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2009by Jon Garfunkel"Your readers know more than you."
Dan Gillmor coined this as the now-familiar journalistic koan: the reporter aims to inform but always finds that some readers have more information about the story they're reporting. This was always the case, he explained, but it took on a new urgency in the Internet era, as readers found outlets to respond, and correct, reporters publicly. by Jon GarfunkelWhy do people still read blogs? There are, obviously, many well-written articles tucked into the blog format by professional journalists, as well as by unpaid savants like Nate Silver. 2008by Jon GarfunkelThe engineer looks at the law and asks, why is it so sloppy? Take the DMCA-CDA disparity, or the fact that anonynous political robocalls are legal in many states while anonymous political commercials are not. The software engineer wonders why this all can't be straightened out. by Jon GarfunkelI've recently spent many hours using the data on Wikileaks to produce some original analysis on the Bank Julius Baer story. by Jon GarfunkelCommunications law in the United States is a little peculiar at times. If I buy time on for an advertisement on television or radio to reach thousands of people over the public airwaves, I have to abide by one set of rules. If. If I use an auto-dialer to reach thousands of people in their homes over the telephone (“robocalls”), I abide by a different set of rules. 2007by Jon GarfunkelWhy do we read what we read? by Jon GarfunkelJohn Tehranian, a University of Utah law professor, recently published an article “Infringment Nation” where he claimed that a typical American might be violating copyright at an astonishing rate: 83 acts of infringement and a potential liability of $12.45 million a day. by Jon GarfunkelTo truly understand the different shades of “conversation” that have been proffered by the blogosphere, let's look at two Op-Ed columnists. by Jon GarfunkelWhat the odd discovery of tapes that far-off year of 1994 mean for multimedia archival and research.
by Jon GarfunkelFans of civic engagement should be delighted by the continuing constructive dialogues about Deval Patrick's new website. Since I posted last week, there's been a number of fixes to the site. Kate Donaghue, a Democratic party activist I know, made a post on the forum (and on Blue Mass Group) chastising anybody who was criticizing the website: "when opponents choose to focus only on the challenges, they are siding against the people and our opportunity to let our voices be heard." 2006by Jon GarfunkelSuppose you're a state judge, like Conrad Rushing of the Santa Clara-based 6th Appellate Court of California. Where do you go if you need to cleave the difference between words like “blog” and “webzine”? You could seek the opinions of any number of experts from law school-affiliated “Centers of Internet and Society” in Palo Alto or in Cambridge. Or you could have asked my opinion. But perhaps citing me directly would not have been very impressive in the footnotes. So instead, the Appellate Court cited Wikipedia, where my words were published, semi-anonymously. (Until now.) by Jon GarfunkelIn looking at the attempted googlebombing campaign to support Alaa, I wanted to first consider a theory about how activism works. Activism needs to be both disruptive and constructive, offering a new narrative or a new artifact of reality for people to accept. Campaigns that are only disruptive tend to be unappreciated, or simply defined as illegal, even in this country. 2005by Jon GarfunkelThe current movie Good Night and Good Luck, about Edward R. Murrow and directed by George Clooney, has been co-produced by a group called Participant Productions. They got a good head start with setting up companion websites (using the Drupal software, no less) for their films (which also include Syriana, Murderball, and North Country), but these are mere baby steps. If they want to have an activist mission, they must have an educational mission first. And it would also be best of them to avoid the scattershot "blog" approach and instead adopt a constructive media approach. Here's my review that I also posted on their site.
by Jon GarfunkelI've been leafing through a six-year old copy of Brill's Content-- a goldmine of hindsight-foresight, grist for an upcoming Civilities piece-- and I couldn't shake loose a media prediction for 2005 from the August 1999 issue: “TV AND THE WEB WILL FINALLY CONVERGE BUT IN UNEXPECTED WAYS.” That's hedging your bets. Maybe the unexpected ways would be it would be not television, but radio, which would first convervge in a natural way with the web. And the best example of that today may be the five-month old Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon. by Jon GarfunkelOn Monday, Steve Outing of the Poynter Institute stacked up the eleven layers of citizen journalism. Stack may be the wrong word-- that's mine-- but layers isn't exactly right, if we are thinking about network communications layers. They're eleven concepts used to frame a number of concepts related to the new media called citizen journalism, with some helpful examples. But it can use a little more work. Here's my citizen additions.
by Jon GarfunkelYesterday I posted the article Fixing a Blog in Time, which was a little experiment in reading a particular blog, and trying to understand how it covered 26 different posts over a period of a little over two weeks. I chose Robert Cox's The National Debate. I did not make fully clear, with each post, how much I was mixing my initial impression of reading it with subsequent understandings. This begs a larger discussion about the tradeoffs inherent in impressionistic news. Bob sent me the following response via email this evening. I post it in full here with my brief reactions interjected. by Jon GarfunkelChecking the sequence of posts on Robert Cox's The National Debate blog over a sixteen-day period. by Jon GarfunkelHere's a summary of reactions to The New Gatekeepers series-- and some brief responses back from me. Also see reactions froom delicious as well as Technorati. February 11, 2006: The number-one ranked site for "The New Gatekeepers" is no longer this series but a thousand-word essay with that title that Tristan Louis posted last Friday. I have a lot of respect for Tristan as a guy who has contributed a lot of critical thinking and original research on Internet and media over years. And we correspond somewhat, not as much as I do with Seth, but I would have figured that he might have Googled the title, to see whether it has an active promoter of it. Dave Rogers was first to comment to Tristan's piece, sending him the link to this series. by Jon GarfunkelA response to The National Review Online.
by Jon GarfunkelA review of Internet discussions over the last two years regarding promoting women's voices in blogging. This is not a complete list, but a spotlight on some of the more well-known participants and discussions. This was part of the analysis Promoting Women Bloggers.
by Jon GarfunkelThere was another "BloJo" confab last week up here at Harvard, officially titled Whose News, but from all outward appearances, it looked like BloJo Redux. That's Blo for Bloggers and Jo for Journalists, and while we're at it. Re for Rehash, and Dux for quack quack. This time, the meeting of the minds sponsored by the Media Center at the American Press Institute and hosted at the Nieman Foundation. I was curious whether I missed anything. So, it turns out, were the attendees.
by Jon GarfunkelThere have been increasing calls for integrating bloggers as "citizen journalists" in traditional publications, based on the premise that bloggers are now making the news. This deserves further scrutiny. There's more than meets the eye here.
by Jon GarfunkelShould we care about what happens in a global forum planning the future of the world? Would we care more if our actions, or inactions, affect larger events?
by Jon GarfunkelFriday night at the Harvard Faculty Club, after the amuse-bouche ordered a bottle of wine outside the house selection, we played spin the bottle. The way you play it blogger-style is you spin the bottle, and find out which of the rotating definitions of blogs should be embraced. David Weinberger was the designated spinner for the evening, and delivered a half-hour talk over dessert. By the last third of it, he started speaking from the heart, and got to the core of what he felt blogging was all about. by Jon GarfunkelI thought I'd be able to weigh in, umm, subjectively on the blogger vs. journalist question; I'm in neither camp. by Jon GarfunkelIs it necessary for journalists to reveal their personal biases?
This comes from the folk bloggers such as Dave Winer, and, to the best of my knowledge, pushed for by folk-blogging supporters like NYU's Jay Rosen-- that journalists are just like normal people and probably have opinions about things they right about, and thus they ought to be as transparent as a blogger. I'm very skeptical about that approach.
by Jon GarfunkelA fifteen minute podcast conversation between Dave Winer and Joe Trippi sheds a little light on the Zephyr Teachout-Wall Street Journal controversy... and even less on blogger credibility. by Jon GarfunkelWhatever happened to the bulge on President Bush's back, visible in the Presidential debates? It was referred to by the usual family of -Gates: AudioGate, PrompterGate, and, my favorite, "The Battle of the Bulge." I had followed the story develop first-hand on various blogs, and saw how it played out in the national media, fading out by election day. It's returned to the news, briefly, courtesy of a Dan Kennedy column in the Phoenix. I thought I'd take another look at the story, and try to answer the question as to why the Internet blogs, for all their supposed powers, could not shake the truth out. This is part of a series on "Truth Exposure: Getting the Facts to Light."
by Jon GarfunkelWhat role did the bloggers play in taking down CBS's 60 Minutes, Dan Rather, and the "liberal media?". The conventional wisdom is that the blogosphere played a central role, and that the mainstream media missed the boat. Too bad that the defenders of the mainstream media are still missing the facts to make a solid analysis. 2004by Jon GarfunkelWhen an earthquake and a tsunami hit and cause deaths in the tens of thousands, what should a blogger do?. There's three broad things that a media publication address: honor the victims; provide relief for the survivors; consider how to mitigate the risk for the future. I have reviewed the responses from the last three days of 25 online political writers (bloggers and columnists). I wasn't expecting much, as I had picked those who cover on the American political scene (some of the "independents," as I call them, actually dabble in many subjects). But this is a global world, after all, and it is cataclysmic events like this which should bring out the best in writers. by Jon GarfunkelThe next leader of the Democratic party may be important to some people, perhaps not nearly as vital as the next Director of Homeland Security is, but it ought to have some importance to the 55 million whose were disappointed that their candidate didn't win. The news is to be found on the Internet, in the blogs, and for many party people, it's the DailyKos. "Kos" has been covering this story regularly since the end of the election, and he has most readers of any weblog.
by Jon GarfunkelThroughout the 2004 campaign, I participated in the emerging conversation of civic activists engaged in using Internet technology to drive the campaigns. Most of the software components-- mailing lists, websites, forums, blogs-- were already designed and ready to go, so what was left was to debate how to properly use it. Part of that debate was driven by what values were inherent in the network models, a discussion that I felt was high on rhetoric and short on substance. So I thought I'd take time to sort out what network models mean and how they ought to be considered.
by Jon GarfunkelI hate when liberals tell lies. I can't stand those people who slander the President, with accusations of murder and worse. Those who never let facts get in the way of a good argument. I have a good reason to harbor these feelings: I'm a liberal myself, and I want liberals to never stray from their dedication to truth.
This worries me now because of the desperate times the liberals are in. For three years the Republican Party controls the White House and both houses of Congress; this is the most conservative (in every aspect but fiscal) that the government has been in modern times. One solution, guided by the Air America radio network, is to compete with the likes of Rush and O'Reilly on the partisan airwaves. But to do that best, one might embrace generalizations, innuendo, and then finds themself down the path of falsehood.
by Jon GarfunkelDon't confuse this website with a blog. It isn't one, even though it shares similar characteristics with them, such as recent articles with lead-ins on the front page.
by Jon GarfunkelAre people devoted to organizations? Or just to organizational technology? One of the fascinating developments of the Internet has been community forums exist largely independent of real organizations. The devotion they generate should be instructive to anyone studying organizations.
by Jon GarfunkelIn October, the Government Accounting Office investigated a number of possible reforms for the cable industry, including à la carte cable pricing. As I write in my review of à la pricing, it is supported across the spectrum, by left-leaning consumer groups and by Republicans in Congress. Nonetheless, libertarian groups like the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have objected to a proposal which would introduce read competition in cable programming.
by Jon GarfunkelI had the oppurtunity this year to tutor a high school sophomore, a girl from the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. Through the METCO program, she attends Lexington High School, 16 miles up Massachussetts Avenue into leafy subrubia. I hope I taught her a little bit about critical thinking and about creative problem solving. She taught me a thing about how the next half-generation does research. No library is necessary: it's all on Google.
by Jon GarfunkelFour years ago, the once-famous political consultant Dick Morris published a book
extolling his vision of the future of politics-- Vote.com, a system of deliberation-based
Internet polling. Even if the conventional wisdom is that
Internet polls are bunk, Morris has an interest in providing some analysis to the
data in order mine some respectability out of the 55+ million "votes" in his
database. None is apparent on the vote.com website, nor does his latest book hint
at it. I thought I would take some time to do it.
by Jon GarfunkelRecently, I was curious about what sort of programming was going out on the U.S.-sponsored Arab satellite television channel, Alhurra. (I had wanted to suggest certain movies to be aired in place of news). I had a look at its website, which was rather abysmal for a network with so important a mandate. It has an email address which appears to bounce and lists no phone number. I figured that Americans ought to have some oversight of our newest outreach effort to the Arab world.
by Jon GarfunkelWhen does a petitions become actionable, that is, when people decide that it should be the popular petition of the sort that they ask others to to attach their name to? Here's a timeline of a number of directed petitions regarding prisoner treatment by U.S. forces; only recently, after the publication of the photos did they become popular petitions.
by Jon GarfunkelWatching some of the news shows this week reviewing Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, I was appalled how many of them peddled a Jew-Christian dichotomy over the film: that is, Jewish observers were portrayed as being on the offensive over anti-Semitic undertones in the film, and mostly Christian faithful defending the it, often conflating an attack on the movie as an attack on religion. I started wondering whether this pattern was exhibited elsewhere.
by Jon GarfunkelIf only he be meeting the press more often. A linguistic foray into today's Presidential interview. by Jon GarfunkelThoughts on an otherwise exciting football game. Had I not watched the halftime show, I would have skipped writing this and been happily asleep with the Patriots win. And a party mostly cleaned up. by Jon GarfunkelAn open letter to Eli and the MoveOn.org team...
by Jon GarfunkelOften I've heard "blogs" and "meta-commentary" in the same breath. I have to find some real references on this. In the meantime, I wanted to just point out that they aren't exclusive to each other. by Jon GarfunkelThe term "k-log" is supposed to represent the next wave of knowledge management. But the term will have a tougher time flying then a lead Zeppelin.
by Jon GarfunkelA curious comment by Chuck Todd on Meet the Press leads me to consider the difference between real rallies and virtual rallies.
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