One Good Move offers QT and a transcript to The Daily Show on the Guckert/Gannon scandal, and Stephen Cobert a la "Ted Hitler" discusses what "real journalism" is about. I know I've said it before: Jon Stewart for President!
Lifted whole from Robert Paterson's Weblog: Tsunamis - Tipping Blogs into the mainstream?.
Tsunamis - Tipping Blogs into the mainstream?
From AP today
"New York — Readership of online journals known as blogs grew
significantly in 2004, driven by increased awareness of them during the
presidential campaign and other major news events, according to a study
released Sunday.Twenty-seven percent of online adults in the United States said in November they read blogs, compared with 17 percent in a February survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Blogs that cover the tsunami disaster and relief efforts are bound to boost readership further, said Lee Rainie, the project's director.
"The tsunami is one of those cataclysmic news moments where lots of people's perceptions change," Rainie said. "Awareness of blogs will grow dramatically. There's so much attention to the coverage on blogs and Web sites and first-person video as primary news sources."
In the past week, blogs have shared information on giving money and finding missing family members, and several posted first-person narratives and photos from the affected areas. The web of links that are fundamental to blogs made it possible to quickly disseminate information that otherwise would have remained obscure."
Johhnie Moore today quotes from the Flamingo Project which uses the metaphor of how Flamingoes tip the group into migration.
An ecologist studying flamingos on Kenya ’s Lake Nakuru has noticed an interesting phenomenon. Every year, when the time comes for migration, a few flamingos start the process by taking off from the lake. Since none of the others take any notice, they soon turn round and come back.
The next day they try again. This time a few others straggle along with them but, again, the vast majority just carry on with business as usual, so the pioneers return to the lake. This trend continues for a few days. Each time a few more birds join in but, since the thousands of others still take no notice, the migration plan is aborted.
Finally, one day, the same few birds take off again. This time however, the tiny increment to their number - maybe just one extra flamingo - is enough to tip the balance. The whole flock takes flight. The migration begins.
27% of online adults is way beyond the Early Adopters and tells us that we are on our way to become a major system. Lead articles in Fortune and Time nudge blogging over the edge in terms of mainstream notice.
The migration has begun folks.
Photo from The Flamingos and Other Animals of the Rift Valley, Ray Chisholm
Articles from 2003-2003 about blogging. Both in different ways point to blogs as the seed crystal around which relationships and communities form.
Tom Coates: plasticbag.org | weblog | (Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything....
"Before the world of the weblog was the time of the homepage. Back before we knew any better, it was the homepage that was going to tranform the world. Everyone was going to have them. They were going to democratise publishing. Together we thought we were going to change the world. But we didn't.. "
But maybe we did... There's not a lot of difference between weblogs and homepages in some respects. Both are spaces to put written content online, for one. But the fact that homepages had no sense of standard structure, required manual updating, were unbound from time and were resolutely non-discursive meant that they were static, lumpen. At their best they became monolithic tomes - bunkers for content, guides updated haphazardly that infinitesimally accrete "content". In terms of the distribution of the word, the homepage was like a "Time Out Guide to {your name here}". The simple addition of structure and mechanisms for ease of publishing have made the comparable form of expression on weblogs so fluid and quick that it borders on speech. In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us - through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear. [emphasis added]
And this is the big leap forward - this is where the value of weblogs lies in the newly amateurised world. This flexibility of publishing creates a fluid and living form of self-representation, the 'homepage (as a place)' has become the 'weblog (as a person)' that can articulate a voice. And when there are a multiplicity of voices in space, then the possibility arises of conversations. And where there is conversation there is the sharing of information. And conversation about what? Well everything from music and movies and animation and medical information.
Weblogs are becoming the bridge between the individual and the community in cyberspace - a place where one can self-publicise and self-describe but also learn, debate and engage in community. In other words, weblogs are not only a representative sample of mass amateurisation, they're becoming enmeshed in the very structures of information-retrieval, community interaction and media distibution themselves. Weblogs are now facilitators of mass amateurisation.They're almost becoming one of its architectures...
and Clay Shirky:
Mass amateurization is the web's normal pattern. Travelocity doesn't make everyone a travel agent. It undermines the value of being travel agent at all, by fixing the inefficiencies travel agents are paid to overcome one booking at a time.
But the vast majority of weblogs are amateur and will stay amateur, because a medium where someone can publish globally for no cost is ideal for those who do it for the love of the thing. Rather than spawning a million micro-publishing empires, weblogs are becoming a vast and diffuse cocktail party, where most address not "the masses" but a small circle of readers, usually friends and colleagues. This is mass amateurization, and it points to a world where participating in the conversation is its own reward. [emphasis added]
Digital Web Magazine - Home Alone? How Content Aggregators Change Navigation and Control of Content.
[...]What about starting from the home page?
With all these aggregators providing new places to start our searches for content, what will become of the home page? The hallowed ground of the home page is the most contested space in the history of the Web, and millions of valuable hours have been spent discussing its design and refining its content.
Whether or not it is important to users, the home page holds such a place in the minds of designers that it usually gets the top spot in the hierarchy of information. The reason for doing this is not entirely clear. It may be because home pages are the first pages to be indexed by search engines. Or perhaps everybody knows that the home page is (or should be) an index of what can be found on the site, so it becomes as good a place as any to start designing.
[...]A shift in control
Aggregators are promoting a shift in the control of content. They’re challenging the idea that we as designers control public access to information in our domains, that users must view things in the way we prescribe, and that our hierarchy is best to present our content. This change is also suggesting that we need the help of others to market our own ideas. It is plausible that another’s approach to our information may be working better than our own.
More concretely, it means that the skill set of designers and information architects will have to be augmented. In addition to the skill set that we have now and the current ways of producing IA, we’ll need to add whatever skills are necessary to get our content on rapidly changing aggregators that our audiences prefer. This includes an element of the unknown—a discovery of how we can create and organize content optimized for aggregation systems that don’t yet exist.