yelvington.com

Don't drink the mind poison, and don't believe Fox

yelvington — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 20:27:15 +0000

There was a time when American journalism was the gold standard of the world. We created the world's first journalism school. Newspapers and, later, broadcasters all over the world looked up and tried to emulate our practices. But no longer.

I've traveled the world quite a lot in the last 10-15 years. I've read local newspapers and watched TV news in places where journalism once was illegal -- Moscow, St. Petersburg, Prague, the former East Germany. Around the world I've seen the influence of the American tradition, and it is a powerful force for good.

Then came Rupert Murdoch.

We live in an open society. Usually what immigrants contribute to American culture enriches us all. But Rupert Murdoch, immigrant from Australia, has injected into American journalism a vile corruption, a willingness to abandon the truth and embrace falsehood when it's convenient and profitable.

Murdoch is a smart and ruthless businessman, and he's used his skills to create a highly successful national TV network. He's taken over newspaper after newspaper, culminating in wresting control of the Wall Street Journal from the Bancroft family. And he's put together a 24-hour cable news channel that could have been an awesome force for good ... but instead has become a source of poison pumped right into the heart of journalism and American democracy.

My disgust with Fox News is not political. I'm not offended that opinion is being mingled with facts. I'm offended that opinion is being constructed on top of fabrications, inventions, falsehoods, lies.

The most recent and most egregious example, the libelous attack on Shirley Sherrod of Athens, Georgia, is just part of a series from a pseudo-news organization that has become part of an assembly line producing mind poison.

Let me be perfectly clear. This is not about left and right. It's about right and wrong.

Here's how the assembly line works. Someone invents a lie. The lie gets passed around among liars, growing and getting momentum. Fox News then gives it a big ride into orbit. Talking points are distributed to TV hosts, TV guests, politicians and bloggers. The chorus gets louder and louder. Soon it makes no difference whether it's true or false, because the poison is so thoroughly injected into the civic conversation that permanent damage has been done -- to individuals, to organizations and institutions, and ultimately to America.

It's like Henry Ford's factory. No one person actually builds the car. Everybody just adds a bolt here, a nut there. And there are plenty of nuts.

Andrew Breitbart, the blog network operator who posted the deception in the Sherrod case, can feign innocence. Somebody else edited the video. He never saw the whole speech. Fox News can feign innocence. It just reported on the controversy. Somebody else is always at fault.

There are legitimate journalists working at Fox, trying to practice actual journalism in a corrupt vessel, but that only makes this more tragic. People, get out. Find an honorable job.

Beware the black swans

yelvington — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:57:15 +0000

When I put together my ten good-enough predictions, I didn't toss in any flying cars or Mr. Fusion generators. Everything I mentioned already exists; I'm just making reasonable guesses about adoption.

Here's what you can't predict: black swan events. A black swan event is by definition unexpected, unanticipated, rare and high-impact. A black swan event represents discontinuous change. It's so named because all swans were long believed to be white, and the discovery of black swans in Australia in the 17th century shook the scientific world.

In 1993, a lot of us believed we were on the cusp of great change in the world of media, but the form of that change was unclear. Online services were growing at mind-boggling rates.

The future seemed to belong to Compuserve, Prodigy, America Online, Delphi and similar services that were heavily recruiting traditional media companies to put their content into paid-access services. Those of us working on digital projects thought that would be the black swan for the print world.

People like Harley Manning at Prodigy and David Rollert at Ziff-Davis had grand designs for slick and beautiful applications that users would purchase and download onto their computers, gaining access to bundles of content and services for which they presumably would pay. Fearing it would miss the revolution, Microsoft poured millions into development of its own platform, codenamed Blackbird, that would change the world.

Then came the real black swan.

When nearly everyone believed these bundled services were the future, something happened to the Internet, which had been around for years as a research and educational network. The change was small but the results were huge: a general ban on commercial usage simply evaporated.

I was in Minneapolis at the time, working on an online project with a slick, downloadable app that people would pay for.

In early 1993, there was only one provider of Internet service -- a nonprofit co-op closely tied to the supercomputer technology community. By the end of 1994, there were more than 110 little entrepreneurial Internet service providers. Telnet and Gopher were replaced by Mosaic and the World Wide Web. Tripod and Geocities were enabling anyone to be a publisher.

A black swan had destroyed the world of scarcity, eliminated barriers between people and publishing, and demolished all the "content is king" plans of traditional media companies that assumed they would rule the new digital world.

Everything had changed. And here we are, some 15 years later, still trying to figure it out.

We may be on the cusp of another discontinuous change, another black swan. If so, then the more certain we are of the future, the more wrong we will be. What do smartphones and tablets mean? Disaster, if you're Microsoft. But do they create a black swan event for media companies? We can only guess.

Ten good-enough predictions about tech, media and news

yelvington — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 17:19:05 +0000

One wall of my office is covered with notes and diagrams trying to divine the future. Nobody can get it right, so I'm actually not worried about that. What's important is to generate views that are useful and helpful in planning. In that spirit, I thought I should share a few "predictions" and see what you all think. I'm thinking of the period 2015-2018. It's close enough to be real, but far enough to give the imagination some running room.

Tablet-like experiences will achieve parity with computer-like experiences. I'm counting future "smartphones" as tablet-like, not just the note/slate size, and referring to usage on the network, not simply having one in your pocket or bag. Computers with keyboards are not going away, certainly not anytime in the near future, but designing for the tactile experience of tablets and touchscreens will be at least as important as any other form of information presentation design.
Voice interfaces -- recognition and synthesis -- won't dominate but they will become a serious part of the mainstream. Piping that data through realtime translators will begin to make the Star Trek Universal Translator real. And it'll keep the gang down at the NSA amused.
Computer chips won't get much faster in clock speed. Instead, the multicore processors that emerged over the last decade will sprout more cores, shrink in size and power consumption, and push their way from the desktop down into tiny devices.
Networking costs will drop and mobile usage will soar. If you thought we had an information surplus and a lack of scarcity in 2010, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Everything really will be everywhere. McLuhan would recognize the network as an extension of the mind. Old fogeys will continue to complain about a loss of quality, how the world has gone to hell, and how you kids should get off the lawn.
Apple, Google and Amazon will be big winners. Microsoft, Yahoo and any company that behaves like a newspaper will be big losers.
Your media experience won't be tied to a device -- it'll be tied to your identity. Current state will live in the cloud and you won't know or care where the data is stored. Quit reading or listening on one device, switch to another, and pick up where you left off. Your pocket screen, tablet, 28-inch desktop display and 55-inch wall "television" are all portals into a single experience.
Radio, television and print won't go away, but they'll be pushed to the margins. Real-time "channels" will still exist and be significant as discovery venues, but they'll be in the minority in terms of usage.
All your devices will be location-aware. All your devices will recognize and network with each other without configuration hassles. All your experiences will become personalizable based on your preferences, your behaviors, your location and your current activities.
Having lost their role as discovery media, any print or print-like "newspapers" that survive will have adapted to focus on other roles, such as explanation, briefing, and entertainment.
"News" will no longer be a good label for the work done by any surviving "newsrooms," as networked word-of-mouth will have stolen nearly all of the "breaking news" function from professional journalism. Smart "editors" will focus on understanding, which they will support through facilitating and providing context, analysis, explanation and debate, and perhaps re-embrace civic action.

Revolutions are made by rule-breakers

yelvington — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:15:54 +0000

Engadget's Darren Murph has a tale of how ESPN's newsroom adopts technology:

"The iPad has been out for just over two months, yet somehow ESPN -- a massive corporation that should technically have all sorts of red tape bogging down this type of forward thinking -- has managed to not only get a setup working in its labs, but actually get the new setup working and onto shows that we're enjoying each and every day. "

This shouldn't be out of the ordinary, but it is. Corporations routinely create layers of rules and red table that keep bright people from doing new things. Rules are for stability. Revolutions are made by rule-breakers.

I'm old enough to have been around at the dawn of the personal computer revolution -- even before IBM got into it.

In the early days, sneaking a personal computer into a corporation was a radical act. Computers were huge, expensive machines surrounded by a priesthood dedicated to protecting the investment (and not so incidentally, also protecting the priesthood).

Personal computers didn't enter the workplace through the IT department. They came in through the side door. Individuals brought them in to perform calculations (using VisiCalc), word processing (using Electric Pencil) or to run amateurishly written programs (in BASIC).

When I started working in digital media at the Minneapolis Star Tribune in the mid-1990s, I had to break all sorts of rules. There was a pathetically outdated corporate standard for PCs and a terribly overpriced official vendor. The officialy blessed systems didn't meet our needs.

I broke the rules by buying computers at Best Buy and the Northgate outlet store on my personal credit card, threw out the corporate Windows 3.1 image and installed a beta version of Windows 95. This led to a great wailing and gnashing of teeth in the IT hierarchy, but I stuck with it. We had Things to Do in a Hurry, and I wasn't at all interested in the limits of "support" from the IT department. We eventually reached an accord on these issues, and the IT folks slowly came to grasp what we were doing, but to get there I had some rule-breaking to do.

Rules are there for a reason. We shouldn't forget that.

Generally, whenever you find a rule, it's because somebody did something that was spectacularly bad or stupid in the past. If you go plugging random crap into the company network you might wind up introducing a virus and accidentally deleting every image on the shared server (which happened when I was at Cox Interactive and no, it wasn't me who did it). And it's not all about technology. You might run afoul of Sarbanes-Oxley, perish the thought. You need to understand the reasons for rules, and the risks that come with breaking them.

But reasons trump rules. Revolutions are made by rule-breakers, and we need revolutions. We need revolutions even if they piss off somebody who doesn't like getting phone calls at 3 a.m. about things they never heard of and can't fix.

Just be very careful about picking your fights, line up management support before you make your moves so that you're not alone out on a limb, and make sure you can win. When revolutions end badly, it's not a pretty sight.

A whack on the head from Maslow's hammer

yelvington — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:21:36 +0000

I thought we were beyond this, but no: it seems that quite a number of people who are old enough to know better are making silly pronouncements to the effect that Tablet Is The New Print.

This calls for a mind-expanding whack on the side of the head, preferably applied with Maslow's hammer. Abraham Maslow was the psychologist famous for his "hierarchy of needs." He also was famous for saying "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." That's called Maslow's hammer, or sometimes "the law of the instrument."

If you're a designer, you tend to see the world as a series of design problems. If you're a newspaper journalist, you tend to look at the Internet and think of "online newspapers." That, by the way, was the chief product visioning error of the period from 1995 to today, an era when non-newspaper Internet companies got insanely wealthy and newspaper companies took a nosedive into the dirt.

So now we have the tablet. The iPad is not the first, but it's the first to come reasonably close to getting it right from a usability perspective, and it will lead to a new breed of devices that will supplant the personal computer for a large percentage of the population.

Old media people are really, really excited about the iPad. Many believe that it heralds a return to the form, the business model and the look, if not the feel, of printed newspapers and magazines.

This is foolish and self-defeating, as we should have learned from 15 years of operating on the Web. The Tablet Is Not The New Print. That's not how the world works.

If you're a Web person you're probably thinking: "of course, the tablet is the new Web."

It is, but a word of caution is in order. This is not the old Web on new devices. It's not even the old Web minus Flash and minus all the viruses, malware and other insanity of the fading Microsoft era. It's something far more intensely personal, more tactile, and -- for more reasons than merely Apple's failure to support multitasking -- focused.

But it's still the Web with all its interactivity and social interaction. And it's still the Web, searchable, real-time, practically infinite. It's not a restoration of the scarcity that made fortunes for print empire-builders from Hearst and Pulitzer to Rupert Murdoch.

Laying out splashy pages with InDesign and cramming them into a 40-minute downloadable iPad app might make you feel good, but it's not the future of journalism.

Four do's and three don'ts about story commenting for reporters

yelvington — Wed, 19 May 2010 16:35:22 +0000

Here are some tips for reporters about how to deal with story commenting.

Do:

Engage. Online behavior always improves when responsible adults are present.
Answer. Respond to genuine questions.
Listen. Keep an eye out for story ideas. Discover whether your reporting is informing or confusing people.
Clarify and correct. When people are confused or misinformed, post clear and accurate information. Link to authoritative sources whenever possible.

Don't:

Debate. Avoid argumentation.
Opine. Your role is to "shed light and not to master." (Extra points if you get the reference.)
Feed the trolls. Some people are best ignored.

When in doubt, consult a supervisor.

One eyewitness account of Bangkok burning

yelvington — Wed, 19 May 2010 14:08:44 +0000

Thirteen hours of Twittering by Austrian businessman @freakingcat tells an eyewitness tale of Bangkok burning in detail that generally has escaped conventional/professional journalism. I grabbed a snapshot of his posts from a long and painful Wednesday in Thailand's capital. You might wish to scroll to the bottom, and read up.

Its getting night! Tomorrow the sun will rise again! Thailand will be changed forever!
37 minutes ago via Twitterrific

freakingcat just have candle light dinner. Bangkok in darknest, it will be a very long night
about 1 hour ago via mobile web

fff
about 1 hour ago via mobile web

At khlong toei believe it or not reds still hold a meeting at their stage
about 2 hours ago via Twitterrific

It gonna be a night of horror for Thailand but there will always be a new tomorrow. Lets work together for Our future!
about 3 hours ago via Twitterrific

Tweeting with almost no battery. Freakingcat is ok. We still are in shock about what happened to Bangkok but we deal with it!
about 3 hours ago via Twitterrific

Received messages for phone interviews. Now almost iphone empty if electricity returns yes email me: freakingcat@gmail.com
about 3 hours ago via Twitterrific

To all reporters and firefighters medics soldiers and police out there...we thank you for risking your lives for everybody. Lets move forwar
about 3 hours ago via Twitterrific

I dont want to report tonight anymore about the violence and destruction th thailand. I have experienced enough today. I wish for peace !
about 3 hours ago via Twitterrific

Freakingcat prepares now for a long night without electricity. Our hearts reach out to all of you who stood by us and even offered accomodat
about 3 hours ago via Twitterrific

We fear looters might come but have blocked every door and window in our house. Our soi locked too. I thank you all for your prayers.
about 4 hours ago via Twitterrific

Freakingcat still alive. Situation more quiet now. We stay in our house and prepare for a night without electricity. Drawing last laptop ba.
about 4 hours ago via Twitterrific

Fire at electricity works still on...rama 4 is a ghoststreet. Thanks for all tweeters. We stay in our house overnighy.
about 5 hours ago via Twitterrific

Lots of firetrucks sirens heard at khlong toei
about 5 hours ago via Twitterrific

Now thaksin you got what you wanted? Bangkok is burning! Thailand is crying!
about 5 hours ago via Twitterrific

All reporters please hide somewhere inside! Reds start to attack you!
about 5 hours ago via Twitterrific

Called austrian embassy and reported our location. We try to stay in our house overnight. Please people of the world, pray for peace !
about 5 hours ago via Twitterrific

Please tweet me the emergency number of austrian embassy
about 5 hours ago via Twitterrific

We will try to stay tonight in our house and tomorrow decide where to go. Thx for all your offers to help!
about 5 hours ago via Twitterrific

Curfew at bangkok. Still huge explosions here. Announcrment of government now via loudspeakers on street
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Please if it is possible get us out from here tomorrow. We need a hotel room for 3 and cats.soi baan plai nuan. Khlong toei
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

We will evacuate tomorrow if possible. We need a hotel room for 3 people and our 3 cats please people help us!
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Got a bit of electricity from laptop. Electricityworks burns out completely. We fear wind may turn and set our house on fire
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

30 meter flames! Fire getting worst. Huge explosions!!!
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Battery almost finished. Electricity works cannot be saved. I will tweet you if i find power. Pray for bangkok! Pray!
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Rama 4 is all destroyed! I am crying!
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Firefifhters try to break open electricity gates.... Huge huge explosions all khlong toei full of smoke
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Transformator blew up!!! Insane fire at whole electricity building now....fire at kt stage
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

All windows destroyed of mrt khlong toei. Smoke took pics but cannot send. Apocalypic!!!! Hell
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Firetrucks arrive but fire out of control!!! My god!!! Mrt getting burned too
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Firetruck just beside at soi baan plai nuan cannot get out! Reds destroy everything!!!
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

My god!!! Huge fire at electricity work khlong toei just beside our house! Huge thick smoke!
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Electricity building beside our house on fire!!! Thicl smoke
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Helicopter is circling over bon kai...sporadic loud bangs...loudspeaker announcement. People heard shouting, ambulances and more bangs
about 6 hours ago via Twitterrific

Many loud bangs at khlong toei, every few seconds...loudspeaker announcement, ambulances heard
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Massive fires at chidlom bts...
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Unconformed reports that central world and paragon are burning. Ambulanes heard at khlong toei
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Many loud explosions heard now at khlong toei!!
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Rours protesters entered central world and start to burn things at 1st floor.
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Funfire bombs and firecrackers at central world plaza...even after reds surrendered reports say
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Loud bang now heard at khling toei street near stage...prob. 2 helicopters circling
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

5 red leaders turn themselves in says TAN network!!! Bangs still heard at khlong toei
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

People throw petrolbombs at stores, its reported...fights still going on in some parts of bangkok
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

More explosions reported at chidlom. I doubt that reds at khlong toei will follow nattawuds request to surrender. They are agitated
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Nattawud and jattuporn arrested!!!! Reds at khlong toei still not give up! One loud bang heard again, helicopters circling above
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Siam and central world reported cleared! Red leaders urge reds to surrender
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Rockets fired from near kt stage...estimated 600 ppl there..saw at least 10 black masked guys passing by towards stage. Now our soi locked
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Crowd at khling toei stage screaming all together...area under expressway completelu empty reds confirm sniper
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Locals say now sniper at mrt khling toei area so thats why everyone leaving towarfs stage...scary not one stays back!
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Many guys with black facemasks moving by...threaten me not to take pic and put phone down. Run to safety into our soi
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Motorbikes warn people to move away from under expressway. All run now
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Area under expressway almost free of people, tyres in front of lumpini tower smoking not burning
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Now quiet at khlong toei so i take a peek... Many agitated reds in front of stage...maybe 400
about 7 hours ago via Twitterrific

Can hear from my house at khlong toei crowd shouting angrily. I am scared to go out now! Explosions stopped.
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Fire outside sheraton/westin hotels ashoke/sukhumvit reported
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

@vaitor you are a hero, please watch out!!! Dont get shot!
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

RT @Tonymaggs: @freakingcat download echofon free. It allows retweets. You're a star, best I'm following...:-)
about 8 hours ago via API

Cannot download another program on iphone to re-tweet phone internet connection too slow but thanks guys for advise!!!
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Udon thani city hall on fire! Protesters torch them!
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

7 read leaders to surrender!! Isnt that great news guys???? Lets hope this is true and fighting will stop soon!!!
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Now huge loud bang heard at khlong toei! Dont get out on the streets!!! Helicopters still hovering above
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Ch3 reports red shirts took over century park hotel
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Continuous gunshots at expressway khlong toei, mrt area. Its heating up here. Constants small explosions. Many more gunshots! Now big expl
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Loudspeaker annoyncements heard now by reds at khlong toei near expressway, helicopters, many gunshots now!!!!
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Khling toei many explosions!! Shots very near by MRT !!! Its dangerous!! Get out from there!!!
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Channel 9 jatuporn wants to surrender!!!
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Senator lertrat told tv thay red leader want to surrender!!
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Iphone program doesnt allow me to re-tweet messages,so i type them from what infos i get from heroes out there. Only khlong toei first hand
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Explosions many heard at khling toei...maybe firecrackers maybe gunshots
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Urgent! Rumours that arisman was arrested...awaiting confirmation
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Big loud bang heard now at Khlong Toei. Another one!!!! loud! Helicopters again above
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

Just bern told that reds at Khling toei stage are mobilizing and are moving towards lumphini . 6 min ago!
about 8 hours ago via Twitterrific

@vaitor spoke of din deng area sorry forgot to mention
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Warning from hero @vaitor reporters hide cameras and take off green armband!!!! Danger crowd Angry!!!
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

@JSeymour026 i can hear and saw helicopters 10 min ago above soi baan plai nuan...now only hear them at distance
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific in reply to JSeymour026

About 100 reds under expressway khlong toei...angry....helicopters circling above
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Gunshots and explosions heard at Khlong Toei. Helicopters circling again
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Police hospital confirms death of italien journalist
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Thai media report soldiers slowly advance towards stage...few protesters there
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Reds putting gas canisters on road near pathum wan to stop advance of troops
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Khon kaen redshirts storm city hall...snipers shoot at firefighters on rama4 soi ngam dupli
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

@vaitor reports 2 foreign reporters shot 2 more bodies found
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Great @vaitor is fine he is near stage now...soldiers moving forward
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

@BKKsmiles5 GREAT !!!! Please RT number to all and send message out to catch those bastards who have brought us so much suffering
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific in reply to BKKsmiles5

Hope @vaitor is fine! That young guy is so brave and his work is fantastic
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Troops seize lumphini around statue about to approach ratchprasong
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Please hunt down those red shirt leaders! They are terrorists!!!!
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

025511515 if you see one of the red shirt leaders who fled, call this number to catch those bastards
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

To my followers: cannot retweet messages now. Please follow others like @georgebkk @tulsathit @vaitor
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Message to dan river: show some guts man! You get paid for doing your job! So start doing it!!!! Non red local thais are upset about you!!!
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Update...flames reaching up to overpasd at rama 4 in front of lumphini tower 10 meters!!!
about 9 hours ago via Twitterrific

Met crazy farang who wants to walk home now from rama 4 khling toei to sathorn
about 10 hours ago via Twitterrific

Reds extremely agressive at Khong toei prevent me from getting near stage and take pictures
about 10 hours ago via Twitterrific

Maybe 800 reds now at KT stage, ready to support reds at ratcjprasong
about 10 hours ago via Twitterrific

Still smoke at bon kai! Reds on motorbikes start to leave
about 10 hours ago via Twitterrific

Urgent! Repeat! 500 reds now start grouping at KT and will storm to ratchprasong
about 10 hours ago via Twitterrific

Red told me crowd now all form a group and will try to go to ratchprasong for helping reds there to fight
about 10 hours ago via Twitterrific

Everyone running in panic away from expresdway towards stage
about 10 hours ago via Twitterrific

Mant reds on motorbikes at Khlong toei now all leaving towards stage
about 10 hours ago via Twitterrific

RT @RichardBarrow: Two bodies of civilians were found on Rachadamri Road in the protesters' encampment (Reuters)
about 10 hours ago via API

Explosion heard again at khlong toei
about 10 hours ago via Twitterrific

RT @georgebkk: "reds running around in small groups, carrying handguns, also two guys with ak47 and painted warface!" /via @vaitor
about 10 hours ago via API

RT @Journotopia: On Soi Ngam Dupli, sth of Rama 4, Fire at what looks like Chanpen restaurant. http://twitpic.com/1p1opm
about 10 hours ago via API

RT @tulsathit: RT @Dany_k: RT @BangkokDan: Reports: first signs of panic among Ratchaprasong women & children.\
about 10 hours ago via API

RT @georgebkk: NBT has the govt warning - "Not to leave your home. The fighting is on going." /via @veen_NT
about 10 hours ago via API

RT @georgebkk: 'Now at Chulalongkorn hospital. Heavy gunfire. Helicopters overhead' /via @markmackinnon
about 10 hours ago via API

Now less smoke near lumphini tower
about 10 hours ago via Twitterrific

Freakingcat has no electricity but is back safe at the house
about 10 hours ago via TweetDeck

Huge fire, some explosions at khlong toei expressway http://tweetphoto.com/23017081
about 11 hours ago via TweetDeck

RT @seacorro: #Redshirts ask reporters to leave media area at main stage.
about 13 hours ago via web

At Ratchaprasong it is full of smoke TNN reports, cannot see what Reds are doing
about 13 hours ago via web

Commenting: An ounce of leadership is worth a pound of management

yelvington — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 22:26:24 +0000

There's been a conversation under way this afternoon on Twitter about anonymous commenting and comment management. I didn't join in -- I was at a dance performance with family, and besides, I've written plenty about that topic in the past. You can Google the details.

What strikes me is that it's the wrong conversation.

I don't underestimate the importance of managing conversation. I've been around the block plenty on that subject. I started managing online conversations in 1985 (not typo, and before some of you were born).

But leadership is ever so much more important.

Across all the bulletin boards, online SIGs, email lists, Web forums, blogs, comments, chat rooms and whatnot, there has been one consistent thread leading to success, and that's leadership.

Leadership begins by establishing a shared purpose. This is where most news sites fail before they even get started. Why do you have comments? What's your agenda? Is it shared by your users? If you can't answer those questions immediately with clear points, you're screwed.

Leadership continues by demonstrating how to do it. This means modeling the behavior you want others to exhibit. I could talk about the psychology of this (put your arms behind your head in a meeting and watch what happens) but let's just point out that you can't demonstrate leadership when you're absent. And on most news sites, the inmates are running the asylum. Know-nothing crazies, haters, racists and psychopaths are demonstrating how they think it should be done, and there's no adults in the room.

Leadership doesn't substitute for management. People are not perfect, and they will sin, even when they know better. Somebody has to clean up the mess. But when there's a shared sense of purpose and a clear demonstration of what's expected, it's a much smaller mess.

Online separation? Newspapers have been there and done that

yelvington — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 16:29:34 +0000

I was reading Alan Mutter's spot-on Andreessen’s not-so-hot idea for publishers and once again ran across some comments of the "newspapers need to set up separate online operations and give them freedom" variety.

Here's the problem: It's been done, over and over. It's being done right now. It's happening in ways you don't see, and I promise you won't like the outcome.

Let's take the biggest, and least visible, part first.

For years, investors have been pulling their money out of newspaper stocks and putting it elsewhere. Much of it has gone into pure-play Internet companies like Google. That's about as separate and independent as you're going to get. Not what you meant? Like I said, you aren't liking that outcome if you find yourself working for the Bugville Daily Bugle and it's owned by a capital-starved corporation that's laying people off in order to survive. But it's how capitalism works. Money seeks returns.

The Hearst family heavily bankrolled the startup of cable broadband services back when hardly anybody believed in it. The Tribune Company, before it got itself taken over by a real estate flipper, was a key investor in America Online, which transformed online services from a niche business focused on geeks to an experience for everybody. About.com is owned by the New York Times. Cars.com, Apartments.com, HomeGain.com and HomeFinder.com are owned by a group of five newspaper companies. There are many other examples.

But if you're advocating a separate online department for the Bugville Daily Bugle, then of course that's not what you meant. It is, however, how investors and corporations look at the problem.

Then there were the separate "online division" efforts, some of them set up in vain hope of cashing in on the IPO craze. Cox Interactive, where I worked at the turn of the century, ran all the local operations for all of Cox's TV, radio, newspaper and cable Internet markets. Newhouse did something similar with Advance Internet. Knight-Ridder Digital took the local sites away from KR's newspapers.

Nobody at the Bugville Daily Bugle was happy about that. When these spinoff efforts failed and newspapers regained control of their Web operations, the usual result was a brief power struggle and a settling of vendettas, ending in the unemployment of most or all of the online staffers.

There were many cases in which local newspapers set up internal online groups that operated independently. Several years ago, a Borrell report showed a strong correlation between that organizational form and revenue performance. But it's not as simple as that. Correlation is not causation. I would argue that the organizations that used that structure had an intent that was missing from most of the newspaper industry at that time. They simply intended for their Web operations to succeed. The rest of the industry didn't really give a rat, and it showed.

But something very important has happened at most newspapers in the last few years. It started, I think, when investor Bruce Sherman kicked the legs out from under Knight-Ridder's chair. And it accelerated when the economy came crashing down. There's been a great awakening in America's newsrooms -- and a huge turnover in personnel who weren't willing or able to wake up. There are exceptions, but the newspapers I deal with are, on the whole, very different beasts than they were in the slumber years.

We don't have the luxury of hiring everyone we want, or even need. Local advertisers have radically cut their spending because they're in economic pain, too. This isn't about the "failure of newspapers." It's about the failure of banking. We have to live with the results of that.

For most U.S. daily newspapers today, confronting the world with everybody playing on the same team, using all the tools that are available makes far more sense than splitting what's left of the staff in two pieces, telling each team to ignore the other one, and then bitching about a lack of cooperation.

Why blog and comment spam isn't going away

yelvington — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:11:45 +0000

Every one of us who opens up a website to public conversation faces a daily annoyance: blog and comment spammers. Cleaning up after them becomes a morning ritual.

Google, a mix of scammers and legitimate businesses, and global economic inequities all play a role in creating a system that guarantees this problem will not go away any time soon.

The result is a mix of overt and covert spam. Overt spam is easy to spot; it's usually just a set of links to e-commerce sites, often peddling fake merchandise. Covert spam is disguised. Here's an example:

Several characteristics stand out:

It's not from a bot or a script, but was posted by a human. Registration systems and CAPTCHA challenges are pretty good at stopping the bots. After you take those measures, you're left with posts like this.
It's awkward. English is apparently not the writer's native tongue.
It's generic, not related to the content. This can be tricky, because the manual spammers have learned to cut and paste phrases from content and from other comments.
The links point to a commercial website. This is where Google comes into play. The point of this spam isn't to get your users to click. The point is to steal the reputation of your site. Google's algorithm values inbound links, especially if they are from "respected" websites that already have good Google rankings. These vultures are gaming the system to boost their Google search rankings.
It was posted at an odd early-morning hour, a tip that if you do a bit of detective work with your logfile info, you'll probably trace the posting back to India, Turkey, Romania, Russia or China.

So how does this happen? This morning I ran across a bit of spam in which a spam factory was looking to hire spammers:

I tracked these guys down. It's an IT company in India, offering to pay 5 Indian rupees -- about 11 cents in US money -- for every "ad" posted on "free classifieds" sites around the world.

But it's not just Craigslist that they're targeting; in their Frequently Asked Questions section they admit that forums and blogs are the target, too:

And they're offering a vague "special bonus" if the ads are posted "in foreign countries:"

I did a little math. The ad claims a range of 10,000 to 25,000 INR per month; that's $220 to $550. The website of this company claims up to 45,000 INR, which is about $1,000.

India has people riding around in Bentleys and Rolls-Royces, and I saw a lot of Rover and Toyota SUVs on my visit. But it also has millions living in brutal poverty and millions more barely above that.

Let's say you're a highly motivated, English-speaking college student with a few basic computer skills. How many spam ads would you have to post to live at that magical 45,000-rupee level? With a 40-hour work week, it would be nearly one ad every sixty seconds. Hard work, actually. But there are millions undoubtedly ready to try it, and if the spam factory simply fails to deliver the promised money order, there are millions more ready to try next week.

Similar conditions exist in Romania, the former Soviet countries, China and many other places around the globe.

The cash that feeds this global spam engine comes from a number of sources. In 2003, when the US housing bubble was running full steam and mortgage bankers were lining up the bad loans that set up our current economic recession, MSNBC followed the money trail of some e-mail spammers and found that it led back to "big-name companies like Ameriquest, Quicken Loans, and LoanWeb." Mortgage lead-generation fees and commissions were ultimately funding the trash in your inbox.

But there are other, more shady sources, ranging from U.S. companies selling term papers to lazy students willing to cheat, to scammers selling counterfeit Rolex watches and fake prescription drugs, technothieves pushing spyware onto your PC, and pump-and-dump stock market frauds.

The CAN-SPAM act gave the US government some tools for cracking down on email spam, and people like Alan Ralsky have been sent to prison. But the law doesn't apply to Web sites and social networks. And while the US government isn't shy about sticking its nose into other countries' business when oil is involved, you'd better not hold your breath waiting for it do something about offshore spamming.