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2009by Jon GarfunkelI need a standard set of adjectives for tagging content in a shared bookmarking system, particularly describing quality. No standard exists that I am aware of.
This is what I know is out there today: by Jon GarfunkelThe social media landscape will get simpler. It has to. There's a jumble of tools, as Rachel Happe reminded us today, and most ordinary people (beyond the early adopters) will want a single input form for posting information. by Jon Garfunkel
The Star Priority Notation is a proposed nanoformat for users of Twitter or any microblggging service. A user can set a bang priority in their post/tweet such that it can be interpreted in a standard way by human readers or machine parsers. by Jon GarfunkelThe Bang Priority Notation is now renamed Star Priority Notation. The name "Bang" is probably a bit too obscure, and more critically, conflicts with the ! used for groups in identi.ca. 2008by Jon Garfunkel[Note: this was originally on the cover page of this series; it was split off to add new information.] by Jon GarfunkelNewspapers have sections; magazines have departments; weblogs have neither. All of these publishing forms carry content of interest to readers, yet none use the same name to describe the essential nature of that content. by Jon GarfunkelTwo updates in the jurisprudence of free speech online this week help shed light on one of our favorite pastimes, the search for truth. The lawsuit against Wikileaks (that "entity of unknown form" according to the district court) was dropped. by Jon GarfunkelMaybe it's a cruel conspiracy of the makers of WordPress, MovableType, Blogger, et al that make blog archives a disaster of design. by Jon GarfunkelThere's a limited market for the Facebook privacy beat, since most problems can be solved by young Zuckerberg flicking a particular switch. After all, one key aspect of a well-designed technical architecture (and Facebook has demonstrated that it is one) is the ability to reconfigure it without much difficulty. And sometimes it's as simple as cleaning up the user interface. 2007by Jon GarfunkelLast month, I sketched out how geotagging could be useful in major emergencies-- such as knowing, should your community be ravished by wildfires, when it is safe to move back (under the presumption that your neighbors have been geotagging their own photos). As such catastrophes don't happen every day, such an idea will take a while to get traction. by Jon GarfunkelI read
in the Times that the most wired magazine (well, Wired),
still has to put up with email pitches. Editor Chris Anderson grew
tired of all the PR pitches and announced to the world that he
was blacklisting all of the email addresses. They should be
by Jon GarfunkelWhen Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, ran for Public Advocate of New York City in 2005, he campaigned on a novel civic idea: the city should create a service that enabled residents to report potholes using their cameraphones. He even set up the website for it. by Jon GarfunkelOver the last year I'd learned through my work on compliance software about the Global Rules Information Database (now organized under the Object Management Group's Governance Risk & Compliance Roundtable). by Jon GarfunkelThe New York Times, like other media publications, faces two major challenges today regarding the relationship with their readers. First, the newspaper needs to give its readers a reason to keep subscribing, as news can well be pulled from anywhere. Second, the readers need their newspaper to not magnify or manufacture reports of any alleged misdeeds. by Jon GarfunkelHere's a brief suggestion how video news archives could better market themselves in a YouTube world. Archive catalogs have, after all, content to license and sell, and a growing number of amateurs (not to mention the next generation of professionals) are seeking to use it. by Jon GarfunkelThis document provides a brief overview of the PONAR Architecture. by Jon GarfunkelLet's review the steps to take if one is the subject of online harassment. How to Respond to Online Harassment is provided by Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA) an organization mentioned in the previous section. There are number of helpful steps; we'd just like to review how these would be followed with or without a lawyer-- as well as through PONAR. by Jon Garfunkel
This is the first draft of a submission form for PONAR (Protocol for Online Abuse Reporting). The form is the heart of the request; this can drive the design for an XML schema, database schema, and system architecture.
The objective of this form is to be more formal than an email, while being more convenient (i.e., less expensive) than filing a lawsuit. There is already a variety of online legal form services. I do hope to work with legal experts in order to improve its clarity.
By example, here is the Craigslist abuse reporting form.
by Jon GarfunkelJust as Creative Commons cleverly emphasizes the rights of users (over what appear to be the overly restrictive rights of coyright), so should Comment Management Responsibility ("CommResp") emphasize the rights of the community members. O'Reilly pointed to the blogher Code of Conduct as an exemplary policy (note: I've been nominated as by the blogher co-founder as "bloghim"), but it focuses mostly on the prohibitions. by Jon GarfunkelThe Congress Votes Database from the Washington Post tells you how Senators and Representatives have voted. But wouldn't it be useful to know what their positions are on issues coming up? In politics, it's the whip who counts the supports before a vote. Hence: Whipster. Take a look at the amount of effort undertaken by Talking Points Memo and by Porkbusters last August -- incidentally, not regarding a specific vote, but regarding finding out who was the Senator who placed the "secret hold" on a bill (which would have created a public, searchable database on federal grants contracts). 2006by Jon GarfunkelLinking from a published article to a letters-to-the-editor written in regards to it makes sense; it's the essence of constructive media. Still, with a decade of web journalism underway, why is this not a standard convention by online newspapers?
by Jon GarfunkelA brief sketch of the ideas going forth for constructive activism. I see three parts: Guide - aka the "how to" part. Note that questions like "How to start a blog" have many answers already on the web. The questions I'd like to start answering are "How do we get the prolific bloggers on the topic to contribute here and not exclusively on their own blog " One of the challenges in the Free Alaa campaign was that the actual blog was not updated regularly enough, so readed had to hunt around SandMonkey, the Arabist et al for updates.Granted, I expect that next-generation aggregation will be able to handle synchronized postings. by Jon GarfunkelIn the previous article, I illustrated how a portal could be specially designed for activist efforts. Now I want to turn my attention towards enhancing activism badges, in order to address some of the needs that have come up among the Free Alaa supporters. Badges are graphics that bloggers and website publishers representing generally affiliations. Traditionally, they are image references which point to graphic files, such as GIFs. by Jon GarfunkelHere's a couple of ways to design community websites. On the left are some schematic layouts of front pages to websites; the colors are there for illustration and don't have any semantic meaning.
by Jon GarfunkelThe last part started with a reference to Ethan Zuckerman, and this one shall as well. Ethan wrote a nice summary of the first four parts, echoing my call for online activists. In this part we'll go into some core examples of disruptive and constructive activism. by Jon GarfunkelThis describes an exercise in building a constructive media process. Let's begin by saying that an organization has policies, bylaws, guidelines, position papers which govern the behavior of its members; for this exercise we will use “policies” as the generic term covering all of them. The organization has two main responsibilities: publish the policies, and understand how they are actually being employed by members. by Jon GarfunkelIt inevitably follows that in becoming a man of letters-- a title which should encompass both "personal publisher" and "freelance researcher"-- one has to keep in mental shape by going to a conference every now and then to meet and greet. This impulse is checked only by the need to anchor oneself at the home office to actually get some work done. My home office shared my interest in my going to this particular conference, the Gilbane Conference on Content Management, so I ventured to San Francisco for the opportunity to do so. by Jon Garfunkel[This is a letter sent to the Boston Globe in response to the horrid Op-Ed contribution “When Librarians protect terrorists” by Richard L. Cravatts on February 6th, 2006. I called the paper to see what follow-up they planned on this, but learned nothing. This is obviously much too long to be a letter, now. I've added some links here for your viewing pleasure.]
by Jon GarfunkelThis essay defines the concept of social data within social media software systems and issues a call for users to recognize its need to be made available for public research. 2005by Jon GarfunkelI've prepared this document as a general how-to guide for what a community organization should consider in upgrading their website-- something to serve the organization and the community. The fundamental choice from the start of the design is what architectural decisions to make. I explain why an open source CMS solution is a good architecture to pick, and do point out Drupal as a worthy example for that.
by Jon GarfunkelA decade ago, the term webzine came into vogue simply to mean a web-based magazine. I'd like to breathe new life into it to describe an alternative format to the weblog for online publishing. Whereas the design fundamental of weblog is the reverse-chronological format, the design fundamental of the webzine is separate departments based on the style of the writing. I'm going to describe here how this would be useful for online communities/publishers. by Jon GarfunkelThis is an addendum to the New Gatekeepers series (formally, part 7). In the series, particularly part 4, I described that the need for gatekeepers is a result of discursive postings; in order to minimize the influence of gatekeepers, we need aggregatable declarations. by Jon GarfunkelProposing a scaleable solution for sending tips to publishers.
Last month, I wrote that publications, traditional and online, have a primary responsibility to demonstrate that they are responsive to their readers, and that a majority of the questions along these lines should be concerned with how they handle tips. This month Jay Rosen recognized the problem in the midst of a PressThink discussion and spelled out some guidelines for sending in tips (e.g., “Write a post in PressThink's major areas of interest that gets other people talking, and makes an original point or two.”) This is a good start. Here's a longer proposal for how it can be done that meets goals of accountability and fairness.
by Jon GarfunkelThere's been many questions and opinions about what the nature of the online community of bloggers and others is composed of, and very few facts. Here I propose some basic identity questions to ask, as well as other series of questions I have posted previously. At the end I discuss some technical means for taking such a census in a sustainable fashion.
by Jon GarfunkelIt's a strange country where Peggy Noonan, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, peddles anti-elitist populism in the media wars. She suggests that the future of the media belongs to people who reject professionalism in all forms. I think there's a better way.
by Jon GarfunkelIf only it were easy to find out what a given person thinks of a certain entity, and by extension, what a given person thinks of anything, or what people think of a certain entity. This, I believe is the goal of "information transparency" that is anticipated by the blogger visionaries.
by Jon GarfunkelProposing a series of questions that should be asked for analyzing online content. These questions should encourage the development of standards and software for qualifying online content such that it can be automatically analyzed. I am tempted to call this discipline media architecture, and I will check with others in the field about the appropriateness of the term.
2004by Jon GarfunkelAfter a conference where one of the major themes is deliberation technologies, it's not surprising to hear a few people reflect about the use of such technologies at said conference. by Jon GarfunkelFour years ago, I thought that to be elected a President, it was sufficient for the candidate to have experience in the White House, command of the issues, a platform which would benefit the majority of Americans, an abiliy to withstand the press's snipings about his wardrobe, authorship of a government report on airline security... ok, all but the last. What I didn't realize is that what he really needed was a collection of votes in New Hampshire and Florida, and a little door-to-door canvassing might have helped turned the tide. So, four years too late, I some did canvassing in those battleground states. (We took the granite, but lost the sunshine.) I only canvassed on a handful of occasions, but whenever I did, my fellow canvassers marvelled at the stories I told afterwards. So I thought it best to write it down to be useful for future campaigns.
by Jon GarfunkelIn my experiences with various organizations and causes, I come across many people who realize the need to augment their communications efforts with an online community. They suppose, "why not set up an email list?" In general, I worry that email lists sometimes bring more trouble than they're worth. Email lists can best be used successfully if the leadership sees the path of how to lead to more productive online communities. I'd like to illustrate that path here.
by Jon GarfunkelThis is a outline of an Internet project which would facilitate real-time monitoring of broadcast media.
by Jon GarfunkelMeetups may have been the biggest innovation of the Internet in the first stage of 2004 Election campaign, notable for its low-tech essence. People organized online in order to meet "offline"-- in neighborhood bars and restaurants. The meeting in real life helped many volunteers build connections that would otherwise take more time to build in a strictly-online community. Meetups famously drove the Dean campaign to the front-runner for the last half of 2003. The question I want to consider here is how the idea of Meetups can be expanded for the future.
by Jon GarfunkelInternet polls had a promise once. They are a cheap mechanism from collecting quantifiable opinions from people who want to give it. Typically the data from Internet polling is instantly visible. This promise has been somewhat muted, due to a slow pace of innovation on the part of the community software industry, as well as some caution offered up by the polling industry.
by Jon Garfunkel"Time to get local" -- the subject line of the email from John Kerry's campaign implores. This rings hollow as the emails themselves come from the national office. Everyday, I and perhaps millions of other Kerry supporters, get emails from a bunch of behind-the-scenes people on the campaign: Josh Ross, Mary Bath Cahill, John Norris, Bill Clinton...
by Jon GarfunkelSubscribers of Comcast Cable in Brookline and Boston are seeing cable channels get zapped under their very eyes-- an effect not unlike the disappearing memories of Jim Carrey's character in the brilliant new movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But the channels aren't going away completely, they are effectively jumping over to the digital side.
by Jon GarfunkelThe most effective way to raise money for a cause is through personal connections. It provides a relationship for the fundraising organization to reach individuals, and it also provides access for the individual up to the campaign. The basis of the system is that donors, when they give their money, name individual fundraisers, who can therefore take credit for bundling the donations. I call this "Social Network Fundraising".
by Jon GarfunkelDraw two axes of American politics-- social issues and economic issues. Along each axis, consider how much individual liberty . Do you want to extend civil rights, women's rights, gay rights? Climb up the left. Loosen regulations? Climb up the right. Congratulations-- you've come upon the "Nolan Chart", which was devised by David Nolan, who first published it in 1971. But have you ever seen this in any political article intended for a general readership?
by Jon GarfunkelIn the town of Brookline, the cable company had given an ultimatum to customers to convert to digital, and pay extra per month to rent the convertor boxes. This has caused a bit of rancor, as cable television is expensive enough as it is. When everyone has a digital cable box, the cable company will be able to fine-tune each viewer watches; no longer will a subscriber be able to simply hook up to a cable-ready set and watch channels. This could be a cause of deep concern. Or it could be a great opportunity, to finally introduce a real market in television by using à la carte pricing, where users can choose to only pay for the channels they want. by Jon GarfunkelThis is a brief proposal to explain how I'd like to extend Drupal to support story types.
by Jon GarfunkelThe handle, the nickname, the nom du guerre, these are used by CB radio users, hip-hop performers, professional wrestlers, and participants in Internet forums. If you're like most world citizens, it's probably the latter group that you're most likely to find yourself to join. But how welcoming is a community where you see posts by names like CmdrTaco, MegaZone, Zealot X, mydogiscoolerthanyourdog*?
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