Chris Boese's Weblog

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.

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.

[...]

Is there another "French Revolution" looming behind this Icelandic volcano?

 

Eyafallajkull: subglacial volcanic eruption.  Zoom on lightning caused by electrical discharge within the ash column.

Link: SwissEduc: Stromboli Online - Volcanic and glacial landforms of Iceland.

Link: How an Icelandic volcano helped spark the French Revolution | World news | The Guardian.

Smoke and steam hangs over the volcano under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland. Volcanic ash drifting across the Atlantic forced the cancellation of flights in Britain and disrupted air traffic across Europe.

Photograph: Jon Gustafsson/AP

How an Icelandic volcano helped spark the French Revolution

Profound effects of eight-month eruption in 1783 caused chaos from US to Egypt, say experts

Just over 200 years ago an Icelandic volcano erupted with catastrophic consequences for weather, agriculture and transport across the northern hemisphere %u2013 and helped trigger the French revolution. The Laki volcanic fissure in southern Iceland erupted over an eight-month period from 8 June 1783 to February 1784, spewing lava and poisonous gases that devastated the island's agriculture, killing much of the livestock. It is estimated that perhapsa quarter of Iceland's population died through the ensuing famine.

[...]

OTOH, this FB link from my friend John Voelker points out (with link to carbon chart illustration):

So the Icelandic volcano actually produced a major net reduction of atmospheric CO2 by grounding European aviation. Hmmmmmmmmmmm.

 

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?

Jonathan Zittrain warns: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms

Link: Zittrain: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms - GigaOM.

I love it when Jonathan Zittrain weighs in on things. Loved his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and mostly what he says here expands on ideas in there, focused on the platform side of things, and the growing lack of "generativity" and openness in the newer platforms coming out, like the iPhone and Kindle.

So if you haven't read the book, here's some pithy bits as summarized by Liz Gannes:

Imagine, if you will, that you bought a cloud-enabled toaster. And that one day, you got a sudden in-home upgrade to three toast slots from two. Then, just as suddenly, the new feature addition was rolled back. So you were left with two slots and some smushed toast. And then your toaster decided it wanted to start serving orange juice.

You don’t truly own the toaster — rather, according to Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, “You entered into a service relationship with a breakfast-oriented provider.” That’s the tragic and giggle-worthy analogy Zittrain uses to illustrate his worry that the cloud computing model gives too much control to platforms, which must be trusted to do good.

[...]

His audience included co-panelist Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, a company Zittrain pinpointed as being at the center of the problem.

For instance, Zittrain called Amazon’s Kindle a device with “an operating system crying to get out.” To an even greater degree than with Apple’s iPhone, programmers can’t get direct access to develop on the Kindle platform, he noted. And Amazon retreating on the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature and zapping of U.S. customers’ copies of “1984″ — despite a convincing apology by Jeff Bezos — show the company can beam itself down to make the device less useful when it chooses.

[...]

Zittrain also pointed to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where people can be put to near-automated work that makes them effectively zombies for largely non-useful purposes such as giving five-star reviews for devices they’ve never used. In this case he thinks government regulation, like the FTC’s new blogging disclosure policy, could be a good thing — at least in the sense that it pressures Amazon to police tasks on its platform.

[...]

Clay Shirky and Laura Flanders on the sacred and profane in social media

Link: Clay Shirky on Twitter and the social media revolution | Online Journalism Blog.

For some reason, GritTV on my computer doesn't match audio to video very well, so besides looking like an out-of-sync old Japanese monster film, this is a terrific interview!

The bit I really listened to and took the most away from is about three-quarters of the way through the interview, when Clay starts talking about the way the Pirate Bay lawsuit morphed into the Pirate Political Party in Sweden, with ramifications for the European Parliament. I am definitely going to run out (figuratively, letting my fingers do the running) and find out more about that!

Also (and this relates to a recent post/discussion we were having on our Scatter/Gather work blog), the rest of the discussion from that point forward explores some of my favorite themes about how periods of great growth and intellectual energy are released in times when the sacred and the profane exist in very close proximity to each other. Except that isn't really the way Shirky put it (although others explore this connection, what in the field of Rhetoric you find in Bakhtin and his talk of the discourse of the "carnival")

The simplicity of Twitter, of course, is its genius. It has the power to do so much by doing so little. But that’s not the only thing that’s simple about Twitter. The service itself was only intended to share 140-character messages with the world. Its significance is its evolution. Everything from @replying and retweeting to using hashes and symbols can be attributed to the users. It has brilliantly allowed users to define it – almost entirely. As Shirky points out, “Most of the uses of Twitter were not imagined by the designers of the service – they were managed by the users of the service.”

R.I.P., Mark Pittman, Reporter Who Foresaw Subprime Crisis

Link: Mark Pittman, Reporter Who Foresaw Subprime Crisis, Dies at 52 - Bloomberg.com.

[Woody Guthrie]

From the Bloomberg.com Obituary:

[...]

In 2007, he was writing about the securitization of home loans when subprime borrowers, who have bad or limited credit histories, began missing payments on their mortgages at a faster pace.

Pittman’s June 29, 2007, article, headlined “S&P, Moody’s Hide Rising Risk on $200 Billion of Mortgage Bonds,” was excoriated at the time by Portfolio.com for “trying to play ‘gotcha’ with the ratings agencies.”

“And that really isn’t helpful,” said the unsigned posting.

Beating the Pack

Pittman’s story proved prescient. So did his reports on U.S. banks exporting toxic mortgages overseas, on Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson’s role in creating those troubled assets while he was chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and on the U.S. bailout of American International Group Inc.

“He’s been on this crisis since before the crisis,” said Gretchen Morgenson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning financial columnist for the New York Times. “He was the best at burrowing into the most complex securities Wall Street could come up with and explaining the implications of them to readers of all levels of sophistication. His investigative work during the crisis set the standard for other reporters everywhere. He was a giant.”

In the “Faustian Bargain” series, Pittman explained how 5 percent of U.S. mortgage borrowers missing monthly payments could lead to a freeze in lending throughout the world.

‘Fearless, Most Trusted’

“Mark Pittman proved to be the most fearless, most trusted reporter on the most important beat during the 12 years he wrote about credit markets, corporate finance and the Federal Reserve at Bloomberg News,” said Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler. “His colleagues will miss his laughter and generous sense of mission. Bloomberg readers were rewarded by his many achievements culminating with a federal court ruling validating his search for records of taxpayer-financed policies withheld from the public and the Gerald Loeb Award.”

[...]

What to think about the CNN.com redesign?

I've been checking out the screenshots and early weekend implementation of the new CNN.com redesign. Several of my journalist and non-journalist friends have been weighing in on links I've posted on Facebook (although my CNN buds have been keeping fairly quiet, as is proper. I did same in public forums when I worked there).

Disclaimer: I was a cyberculture columnist for CNN.com from 2002-2005, where I often had to advocate for certain "bloggish" types of discourse that were not generally permitted on the site because the online common wisdom or ways of knowing (crowd-sourced consensus on cyber-topics, usually) couldn't be traced to some important person quoted as saying "X" (an absolute requirement for CNN.com at the time), or because online "conventional" wisdom didn't necessarily jive with journalistic copyediting standards of "The Row" at that time.

Times have certainly changed, both in the network and with the site's embrace of citizen media (something I was also an early advocate for), and now, in its turn toward the site stylings of online "opinion writing" found at Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, among other blog and news aggregators (more on that below).

For what it's worth, a full archive of my CNN.com columns can be viewed here. I was employed by Turner Broadcasting from 2001 to the end of 2006, when I moved to NYC to take a position at Razorfish, ironically, the company responsible for the CNN.com 2007 redesign (UX and creative). I was not involved in the redesign at either company.

That should cover all necessary disclaimers. All I'm doing here is giving my impressions on the 2009 redesign (largely positive, I'll tell you why), in spite of my friends' initial reactions on Facebook (largely negative, I can speculate why), and what I think may have been lost from what I considered a visually stunning "liquid" (the gray modular look) redesign as proposed by Razorfish and executed by CNN.com in 2007.

What follows is my opinion and my opinion only, and in no way represents the views of any of my employers, past or present.

Dan Gillmor proposes some "New Rules of News." I pick my favorites.

Link: The new rules of news | Dan Gillmor | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Constantly risking absurdity and death... er, no. That's Ferlinghetti.

Um, clearly risking IRONY without death, Dan has waded into trying to define what journalism is yet again! Thanks Dan! Don't know what I'd do without you, and I mean that seriously (having taught from and even blurbed, I think, your terrific book We the Media).

But for the irony! It's so postmodern!

From this insightful list of 22 New Rules for News, we first must talk about Rule Number 11...

11. We would never publish lists of ten. They're a prop for lazy and unimaginative people.

I guess lists of 22 are OK then? Numerologists would tell you 11 and 22 are Master Numbers that can't be reduced, linked to both channeling IDEALISM into the planet from a higher plane (one more than 10 items) and working as a MASTER BUILDER, some kind of journalistic Freemason, I guess.

There you go, Dan. Always trying to moving things to a higher level! Lists of more than 10 items are OK. Whew! [grin]

I jokes. But some good stuff to chew on in this list of 22 items. Because Dan doesn't wade into the polemic that surrounds so much of the debate about the future of journalism (but instead has characteristically put his money where his mouth is, to work as a practical master builder of sorts for the highest kind of idealism the religion of journalism can sustain) I find it interesting picking his brain on this stuff.

Some things I agree with. Some I don't. Some are more important. Some less. Which inspired me to add my (for what it's worth) two cents.

How about a list of my 10 favorites?

First, the set-up (so it makes sense):

Dan sez:

You may have noticed – you could hardly miss it – the blizzard of anniversary stories last month about the fall of Lehman Brothers, an event that helped spark last year's financial meltdown. The coverage reminded me that journalists failed to do their jobs before last year's crisis emerged, and have continued to fail since then.

It also reminds me of a few pet peeves about the way traditional journalists operate. So here's a list of 22 things, not in any particular order, that I'd insist upon if I ran a news organization.

He's got me at Number 1, which just happened to be one of my pet peeves too, especially when I worked in TV-Land.

1. We would not run anniversary stories and commentary, except in the rarest of circumstances. They are a refuge for lazy and unimaginative journalists.

Dan tells my friend Grayson Daughters that the "lazy and unimaginative journalists" line was added by the editorial process at the Guardian, and that he wouldn't have used that term himself. I would have! If I'd have stayed in newspapers instead of morphing into cable news, it probably wouldn't bug me so much. But if I have to see ANOTHER Coney Island hot-dog eating story, I'll barf up all the hot dogs those guys are eating.

Sad shift work, really, was what it was, for 24-hour news staffers who couldn't get those days off. I didn't mind the national election rituals. But certain non-holidays that lead to a pre-set mandatory programming mantra of cliche's could just make me run around the room screaming. Like the hurricane preparation story, as the hurricane is of course "bearing down," right before it starts to "wreak havock."

How about the Super Bowl Sunday bizarro land programming as a national holiday?

OK, maybe it isn't a refuge of "lazy and unimaginative journalists" at all. Nope, I'm sure it isn't. They dread those godawful assignments. The mandate for such "coverage" comes from on high, editorial/management, that you MUST stack a show a certain way on those cliche' days. Mother's Day. All the stories about these days have to have several invocations of "We" in them, and the on-air staff have to chuckle or sigh sadly along with the same remarks from the year before.

I have to stop. I'm giving myself nightmares.

Rules 2-3 are from the glory days when citizen journalism was a bright and shiny new thing. It still has great promise, and I'll invest as much energy in it as ever, but oh boy, the rumbles I hear from the trenches. There's a lot of blogger payola not disclosed on the ground in some state and local political wars!