Citizen-Generated Media (CGM)

Tracking Your Ancestors Diaspora

iUsing U.S. Census records, Ancestry.com has figured out a way that you can track you last name’s distribution in 1840, 1880, and 1920. This idea will probably become more robust as other databases are added.

This Would Be Hilarious If It Were Not Tragic

The Indian Council of Medical Research has been busy lately, measuring the penis size of over a thousand Indian men, volunteers all, chosen for their representative demographics.  Indian men are, well, under-endowed, only by a few millimeters, but then again, every millimeter counts.  This is more than a passing amusement, because condoms are manufactured in one size, and if there is greater slippage occurring among sexually-active Indians, this could be a factor in the rising HIV rate on the subcontinent.  So, are you listening, condom manufacturers?  We need sizing in penis sheaths, just like we do for gloves and shows.  Obviously, size matters not regarding birth rates, even if those happy sperm have to swim a few mm. farther.  For a comprehensive history of condoms throughout the centuries, visit Avert.org.

Heavier Than Air - Friday Tidbit

The list of famous people who perished in airplane crashes is always growing, and this handy website allows you to track the grisly record decade by decade over the last century.

Shifting Populations

The Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia’s Earth Institute has created a map showing what the likely population shifts will be by the year 2025.  This map takes into account probable sea level rise and the coastal dislocations it will bring. Southern and Eastern Europe and Japan are expected to experience population declines, though the number of people living near the coasts worldwide is expected to increase by over 35 percent. 

New vs. Old Media

Lawyer Jack Balkin was asked “How do you see the new media and old media affecting and influencing each other in the next five years?”  His answer, as posted on Balkinization, follows:

Although bloggers like to think of themselves as bravely checking and critiquing old media, and parts of old media still regard bloggers as uncouth, unaccountable, and unreliable, in fact new media and old media (viewed both as a set of distinctive technologies and as a set of persons and social practices) have effectively merged much more than either would care to admit.

Reporters now regularly use bloggers, particularly expert bloggers, as sources for their stories. Newspapers, television networks and newsmagazines increasingly incorporate interactive elements in their online versions, sponsor their own blogs, and provide linkbacks to the blogs that discuss their stories. These trends, which have begun in earnest in the past year or so, will only accelerate as time goes on, as traditional media organizations work out the kinks of how to integrate interactivity into their business models. (Eventually, of course, broadcast television and internet video will merge as content delivery methods, and online delivery of text will increasingly dominate paper delivery.)

The most heavily linked to opinion and expert blogs, and aggregator blogs (i.e., blogs which primarily collect links to what other blogs are doing) make it increasingly easy for mainstream media to know what is going on in the blogosphere and to use this as information sources, as ideas or raw materials for new stories, and as a rough estimate of public opinion.

Interactivity will transform old media, which will not give up the ghost, but will instead use its considerable political and financial clout to draw important elements of the blogosphere ever closer to it, coopting and transforming them, even though many parts of the blogosphere will always remain beyond old media's grasp.

What mainstream media has to offer the blogosphere are money, advertising and links (i.e., traffic). Although the structure of the Internet guarantees that bloggers can generate some degree of traffic on their own, mainstream media platforms, because of their prominence, will help secure a disproportionate share of traffic and attention, and therefore will become (even more than today) important nodal points in the blogosphere, much to the chagrin of some bloggers and the delight of others.

Of course, the more that old media tries to coopt the blogosphere, the more it will itself be transformed. The result, I am afraid, will not be an unalloyed victory for decentralization or democracy, nor will it represent the end of powerful shapers of public opinion who occasionally abuse their power. Rather, it will instead produce a different distribution of power and a different set of dangers and responsibilities.

Just as political parties learned how to manipulate mainstream media in order to structure public debate and deliver their preferred messages, they are learning how to coopt, manipulate (and in some cases become part of) the blogosphere in order to shape public opinion. Increasingly, opinion makers (both in political parties and in the business world) have a multi-pronged strategy that attempts to influence both old and new media. Although the blogosphere regards itself as far too large and too diffuse to be manipulated by powerful political and financial interests, this is surely not so, and the degree of this influence will become even more obvious as time goes on. Nevertheless, the decentralization of the blogosphere and its characteristic architecture (of log normal or powerlaw distributions) allows a degree of countervailing power, which, I continue to hope, will not be extinguished. The revolution is real.

Newspapers of the Future

The San Jose Mercury News is one of the newspapers left dangling by the acquisition of the Knight-Ridder chain by McClatchy Co., and blogger Dan Gillmor, proprietor of The Bayosphere, is not amused.  Gillmor writes of attempts to “Save the Merc” by allowing the staff and some community-minded investors to buy the paper and run it, and in so doing, transform the business model for newspapers, a change that has been a long time coming.  Gillmor suggests that Yahoo might be a buyer, and could turn the Merc into a “living laboratory of tomorrow’s journalism.”  Gillmor adds: “Yahoo is also competing on a journalistic level, which is different than most other business rivals – moving into news in a fairly big way, including the bottom-up kinds of citizen-generated stuff that I believe, more than ever, are essential to the future of newspaper franchises.”  Jay Rosen of Press Think also fulminates on this subject.

Take That, Your Honor

The state of Washington has ruled that bloggers have free speech rights, even when they blog against a judge they are appearing before in a law case.  It all started when a Seattle retirement home resident started publishing a newsletter critical of the federally-subsidized place he was staying.  Council House, the retirement home, sued, and the judge ruled in its favor.  So the resident began to go online and criticize the judge, who promptly declared ”Contempt of Court” and ordered the man jailed until he removed the criticism.  A few months later, the man was released and took down his website, but he appealed the judge’s contempt ruling, citing that it was based on the reasoning that the man was not a journalist because he was not employed by a legitimate news organization.  The Washington Supreme Court upheld the man’s claim, but did not deliver him from all responsibility, saying that some of the things the man had claimed could still be prosecuted as harassment. 

Bloggers and the Federal Election Commission

The Federal Election Commission has determined that only paid ads on a third party site are subject to campaign finance laws, and explicitly stated that other forms of online campaigning are exempt. The vote was 6 to 0.  Bloggers will get the same First Amendment protections afforded newspapers and other forms of traditional media.  FEC Chairman Michael Toner said “there will be no second class citizens among members of the media,” which probably comes as news to some paranoid bloggers.

The Trouble with Citizen Journalism as Seen by a Pro

Samuel Freedman is a Columbia journalism professor who was asked by Public Eye to opine on what differentiates professional journalism from the newly emerging category of citizen journalism. What, did you think he was going to give amateurs a free pass?  One aggrieved critic at Next News takes Freedman to task, citing Hurricane Katrina and the London Tube bombings as two places where citizen journalism surpassed that of the professionals.

Blogger In Trouble

Hao Wu runs a blog, Beijing or Bust, which he bills as “Random Observations of this Over-Hyped Yet Still Fascinating City.”  Or at least, he did run a blog until the end of February, when he was detained by China ’s State Security Service.  Over a month later, he is still being held, yet no charges have been filed against him.  Hao lived in the USA during the Nineties and has scientific training as a molecular biologist, and an MBA from Michigan’s Business School.  He moved back to Beijing to make a documentary film about Chinese-Americans who have gone back to China as she slowly opens up to the world of commerce.  The site appealing for his release speculates that he might have been interviewing Chinese Christians whose church is not recognized by the government.

Whatever the pretext, this kind of thing is going to recur until outside economic pressures force Chinese authorities to pull down their Great (fire) Walls.