Citizen-Generated Media (CGM)

Columbia University Class Visit - Lesson #1, Deciphering RSS

Old pal Jeremy Kagan, who has now advanced his teaching efforts to Columbia Grad students while managing well, let’s just say…a diversified capability base, asked me to come in and address his “Marketing and the Internet”, class regarding blogs and social media yesterday. The students are working on a class blog project, and I’ll be sporadically participating as an advisor for as long as they’ll have me.  Overall, it was quite a nice day as you can see from the picture I snapped on my Treo below.  I also am making my first formal contribution to the class by the RSS resource listing below.  Class dismissed…

CT Biz Blogs has posted a series of articles on Really Simple Syndication (RSS).  “RSS and You” is an introduction, “How To Find and Use an RSS Reader” and  “Ways to Find RSS Feeds” are follow-ups.  CT Biz Blogs also links to articles outside their domain on this topic.  “What are Webfeeds and Why Should You Care” is a twelve-part tutorial from 2003.  “RSS: The Web at Your Fingertips” is PC Magazine’s take on RSS from late 2005.  “Save Time with Syndication” is a 2004 post from Newsforge, and “Order from Chaos via RSS” is Information Week’s contribution from August, 2005.

Tracking the Blogosphere

Nick Wilson has just announced the free public beta of Performancing Metrics, a blog statistical tracking service for professional bloggers. Nick must assume that the numbers of professional bloggers will begin to rise precipitously pretty soon.  New blood is always welcome. 

Blogger-In-Chief

President Bush was defending his war in West Virginia this past week and was asked a question about how supporters could get their message out when the mainstream media persist in only reporting the bad news. Bush responds:

"One of the things that we have to value is that that we do have a media, free media that's able to do what they want to do and I - you ask me to say something in front of all the camera here [laughter]. Help over there will ya? I just got to keep talking and word of mouth, there's blogs, there's internet, there's all kinds of ways to communicate which is literally changing the way people get their information and so if you're concerned I would suggest that you reach out to some of the groups that are supporting the troops, that got internet sites and just keep the word moving."

That’s right, even Dubya knows that blogs were a backchannel for contrarian opinions.  Video is available here.

Red States Plagiarism

It took all of one day for 24-year-old Ben Domenech to resign his new position as conservative “Red America” blogger for the Washington Post after examples of earlier plagiarism were posted by Daily Kos and others.   Domenech, who had taken Michael Moore to task for plagiarism in 2002, was found to have appropriated large chunks of P. J. O’Rourke’s book Modern Manners while a student journalist at the College of William and Mary.  It probably did not help his cause that he had recently written that President Bush should not have attended Coretta Scott King’s funeral because she was a Communist, which moved Media Matters watchdog David Brock to send a letter to Post officials demanding the sacking of this “bigoted blogger.” A compendium of additional outrageous statements by the not-so-Gentle Ben can be found at the Poor Man Institute website.  Domenech takes on his critics on his Red State blog, and the reader can judge if these justifications hold water, or leak like a sieve.  In one of those delicious synergies that sometimes occur in the blog world, the music critic for the New Yorker, Alex Ross, reports an instance of Domenech plagiarizing a classical music review written for the National Review, by lifting an Amazon review of a Chopin CD by Vladimir Horowitz’s last student, Edwardus Halim.  Mind your keystrokes, would-be journalists.  They will come back to haunt you if you’re not careful.  In a related post, Press Think’s Jay Rosen suggests that the Washington Post conduct a blog-off competition to replace the disgraced Domenech.  It’s a great idea, but ultimately too subversive for the meek Posties to adopt.  What of someone with actual literary talent and deep political sophistication came to the fore? It would expose all the other working journalists at the Beltway Daily Blatt for the poseurs they frequently are, masters of re-writing press releases and embellishing government spokesperson spin instead of probing investigators.

Blogger wins Journalism Award

Hunter College established its James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism in 1990, and this year, established a special category for bloggers.  The first blog winner is Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan who has been writing on Iraq ever since the war began.  Many people think Informed Comment is more accurate on matters Iraqi than any other source, be it newspaper, television program, or blog.

Media Blurring

The BBC and Channel Four offer a prize for the best work in non-fiction, and for the first time, a blogger has been nominated among the nineteen finalists for the award.  Baghdad Burning is a blog written by a woman who goes by the blog-de-plume Riverbend.  She has been blogging since August 2003 and takes her pseudonym from a quote that opens her blog: “I’ll meet you round the bend my friend, when hearts can heal and souls can mend.”

Water, Water, Everywhere

This past week marked World Water Day.  If there was ever an unrecognized fly lurking in the ointment of modernity and burgeoning population, access to water (without which life as we know it could not exist) is it.  We fret about rising temperatures and declining biodiversity, but if the world runs out of fresh water, global famine and massive species loss will be the result.  Ponder this when you leave the tap running while you shave or brush your teeth.  On the brighter side, satellite observations of Earth are making it easier to identify exactly how much of our fresh water supply is at risk.

Computers are to Biology as Mathematics is to Physics

Last Sunday’s New York Times has a squib called “Bytes and Biology”, which links to an article “Towards 2020 Science” from Microsoft Research.  This article lists eight of science’s grand challenges, areas where computers are expected to facilitate breakthroughs in understanding over the next couple of decades.

Blogs vs. Newspapers

Press Think’s Jay Rosen has written an extensive review of how some newspapers have been adopting blogging culture to build reader loyalty, while other papers just don’t seem to get it.  (Hint: check out both the 3/1/06 and 3/13/06 posts on Press Think).

R. I. P. Stanislaw Lem

One of the central notions of my book, The Blog Ahead, is that the blogosphere is a modern technological equivalent to Teilhard de Chardin’s more mystical notion of the noosphere.  Very few people knew what to do with de Chardin’s notions when they were first published, but one who did take the idea and run with it in his masterful science fiction was Polish writer Stanislaw Lem.  Lem believed that machines would evolve into entities indistinguishable from human beings.  His 1961 novel Solaris, which was first made into a film in 1971 by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, and more recently re-made by Steven Soderbergh (starring George Clooney), was about a space ship full of astronauts who come to a new planet, where the sentient being is an intelligent ocean that can read the psychologies and memory banks of individuals near it.  Lem was an exceedingly original science fiction writer, and would be much more well known had he not written in Polish.  He does have a website in both Polish and English.  A beginner’s biography of him can be found here, but it was written before he passed away.  That occurred recently in Warsaw at the age of 84.