You don’t often hear that Apple is getting pushed too little by the media, but Dan Gillmor says that is the case with the new iPod touch:
News-folk: You should be aiming at least some of what you produce at the screen on this WiFi enabled audio/video/Web machine. This is breakthrough territory, way beyond what the iPhone even suggests.
And it looks hübsch indeed. All the video and music presentation aside, I wonder how well it works for web browsing and reading of texts.
Impossible to digest all the news and views I would like to comment on, so here are just some of the most recent links for now:
“It is crystal clear to me now that at least in industries where lots of people are online, blogging is the single best way to communicate and interact, Marc Andreessen concludes after five weeks’ experience with blogging.
Strong and encouraging stuff from the Netscape founder! Nowadays, you are more likely to hear people groaning about blogging or just dismissing the format as “very 2003″ or something equally original. Thankfully, the Wall Street Journal reinforces the Andreessen effect with a 10 years blogiversary celebration. (10 years? Yes, in a few months, anyway. As Tunku Varadarajan notes, the consensus is – as far as that is possible – that the blog term was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997. But of course the blog format was in the incubator from day 1 of the www age. Andreessen himself mentions that he updated a page in 1993 that looks suspiciously like a classic link blog!)
The WSJ has polled an impressive gang of ten about their favourite blogs and relation to blogging, thereby finagling a selection of views and topics that together form a varied panorama. Take Elizabeth Spiers’ precise definition of criteria for a successful blog:
Of the various blogs I’ve written or produced, the ones that worked best — the ones that had the biggest and most loyal readerships — always had a few consistent qualities. They were topically focused, often in niche areas. They published regularly and frequently, typically during office hours and several times a day. They published content that was original or difficult to find, from breaking news to proprietary photographs to obscure links that readers are unlikely to find on their own. They were usually well-written, which has its own intrinsic appeal for anyone who prefers to enjoy what they’re reading. And lastly, they engaged their readership by soliciting feedback and responding to it, in the form of asking for tips, allowing comments or otherwise demonstrating some level of interest in their audience’s preferences.
But all ten of them are worth reading, of course also my old favourite Tom Wolfe’s (unusually taciturn) dismissal of all things “user-generated”.
Knight Citizen News Network has published what looks like an immensely useful online handbook for shooting, editing and publishing video online. The guide has detailed instructions and suggestions for choice of equipment, editing software etc. Smart: there’s also a wiki dedicated to the project. (via RConversation).
Video and multimedia productions is fast becoming essential features of modern news websites, but new independent sites are mushrooming as well. One example is Move30. In their own words:
MOVE30 was created out of a desire to democratize the multimedia landscape. It is a community upload website that showcases multimedia stories whether they are documentary, fiction, video, photography-driven, motion design or animation.
Another recent initiative is Slate V, the good old web magazine’s new video companion. Besides video exclusively produced for Slate V, the new magazine also has best of web video blog.
The BBC webpage for Ben Hammersley’s experimental Turkish journey is finally up and running. This shows how reporters can use the popular web tools such as YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter, Flickr etc and then integrate all the pieces in the puzzle on one page. Good. Now let’s see if we can learn something new about Turkey as well!
Hans Rosling is already well known by many for his incredible presentations using the Gapminder tool (which was acquired by Google). Now here is his first GapCast which deals with “Health, money and sex in Sweden” in a historical perspective. Rosling has the perfect combination of personality, knowledge and tools to become a Global Celebrity Educator, if such a thing can be imagined. A web era David Attenborough? (via mymarkup):
There are now virtually endless possibilities to engage in debates – on blogs, on news websites, in forums. But if you are a prolific contributor to the big conversation, as you are told you should be, how do you keep track of what you said and what others replied? A web debate can develop over a long period of time. Some debates are so hectic that your comment is difficult to relocate even after a short while.
Enter tools like coComment, which aims to solve the problem. And it looks good – at first. You can collect “your” conversations on a single page, keep track of new comments via a feed, and include all your debating efforts on your own blog etc. The problem for me is that coComment doesn’t work with all publishing systems, for example MovableType, although it supposedly should. And then there’s the news website debates, which run on other systems. Still, it’s a great idea and I really hope it will work out.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof lends a baker in Kabul a small sum via Kiva.org and travels there to check out the bread and put the report on video (via the indispensable Foreign Policy blog).
As Kristof says, part of the appeal of microlending is that it isn’t charity-based. It’s a business relation.
But if it’s going to be charity, at least the money should go to the people who need it. GlobalGiving promises that “85-90% of your donation gets to local project leaders within 60 days.”
Both Kiva and GlobalGiving fit well into the microglobalization puzzle, I think.
I’ve contributed an article in this week’s Mandag Morgen (in Norwegian, not online) about how tiny service companies – even one-person outfits – can participate successfully in the global economy. The story focuses on several portals such as GetAFreelancer.com that match buyers and sellers of services. Many of the projects are fairly small, often the transactions are just a few hundred dollars. The portals have been active for years, but haven’t received much media attention.
The main example I describe is Asia Observer, a news portal/community site run by Norwegian journalist and previous Asia correspondent John Einar Sandvand. The site has been around since 1999, but last year Sandvand wanted a major renewal. So he posted the job on two of the portals and found his Belgrade-based programmer through Joomlancers. Recently he expanded the spare-time project further by hiring a part-time employee through the Manila version of Craigslist. So now the site which has a growing community is run and developed by three people living very far apart from each other who have never met physically. That’s microglobalization.
This week’s news and views round-up, more retroblogging from Undercurrent:
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