The Salam Pax photo blog

Good gosh. You know photoblogging is real when Salam Pax begins a photo blog showing street scenes of Iraq.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the pointer.

Loophole Executives

Larry Lessig has a thoughtful entry about Loophole Executives. It looks increasingly likely that if Gray Davis is recalled (and you've got to bet that he will be), his replacement will take office with fewer votes than Davis receives in the recall.

What kind of mandate is that?

Writes Lessig: "Whether or not you believe in the power to recall, the California provision is insanely stupid. It makes no sense to decide the winner on the basis of a plurality."

Photojournalism and news sites

Just going up on OJR: Mark Glaser takes a look at news sites making greater use of still photography.

I wrote a related piece about photojournalism for OJR on the day the Iraq war began.

New from California authors

CaliforniaAuthors.com (they've even got an XML feed) offers up items on California Dish and Indigenous, carries an early excerpt from School of Dreams, and points to Poynter's Book Babes column, with Margo Hammond, the book editor at the St. Petersburg Times, enthusing over the California literary scene.

Uh-Oh. Paparazzi with Phonecams

Smartmobs.com: Uh-Oh: Paparazzi with Phonecams. Adds Steve Outing: "Tabloid editors are now wise to the idea of getting photo phones for their photographers -- all the better to blend in with the regular people and get that perfect candid of J-Lo having dinner."

Net phone calls catching on

I'm a big fan of the San Jose Merc's Personal Technology section (for years I edited and designed the Science/Medicine/Technology pages of the Sacramento Bee), so I look forward to it every week. Today they've got:

- Mike Langberg on a $10.99 digital camera.

- Dawn Chmielewski on home networking.

- Marcelo Rodriguez on Internet phone calling. (You won't find it on the Merc's technology front, oddly, even though it was the lead story in today's Technology section.) Excerpt from the latter:

... Early users were limited to talking only to others with the exact same software setups. There were no phone numbers and the parties had to make arrangements to be online at the same time.

That's all changed. Largely as a result of readily available broadband Internet connections and low-cost telephone appliances that attach to any home computer network, it is now possible to use VoIP to make phone calls to any phone number in the world using the trusty traditional handset, even a cordless one. What's more, VoIP service comes with features the traditional telephone companies are not even able to offer and at costs that are a fraction of the typical residential phone bill. ...

If you've made any international calls over the past year, chances are that you used VoIP without even knowing it. Major international phone carriers such as Sprint and AT&T have been quietly converting much of their international telephone traffic to the Internet, a much cheaper method of transport.

FBI nabs suspected bookworm

Sacramento News & Review: Imagine a country where reading in public can get you in trouble. Now guess what? Youíre living in it.

Google Alerts -- and Google News Alerts

When Google announced a new service yesterday ñ Google News Alerts ñ I was under the mistaken impression that it was an upgrade of its Google Alerts info retrieval service.

I've been extremely disappointed in Google Alerts. For example, searching the term "copyright" returned these results:

Search 3: copyright (tracking top 20 of about 206,000,000 results)

15. Wired Copyright Information

... tel 415 276 8400 fax 415 276 8499. Wired Digital's Copyright Notice, Copyright C 1994-2003 Wired Digital, Inc., a Lycos Network
company. All rights reserved. ...

http://hotwired.lycos.com/home/copyright.html


17. Copyright Notice

... CUSTOMER SERVICE Copyright Notice Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved. All materials contained on this
...
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html

You'd think with 206 million results they could come up with one timely and relevant result rather than feeding me copyright notices.

But Gary Price corrected me, pointing out the differences in the services. Says Gary:

I couldn't agree with you more. Google Alerts supposedly searches the main Google web database for new links. But it's junk. It's been awful to see so many journalists flocking to this tool. I've been planning on writing an article on this topic.

Wednesday's announcement comes directly from Google and uses the Google News database. Much different.

Remember, other alert services exist and are also VERY valuable. I mentioned a few on my blog but give me a call sometime and I can turn you on
to a few tools that should be on every journalists desktop. In other words, make the web a valuable current awareness service for a very small amount of money.

Finally, take a look at this article I co-wrote about a year ago. It discusses limiting web search pages by date. It doesn't work well. Heck, just ask the search engines themselves and they will tell you as much.

I just signed up for Google News Alerts, Google News Alerts (it's free), which allows you to be e-mailed with stories from thousands of Web news sources on topics you specify. I'm expecting this experience will be better.

Here are two stories on the new service:

News.com: Google Spreads Into News Alerts.

SearchEngineWatch.com: Google Unveils News Alert Service

BloggerCon 2003 filling up

Dave Winer, host of the BloggerCon 2003 conference at Harvard Law, says that registration is filling up fast, so if you're interested, check out the site. Cost is $500, or $250 for students. Glenn Reynolds, Joshua Marshall, Doc Searls, Scott Rosenberg, Adam Curry, Elizabeth Spiers, Jim Moore, Susan Mernit, Lance Knobel, Ed Cone, Christopher Lydon and big Dave himself are among the luminaries on tap.

Wish I could be there, but I've got to do less conference schmoozing and more book writing.

Media map of New York City

Do you know the way to Conde Nast? Or NBC? The Publicity Club of New York has developed an interactive online map to New York City's leading media companies.

Cool map. Wish it were a lot bigger, though.

It's currently the top link on IWantMedia, which has been doing its usual stellar job in aggregating pointers to stories on important topics such as the FCC's rollback of media ownership rules.

Can lawyers ever be on innovation's side?

Larry Lessig has a very instructive -- and quite depressing -- post today about a back and forth between Creative Commons and the legal folks over at Vivendi.

His conclusion: "Is it impossible to imagine the lawyers ever on the side of innovation?"

NYT News Tracker hits 20,000 subsribers

NYTimes.com announced today that it has surpassed the 20,000 subscriber mark for its paid News Tracker e-mail notification service. Times News Tracker is a personalized service that enables readers to follow coverage in The New York Times on specific topics that interest them.

No word on how many hundreds of thousands of readers abandoned News Tracker when it went to a pay-subscription model in June.

Craigslist -- the movie

Wired News: Craigslist -- the movie.

The Prague summer

Geoff Goodfellow blogs about the Prague summer (it's in English).

Gore criticizes Bush's leadership on Iraq

Former VP Al Gore, in a speech last night organized by MoveOn.org, argued that the Bush administration ``routinely shows disrespect'' for the ``honest and open debate'' that produces the truth.

"The direction in which our nation is being led is deeply troubling to me, not only in Iraq but also at home, on economic policy, social policy and environmental policy," Gore said.

"Millions of Americans now share a feeling that something pretty basic has gone wrong in our country, and that some important American values are being placed at risk, and they want to set it right." ...

MoveOn's organizers tell (in a mass e-mail) how the speech came to be:

Two weeks ago, we received a call from former Vice President Al Gore. Mr. Gore explained that he was deeply concerned about the President's pattern of misleading the public -- most recently on Iraq, but also on the environment, the economy, and a host of other domestic issues. He said he was working on a major policy speech, and he wanted to give it to MoveOn members and with MoveOn's sponsorship. MoveOn was a good partner, he said, because so many MoveOn members are engaging in the national conversation about the direction of our country. ...

You can read the entire speech transcript, and, by 5pm EST today, view streaming video of the event at the MoveOn home page. The group has also been successful in collecting 414,000 signatures for its petition asking for an independent commission to investigate the distortion of evidence leading up to the Iraq war.

Arnold changes the equation

I'm as surprised as everyone else by the news that Arnold Schwarzenegger has entered the recall race for California governor. And now comes word that Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante will enter the race as well.

Lots still unknown. Richard Riordan, who feels he was double-crossed, is reportedly steamed. Arianna Huffington may be sorry she entered, 12 hours after her announcement.

As for the news media: OK, we'll let you guys have your 48 hours of celebrity gawking and tittering and bad Terminator puns. But we've got a $1 trillion economy to run.

If Arnold pursues a Rose Garden strategy of refusing to answer questions about his position on issues -- his announcement on last night's Tonight show was a tipoff that he's arrogant enough to believe he can ride his celebrity credentials right into the governor's mansion -- then the media need to hold his feet to the fire. Just what exactly are your positions on balancing the budget (which specific programs would you cut?), education, health care, prison reform, and dozens of other positions that the other candidates are spelling out.

You've already succeeded in turning the recall into an international spectacle, Arnold. Now let's see if there's any substance underneath those famous biceps.

A series on participatory journalism

A few hours ago the Online Journalism Review posted what I consider to be my most important series of articles this year (not counting the book I'm working on).

The subject is participatory journalism. The three-part package includes:

• Personal Broadcasting Opens Yet Another Front for Journalists

• Participatory Journalism Puts the Reader in the Driver's Seat

• What is Participatory Journalism?

OJR originally didn't package these well, but they've corrected this, so I've temporarily removed the articles from my site. (As I say below, my complaint is really with all online news outlets, which continue to make related material very difficult to find. In any event, that minor quibble about format shouldn't overshadow the thrust of the articles.)

An excerpt from the main article:

By night, Raven -- the name everyone uses for 47-year-old Harold Kionka -- works as a janitor, mopping the floors and cleaning the grease traps in TGIFriday's in Daytona Beach, Fla.

By day, he operates almost single-handedly a 24-hour Internet TV station, serving as owner, station manager, producer and on-air personality. Daytonabeach-live brings live coverage of events in the Florida resort town to as many as 17,000 viewers a day.

Raven and a handful of others are at the vanguard of a new breed of journalism: personal broadcasting. Using equipment that is now relatively inexpensive and simple to use, these video pioneers are claiming a stake in territory that was once the exclusive province of big media.

And the first sidebar:

The New Directions for News report says of this phenomenon: "Everyone on the Internet is a potential expert on some subject -- from Pez dispensers to digital photography techniques to wormholes -- and these participatory forms are great places to find and share not only obscure or rare information, but commentary that might be too controversial for mainstream media."

One of those niche publishers is Sheila Spencer Stover of Bunn, N.C., whose Indian name is Firehair Shining Spirit. She runs the Internet Native News and Issues List, a mailing list with 400 members, mostly native Americans. ...

"Our members talk about prison rights, religious freedom, the selling of spirituality, the repatriation of bones, the stockpiling of native artifacts in museums stolen out of grave sites, building on sacred lands, the reclaiming of languages, elder health, Alaskan natives afflicted by gas-sniffing, suicide on reservations, issues with Indian trust monies, the Pipestone project in Montana, where they want to build a theme park on sacred land -- we exchange news about anything and everything," she says.

Here's the series of articles I've written about new media as a force in empowering readers and citizen-journalists:

Follow-ups:

Steve Outing in E-Media Tidbits this morning recounts my complaint about OJR's burying my two sidebars. It wasn't that big a deal to me -- if it was, I would have taken it up with OJR's editors. As it turns out, they've redesigned the page to make the two siders more prominent.

My complaint is really with all online news outlets, which continue to make related material -- even stories that are part of the same package -- very difficult to find. It's one of the major flaws in the online news soup.

Mitch Ratcliffe over at Correspondences.org has kind words for the participatory journalism series, though he prefers the term "civic journalism." He's right -- the label's less important than the concept.

Howard Rheingold liked the package, too. He excerpted the section on programmers Matt Haughey and Rusty Foster's plan to launch a "smart mob-style site" to provide a place for independent reporting about next year's election. LostRemote.com also reported on that bit of news today.

Ernie the Attorney blogs from his temporary new home on TypePad.

Tim Porter weighs in thoughtfully, writing, "Self-publishing and other forms of participatory journalism are both a threat and an opportunity to traditional news media, particularly newspapers. Newspapers certainly don't need another media type with which to compete for reader attention, especially one that invites readers to sit at the keyboard themselves. They could, however, embrace the change and lead the reader instead of following him. Their track record in this area is lousy, though. Participatory journalism is another one of those fields that newspapers should be playing in even if they don't fully understand its implications. The future tends to unveil itself only to those who are there."

In "Moblog the vote," BoingBoing points to the 2nd OJR story by way of the mention in Lost Remote about the upcoming experiment in citizen coverage of the 2004 election.

At Projo, Sheila Lennon went nuts today with a great examination of the issues related to participatory journalism, pointing out specific kinds of reader participation that take place at the Providence Journal.