So you hand out a bunch of disposable cameras with stickers on them. The stickers say “take a picture, pass the camera on, mail it here when it’s out of film.”
Category: General
N is another evil Flash game. It’s sort of an action platformer physics simulation. I like it a whole lot.
I will be discussion leader for a session at BloggerCon that we are tentatively calling “What is Journalism? And What Can Weblogs Do About it?”
If you plan to attend, (see Dave Winer’s invitation) or follow along by webcast, or if you just have an interest in the subject, here are background notes, some distinctions that might usefully be drawn before discussion starts, and an initial list of questions for the group. There will be no lecture, no speeches, no panel. Dave’s philosophy at BloggerCon (and I agree with it) is that the people in the room are the panel. Keep that in mind as you read this. If you show up, you are a participant. It helps to be on the same page as others, and that’s the purpose of this post.
This post is expanded from a comment I posted in response. I don’t usually do that, but given my earlier curt dismissal of the question I felt like I ought to make amends.
The question that comes to my mind is “What tools do traditional journalists have available to them that bloggers do not, and how can bloggers get those tools?”
Phil Wolfe asks, in the comment section of Jay’s thread, “When should the press director replace a camera man, photographer, or a print, TV or radio reporter with a blogger?”
I think that implies one answer: “traditional journalists have access.” Joshua Marshall has access because significant public figures will answer his questions. Kevin Drum had some pretty decent access during the Bush AWOL debate; did he just call Bill Burkett and ask questions? Did Burkett talk to Kevin because of Kevin’s reputation?
How do you decide which blogger gets on the bus? Does the answer to that question scale? If you make your decisions based on the most popular bloggers, doesn’t that just shift the paradigm? I.e., where it was once bloggers vs. Big Media, it might easily become the A-list vs. the B-list (vs. the C-list).
What else do trad journalists have? Lexis/Nexis access helps; I can get that but it costs me money. I think it’s fair to say that the traditional journalist has better access to research tools.
What else?
Obsessive Flash game of the month: Hexic. Go, waste time. It’s from the guy who invented Tetris.
Al Giordano, who has been there and done that, explains how press protection works. This is a post that a lot of bloggers should read, because Giordano went through a libel lawsuit focusing on his online news site and won. He knows exactly what he’s talking about.
He’s also trying out an interesting experiment involving blogs and investigative journalism. I’ll be keeping an eye on it; he’s been publishing online for quite a while now, and is one of the more experienced people working on blog/journalism crossover.
The Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection is why one should be in the habit of saving one’s photographs. Well, if one is Charles Cushman, at least; most of us don’t have his eye. Amazing collection. (Via Electrolite.)
Midnight in New York. It’s a Quicktime full-screen panorama; I don’t know if Windows users will be able to see it, but I think so. That whole site is just chock full of goodness. Ten years from now we’ll be looking back on this like we look at ViewMasters today, I imagine.
There, that’s my unrepentant futurism for the year. Speaking of futurism, go read the best weblog post of 2004. The year’s early yet, mind you, but damn Rob is smart.
Anita Mui, one of my favorite Hong Kong stars, died today. I guess she was better known for her singing, but I really admired her acting. I first saw her in My Father Is a Hero, but she was also pretty special in Heroic Trio, Executioners, and Drunken Master II. This makes me sad.
Distributed Proofreaders is one of those cool things enabled by the Internet. Project Gutenberg has the problem that proofreading OCRed books is painfully time-consuming. So what do you do? You farm out the proofreading one page at a time.
It takes a few minutes to proofread a single page; you do five, and you’ve made a difference. Come back the next day and do five more. At the moment, Distributed Proofreaders has provided over 25% of Project Gutenberg’s 10,000 books. It’s neat. Plus I got to proof some James Branch Cabell — in fact, I just proofed the last page of The Eagle’s Shadow.
There are also teams, in the tradition of distributed processing projects. I set up Population: Too (misspelling intentional for obscure reasons), and anyone’s welcome to join. I’m fairly certain that with some steady work we could overcome both Poland and Team New Jersey, although Team Canada’s hundred thousand pages seems out of reach.
Look, I’m the most cynical guy in the world, and I can let go of all the annoyances of bad Christmas music and overcrowded stores and equitable gift-giving and so on. It’s happy day! It’s happy season!
Merry Christmas, y’all.