Word of the day: Davide. I keep seeing this guy around downtown and it makes me miss playing soccer from the time last year when I was on a team with him in an old-man league.
Davide – var. of David meaning “beloved” in Hebrew.
The view from Kaldi's on Saturday morning.
It’s May 29th in a college town on a Saturday morning, and you might expect in this time between graduation and the start of the summer semester for there to be absolutely nothing going on, but downtown has a decent amount of activity.
I love that you can walk around downtown Columbia and see the Episcopal church giving free coffee to homeless guys, and you can overhear people talking about what hours Ellis Library is open today. It just feels like home.
This summer I have the exciting chance to teach J2100 on my own. I have taught a lab section for the past two semesters, but now I am responsible for lectures, and each class period is a week’s worth. Wednesday week 1…Friday week 2…and so on every Wednesday and Friday throughout the Summer Session. It’s going to be a wild ride for the students. I hope they don’t plan on having jobs because they’ll be reporting and writing most of the time outside of class.
Let’s hope this gorgeous weather holds out and the buzz stays just as it is.
Word of the day: App-less over Hapless
Back from the dead, my Facebook profile.
Along with a few million of my closest friends (of friends), I contemplated dropping Facebook this past week. I temporarily deleted my page, but since I logged in again within two weeks, my data had been saved in a way accessible to me, and I’m resurrected. Of course Facebook would have stored my data anyway, and apps can now store my personal data as long as they damned well please.
It dawned on me about five days in that I was going to have to sit down in interviews this summer and throughout next year and say, “Yes, my research and teaching both focus on socially-networked capabilities in news, and in the newsroom. But, no, I don’t have a Facebook page.”
It would have seems ridiculous, even if I went into my soliloquy about control over personal privacy (however fleeting) and my concerns over Facebook sharing my data with several websites, friends of friends and anyone who can create a quiz application.
Mark Poepsel became a fan of “Not Inadvertently Giving Your Data to Too Many People”.
Facebook responded, well, Zuckface responded on NPR and in other venues, by pointing out that they serve 400 million people and that at any given time if a million people are mad at you, that’s just part of the game.
The recent addition of simplified privacy settings begs the question: “Why were they so needlessly difficult to manage in the first place?” The answer is most likely that you are not supposed to be aware of your lack of privacy on Facebook, and you’re not supposed to care about it.
The age-old argument that if you’re doing nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about would make sense except for the fact that a certain level of privacy is assumed by Faebook’s very nature.
You go on Facebook and you share information knowing, or expecting, that only your friends can see it (or perhaps you’re aware friends of friends can access most of your information if you bother to look into your privacy settings).
But privacy between users, mucky as it is to try to deconstruct and examine is not even the issue.
You can do nothing wrong. You can share only happy memories, good vibes and zero drunken party photos and still be screwed by Facebook because it will share your information with third parties.
So what? So what if they use your data to try to advertise to you? Isn’t that all we’re really talking about? It depends. App developers or friends might be collecting your data, including message and chat information, which are presumed to be more private than they really are. (TechCrunch Europe). And they might have reasons to gather that data about you other than to place a display ad on your profile. They could relatively easily compile lists based on political leanings, work habits and/or your online shopping tendencies that you would never expect to be made available to so many people.
I don’t care if you try to sell me a digital SLR. I do care if you snoop into my health history. Facebook probably knows more about the number of days I was sick last year and why than I can even remember. I don’t care if my wife or my best friends can figure that out, but I don’t particularly want the world to know. I also don’t want thieves to know when I’m out of town or when my car is in the shop.
So you say, “Just don’t share as much, dummy.” That argument is starting to make a lot of sense.
My best option thus far has been to drastically cut back on Facebook status updating and commenting and to read up on privacy concerns. The more I read the less safe I feel about everything: my data being collected, any health information being divulged, what my friends of friends can see, what Facebook apps can see, what third party websites can see.
I was becoming quite open with my Facebook “friends” and with Facebook itself. I was getting used to sharing quite a bit and being kind of a smartass whenever possible. Zuckface made me feel stupid for thinking that’s all I was doing.
What it comes down to is Facebook expecting me to be “radically transparent” but the company itself being anything but. I’ll quote Danah Boyd (apophenia of zephoria.org) one of the world’s experts on the subject:
If you don’t know where your data are going, and the news media have a hard time being fully aware of the issues at hand, it’s time to cut ties or at least cut back.
I have deleted (one-by-freaking-one) my Facebook apps. I rarely post status updates or post to my profile at all but to share links. In short, I’m making every effort to be as limited in my transparency as Zuckface and Facebook (as its own entity) are.
And I’m waiting for someone to get it right, so I can jump the train at the next social-networking boomtown.
If ever there was a time to launch a Facebook competitor, the public’s concern for privacy has created the atmosphere. Let me know if you find a better option. You can even write it on my wall. Call it the last brick.
Word of the day: Parkour
I think I tried seven times to get a parkour story on the air in Tucson because it looked incredible on YouTube, and I thought it would make a good visual story. That never happened, but the last contestant on So You Think You Can Dance is a parkour practitioner.
The formula for general contest shows, as opposed to those with a set number of participants (e.g. The Apprentice), including American Idol, So You Think You Can Dance, America’s Got Talent, seems to be good contestant then bad, then weird. They may not always be arranged that way, but 1 part “good” to 1 part “bad” to 1 part “weird” seems to stand, at least from a very basic, anecdotal content analysis.
It’s not a spaghetti western, but there does seem to be a Mexican standoff in every reality show. I have no idea what the implications are for viewers except maybe that in our culture, there are different ways to gain attention. If attention = success, good, bad and weird work. Usually in these shows, talent matriculates, that is, until the voting begins. Then again, I have to trust voting for reality stars. If I’m not sure people are smart enough to pick their favorite dancers or singing idols, what does that say about my faith in Democracy?
Multisource political news, world news, and entertainment news analysis by Newsy.com
One escape in this past semester has been to watch LOST on Tuesday nights with Gaby and usually with my colleague Seth.
We had seen season one and a few of the summary episodes, the ones the producers said were important to the central plot.
Admittedly, I don’t have a deep knowledge of the show or the myriad questions it raised, but even I wasn’t satisfied by the finale. Philosophers and writers of great literature have the gall to offer a best guess, to raise the questions they feel are the most important and then to try to answer them as best as they can with evidence or at least with references to previous philosophers, writers, orators.
I think LOST raised dozens of serious philosophical questions and in the end settled on a simplistic response: relationships matter most, with preference to romantic relationships, (mostly white, upper-middle class non-gay, BTW).
So, here’s my take on the alternate reality – what I call the “Islands in the Stream” reality.
I took the alternate reality to be Heaven, or a heaven of the mind – if you could make the best world for yourself, what would you be? Would you still be connected to these people who died in a plane crash with you? Miles and Sawyer would be detectives, Faraday a pianist, Jack a father, Kate an escapee, Desmond and Penny together. I guess the idea is that you find heaven through relationships and human connection rather than a single, selected and selective dogma. Of course, that belief in and of itself – that through romantic love or through friendship heaven can be found is itself a dogma, a hope turned into belief.
I was disappointed that the show made scientific references, philosophical references and claims and then wrapped it all up in a couple of glowing light deus ex machinas.
Maybe there are some answers I missed.
Skoler and I presented a rough (ROUGH) idea of the cycle of open source production, value addition and profit.
Help me think of how the cycle might work for journalism.
Here’s the path, as best as I can briefly explain it for open source operating system development as it works for Red Hat (RHT).
1. Community of contributors – In this case, the community is a group of computer programmers, hackers, IT managers and youngsters who contribute chunks of code called packages to Linux. Red Hat sponsors one Linux build or “distribution” called Fedora. Every six months, a new Fedora is released. It’s free for everyone. It is meant to compete with Windows and OSX. It works well with Open Office and Firefox and tons of other open source software to do most of the things your PC can do.
2. Red Hat company – The community, by helping develop Linux, especially those who are part of the Fedora Project, essentially works for Red Hat for free. Red Hat contributes quite a bit of its own content to the final distribution of Fedora, but they couldn’t do it without the Linux contributors. As a company, Red Hat is quite profitable, and what it really does is add to, test and support Fedora and then develop it into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat also produces and supports JBOSS, a middleware product. Middleware connects databases, servers, operating systems and applications. Red Hat bought out a middleware system and made the license public in order to create the same cycle. At any rate, Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs business computers, and the company makes a lot of money selling subscriptions to support it.
3. The product – Red Hat Enterprise Linux is primarily sold to businesses who need stable operating systems for keeping track of inventories, sales, web operations, you name it, even military tasking. Red Hat sells SUPPORT for these products in the form of subscriptions. This is essentially insurance that your system won’t crash or that you can get it back up quickly if it does. Different levels of support cost more and bring more availability, but there is always an unlimited number of support tickets you can start if need be. Mostly, you’re paying to have someone on the line when you call.
4. Return to the community – Red Hat organizes meetups all over the world for the Fedora Community and for Red Hat and other Linux fans, such as FOSDEM. Red Hat provides jobs for some programmers who show talent while working on the Fedora Project. The experience looks good for college entrance and on resumes. Red Hat also sets up space online to discuss and share developments in Fedora’s version of Linux, and it distributes Fedora for free to anyone who wants it. It’s not the only Linux in the world, but it is one of the most popular for PC users. For business, it is starting to carve out a market share and competes technologically with companies 10 times its size.
SO, what’s our community of contributors? What’s the company going to look like? What’s our product really going to be? How can we give back to the community of people who provide us with content?
I know you have some ideas. Think aloud, please!
Teh Hurt – The Hurt Locker Wins Best Picture as Newspapers Eat Financial IEDs
There’s some sad irony in a film based on good journalism taking Best Picture at this year’s Oscars when journalism is in such steep decline.
Maybe it’s a ray of hope that good journalism is still getting done, but maybe it is a vestige of a time quickly passing when companies spent real money doing journalism.
The good: This was the lowest-grossing Best Picture Oscar winner of all time, which means people thought enough of it to vote for it over Avatar, the highest-grossing MOVIE of all time.
The bad: many people are only now deciding to go see this film about the war we think we know so much about. Our ability to distinguish between hearing about and knowing about seems to have diminished.
Here’s to being grateful for our warriors. Here’s to bringing them home safe.
Here’s to Mark Boal, who wrote something true about what he saw, although The Hurt Locker is a work of fiction, ultimately.
Here’s to Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman to win Best Director.
I wanted to share this story with people who are not friends on Facebook. Yes I did link to it on F-book, but I also sent this link out to a couple of professors.
Not sure if the regular link would last, I decided to include a permalink on my blog.
As the name suggests, the link is “permanent” and will remain active even after the story is archived by The New York Times.
Just yesterday, we were studying binding and bridging social capital. Which is it in this story of Jan Baalsrud?
The original article is by David Brooks, an interesting moderate conservative thinker I find myself agreeing with from time to time.
David Brooks. Apparently he got new glasses in the five years since this photo was taken.
Word of the day: Max Spevack
Ok, so I’m out of my depth when it comes to discussing open source software. Perhaps I am more in awe of the software concept than the open source one. Open source makes sense to me. I think it carries the same ideals as Democracy. When it comes to software, I don’t know much.
At any rate, if anyone has heard of Max Spevack, he has been associated with Red Hat for more than five years, and now he’s managing Red Hat’s community architecture team.
It’s funny because he was in charge of Fedora for two years, and I recently had a lot of trouble trying to port a free Linux video editor over to my mac. Developer tools, mac ports, terminal commands, and I couldn’t get the app to run. That’s not funny. I just realized.
But, it makes me appreciate the level of love/trust/something people must have for Fedora to develop software for themselves and for the community.
I came to interview Max Spevack because I work for Donald W. Reynolds Research Fellow Michael Skoler. Skoler is interested in how some companies make money by adding value to stuff that is otherwise free. Fedora is what you might call a desktop version of Linux, an open source operating system.
Here’s a preview of an article Michael and I are writing for RJI, hopefully for one of the journalism reviews.
The following is part of a working draft. Cite and link if you share.
- Fedora is a community and a version of Linux. You know: “I’m a Mac.” “I’m a PC.” “I’m a Fedora/linux/releases/12″
- Fedora the operating system is made of a few hundred software packages. Really, all operating systems are made up of smaller packages. Really, all software programs are made of smaller packages of code that make things work. Operating systems…well, a Dell is a bunch of computer hardware. Windows is an operating system. Word is an app. You are a user. Just say maybe.
- Fedora is a version of Linux. Fedora 12=Linux. Snow Leopard = Mac OS X. Windows 7 = Windows. Some of us aren’t so creative.
- Every six or eight months, there are enough updates to warrant releasing a new version of Fedora. In a way, a new version of your OS comes out just about as often, but it comes out in service packs or in ferocious felines releases.
- Every 2.67 years, a version of Fedora with almost all of the kinks worked out is developed as Linux Enterprise. William Shatner flies to Raleigh, North Carolina where Wil Wheaton is waiting, and…
- Enterprise Linux is Linux for business. It’s bigger, better Fedora, hence they drop the hat reference and instead imply it will boldly go where no ___ has gone before. I’m not gonna get into that debate.
- Enterprise Linux is not going to crash as often. You’re not going to be able to update it as often, but you’re not going to need to because it’s going to run business computers that are usually managed by people who majored in that sort of thing. Anyway, they can live without constant updates if it means a more stable system.
- If your version of MS Word crashes because you put too many 10MB photos in the same file, it might make you have to stay up late to get your art history paper done, but you’ll live.
- Enterprise Linux can run massive applications that take orders or process funds or manage inventory. You get the idea. As I said, kind of out of my depth.
- Enterprise Linux can’t afford to crash, and oh, if there is a problem you can call people at Red Hat and they’ll help you fix it, which is a huge part of what people pay for because many of the men and women who run these systems could figure out how to download, install and manage a fairly stable Linux system on their own if they really wanted to. Of course, they might not be able to trust a free version to run 10 servers. But whatever they’re doing with their computers, they need an operating system to run it, and they need it to be stable, and they need tech support. With some versions of Linux you are guaranteed to be no more than one step removed from the people who actually compose code.
- They train their tech support well, and in many cases there is support for people who use Linux alongside proprietary manufacturers’ stuff.
- So, bad jokes and computer info aside, what does this mean for journalism?
- Red Hat takes a free product that people are constantly working on for various reasons. I’ll go into those in Michael’s and my brownbag presentation, and we’ll both be blogging and writing about it more later.
- So, Red Hat takes something free and verifies it. At some point, they stop making major changes, put it under a name you can trust and sell it. Sound familiar?
- It sounds a lot like news, but there are differences. How’s your newspaper or TV station’s customer service?
- When was the last time your newspaper/agency advocated for one or more members of the community?
- When was the last time you threw them a party, invited them to a developers’ conference, or set up a website just so that they had a place to contribute to you?
- Remember, packages make up Fedora. They aren’t relegated to “myFedora” while the real programmers continue producing the next greatest OS.
- What is your newspaper/agency doing to build community and to build demand for your product, not just for your newspaper but for verified current events information in general? What are you doing to distinguish your product from entertainment, gossip? You had better bet there are subpar packages that don’t make it into Fedora. I’m not going to go to Max and ask about that right off the bat, but you get enough genius programmers at enough computers and one of them is bound to write an ILOVEYOU to Melissa Sasser.
- At the user contribution stage, a package isn’t perfect. Hopefully it’s on its way to verified, but that’s why Red Hat has its own tests. Junk packages shouldn’t make it into Fedora. They really shouldn’t make it into Enterprise Linux. Open source is enabled only by open structure, but you don’t have to take everything out there and highlight it in what YOU produce. You have to trust the community to recognize the different between the OS you build and the bunch of packages out there floating around that will, in a manner of speaking, always be there.
- Oh yeah one more thing, people who write packages hope to get jobs at Red Hat or get into college or get another job based on the portfolio they’re building. Just another tasty morsel.
- Now, there’s a major major kink I’m trying to work out:
- An OS serves a purpose that is easy to recognize. If you download the disk image and install Fedora, you have an operating system. Essential apps including word processing and web browsing come with the OS or are very easy to get. In fact, adding new software is usually a matter of typing a command in a terminal window. It’s not a matter of hearing about a website, searching for it, downloading the file, installing it, hoping it doesn’t have a keylogger getting footloose and fancy free with your SSN. It’s quicker than all of that, and really it works if you merely know how to write a sentence.
- One thing I learned. The worst that can usually happen in terminal is you send an unrecognized command. I mean I guess you could look up commands that destroy stuff and enter them, but you probably aren’t going to type anything in terminal that will really screw up your computer. On the other hand, I once trashed my system folder in OS X thinking it was a carbon copy. That cost me two weeks of reinstalling everything from scratch. This was a month AFTER I turned in my master’s thesis, which is both a relief and kind of scary if you think about what that says about my education and me.
- Ok, so operating systems are valuable in an obvious way, and they are complete packages that take months to build-not daily products. Maybe news isn’t valuable in the way an OS is. Once I get my news, what am I supposed to do with it?
- Wait for it…wait for it…A newspaper should be a life operating system. Within its platform, you should be able to go to CityHall.app and learn about candidates, development issues, and what time was that parade again? “YourWork”.app should exist for employers of more than two people. “YourKid’sSchool”.app should tell you about upcoming events, student success stories, student-teacher ratios, Math and language scores (I guess if that’s important to you). How was their basketball team this year? Undefeated? You don’t say!
- This kind of thing would work if you could build a nice GUI over the database technology currently being implemented at the Missourian.
- It only works if it’s interactive.
- A community of users will build packages for those apps.
- Some will build packages for the OS itself, if you think enough of them to allow it.
- At some point, you’ve got to find a way to deliver a premium package of business, real estate, classifieds (do it anyway, even if Craig’s isn’t going anywhere), schools, health, etc. It’s not an online magazine. Stop thinking in ink. It’s a premium version of the same OS. It’s like free surveys up to 30 responses, but if you’re really doing research, you need a subscription.
- You’ve got to open up and let users in. You’ve got to let them decide at various stages what’s important and what’s accurate. You have to live with varying levels of acceptable accuracy and functionality.
- There’s one more thing Red Hat does that is important for this conversation. It will buy out proprietary software and make it open source so that its community can have a look under the hood and see what they can do with it. When was the last time you spent $400 million on something and then gave it all away, not counting your building and your market cap, J-boss?
- The programmers who build packages for Fedora are trusted, but of course they need verification of the info they themselves provide. Amongst themselves, they might get 3000-4000 tests on a given software package. Red Hat will do their laundry, send it through 25,000 tests. Remember it can’t cost anything to be a user/contributor. Not everyone in your community is your customer. They still belong in your community.
- Just as Red Hat writes software tests. Journalists have been writing news verification tests for 100 years. Duh.
- You can see how info about the next round of parent-teacher conferences could stay in the school’s app for in-house concerns and at the same time could work as a tiny part of an app on a newspaper life operating system platform. The person writing your package (typing it into an interactive online calendar or whatever) doesn’t necessarily care if you use it. They might not read the paper site all week. Not if they’re a teacher with 40 parents to look forward to. But, as a user, they might still go to your site to update their app if you run a good site and make it easy for them and if they know parents will be using the same site. If we don’t do it, AOL will, 4free.
- It should be as easy for you to contribute to and build your community news app as it is for an 8-year-old kid in the Columbia Public Library to build a farm on Facebook.
- This structure makes sense as a way for newspapers to build value around free content. It will work and it will work soon if we can repurpose our products, rebrand and for the love of God don’t go behind the wall.
- Bureaucracy is so 20th Century.
Academia seems to be about finding the right conversation, getting involved in that conversation in a strong way, finding a way to push theory and practice forward, and trying not to say anything stupid, although bad guesses have to be a part of research. I think I’m finding the conversation into which my research agenda fits. It’s funny to think I’ve been in grad school for four years and in the J-doc program for two years, and I’m just now figuring it out. Then again, this is about when it should happen–a year before my dissertation is due.
What’s on my mind: Student writing. Looking at student papers kind of got me down over the past couple of weeks. I made an effort to focus on grammar a little more this semester, but I don’t want the course to turn into the English major’s requisite grammar course, which was fun, but it was a three-hour class. I wanted it to be a quick refresher, but enough of them are having trouble with parts of speech I don’t know where to begin. I got into a Facebook discussion about this in the wrong forum. Sorry, Cyndi. Anyway, student writing still bugging me because that’s the starting point for anything multimedia any of them are going to do.
Inverted Pyramid/Superman/Mothership Connection
I’m looking at doing a case study on a local news website, and I just got into a conversation today with the first site publisher who agreed to work with me. I don’t know if I’m going to work solely with this site or with this site and another, but I sure as hell am going to talk to him for a paper that needs to be finished in six weeks.
Two papers, about eight weeks for both of them, and I might be well on the way to my dissertation. I’m going to the paper in my social movements class to establish the conversation and get a literature review out of the way. This should also get some of the work for comprehensive exams out of the way. I can hope, at least.
The other paper is for a course in collective action, and I am going to look at a community news website as a collective.
Always at risk of saying too much too soon, let me leave it at this. It’s going to seem obvious, but don’t worry. I’m sure I’ll find a way to make it sufficiently complicated to earn my genius certificate: We may be entering a time where it will be incredibly difficult to make money in a community without giving a shit about the people who live there. The old model is one of scale. I’m not sure it’s entirely worth saving, except for one major fact: the institutions journalism has had to face in the past 234 years have always been powerful and broad-reaching.
Ben Franklin started with 90 subscribers.
There’s nothing that says community sites can’t create networks and sell advertising on the larger scale. Boards of citizen publishers could grow in power, but in order for power to be derived from people, you have to maintain contact with people at all times. That’s what it’s sounding like so far. We’ll see if I still think so in a year.
