what I miss? The newer computer voices have more inflection than that early computer voice that I just always associated with Stephen Hawking.

Even with other voices to choose from, I always picked the one that sounded like Stephen Hawking, just so I could pretend that I had the famous physicist talking to me inside my computer. I just like having him around!

I used to listen to the NOAA weather repeaters on my scanner as I drove around the country too (until they changed the voice), because I wanted Stephen Hawking giving me the weather report. I could just pretend he'd tell me about the tornado watch, and then after, give a short discourse on entropy or black holes in the hearts of tornadoes. Or maybe past tornadoes that existed at that particular point in the space-time continuum.

Washington Post Obituary for Mike Gauldin

It took a while, but the national press (AP and Washington Post, at least) have noted Mike Gauldin's passing. Since the link may go missing some time in the future due to the uncertain nature of newspapers online and off, I want to save the WashPo obituary here:

Link: Doris E. Gola, Michael G. Gauldin, William L. Siskos, Ora Belle Tamm.

    

Michael G. Gauldin,

Clinton Press Secretary

Michael G. Gauldin, 55, a press secretary for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton who came to Washington to work in public affairs after Clinton was inaugurated as president in 1993, died July 22 of brain cancer at his home in Burke.

Mr. Gauldin was the director of public and consumer affairs for the Department of Energy from 1993 to 1995, followed by six years as communications director at the Department of the Interior.

He then joined the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement as the director of public affairs. In 2007, he became a public affairs officer for the U.S. Geological Survey, a position he held until his death.

Michael Glen Gauldin was born in Mena, Ark., and raised in nearby Foreman, Ark. He served in the Army as a public affairs specialist in Colorado and Europe before graduating in 1981 with a degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.

Before going to work for Clinton in 1987, Mr. Gauldin worked as a journalism instructor and assistant director of information at the University of Arkansas and as a reporter and cartoonist for several Arkansas newspapers. In early 1992, Mr. Gauldin briefly served as press secretary for Clinton's presidential campaign.

Mr. Gauldin was a freelance commercial artist and cartoonist. His clients included newspapers, corporations and the last three secretaries of the Department of Interior. He also made American history action figures, including Native Americans and African American Buffalo Soldiers, and sold them online.

He was separated from his wife, Jane Catherine Harrison Gauldin of Springfield.

Survivors include his companion of 15 years, Jana Prewitt of Burke; four children from his marriage, Amanda Willett of Oak Hill, Va., and Patrick, John and Elizabeth Gauldin of Springfield; his parents, Harold and Fairy Gauldin of Foreman; three brothers; and two grandchildren.

-- Emma Brown

Dan Gillmor gives much-needed perspective on the journ-opoly's real market failures

Link: Dan Gillmor: Journalism monopoly was also a market failure - Advertising - Salon.com.

Dan lays it down tough, but he says some things that really needed saying, that needed amplifying.

I'm still pretty freaked over the general decline of the overall enterprise of public affairs reporting, investigative reporting, civic and civil society reporting and analysis, as these behemoth media monopolies falter like a single-species pine forest hit by the bark beetle.

But Dan is at least reminding us, reminding me, of something I knew, suffered with as the status quo, never quite reconciled myself to as the years rolled by, but found myself increasingly powerless to do anything about it to fight those monopolies, at least until the blog movement and the idea of citizen journalism came along.

Not that the pretty feeble but courageous citizen journalism and non-profit journalism efforts caused the massive monopolies to shiver in their boots. That mild contribution to the monopolies' death is just a thousand cuts, with the IDEA of the real masses, the huge reading publics accessing content for free online. Those readers were fed by an advertising-subsidized content machine, however, a machine created and delivered in an industrial, mindless assembly-line, tape-recorder-journalist-as-low-wage-line-worker model, not with a a critical thinking and analysis (even semantic parsing!) information age model (one could argue the Internet model is SEO-driven, nearly-bot-written content thinly scraped to follow trending topics... but that's a subject for another post!).

But the real death blow is being struck by the hand that fed the monopoly powers: advertisers cutting back in the face of the Great Recession.

Jan Chipchase leaves Nokia, joins Frog Design - BusinessWeek

Link: Jan Chipchase leaves Nokia, joins Frog Design - BusinessWeek.

I know I'm finding this story late, but ever since I heard Jan Chipchase do a talk on his research and design work, I like to follow what he's doing wherever he's doing it. Sort of like Carmen Sandiego!

Jan Chipchase leaves Nokia, joins Frog Design

Posted by: Helen Walters on April 05, 2010

Interface designer and anthropologist Jan Chipchase (that’s him in the background, taking the picture) has made a name for himself and collected quite a following as a result of his work at Nokia, where he worked in both the research group and the design team (read a 2007 BusinessWeek Q&A with him here.) Having joined the Finnish telecoms company in October, 2000, Chipchase spent nine years in Tokyo and the last at Nokia Design in Los Angeles. Now, however, change is afoot, as Chipchase moves to work at design and innovation consultancy, frog design. As the firm’s new executive creative director of global insights, Chipchase is relocating once more, this time to Shanghai, China.

[...]

What does your title mean and what will your new role entail?
It’s a global role, so I won’t be restricting myself to Shanghai. Having said that, it’s a growing studio, so I look forward to being part of that story. Within frog, I hope to bring my considerable hands-on experience of going out into the real world and bringing insights and information and inspiration back into the organization. I’ve seen firsthand how that can affect not only what a company decides to make, but how it decides to make or even whether it should make. And by “make”, I mean products and services and applications, even things like how an organization structures itself, how it puts processes in place for innovation. Put it this way, it’s pleasantly messy. No Teutonic, Finnish answer of “this is how it is.” It’s way more interesting than that.

[...]

Ho boy, I'm in trouble now!

CNNBC | Breaking News, Weather, Sports, Tech, Opinions, and Multimedia | By You, For You, And About You.

Words to live by...

OJR's Robert Niles: Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

Link: Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists.

Boy, there's some intriguing stuff packed into this short Online Journalism Review piece by Robert Niles, stuff that gets said on the way to saying something else, and those are the bits that give me pause!

They seem to have more ramifications for the world of writing and literacy than they do for the world of vocational training for journalists, although they are also in some sense tossed off, and could use more support than a hasty generalization.

So I figure, why not look in at them here? Let's look beyond the practical vo-tech employment concerns and wax a bit philosophical.

First, to Robert Niles:

Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

By Robert Niles

What's the value of journalism?

The short answer is, of course, "whatever someone will pay for it." But a more thoughtful response gets at why people are willing to exchange something of value for news information.

Economics 101 teaches that if more people want something, and the scarcer it is, the higher the price. With millions of new websites competing for people's attention, advertising rates across all media have plunged, threatening news businesses that depend upon advertising income.

[Hmmm. Tell the Econ 101 argument to poets, and they may beg to differ.

While journalists have long had to contend with the idea that their best work has the value of the Daily Fishwrap, the thing that people pile up unread, throw away daily, or use to line birdcages, poets have lived with this deep knowledge, that their very best work, their best of the best, work that strives for standing the test of time, or ephemeral, contingent, and quickly forgotten work like performance art, has an economic value of precisely ZERO, since before the time of Gutenberg. 

Wikileaks Shuttered and on Hiatus

Link: Wikileaks: whistleblowing, investigative journalism isn't cheap | Blog | Econsultancy. [Photo by aturkus via Flickr]

Just another voice in the wind about the very real difficulties facing journalism right now. So many people have talked about a non-profit journalism sector, operating largely along the lines of public radio and public television, with telethon-like beg-fests that apparently turn up a fair amount of cash (much to the annoyance of anyone forced to listen to those interruptions).

So, folks reason, this model could be applied elsewhere. It goes back to the first warbloggers, like Christopher Allbritton, working for donations to get to Iraq and be an independent journalist on the ground in-country. I'm not certain that model even worked that well then.

Other "entrepreneurial journalism" ventures have also attempted to crowd-source editorial assignments, and support for those assignments, like the once-hopeful http://newassignment.net.

The inheritors of this mantle now fall to foundation-supported sites, or sites like Pro Publica (http://www.propublica.org/) or Global Post (http://www.globalpost.com/), sites that seem to want to create a new syndication model for longer form journalists along the lines of what the agencies like Black Star or Magnum did for photojournalists once upon a time, only without the high demand of a glossy magazine industry beast that needed feeding.

Then there's the sponsorship of the Knight Foundation, with the News Challenge for entrepreneurial journalism (http://www.newschallenge.org/).

A cautionary tale as social media sites and platforms inevitably rise and fall

Link:  FT.com / Reportage - The rise and fall of MySpace.

I've been around the social media block long enough (Geocities, Friendster, Tribe.net, anyone?), and this seems to apply to the seemingly "invincible" search engines as well (WebCrawler, AltaVista?): the one thing that seems as constant as death and taxes online is that the social sphere (the wisdom of crowds or mob rule) is fickle.

You may be up one day, but most surely, a day will come when you will be down (think about it, Blackboard!).

So while I never really got into MySpace, the larger story of the MySpace failure is a cautionary tale for any 800 pound gorilla entertaining dreams of invincible bigness.

This Financial Times article dissects the failures of the early leader dancing on the tensions between interactive communication models and mass media communication models, as News Corp tycoons demanded MySpace scale up to mass media audiences and oblivious mass media behaviors, effectively killing their own golden goose.

But is that what killed the MySpace social ecosystem?

(Note, it is not really dead, but it is acknowledged in this article that its 100M users are no longer contesting Facebook for leadership at 300M users.)

One could argue that as surely as MySpace rose, it would also fall, as surely as a small town church will split into two churches, as surely as Friendster begat Tribe begat MySpace begat Facebook (which will begat ???).

But back when this question of ascendancy between MySpace and Facebook was still in more open contention, I never once doubted Facebook would come out on top (and this wasn't just because MySpace often resembled the old Geocities pages either!).

But people argued with me. And I knew they were wrong, despite their very earnest and rational arguments, proofs, numbers.

It bugs me: How did I know they were wrong? I am wont to reflect on these things. I wouldn't just  cite my online research background in social ecosystems, user experience design work, or some other thing from my resume' (an argument based on authority or expertise, which seems to be a cheat in this instance, since I have never designed a site as successful as MySpace or Facebook).

So truisms and arguments from authority or expertise don't count, at least for this exercise.

So how did I just KNOW? How did all those other 300M users just know? What did we know?