He Shoots, He Scores: The Brave New Web

I am happy to report that after nine months at Oxford studying citizen journalism I have decided absolutely nothing.

No, that's not entirely true. I've learned a lot and arguably even formed a few opinions. (I sketched some of them out recently in a guest post at Kyle MacRae's Frontline Club blog.) But the main impression I have is of an industry--journalism--in a state of flux that is, depending on your particular outlook and constitution, either nauseating or exhilarating. Or a bit of both.

We're making the rules up as we go along. And how else would we do it? I'm reminded of James Naismith and the game he refined over years: basketball. Here's a great video re-creation of what that process may have been like. Naismith started out with peach baskets nailed to the wall rather than string nets around stiff metal hoops. The baskets still had the bottoms on them, until someone had the idea to cut them off. (Thus depriving some poor unskilled worker of a job: the ladder-climbing basketball basket-emptier.)

I know I'm stretching the analogy past the breaking point--traveling, you might say--but journalism today
probably hasn't cut the bottoms off its digital peach baskets. ("Digital Peach Basket": the new album by Moby.) That we're still finding our way is evident in two stories in today's Guardian. Reader' editor Siobhain Butterworth writes about altering, updating and correcting the paper's stories on the web. I don't completely understand the genesis of the column--something about a freelancer wanting to add material to an already-published piece--but I buy her central argument: You can't go around "invisibly" correcting/changing web stories, even if technology allows you to do just that.

Another issue is raised in a story about newspaper-sponsored blog sites. The Daily Telegraph allows anyone to start blogging under its umbrella (even me; I did it to test the process). Some 20,000 people have signed up and the Guardian points out that a few Telegraph readers have used the forum to promote the racist British National Party. What responsibility does the newspaper have? The Telegraph's Shane Richmond stirs up plenty of debate in his blog posting on that issue.

The irony is that the Guardian's Comment Is Free section is chockablock with vituperative backbiting of a most disagreeable nature. The Guardian points out that those sorts of comments are posted by readers in reaction to sanctioned bloggers and that the remarks are moderated (as are MyTelegraph's; and both sites allow readers to report posts they find beyond the pale). I suspect the Telegraph thinks this is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black.

But, see, this is us experimenting to see what works. Years from now we may look back and think it was crazy to host reader blogs, or we may wonder what all the fuss was about.

Video Killed the Internet Star
I was curious what sort of video quality my Canon compact digital camera was capable of, so I shot a couple of events this weekend. And, being the compleat digital journalist, I stuck them on YouTube. Here's some of the Summertown Street Festival (the fast-mo, slow-mo is an "arty" effect I added in iMovie):



And here's a bit of the Oxford Town & Gown 10K:




While I wouldn't want to use the camera to shoot an Indiana Jones movie, the quality's not too bad. And note that as of 9:30 this morning about a dozen people had watched each. True, that's not very many, but it's amazing that anyone watched them at all, given that I just slipped them into the great vat of YouTube content. There's probably a Long Tail point to be made here.

Stop Your Sobbing
Don't forget: "Flat Earth News's" Nick Davies, speaking in Cambridge tonight. I'll be there too.

Roger That: Observing Roger Alton

I think one of the reasons I like the British newspaper biz is because I'm not too close to it. The figures I read about--the venal owners, the embattled editors, the disgraced reporters--aren't like real people to me. They're like characters from a comic book: flawed superheroes whose exploits I can enjoy at a remove.

In contrast, I find it harder to enjoy what's happening to the news biz in the United States: the grim circulation and advertising statistics, the layoffs, the lashings of gallows humor (and, believe me, no one does gallows humor like a journalist). It's all very close. Today is being called "D-Day" at The Washington Post, the deadline by which eligible newsroom employees must decide whether to take the company's buyout offer. (Hey, let's not forget that on the real D-Day the allies started turning things around in Europe!)

With his imposing stature and large, bald cranium, Roger Alton resembles a comic book character: the braniac mastermind who remains in the futuristic HQ while his ragtag band of superheroes do battle with the forces of evil. And that, essentially, is what a newspaper editor is. Alton ran the Observer, the Guardian's Sunday sister, for nearly 10 years, before leaving at the end of 2007. He'll become editor of the Independent in July. He spoke yesterday to the Reuters Fellows, delivering a lecture entitled "Not Dead Yet."

The title echoed one given by the New York Times's Bill Keller last fall in London. An "homage," said Alton. Alton's remarks were, if anything, even more upbeat than Keller's. (My write-up for the Reuters Institute should be up on its web page soon. Click here to check. ) Yes, times are tough, said Alton, but plenty of people still buy papers and there are plenty of ways to make sure they keep buying them.

I noticed that while Alton spoke, and especially when he answered questions, he would sketch on the papers in front of him: boxes, flowcharts, sets of concentric circles. He didn't show these jottings, they were just the graphical manifestation of what was going on in his mind. Many of the best editors I've worked with have shared that illustrative trait.

But is a nimble, doodling mind and a surfeit of energy enough to turn around the anemic Independent--or any newspaper these days? Alton touched on the changes new media have wrought--bloggers! vodcasting! social networks!--but it didn't sound like his heart was in any of it. He said his changes at the Indy wouldn't be revolutionary. "I'm not cut out for that," he admitted. He said the paper too often looked like a second section and that the campaigning tone it takes on so many front-page stories can induce a sort of campaign fatigue.

Independent columnist and former Sunday Telegraph editor Dominic Lawson was the seminar's discussant (isn't that those little sachets of chemicals packed with electronics equipment?). Like Alton (and me, I suppose) he's a bit of a newsosaur. Both decried the way Fleet Street peddles its wares these days with things like free DVDs and Prince CDs. It makes news a commodity, said Lawson--which, of course, is what it's become for many people. That old holy grail--the scoop--isn't respected anymore. It can't exist in an Internet world and it never did sell papers anyway, said Lawson. (England winning at soccer is much more likely to shift copies, but those days are over, right?) The tabloids are a bit adrift since their stock and trade--puncturing taboos over sex and celebrating topless trollops--now spills for free from our PCs.

And yet, and yet.... Alton said he can't help but believe that if you went down to the corner shop in the morning and there were no newspapers, you'd want to invent something like them. What else can you crumple in anger than a newspaper, said Lawson. I could see the wheels turning in their heads, these two old Sunday editors. Running a paper is like getting the coolest toy in the world to play with, a board game that entertains with every roll of the dice. Bring down a world leader: Move ahead three spaces! Defend an expensive libel suit: Lose your turn!

Or maybe it's like chess. What I wonder is if it's now like three-dimensional chess, that game they played on "Star Trek." Can any one person keep it all in his head?

In the Time of Nick
Alton is a main character in "Flat Earth News," the Nick Davies screed about the sorry state of journalism. ("Roger Alton has never claimed to be a political animal. His style is too intense, bordering on manic, at best full of charm, at worse eye-wateringly clumsy.") Davies says that Alton and the Observer basically carried water for Tony Blair in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, parroting the government's line and getting extra chummy with Blair and his PR Rasputin, Alastair Campbell.

Alton said he hasn't read the book but he bristled at one reference he had heard about, in which he allegedly returned from lunch with the Prime Minister "full of determined support for the campaign against Saddam." "It makes me sound like a fucking infant," said Alton, who said he never had lunch with Blair.

I think it's safe to say Alton and Davies won't be having lunch together anytime soon. Said Alton: "Journalists spend a lot of time shitbagging people so it's expected that they'll get shitbagged." At least, I think that's what he said. I hadn't heard the expression "shitbagging" before and perhaps I got it wrong.

Nick Davies will be talking about "Flat Earth News" at 8 p.m. on May 19 at Wolfson College in Cambridge. Click here for details.

New Media Killing Journalism: Yes or No?

Up early and down to the Frontline Club in London Friday for a World Press Freedom Day event sponsored by UNESCO. It took the form of an “Oxford Union-style” debate. OU-style means a gimmicky sort of thing where participants must argue for or against the motion, in this case “New media is killing journalism.” Wow, killing journalism. That’s pretty severe. Whoever could they get to speak in favor of that?

How about the self-described "antichrist of Silicon Valley”? That’s what it says on Andrew Keen’s business card. I’d been wanting to meet the author of “The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture." His book is an entertaining polemic, though in the margins of my copy I kept scribbling "So what?" Also arguing for the motion was Kim Fletcher, a former editor of the Telegraph and the Independent on Sunday. Against the motion were the BBC’s Robin Lustig, host of “The World Tonight” (with a blog of his own) and Nazenin Ansari, diplomatic editor of Kayhan (London), a weekly Persian language newspaper.

Keen spoke first. A bit of a slow starter, one of the points he wanted to make was that journalism is a collection of facts “for which one is paid.” Web 2.0 threatens that. People no longer put a premium on content from brand-name providers. They’d rather rely on the recommendations of their friends, as information is passed around endlessly online.
The future, he said, belongs to things like the Huffington Post, the unpaid blogorama which he says gets as many page views as the New York Times. (Can that be true?)

Lustig celebrated the ubiquity of journalism thanks to new media. Not only can you find him everywhere (courtesy of the web), you can find little snippets of information that would have taken days to unearth before. Fletcher admitted that it seemed crazy to think anyone could be against new media, and yet it was undermining the economics of journalism. He hates the term "user-generated content," since it calls to mind a "bucket of stuff" that can be slapped online. Ansari said that online newspapers such as hers, and the work of courageous bloggers living under repressive governments, show the power and necessity of new media.

I was among the “named speakers.” These were people salted in the audience who prepared remarks in advance to deliver when called upon by the moderator, in this case William Horsley, former BBC broadcaster and chair of the Association of European Journalists. I'd been instructed to start my comments in Oxford Union style, thus: "Mr. Chairman, I oppose this motion... because I hate to see my fellow journalists fall prey to the same sort of victim mentality that we quite rightly criticize when it's adopted by other industries that have failed to keep pace with changing times." Then I blathered for a couple more minutes.

LES's Charlie Beckett (below right) got to take a few swings at the motion too, noting that it isn't journalists that need to be saved, but journalism. And that means sharing the power to create something more valuable. Ashley Norris (below left), a former Guardian writer who founded a stable of blogs, said it's no wonder new media rose up to threaten journalism: People became fed up with a journalism that acted superior and non-responsive. Magazines are especially bad, he said. Before long it looked like the motion might have been "New media should kill journalism."


One audience member said journalism could be saved if corporate directors weren't so intent on lining their pockets and those of their shareholders, rather than reinvesting in the product. Someone else noted that new media helps facilitate a race to the bottom, as mainstream news organizations ape the tabloid styles of blogs and celebrity-obsessed web sites.

Keen tried to turn the discussion away from notions of free speech and the exploits of brave bloggers. He is essentially focused on the West and, like Fletcher, sees the issue as an economic one. There are also questions of authority. New media means that the "expert" is no longer valued and Keen urged journalists to "liberate yourselves from humility." He added: "I guarantee we will lose this debate. You will see new media as a good thing."

He was right. When the votes were counted, 13 people had voted for the motion, 43 against it and five had abstained. The motion was a bit of artifice--baby, meet bathwater--and I don't know if anyone there had his or her mind changed.
Changed, probably not. Broadened, perhaps. I have some sympathy for Keen's position (he warmed up eventually). And when he talked about how everyone is an expert these days, picking and choosing their "news" and their "facts" from their Facebook widgets and their world wide avalanche, I had a thought: Will that put even more of a premium on knowledge and "the truth," creating an ever-more Darwinian process by which those who can access, process and understand the news will prosper, while those who can't don't. I can sort of see it going either way: The web democratizes and educates so much that you needn't subscribe to the New York Review of Books or sip cherry coke with Warren Buffet to prosper. Or the web throws so much garbage into the atmosphere that only those inclined to hunt and peck--by dint of their education or elite status--are rewarded.

There's a much better write-up of the debate at Nico Macdonald's blog and the video will eventually be up on the Frontline Club's website.

Sky Larking: Don't Adjust Your TV

My humble little blog doesn’t attract much attention. I like to think of it as appealing to a small but select readership, a readership that, to be honest with you, typically numbers in the low three digits—the very low three digits. Still, every writer dreams of a larger audience so when a producer from SkyNews asked me to appear on one of their programs, I had to say yes. She’d seen my Guardian essay and, given that she has the unenviable task of finding a new blogger to appear nearly every night, she’d asked me if I was game.

I was to appear on a segment that looks at stories that are “moving up the web.” I don’t know what particular criteria they use to select the stories—is the web vertical, up which things may move?—but I didn’t have to. They would provide me with five links, I’d look at them long enough to have a rough grasp of the topic, then I’d sit across from a presenter and blurb the sites while graphics played across TV screens around Britain. They’d also run my blog’s address, thus increasing the chances that some shut-ins might wash up here at Voxford.

I’ve been on American TV before (mostly the rarely-seen NewsChannel 8 but also, very early in my career, the CBS Evening News) but British TV was new territory. I spent 40 bucks of my own money and splurged on the fast train to Paddington, where a silver Mercedes sedan was waiting to whisk me to SkyNews’s west London headquarters.

The driver was from Iran. He was 15 when he left that country, traveling with a forged Yugoslavian passport and hoping to end up in the most Iranian of American cities, Los Angeles. (“Tehrangeles,” he called it.) But he was caught in Britain and this is where he’s been for the last 20 years. He said he’s never gotten used to the rain.

We had a lot of time to talk. Traffic was awful and it took us nearly an hour to navigate the drizzly back roads of London and arrive at Sky. A runner met me in the lobby and took me to the makeup room.

NewsChannel 8 doesn’t do makeup, so this was a first. Well, a first since my acclaimed performance in “You Can’t Take It With You” in 12th grade. “How long are you going to be on for?” asked the makeup lady. "Not long," I answered. "About three minutes." It turns out they don’t use the good airbrush-applied makeup if you’re only going to be on for three minutes. She used a camel’s hair brush, dabbing powder on my macrocephalic forehead until it had stopped shining like a signal mirror. She did my whole face—ears too.

“What’re you talking about?” she asked.

“Um, the web,” I answered.

“The world wide web? Oh, of course,” she said. “Today’s the 15th anniversary of when it was invented.”

Really? Somehow I’d missed that. Maybe that’d be good to work in, I thought. “Can I ask where you heard that?” I said, suddenly worrying that a SkyNews makeup lady might not be the best source.

“I saw it on TV somewhere,” she said.

I looked better with makeup on—not so shiny, little blemishes gone, my red and vaguely disturbing complexion obscured—but I’m not sure I approve of it. All the TV newsreaders in England—the white ones, anyway—look the same, with a sort of matte plastic appearance. I guess the viewing public would be horrified by a zit or the riverine sprawl of a varicose vein, but the makeup looks so fake that I have to wonder why they don’t just wear a kabuki mask.

Or use an avatar. See, the first story moving up the web was something about avatars. It was also the toughest one for me to explain, since I don’t really know from avatars and the story was based on some research at Stanford University, research described in a dense journal article I’d read on the train.

I went to the Green Room and re-read the notes—the script, really—that I’d written. How much detail should I go into? What if host Martin Stanford asked about the research methodology of the Stanford experiment? There was also an item on a huge pig balloon lost during an outdoor Roger Waters concert in California. I’d be okay if he asked what song had been playing when the balloon became untethered (“Pigs”) but I’d be sunk if he asked me to sing it or hum the melody. And no way could I pronounce “lysergic acid diethylamide”—aka LSD—the discoverer of which had just died.

The floor manager wired me with a microphone and escorted me to the set. I've learned a lot of things about TV and the most important one is that it's impossible for a newspaper person to look good on it. TV people sit with an erect carriage, they know how to hold their head and not to cross their legs. It's actually hard to do it right, which is why newspaper people look so awful. I am resigned to this and so I tried to get comfortable.

The other thing about TV--at least the sort I've been asked to do--is that it moves quickly. I'd barely gotten into the avatar item when it was time to move on to the dead LSD inventor. Oops, I'd forgotten to mention that the Stanford researchers call their theory the "Proteus Effect." Oh well. After LSD came Roger Waters's pig. I got my Obama joke in, but just barely. Barely time to address the Texas bonehead who tried to cash a $36 billion check or the Wisconsin paper that has migrated to the web.

One of the problems of going on TV is that TV people never seem to be paying attention to what you're saying. The same thing applies to radio. When I used to be on David Burd's WTWP program on Saturdays he was forever twisting dials, cueing up sound effects, seeing which callers were on hold--all while I was talking. Was he even listening? Yes, as it turns out. Martin was too, able to extemporize even though it seemed like he didn't even know I was there. This kind of multitasking is as vital to a TV person as knowing how to sit up straight.

And then it was over. The same Iranian driver whisked me back to Paddington and I boarded the 20:51 to Oxford. I arrived back home at 10 p.m., five hours after I'd left for my three minutes of television.

How did I do? See for yourself. The video isn't up yet, but it should be soon. And in the unlikely event that you've come to my blog because you saw me on SkyNews, thanks for making the trip.

Hey There Delilah: Shirt Happens

Cable news giant CNN appears to be testing a new feature that will allow you to order a T-shirt emblazoned with a headline from its web site. The beta site is already attracting the derision of bloggers. I was prepared to heap abuse on poor CNN myself, but then I paused. Why shouldn't people be able to order a T-shirt that has a CNN headline on it?

The gleeful scorn with which some bloggers met the CNN T-shirt news is unseemly for a few reasons. The first is that most of these bloggers who are calling the CNN shirts lame already wear lame T-shirts. They probably have drawers-full of 100 percent cotton Hanes Beefy Ts with lolcatz, "Zero Wing" and other ironic sayings on them. Second, the underlying premise of the Internet--the one most vigorously embraced by most bloggers--is that you can do anything. You can find anything, post anything, download anything. The web is ancient Rome, baby, and we're all Caligula. You want to pirate "Silver Surfer," upload a video clip of your roommate barfing, sleep with your sister and make your horse a consul, go ahead! But let poor CNN dabble with a T-shirt and suddenly it's "the death of broadcast journalism."

If CNN goes through with this--and it appears that some of its beta T-shirt web site has already been taken down--I can guarantee you that first in line to buy the shirts will be spittle-spewing bloggers who will defend their purchases by arguing that they wish to wear their chemises in an ironic, post-modern way.

Pest in Show
Some of the bloggers say the shirts will be lame because CNN.com's headlines are lame. Okay, there's something to that. But all news web site headlines are lame. They're designed to be read by machines, not humans, an attempt to achieve maximum Googlage and linkage. I was told that to increase traffic to my blog I should use straightforward headlines. But simple, boring headlines leave me so cold that I opt instead for inscrutable ones like today's, which will guarantee no one but adolescent girls and dyslexic "Forrest Gump" fans find me.

Anyway, everyone knows the best news headlines are on tabloids. The New York Post's "Headless Body in Topless Bar" and the Sun's "Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster" are classics of the genre.

The British are also good at writing "news bills," those advertising signs outside of news agents and tobacconists. Here's one I snapped this morning:



The problem arises when you don't put the sign in its holder correctly:


An "ex pest?" Well what's the problem then?

Upper Class Twitter

I've done something I swore I'd never do: I've joined Twitter.

The fact that I don't know if the correct expression is "joined Twitter" or "signed up for Twitter" or just "Twittered" shows how unhip I am. (I do know that in the future every word will be a noun, a verb, an adjective and an adverb: "I Twittered the Twittery Twitter Twitterly.)

For those unfamiliar with it, Twitter is an application that lets users answer the question "What are you doing" by sending brief messages in just about any format: Web page, e-mail, instant message, phone text message. I've been skeptical about Twitter (do we really need to be more connected than we already are?) but decided to give it a try. I can see some benefits already. It's a good way to broadcast information that doesn't rise to the level of an e-mail or a blog post.

(I met Twitter co-founder Biz Stone at an event in Oxford last year. He's a Silicon Valley wunderkind and people wanted to touch the hem of his garment as he walked past.)

If you're a Twitterer you can find me at JohnKelly. And for a really good introduction to Twitter, check out a new(ish) blog that's part of PBS. It's called PBS Engage and it covers social media. Clicking there will take you to a link to a nifty YouTube video that explains Twitter.

As Patrick McGoohan might say, "Be Twitting you."

BritNews RoundUp
What can one say, really, about David Batchelor, the Scottish man charged with indecent exposure after walking down the street with his thong on backwards? For starters, it's not a surprise he's not only named Batchelor, he is one. The 58-year-old had left his house to feed the pigeons, not understanding that wearing a backwards thong might startle passersby, which included some schoolgirls. Not that Batchelor felt sexually attracted to them. If he'd really wanted sex, he told police, "I would just go down town and get a whore."

Feeding the pigeons. In a backwards thong. In Scotland.

Speaking of whores, The Post's Kevin Sullivan had a nice story this week about a Brit denied entry into the United States on the grounds of "moral turpitude." Sebastian Horsley is an artist, reformed drug abuser, frequenter of prostitutes, and general all-around debaucher. When he arrived in Newark to celebrate the American publication of his book "Dandy in the Underworld" he was questioned by U.S. authorities and put on a plane back to Blighty. "I'm an artist," Horsley said. "Depravity is part of the job description."

The news media here has been full of stories about French president Nicolas Sarkozy's state visit. It's an excuse to write about his wife, the lovely Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, whose Italo-Gallic pout and letter-opener cheekbones have been gracing front pages everywhere. The contrast with Britain's rather stodgy first family has been telling. The Browns are Weetabix to the Sarkozy's sugar-dusted crepes suzette. Sarah Brown has been described as "matronly" but she comes off better than poor Gordon, whose awkward attempt at a European cheek kiss is deconstructed in the Daily Mail, complete with close-up photos of the maneuver. Gordon resembles a blind grouper trying to swallow a fishing lure, or as the Mail's Robert Hardman puts it, "Mr. Brown looked like a man walking into a lamppost while checking his watch."

And finally, a New Zealand man has been charged with wasting police time after calling authorities to say he was being raped by a wombat. He said he suffered no ill effects from the assault except that the experience left him speaking with an Australian accent. As you know, the wombat is a marsupial native to Australia but not found in New Zealand. My suggestion for getting his accent back? Get real friendly with a kiwi bird.

Gargoyle of the Week
There was little doubt where I would get this week's gargoyle: Canterbury Cathedral, of course, where we were for Easter services.


This fellow looks like he's really proud of his teeth and wants to be sure everyone can see them.

The rain is beating against the windows here, which must mean I'm in England. I think a trip to the library might be in order. Whatever you're doing this weekend, enjoy it.

Ted Nelson: Crackpot or Genius?

And so yesterday to a lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute by a man named Ted Nelson, the guy who either "invented" the World Wide Web years before Tim Berners-Lee could tie his own shoelaces or who is a tragic joke, destined to forever claim that the paradigm-shattering software he's been working on for four decades is just around the corner.

Nelson went to Swarthmore and Harvard, where he trained as a sociologist. The story goes that his severe attention deficit disorder raised in him a wish that he could organize all his thoughts and the countless pieces of paper on which he scribbled notes. Early on Nelson saw the potential of computers and he envisioned a system that would not only link documents but maintain their connections. When a writer moved paragraphs around in a document, there would be still be a version of the original document. When a writer quoted from another writer there would be a pathway to that other work. When another work was cited, a royalty micropayment would somehow wing its way to the copyright holder.

Nelson coined the word "hypertext" to describe these interconnections and he called the project Xanadu, after the pleasure palace in Coleridge's poem. (It's an actual place, too, the summer capital of Mongol emperors. Nelson showeds a Google Earth image.) He wrote several influential books that, among other things, outlined his vision.

But Nelson seemed better at describing things that had yet to be made rather than actually making them. He was not a computer programmer himself and he enlisted the help of a rotating cast of characters who have been working on Xanadu since the 1960s. (Nelson hates this Wired story from 1995 describing the so-far ill-fated project.) Despite the fact that he was a visiting fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, I was prepared to write him off as a crackpot. I mean, the guy showed up to his lecture dressed in a tuxedo, claimed to have written the world's first rock musical, sang three songs and recited a poem.

But perhaps he does have something to teach, after all, more as an inspiration than as a creator. He said he wanted to invent Xanadu because if he didn't, "the techies would screw it up. And that's exactly what happened." Word processing programs replicate the worst aspects of paper while ignoring some of the best. He despises "cut and paste" because it doesn't actually do that. "Hide and plug" is what he calls it, since the action makes your text disappear before showing up when you press ctrl V. The web, he said, is limiting, not liberating. He bristles when people talk about things like "Windows technology." There's precious little technology involved, he argues. Software is just a collection of conventions, most of which we've got wrong.

He showed a demo of Xanadu: Eleven long, thin documents were arranged behind two working documents. Everything floated in three dimensions, with lines and triangles of different colors showing various connections. It was a confusing hodge-podge but it hinted at a certain power. Perhaps it was a graphical representation of Nelson's mind.

"It always seemed to me that things would be so much better if they were different," Nelson said. I'm not sure he's right about everything, but he's probably right about a few things. Too often we allow ourselves to fall into ruts, doing things the way we've always been done them just because that's the way they've always been done. We don't push ourselves to not only think outside the box, but think outside the store that sold us the box. Visionaries should be allowed to be crackpots, if a few of their visions turn out to be right.

Long Live Literacy: Lilley's Last Lecture

Those of us who attended all four of Anthony Lilley's lectures felt a certain camaraderie as last night's seminar drew to a close. For four weeks we few, we happy few, we band of brothers (and sisters) had been together as one as Lilley explained why he shouldn't be called the News International visiting professor of broadcast media but the News International visiting professor of networked media.

Okay, he didn't say that in so many words, but if the Oxford mediaocracy takes anything from his sojourn here, it should be that broadcast is dead. (I described his earlier lectures here, here and here.)

Lilley billed this as a user-generated lecture, taking inspiration from comments on his university blog, but, frankly, visitors to his blog didn't really pick up the gauntlet he had thrown down. I include myself in that, even if Lilley did reference a quote I posted on his blog. It's from a fellow named Benedict Anderson. When reading a daily newspaper, Anderson wrote, "each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throught the calendar. ... At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in every day."

I confess I get a bittersweet and melancholy feeling when I read that, for it describes a world that's on its way out, if it isn't gone already. But there's no use crying. As Lilley said, he didn't approach his subject--the future of media--from the standpoint of "how do we preserve newspapers?"

The market still offers simultaneous experiences--witness the 107 million people who watched the Super Bowl "together"--and some media experiences will go forth and multiply, living beyond the moment of their creation: The Beatles' White Album, for example, which people can enjoy without any temporal association to the Fab Four. Sticky ideas will spread virally, borne along by communities that can coalesce with ease.

Lilley touched on the proposed takeover of Yahoo by Microsoft. It's plain to him that it shows a strong desire to capture more of the lucrative online advertising market and could presage a shift of ads from TV to the Web. He cautioned that anything that threatens to restrict choice should be weighed closely.

In a previous lecture Lilley outlined what a public service broadcaster should accomplish: inform, stimulate, etc. Wasn't that also what an educational institution should do? Should we replace schools with online interactive learning centers? Lilley wouldn't go that far, but he criticized Oxford for refusing to join the 21st century. Why not put lectures online, he asked, a low-cost way of using the power of the network to energize the university's core values?

The digital revolution brings with it an explosion of choice and an erosion of control. With that, said Lilley, comes the Moral Panic, as parents turn to government to protect their children from inappropriate content and internet predators. The answer, Lilley suggested, isn't more regulation (we already have laws to protect children) but education: Parents and children need to be more media literate.

And that was his final message: Whether we like it or not, it's a big, messy, open-source world out there. We all need to learn how to navigate it.

Cynical World
There was an interesting question from a student about whether media literacy required a certain amount of cynicism. I was wondering the same thing myself: Do we tell our children not to believe anything they see on the Web? Or would that deny them the good things they can find there? Perhaps it's good for them to learn as early as possible that the world is full of all sorts of people peddling all sorts of information--and disinformation.

Hopping on the Lilley Pad

Last night Anthony Lilley delivered his second of four lectures on the future of media. (Click here for my take on his first lecture.) Today I'm trying to decipher my notes.

Lilley comes from the world of the mainstream media (his company has done work for Channel 4 and the Guardian) but he is not desperately holding onto old ways. He said that as we move from a broadcast model to a network model, the mainstream media will move from a position of control to one of influence.

He then illustrated the central quality of a well-connected network and how it differs from the broadcast model: The blinking television transmission tower sending its singular product to lone audience members--ie, broadcast--has been joined by the mobile phone model that allows users to talk to one another, and, more importantly, by the near-infinite network model that allows users to coalesce and come apart in an orgiastic assortment of groups. These groups can communicate to, among and with each other. (A Reed network Lilley called it, and who am I to disagree?)

Lilley quoted from my old friend Chris Anderson's book "The Long Tail" but he resisted the urge to sketch the graph central to Anderson's argument. (I had to sit on my hands so I didn't jot it in my notebook. I sometimes think that the key to Anderson's success is how easy, and how much fun, it is to draw that long tail. It's the Nike swoosh of new media bloviating.) Anderson's argument, by the way, is that niche products--books, music, film--can be more successful now that they're easy to find, thanks to the power of search.

Then Lilley was back to memes, those building blocks of culture. What makes a meme successful, Lilley said, isn't whether it's true or good or educational. It's how well it spreads. It isn't, he said in a nice turn of phrase, a matter of people accumulating ideas but of ideas accumulating people. It's a process akin to evolution, where memes compete in the environment, the successful ones spreading their cultural DNA, the unsuccessful ones being snuffed out with all the pitiless abandonment of natural selection. Competition drives memes to become more interesting and complex over time. We go from fin to paw, from paw to opposable thumb, from opposable thumb to wrist-mounted flamethrower (well, eventually).

Lilley touched on two arguments percolating in this field, between those who see great hope in "the wisdom of the crowd" and those, such as Cass Sunstein, who believe that the way the Web helps the crowd arrange itself can have a detrimental effect on society. We reinforce our beliefs rather than challenge or broaden them, says Sunstein, building "information cocoons." (Lilley called this the tragedy of the commons but that's not how I've seen that phrase used. I thought the TotC was more a conflict over finite resources, and how big groups of people--whether they be shepherds grazing their flocks or Webheads editing Wikipedia--just muck things up.)

But even something as seemingly "democratic" and free-form as Wikipedia is actually quite structured. There are about 100 overseers for Wikipedia, Lilley said. Not all Wikipedians are created equal. He moved to a discussion of Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" and the people Gladwell calls connectors (socialites with lots of loose bonds), mavens (experts trusted by those around them to know what they're talking about) and salesmen (those good at persuading others). For a meme to spread you probably need to involve one or more of these types of people.

These are all interesting concepts, and useful when it comes to contemplating the future. It's mixing this all together and finding value (as a creator of memes) that is difficult, or at least difficult for me to grasp from Lilley. Take this slide he put up onscreen:

Irreversibility
Reduce entropy locally
Increase entropy globally
Fit for human purpose

"Irreversibility" means, Lilley explained, that you can't put an idea out that has to be taken back. "Reducing entropy locally" means that as a user I will understand (via a network-generated or -distributed meme, I guess) more about something. But the very act of creating that meme increases entropy globally by adding to the already over-burdened world of ideas and connections (more potential connections than there are atoms in the universe! or something). And "fit for human purpose"? Well that's obvious isn't it? In fact, you could put that one first and dispose of the rest.

The notion of value in networked media is complicated, he allowed. And the tools we'll need to bring to bear are not simplistic, linear tools. In a network, the power resides in the relationships.

I think I believe all this. I suppose I do, anyway. But I'm again left hungry for some flesh on this succinctly-sketched skeleton. It's not that I want a business school case study, it's that I need some analogies to give form to these wispy notions. Nobody else may need it. He's probably doing a good job of describing the landscape as he sees it. It's just that I'm selfish.

Or maybe, and this thought just occurred to me, maybe what he's on about isn't the creation of memes at all. Perhaps Lilley feels that a meme is a meme is a meme. What's changed is how those memes are distributed. I shouldn't be expecting Meme Creation for Dummies, but Harnessing the Networked Meme. But then again, I don't think so, for I'm pretty sure Lilley is in the school that dismisses the notion that all we're seeing is the same old stuff in a new wrapper. I think he thinks it's a whole new ballgame.

By the way, Lilley promised last night that he would say some "naughty things" about the BBC and Channel 4 at his next lecture. So get there early to pile on, all you public service broadcasting haters.

The Vote-o-Matic!

Who are you voting for in the U.S. presidential election? Well if you live in England, I'm assuming your answer is "None of the above." You're not allowed to vote, are you? But we Yanks have to make a decision. But how?

I once proposed that the religion page at The Washington Post print a big chart comparing all the world's faiths in various categories (views on sex before marriage, policy on sin, who gets into heaven, etc.). Readers could then run their fingers down the page and decide if they wanted to convert. ("Hmmm. These Zoroastrians have something going for them.")

This sort of thing is now easy on the Web and it's being applied to the presidential campaign. My friend and former Post colleague Craig Stoltz created a very cool online tool that compares the candidates' viewpoints on various healthcare-related topics. Tiny little candidate heads (echoes of Spy Magazine, Craig?) are arranged on two axes depending on how important the issue is to them and whether they see the solution as being, say, something for the market or for government. When you change issues--from stem cell research to heathcare reform--the heads obediently rearrange themselves. It's a nifty way of visualizing information.

The Washington Post has a few cool things, too. "The Front Runners" is a collection of Post coverage, including interviews, stump speeches and a neat feature called "Free Association." It creates a tag cloud of words voters use when describing a particular candidate. Thus John McCain's cloud includes "veteran," "old" and "hero" while Hillary Clinton's includes "Bill," "woman" and "b----."

"Choose Your Candidate" is a bit like my religion-o-matic. You answer a series of questions on various issues to help decide whose opinion most matches your own--though how helpful a statement such as "Yes. I propose a specific plan to guarantee truly universal health care for every man, woman and child in America" is is open to debate.

The Post's "Issues Tracker" shows what's being written about the candidates--in news stories, in op-eds, on blogs--on various subjects, from the abortion to the Iraq war. You can see that Hillary Clinton and "education" has garnered 22 mentions, while Hillary Clinton and "health care" gets 497. You can then click through to read the stories.

The Post has some other online political tools but I couldn't find them. That's one of the drawbacks of the Web: stuff just gets subsumed and lost so quickly. (Shades of the attention deficit Anthony Lilley spoke about.)

The New York Times has an interesting thing called "Candidate Schedules". It shows where the candidates have been campaigning. Light purple circles of various sizes are arranged on a map of the U.S. depending on where a candidate and how often he or she went there. When you press "play" violet circles bloom across the map. It looks as if Ebola is raging through Iowa and New Hampshire. (Which may be exactly what voters in those states thought.)

It's a bit easier to find the flashy (and Flash-y) campaign features on the Times's Web site, since there's a tab that calls up interactive offerings. That's how I found the debate analyzer, which shows how much each candidate spoke during a debate and allows you to mouse over a graphical representation of the debate, calling up their utterances.

None of these multimedia tools are a substitute for a sober , thoughtful analysis of the issues and the candidates. Oh, who am I kidding? They might be a perfect substitute. Or, rather, if the choice is between doing no research on a candidate and clicking around on a nifty Web tool, the latter is probably better. I doubt that any of them will replace that age-old deciding factor, however: How the candidate strikes you in the gut.

Media Moguls and Media Molehills

Happy Thanksgiving. Now, where were we? Ah yes: I spent Monday at the Said Business School, where various high-tech honchos were summoned as part of “Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford.” In the evening I had the choice of attending one of the three panels: "Young Entrepreneurs," “The Next Big Thing” or “Innovation & Media.” While I have the greatest respect for young entrepreneurs, and it would have been nice to know what the next big thing will be (sandpaper trousers? Do-it-yourself laser eye surgery? Splunge?), I felt compelled, in my role as newspaper savant, to attend the “Innovation & Media” session.

These are depressing times for newspapers. Circulations are down. Revenue is down. Classified advertising is being siphoned away by the likes of Craigslist and Monster.com. Readership of papers like The Washington Post may be up, thanks to the global reach and access provided by the Web, but no one has figured out how to make money from all these eyeballs, or, rather, enough money. Thinks aren't much better for the networks.

Mike Malone (history’s first daily technology columnist, doncha know) is convinced the printed paper is terminally ill, with no chance of recovery. Papers that economized by laying off senior staff did the wrong thing, he argued, since they hacked off their knowledge base and continued to pump money into expensive newsprint production. Better, Malone said, to have jumped to the Web immediately.

Some in the audience didn’t agree. They pointed out that newspapers possess an easy readability that computers will never match and that circulation is skyrocketing in places like India and China, where rising literacy rates are driving the boom.

Perhaps, said Malone, but that isn’t the case in the U.S. There’s still hope for newspaper Web sites, he said, since alternative media—blogs and the like—dropped the ball early on. Selling ads, the life blood of most media, depends on having detailed knowledge about readers. Blogs haven’t been providing that. Newspapers have. Malone predicted that whoever cracks the challenge first—newspapers that offer the sort of creative coverage that blogs do or blogs that deliver the detailed metrics that advertisers crave—will prevail.

Jonah Peretti, co-founder of the Huffington Post, predicted we would see the once-sacred wall between advertising and editorial breached, not in the form of advertorials or payola, but by each side of the divide borrowing tactics and practices from the other.

“If you look at advertising, it’s highly optimized,” he said. The obsession of marketers is in how to maximize clicks. “Whereas in editorial, you just cover the important story and give readers, not what they want, but what’s important for society. That only drives traffic so much."

Said Peretti: “I think we’re going to see some of the tools from advertising get transferred to media." Headlines will be written with search engines in mind. Stories will be commissioned on the basis of what people are already searching for, since this sort of bandwagon-jumping increases links. Linkbait in the form of shorter , more polemical pieces will become more common. Peretti saw methods migrating in the other direction, too, such as Web advertisers linking to other content, the way newspapers link outside their own sites.

I got the feeling that Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, felt a twinge of sadness at the prospect of the mainstream media crumbling, possibly taking with it the objectivity and care with which it does its job. It pisses him off that sites like ValleyWag print any bit of scurrilous gossip that comes along. Even so, he said that, as an investor, "I try to look for businesses where I’m not holding up the dam." The water's rising on the traditional media.

Stanford's David Nordfors, the leading proponent of something called "innovation journalism," said the media is stuck in old ways of doing things. I was unable to grasp exactly what innovation journalism is meant to me (innovatively-produced journalism? journalism about innovation?), but Nordfors has a snappy abbreviation for it: "injo." Isn't that the name of Jonny Quest's sidekick. Or is it an Ethiopian flat bread?

Whatever it is, Nordfors thinks there should be more of it. The traditional media, he said, are "not only losing their business model, they're also drifting toward telling less relevant stories."

After the panel ended, I drifted outside, where a cold rain was soaking Oxford. I unlocked my bicycle, climbed aboard and pedaled home in the dark, thoughts of innovation journalism competing with fantasies about stripping off my sodden clothes and changing into something warm and dry.

Web 2.Whoa!

I spent yesterday in Silicon Valley, or, actually "Silicon Valley," as in "Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford: The Oxford Forum on Entrepreneurship and Innovation," a day-long seminar at the university's Said Business School. About two dozen high-tech people--Web company founders, venture capitalists, assorted innovators--traded the California sunshine for a steady English drizzle to impart their wisdom to MBAs-in-training and other assorted attendees.

The speakers were all lined up on stage, shooting gallery style, for the opening session, giving me a chance to ponder important things, such as their choice of clothing. Represented on the dais, fashionwise, were:
Internet Millionaire Schlub (LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman)
Metallica Roadie (YouNoodle.com co-founder and recent Oxford grad Kirill Makharinsky, wearing a goatee and a black T-shirt that read "Creative Juggernaut")
Neck-tied Mike Brady Lookalike (venture capitalist Allen Morgan, who said, "The Web in 2007 is finally the platform we thought it was in 1997.")
Steve Jobs Clone (Jerry Saunders, in black mock turtle neck; he had several of the day's great lines, including: "I was asked to leave every single I job I had. That's when I realized I was an entrepreneur.")
Creative Genius "Regular Guy" (Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter and developer of Xanga, Blogger and Odeo)

I don't spend much time around entrepreneurs so it was all heady stuff. I really got the feeling that if you had a good idea (and the right contacts and the right funding, two things you could have picked up if only you'd been there) you could be a success.

I also detected the low-grade hum of money. Of riches. Though speaker after speaker insisted that budding entrepreneurs should not be thinking about their "exit amount"--that magical number you get when you sell your successful start-up to Google or Microsoft--surely such thoughts were dancing in everyones' heads. I know they were in mine, especially when some of the speakers, like Hoffman and Google's Chris Sacca, talked about investing in friends' companies as if they were buying beers. Wouldn't it be great to be able to give a struggling entrepreneur $50,000 or $100,000 to help get a great idea off the ground, not least of all because it would mean you were wealthy enough to give someone $100,000?

So, What Did I Learn?
That I probably don't have the balls to be an Internet entrepreneur. But I learned other stuff too. Paul Graham of early-phase funding group Y Combinator said entrepreneurs should "Look for things that are evil or broken or stupid." That's where you can make a splash.

The buzz word of the day was "API." APIs are really, really important. Everybody should have one. Sadly, I don't know what APIs are. (I think they're like little bundles of programming that allow cool things to work across platforms. Can someone enlighten me in the comments, please?)

Are we approaching Bubble 2.0? Maybe, but it shouldn't matter, or certainly won't be as bad as when the tech bubble burst in 2000. Costs are down for things like data storage and programming and a better economic infrastructure is in place. Besides, good ideas prosper, even in bad markets.

Biz Stone, of flavor-of-the-moment Twitter, spoke in a masterclass about his background, from book designer to Web entrepreneur. Isn't he worried, I asked, that fickle techheads will leave Twitter behind, the way they abandoned Xanga for MySpace then MySpace for Facebook? No, he said. Besides, Twitter is something that exists on multiple platforms, that moves with you. "If you do a good enough job of sending them away, they will come back," he said.

I thought it would be rude to ask how he makes money off of Twitter. Luckily someone else did. As far as I can tell, he doesn't. They want to build up as many users as possible before they "monetize" the operation, a process that could include ads, though Stone agreed that was kind of gross.

If the attendees at a session with four recent Oxford grads heed what they heard, Oxford might empty out. To paraphrase the Beverly Hillbillies: "Californy is the place you oughta be, so they loaded up the truck, and they moved to the Vall-ee...."

"Go to America, you make things easier on yourself," said Kulveer Taggar, who with Harjeet Taggar founded eBay tool Auctomatic.com. The Oxford grads had been part of start-up incubator in Silicon Valley, bouncing ideas around all day before they hit on their product.

A session on the future of media made more grim listening for anyone interested in newspapers. A dying breed, the speakers said. I'll have more on that panel discussion tomorrow.

The Guardian's Jemima Kiss has a much more coherent overview of the conference (scroll down if it's not at the top of the page). And click here for a photo that includes my polka-dotted shirt cuffs, proof--should I ever need an alibi--that I was in attendance.

The 'Space' Space
It's not a proper Silicon Valley gathering if the speakers and attendees aren't fighting the urge to say "area" or "sector" and are instead employing the S-word. Here are a few usages I jotted down:
"the consumer internet space"
"the dating space"
"the Yellow Pages space"
"the soft innovation space"
"that space" (the U.S. market)
"time space"
"lucky space"

I think the lucky space is the best place, er, space to be in.

Snagsta Rap
I was in a couple sessions with a nice chap from a Web start-up called Snagsta. According to its pre-alpha, place-holding Web site, Snagsta promises to "help you find the things Google can't." That's a simple concept, the sort of pitch a Hollywood producer would love ("It's 'Star Wars' on a dairy farm"; "I love it!").

The Snagstas hope their product becomes viral, although as one speaker pointed out, almost no one has ever made something viral on the Web in less than a year. Snagsta has funding through the middle of 2008. We have to be talking a virus of bird flu proportions for it to sweep the planet by then.

But I wish them the best of luck. If Snagsta becomes the Next Big Thing, please let it be remembered that I wrote about it first.

I Don't Drink...Wine

What is proper wi-fi etiquette? When you fire up your laptop after moving into a new house and your browser latches on to a stray signal, are you allowed to sink your fangs into it, like Dracula supping on the neck of some unsuspecting beauty? Or do you have to bypass that sweet-sweet broadband and wait until your cable company or phone company can get its butt in gear and get you hooked up?

I think I know the answer--it's okay to suck a little free wi-fi, just don't be greedy--but am I right?

Two incidents have me pondering this modern dilemma. The most recent occurred here, after arriving in Albion. The first thing we did after dragging our suitcases into our house was turn on our four MacBooks. We were absolutely bathed in broadband. The AirPorts identified a half-dozen signals. All save one were password-protected, however. I will call the victim, er, the open signal, "Valparaiso."

We leapt on Valparaiso like hungry ticks upon a hound dog. When we had gorged ourselves we dropped off. The pattern continued for two weeks. Occasionally our surfing would slow to a crawl and we would curse the Valparaiso family for their bandwidth-hogging ways ("What are they doing? Downloading the 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy?"). Finally British Telecom finally sent us our DSL pack and we bid the Valparaisos goodbye.

Now, one could argue that if the Valparaisos were not smart enough to password protect their signal, they had no one to blame but themselves. They were just asking for it, your honor. Or perhaps they intended for others to partake of their wi-fi, as a sort of community gesture.

To be honest, I hope that my BT signal is password protected, but the installation was so complicated that I have no idea whether that's the case. A karmic digital vampire may be lapping at my jugular as I type this.

What was the other incident? Well it happened before we left the States. Because we had rented out our house as of August 1 but weren't leaving the country until later in the month, we were obliged to stay in various friends' houses while they were on vacation. We stayed in a lovely house in Kensington, Maryland. We found wi-fi there, too, courtesy of neighbors I'll call the Wallendas.

We'd been there about a day, guiltily supping on the Wallendas' signal, when the telephone rang. The house we were in had caller ID, that service that tells you who's calling. A readout on the kitchen phone said: "Wallenda." We'd been caught! The jig was up! We were certain they'd been able to trace us somehow. With trembling fingers My Lovely Wife answered the phone.

It turns out they just wanted to drop something off for the owners and wondered if we'd be home to answer the door. Our secret was safe, leaving us to pilfer again.

SITE for Sore Eyes
My colleague Joby Warrick has a story on the front page of The Washington Post today about the non-profit group SITE--it stands for Search for International Terrorist Entities. The outfit combs the Internet looking for terror group-related postings. It was able to procure Osama bin Laden's most recent video tape before any official U.S. intelligence outfits. And that's where the problems started.

SITE shared the video with the White House with the request that it not be distributed, arguing that wide disclosure could endanger the sources SITE had built up. But the White House evidently leaked it. "Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless," said the firm's founder, Rita Katz.

A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told The Post that the leak shouldn't worry anyone: "We have individuals in the right places dealing with all these issues, across all 16 intelligence agencies."

In other words, since official channels are monitoring al Qaeda communications compromising an unofficial channel isn't anything to get upset about. Which strikes me as odd, since the Iraq war is the most outsourced conflict in U.S. history. The administration is depending on everything from private caterers to armed bodyguards to support the war effort, and here they've apparently pulled the rug out from someone who was doing some good.