Category: Media

Have recently become enamored of subversion, not just as a developer’s tool but as a software management system. WordPress and Drupal installations and updates become trivial when you throw away FTP.

Realized there was no WordPress Codex page on managing WordPress via svn, so I wrote one (Codex is a MediaWiki site). Covers installing and tracking the trunk release, but also (and this is the info I originally set out to find but couldn’t), installing and tracking stable release versions. Linked from the Getting Started/Installation section.

Since there are probably thousands of WordPress blogs that were originally installed without subversion, but that people might want to convert over for the sake of dirt-simple future upgrades, tossed in a recipe for converting “traditional” WP installs to subversion-style installs.

On the WP-Hackers mailing list, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg offers 7 WP predictions for 2007:

* We’ll do 3 major point releases
* People will start Wordcamps around the globe
* WP will become the #1 used tool on the Technorati 100
* Daily spam will be 10x what it is today
* WYSIWYG will no longer annoy savvy writers
* Several new WP-based companies will start
* We’ll figure out the whole plugin/theme directory thing

10x more comment spam? I don’t doubt it, but scary indeed when you look at Akismet’s graphs showing the rise of comment spam through 2006.

See also Heise Security’s half-serious-but-plausible 2007 in Review.

The Merc compares wildly popular “news” site Digg, which dispenses with both writers and editors in favor of a simple thumbs-up/thumbs-down voting system, with newly formed NewsTrust, which uses a similar approach but applies more rigour to the process by requiring voters to evaluate stories on a battery of 10 criteria. The result is that NewsTrust ends up with meatier, better-vetted stories capable of passing at least some kind of trust threshold.

NewsTrust’s more thoughtful approach can yield dramatically different top stories. On Tuesday, NewsTrust’s users selected “Top Ten Myths About Iraq 2006,” from a blog written by Juan Cole, president of the Global Americana Institute. Digg’s top story was “50 Reasons — why it’s great to be a Guy!!” from a blog written by someone named Mike in Los Angeles. Reddit, a Digg competitor that was recently acquired by Conde Nast, featured “Why iPods Are Never on Sale,” from Salon.com.

If human-driven filtering and aggregation is to become an important part of the news landscape, as it appears it will be, the simplicity of the mechanisms must be tempered in some way. NewsTrust is a great first step.

“You ever heard of emotional release? I’m talking about people having a good time,” Rush Limbaugh said of the Abu Ghraib pranksters in 2004. Old friend Scott Hamrah writes on torture at the movies and in American foreign policy for L.A. Times:

That’s a definition of torture to stand next to Bush’s. Here’s another: Torture is what we watch acted-out in front of us as we sit in movie theaters eating nachos. Torture is serial and endless, like entertainment, and comes to us in the guise of fun, as it did at Abu Ghraib. The two are beginning to merge.

At the Center for Citizen Media, which is a department exploring concepts of citizen journalism at the Berkeley J-School, Dan Gillmor asks whether the ubiquity of hand-held / cell-phone video cameras is leading to a decline in professional photojournalism. He points to the famed Zapruder film as one the earliest and most famous examples of citizen journalism being picked up by mainstream media, and to a handful of other more recent examples.

Comments on the post question both the premise and the conclusion, but there’s no denying that with nearly a billion video cameras on the planet, the chances of a citizen being present with recording gear is always going to be greater than the chances of a pro being on-hand (Gillmor notes that we’re really talking about spot news here). What blogs are doing to journalism, what digital still cameras are doing to the stock photography industry, is parallel to what hand-held still+video will do to photojournalism.

I find it interesting that many readers are questioning whether what we generally refer to as “citizen journalism” qualifies as journalism at all – and they’re doing so in comments on a post from the person who is a lifelong journalist and who practically coined the term. Slashdot picked up the piece, and there’s a good round of comments over there as well.

Pictured: What a good slashdotting looks like to OS X Server, from a bandwidth perspective.

Yahoo! news correspondent and backpack journalist Kevin Sites will be speaking at the J-School Thursday night, and I’ll be webcasting the event. Watch it here, 7pm pacific time.

Sites has spent the past five years covering global war and disaster for several national networks. Sites helped pioneer solo journalism, working completely alone, traveling, and reporting without a crew. As a solo journalist (“SoJo”), Sites carries a backpack of portable digital technology to shoot, write, edit, and transmit multimedia reports.

Check out his reflections on his first year in the “hot zone,” covering every major global conflict. The talk should be fascinating.