Al Jazeera's citizen journalism project

Submitted by yelvington on November 26, 2008 - 8:12am

Mohamed Nanabhay's new-media crew at Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based Arabic satellite TV network, has launched a citizen-journalism upload portal, seeking eyewitness news reports from its vast international audience.

This is another of the many times when I wish I had fluency in a foreign language so I could follow the unfolding of the project. Conventional journalism is difficult enough amid the complex tensions of the Arabic-speaking world. Al-Jazeera will have quite a challenge protecting itself from fraud and manipulation.

Observation-based vs. active harvesting of human intelligence

Submitted by yelvington on November 21, 2008 - 1:41pm

I tripped over a reference to "artificial intelligence" the other day. I guess I tripped because it's not a term I hear very much any more. Maybe it's because I hang around with a lot of geeky people, but it seems quaint and maybe a little pretentious.

Instead, I hear about a lot of very specific techniques: Bayesian networks, collaborative filtering and the slope-one algorithm. I guess those fall under the "artificial intelligence" umbrella, but often it's really a matter of harvesting human intelligence and then acting on the results.

No editions, please

Submitted by yelvington on November 20, 2008 - 9:58am

While we're treading water pending the rollout of our Drupal-based site management project, I thought it might be worth mentioning some of the principles and assumptions behind it. Here's one: No editions, please.

I've seen developers put a great deal of effort into creating Web content managment systems that are intended to reflect the edition structure -- daily, weekly, monthly, whatever -- of a legacy (print) product.

Don't do it. We live in a 24x7 world. The Internet is always on. Information should be available when it makes sense.

One more reason why feds won't bail out newspapers

Submitted by yelvington on November 19, 2008 - 8:59pm

Newsosaur Alan Mutter lists a series of reasons why newspapers won't see any of the bailout money that's being passed around by the Treasury. Here's one more: Diversity in media ownership is one of the incoming Obama administration's agenda items, and consolidation of ownership -- generally funded by heavy borrowing -- is very much a part of the newspaper industry's problem. New-media folk don't like to admit it, but it's not all about the Internet. We have an ownership crisis.

Beware those derivative numbers

Submitted by yelvington on November 19, 2008 - 8:37pm

Editor and Publisher reports  'Time Spent' at Top Sites Still Declining." This is another case where numbers can fool you.The Nielsen Online data "tracks the average time spent per person at a site during October." As the story notes, unique users "soared.""Average time spent" is calculated by dividing the total online time by the number of unique visitors.

A slight delay

Submitted by yelvington on November 18, 2008 - 11:37am

Our project to relaunch Jacksonville.com on a new Drupal-based site management system has run into a slight delay that primarily involves integration with external, vendor-supplied systems. This is particularly frustrating because it pushes us into the Thanksgiving holiday, when nobody ever gets anything done. Instead of a public launch, we're going to slowly bring some selected external users on board over the next week or so. I'll post a link when I can.

Painted into a corner by success

Submitted by yelvington on November 13, 2008 - 8:58am

I caught a bit of Thomas Friedman on the TV this morning, opining about what's wrong with General Motors and whether/how the government should respond. For those who haven't been following the story, the "heartbeat of America" is one thump away from bankruptcy and, as Mark Potts points out, worth less than half as much as the Washington Post Company.

Maybe these are the best days for journalism

Submitted by yelvington on November 9, 2008 - 10:09am

One night last week I was having dinner in a Jacksonville, Fla., restaurant. At the table next to me, a Joe the Plumber clone was ranting about how terrible and biased the media had been during the campaign. And I'll confess I had an urge to whack his neatly shaved ditto head.

What's the matter with you? Has your brain gone soft? You have access today to the biggest and the broadest set of media choices in human history. You have it way better than you deserve, you knuckle-dragging skinhead. Kwitcherbitchin and enjoy it ... while it lasts.