Category: Media

Salon.com:

According to an Annenberg poll conducted this spring, about 40 percent of Americans consider Fox News talk show host Bill O’Reilly a “journalist” — while only 30 percent of the people surveyed said they considered famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward to be one. … Meanwhile, more than a quarter surveyed said that another champion of judicious reportage, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, was a journalist.

So when you see reports about the sinking credibility ratings of journalists, keep in mind who the “journalists” being rated really are.

Great evening event tonight with Amgine — one of a handful of volunteer administrators at WikiNews. Probably safe to say he blew the minds of a roomful of journalists, discussing grassroots journalism and the growth of open-source information repositories. The discussion, of course, centers around the credibility of the source when you replace the traditionally trained information gatekeeper with a collaborative, volunteer-driven process that can only be described as massive organic peer review. Lots of discussion throughout this conference about citizen journalism, but most of the attempts at enabling it pale, I think, in comparison to the success (both in numbers and in growing credibility) of WikiNews and WikiPedia.

At home, started browsing WikiPedia’s public stats pages. Freaky facts (synthesized from that page and tonight’s talk): WikiPedia currently contains more than half a million articles (6x larger than Encylopedia Brittanica), and is growing at a rate of around 1,000 articles per day — the largest single, unified body of information on the planet. The WikiPedia database now weighs around 67GB, most of it plain text (and only 20% of that text is in English). Dishing up around 1200 hits per second. The changelist, when viewed through the administrator’s IRC-like interface, sometimes scrolls by too quickly to read. Average time needed for the hive mind to correct a vandalized article: 4.5 minutes.

And it all runs as a non-profit entity, on top of donated servers and bandwidth. The only religion of the admins and hardcore participants is total, obsessive commitment to neutrality.

It’s difficult to gauge or imagine what the ultimate effect of open source knowledge bases will be on traditional journalism, but it’s clearly adapt-or-die time. It’s going to be fascinating to watch traditional media struggling to cope with this phenomenon over the next decade.

If you missed tonight’s live webcast, I’ll try and get the archives up by late next week.

Update 2012: Amazing infographic on Wikipedia and education:

Via: Open-Site.org

Via OpenSite

From Media Matters:

Clear Channel radio host Glenn Beck said he was “thinking about killing [filmmaker] Michael Moore” and pondered whether “I could kill him myself, or if I would need to hire somebody to do it,” before concluding: “No, I think I could. I think he could be looking me in the eye, you know, and I could just be choking the life out — is this wrong?”

Political Puzzle wonders how it would have gone down if Michael Moore said something similar about a right-wing commentator…

A few days ago I was standing in the courtyard at work when a guy walked in and started to set up a tripod. This reminded me that I had been meaning to shoot a panorama of the courtyard stitch it together into a QTVR movie. Started talking about this with my boss, and the tripod guy piped up. Turns out it was Don Bain, one of the world’s premiere QTVR experts, and that he was there to do just that. “It’s a strange and beautiful world.”

Spent a couple of hours this morning with Bain in his labs at the Geography dept, where he is director of the Geography Computing Facility. Could not have asked for a more thorough or careful introduction to the technology than one-on-one with the man himself. He’s been doing these for many years, and had mountains of QTVRs to show (full-screen on an immense Apple monitor, no less). Also got a very detailed introduction to QTVR Authoring Studio, which, strangely enough, Apple has never ported to OS X (but which works fine in Classic). The difference between watching a master at work and an ordinary Joe is that Joe will pump something like this out in 15 minutes, while the master will spend days doing and re-doing until it’s exactly right.

Bain is also the progenitor of the World Wide Panorama, in which participants from around the world all shoot a similar object (like a local bridge) in their region on the same day, and upload finished QTVRs to the site. You can waste hours surfing the panoramas at the site, for which he won a “Best Find” award from Yahoo UK last year.

Heh – just clicking around his Virtual Guidebooks site and was surprised to see a panorama of Morro Bay on the Help page. I spent many hours paddling across, diving under, rowing over, and daydreaming in that bay. Funny to have it pop out of nowhere at me like this.

O’Reilly was kind enough to send me a copy of the premiere issue of Make — a magazine more about atoms than bits (though there’s software stuff there too), written by and for extreme makers — people compelled to hack anything and everything they can get their hands on.

First issue: Great article on Kite Aerial Photography (which I’ve posted about here before), building a miniature linear accelerator in your basement, fabbing a functional video camera stabilizer on the cheap from galvanized pipe and barbell weights (crude, but effective – apparently performs almost as well as rigs costing thousands)… tons of fascinating stuff. A version of Popular Mechanics not destined for the barber shop, but for the workshop benches and nightstands of modern geeks. And almost no ads (though I’m sure that won’t be true by the second issue).

Includes a wonderful piece by Tim Anderson on Heirloom Technology — how inventors and researchers can work smarter and faster by spending more time in the library researching historical and organic solutions than in the lab reinventing the wheel. Beautifully written. Back when I lived in Boston, used to go to Tim’s MIT inventor/storyteller parties, and never left without jaw on floor. It was in Tim’s lab that I saw my first 3-D photocopier in action.

O’Reilly has hit one out of the park with this one. Will also check out the Make podcast tomorrow.

Just started experimenting with the beta of NetNewsWire 2.0. Leaps and bounds, it’s come. In-line HTML renderer so you can see full web pages inside the reader rather than launching an external browser; select text and click Post to Weblog to pre-fill an Ecto (or other posting client) entry; a bunch of built-in skins through which you can view RSS entries (I’m reading through the BeBox skin now… memories!), subscriptions to de.liciou.us and Flickr tags, tabbed views, etc. Every now and then you find a piece of software that just sparkles with excellence. NNW’s got that sparkle.

Update: I just pulled down “Show Sites Drawer” in NNW2 and was surprised to see that birdhouse.org is among the list of blogs built into the application itself. Way to go, me!