Crowdsourcing the universe

Submitted by yelvington on July 16, 2007 - 5:43am

I think this is fascinating: GalaxyZoo.org is asking volunteers to look at pictures of the sky and scientifically classify entire galaxies. Spiral? Elliptical? Clockwise? Anticlockwise? It turns out the human eye and the human brain are much better at this sort of thing than any currently available technology.

But isn't science about precision? But what if they're wrong? My bet is that the underlying system relies on the establishment of a consensus.

Adding or subtracting?

Submitted by yelvington on July 14, 2007 - 10:27am

I have long believed that the mind is not to be found between the ears, but rather in the sum of our interactions with our environment. In a sense, we are what we do and who we know (so be careful what you do and who you know).

Technology extends and expands our reach, and therefore our minds. Tools shape the user. Marshall McLuhan famously said the media are an extension of our central nervous systems.

Back from the far side of the world

Submitted by yelvington on July 12, 2007 - 3:41pm

I'm back from nearly two weeks on the far side of the world: southeast Asia.

Being a lazy blogger, I sat back and didn't bother blogging from the Ifra citizen media workshop last week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Kevin Anderson and Robb Montgomery were singing, dancing, spinning plates, shooting videos and live-blogging like mad. I took it easy.

The sports power struggle

Submitted by yelvington on June 26, 2007 - 9:45am

Writing for followthemedia.com, Philip Stone has a good roundup of the blooming power struggle between sports sanctioning organizations and the media.

At the other end of the spectrum, Steve Klein notes that the National Hockey League is setting up a "blog box" -- a special area for live bloggers -- at some of its venues.

What's going on? Is the NHL enlightened and the rest of the sports world stuck in the dark ages?

Stop shoveling, start building

Submitted by yelvington on June 20, 2007 - 12:46pm

Every day, millions of pieces of information stream through the newsrooms of every newspaper in the world.

Some of them land on paper, to be quickly discarded or recycled. Some of them land on websites where they're quickly shoved aside by newer information. Yesterday's information is relegated to poorly searchable archives.

Very little is put to good long-term use.

Newspapers should be the experts on their communities, but the typical newspaper website provides almost no useful background information.

Some questions and answers about citizen media

Submitted by yelvington on June 19, 2007 - 11:30am

An editor for Ifra's magazine, Newspaper Techniques, interviewed me via email. Here's my response:

How can newspapers implement community sites?

I think the first step is to recognize the nature of community, and the constructive role played by journalism.

We typically don't do that. We typically think our job begins and ends with "covering the news," and we don't think carefully enough about what effects we have in the community.