thecyberbrains.com

The sessions at the We Media conference in Miami always interesting, but some of the best information is gleaned in hallway chats during coffee breaks.

This morning I heard a broad British accent hail me with “Hello, it’s the famous Clyde who told us about Facebook.”

It was David Dunkley Gyimah, a hyper-energetic and hyper-talented video journalist I first met in San Antonio at the International Symposium on Online Journalism.

“Famous” is a stretch, but at during a coffee break at that 2004 gathering I had tried to tell my colleagues about this oddball Web site that my students were gaga about. I had recently become one of just a handful of faculty to sign on and I a gut feeling there was something to it.

Facebook? Frat party pictures and dorm chatter? I was met with blank stares. It certainly didn’t sound like anything that would be of interest to media professionals. But David thought the dearth of innovative thinking by the gathered journalists was funny.

So today David and I had another great laugh. And this time he told me about a technology to watch.

While David is a noted video innovator, senior lecturer at the University of Westminster and founder of Viewmagazine.tv, he is also a student in what may be the most unusual doctoral programs in the world. SMARTlab is a “practice-based Ph.D. program” Teams of students actually invent new technology after research that includes “landing” in a community, culture or research environment and spending enough time there to know it intimately.

And what’s on the boards these days? How about an Internet variant the lifeblood of which is real flesh and blood?

One of the SMARTlab teams is exploring a system similar to that used by British intelligence operatives to surreptitiously pass messages. The system uses a set of small Bluetooth transponders that exchange information when the person wearing Unit A gets close to the person wearing Unit B.

Great James Bond stuff, but the SMARTlab folks want to know what happens if you have a whole lot of people with those transponders. Could, for instance, one pass a message across a city or whole country by relaying it from a jogger to a bicyclist to a senior strolling the park to the mailman and on and on. Digitial internodal communications. That’s Web talk on the hoof, so to speak.

This is not just fun and games. One might be able to gather information from nearby stores without stopping or pickup news updates while walking to work. Or send a digital personal message to a distant loved one without ever going on the Internet. Who knows what you could do by putting transponders on dog collars.

So it’s my turn. Next conference, I get to give David the loud hello and tell everyone he is the famous seer. But they'll probably already know that before he is in handshaking distance.

Not all of the gamechangers here at the We Media conference rely on cutting-edge technology. In fact, a project that depends on villagers in rural Africa has, in my mind, one of the best chances of the way distribute breaking news.

Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, is a non-profit organization that has built a unique crowdsourcing information. Crowdsourcing is the journalistic process of gathering information from a large number of people via blogging, texting and other digital media.

Erik Hersman, director of operations, told a auditorium of Ushahindi works primarily in Africa to gather and forward crisis information. While it will take e-mail and Web information, the tool of choice for its contributors is the simple cell phone. Not the iPhone, Blackberry or other smartphone. Just the cheap “dumb phone” that does little else but make voice calls and allows text messaging.

In countries where wired phone systems are unreliable, newspapers seldom make it to the hinterlands and broadcast media is often government controlled, the cell phone is ubiquitous across social classes. For instance, the International Telecommunications Union said about one in four Ugandans – 8.2 million – carry a mobile phone.

When a natural or political crisis erupts, an Ushahidi user sends details by text to the organization. After a local NGO verifies the account, Ushahidi logs the incident on database and plots on a digital map with space for pictures and video. Reports can then be texted back to local leaders, who respond to disaster or mediate community conflict.

It’s almost too simple to be true. It reminds me of the old “farm telegraph” where the call for help was passed from neighbor to neighbor by ringing bells. In this case it is done by with open source software Ushahidi shares freely with others.

Take a look at http://ushahidi.com . This is not only a stellar humanitarian effort by a simple use of technology that could be modified for many uses.

I had an interesting conversation with a fellow scholar who works in the organizational management and planning discipline about ways to innovate and push new media products into the market.

His analogy was interesting. He noted that Japanese auto makers such as Honda made inroads in the American car market in the 1980s by offering cheap vehicles that were high in motor quality but didn’t look that great. Slowly but surely, they added features while incrementally upping the cost. While the Fords and Chevys of the world couldn’t compete against a much cheaper product without stripping out major features, Honda slowly improved quality while keeping its image as a low-cost alternative, effectively squeezing its way into a crowded market.

We know the lesson now, as Honda has become the dominant automaker in the U.S.

The analogy he was drawing is that this is effectively what Rupert Murdoch has done in his career, launching new low cost products (and acquiring others) that slowly make their way into the market while also giving NewsCorp more power as a conglomerate.

I won’t go on about his ideas because it’s obviously his work, but it got me thinking about one thing Murdoch does do well vis a vis other media groups. We as scholars often decry the lack of imagination and experimentation among legacy media, but for all his faults (and I am no Murdoch fan on the balance), Murdoch has turned NewsCorp into a company that is constantly trying new things.

Scholars and media critics have noted that online news products have been slow to embrace social networking. They’ve tapped in somewhat to external networks such as Facebook, but they’ve done little to foster social community in the context of their own sites.

NewsCorp’s offerings, on the other hand, are all over social media, and that says nothing of the fact that they now own MySpace. And in fact NewsCorp has done a good job fusing social media offerings as part of their regular content push. The two are much more integrated than what you’d see on a competitor such CNN or MSNBC.

On the whole, it appears Murdoch understands the power of social media much more than his corporate competitors. And because he exercises more direct control over company direction, he’s able to implement the resulting philosophy.

Of course there are other issues such as hegemony of media voice and lack of consumer choice that is in the background of this discussion. And I won’t even get into Fox News, which has altered the news landscape in some pretty bad ways.

But for innovation, I’m not sure there’s another conglomerate right now that is both dabbling in it and seems to “get it” when it comes to social media. A lot of us think it is this spirit at least that will allow news to survive and thrive in the transition.

So, uh, be more like Rupert Murdoch. My students’ heads are gonna explode.

Escaping February’s icy grip on the Midwest is always a treat. But for me that usually means a convention and more time in an air-conditioned room than in the sun.

We Media Miami promotes itself as a different sort of conference and I was treated to a different sort of introduction. I had to catch a plane that arrived seven hours before kickoff, which meant I had a chance to relish a Latin lunch and a few minutes of sun before I got to work.

Work? At a conference in Cocoanut Grove? Alas, there is no free lunch (especially cilantro soup). The Reynolds Journalism Institute sent me here to look at the We Media organization’s concept of “gamechangers” for the Web and the world.

We Media describes itself as “a Web site, a community, a conference and a global movement to make the world better through media.” It is the brainchild of Andrew Nachison and Dale Perkins of the Seven26groups consulting company.

The conference is framed around a competition for which 35 Web sites were nominated. A panel of judges this week pared that down to eight.

Prior to the announcement of the finalists, I went through all the sites myself and then asked 24 students in my citizen journalism-focused Online Journalism class to do the same. We each ranked the sites on a 1-5 scale and then made comments.
Twenty-somethings are hard to impress. I found a few gems in a mostly been-there, done-that field. But the students were harsh, giving only one site a “3.” At least it was one of the sites I liked well enough to grant a “4.”

I often notice in class how jaded young people are about technology. They have grown up with life-like video games, CGI movies and a Google answer for anything. To catch their attention takes work.

For We Media, the students wanted both new process and intriguing output. Mere content would not do it.

The site that did that was Charitywater.org. Like me, they appreciated the social benefit of funding clean water projects around the world. And we both enjoyed the ease of navigation and the web cam documenting well drilling.

To me that was not enough to “change the game.” But the way Charitywater.org ups the ante in fund raising is. The site looks like something from Ikea and has the same appeal to the pocketbook. You can give on any page.

But I think what most impressed me was Twitter campaign. Sure, we have all been asked to use that addictive SMS community to promote a cause. But this was the first time I was given a long list of pre-written comments I could copy and past into my Twitter feed. Very cool.

But not cool enough for the judges. It didn’t even place.

That’s the conflict of ideals and ideas I will explore this week. Through Thursday, I will be blogging from the conference with my observations on why people think the game needs to be changed and how they think we should go about that. And I’ll weigh in with my own opinions – which are never in short supply.

I've been kind of reeling in dissertation depression lately, so my apologies for not updating more frequently. I'm in the weird stage where I'm dreading all the work I need to do so much that I'm not accomplishing anything. It sounds bad, but that leads to the "Oh-crap!-I-have-to-get-this-done-no-matter-what!" stage where I usually do my best work. Yeah, it's screwed up process, but it works for me.
Anyway, I don't know why I'm apologizing because it's not like I have a huge following here. I'm not throwing a pity party. It is what it is, but it's made me question why I'm even blogging at all. Combine that with the studies I'm searching through for my dissertation, and I feel sometimes like I'm trying to catch lightning in a bottle. Can I really boil down the reasons why someone posts on a blog or submits a story to CNN's iReport in one mathematical model? Can I even add insight into something that just seems to happen on its own? Even if I do find something, what's the point? Can you really do anything to foster the Stephenie Meyers of the world?
Yes, I did call upon the name of the Twilight goddess because I think she's a good example of what I'm researching. My wife told me she just read an interview with the stay-at-home mom in which she described her early writing process. She tells Vogue she often wrote after her kids went to bed and sometimes with a child on her lap. She never showed her writing to anyone - not even her husband - beyond one of of her sisters, who finally convinced her to send it to publishers. A $750,000 book deal later and the rest is history of course. But while I'm sure she doesn't mind the dump truck full of money she now receives, it doesn't seem like that was her ultimate goal.

"I had always told myself stories my whole life and assumed that everyone does," Meyer says.

She turned to writing because it allowed her to get those stories out of her head.

"I used to paint, and I won a few watercolor contests, but I could never get it to look exactly like it did in my head. But with writing, I discovered I could get it to look exactly like it did in my head."

In other words, she's saying she writes because it's a need. She doesn't write for reward or praise or admiration. She writes because there is value in the activity itself.
George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, puts it a bit differently, but I think he agrees.

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

If Orwell is right and even the writer him or herself can't understand the demon that compels them, why am I even trying? If I can't even understand my own motivations (or lack of motivation, most of the time) how can I attempt to find it in others? Is contributing to an online news site such an individual act that it can be understood only in terms of the person? Or can news organizations actually do something that will make their readers more likely to contribute?
I put a lot of faith in that last question because I truly believe they can, and I think they need to. The capabilities of the Internet make connecting with audiences easier than ever, and the mission of journalism has always been to bring people together. News organizations lost sight of this somewhere, and it has taken the Internet and dwindling revenues to pull them back.
The key to making those connections and encouraging contributions lies within the intrinsic motivations for writing Meyer and Orwell uphold. The media need to do a better job at making what they have to offer valuable in itself. Information cannot be valuable only because of what you can do with it or what you can talk about with others.
Personally, I need to do a better job writing to satisfy my own personal demons, one of which will always be journalism. No matter how many times they cover the Octo-Mom or Oscar fashions, I believe in the democratic potential of the news media. I believe a good story can make a difference. I know the media won't always be perfect, and that's why they need people like me to remind them once in a while.

My family likes to joke about my father’s garage. It is a foreboding place, packed to the hilt with boxes and boxes of stuff that predates Richard Nixon, and he declares he “needs” all of it. The garage is a source of constant humor in my family. I’ve long thought I didn’t inherit my dad’s packrat ways, and in terms of material things I think I do OK in that regard, but I’m learning I am a packrat when it comes to online stuff.

With a cross-country move coming up, it is time for me to start consolidating and packing. Not the house - it’s a little early for that. But because I am at some point going to lose my MU e-mail account, and because I’ve been annoyed with the spamage on Yahoo! Mail, I decided to declare endless war on spam and make the switch to Gmail this weekend.

This means migrating a lot of saved emails to Gmail, so I started with my Yahoo! account. And it’s amazing the stuff I have sitting around.

A receipts from an Amazon purchase from 2003, just in case I didn’t get that book (I did). Registrations for extended warranties that have long since expired on purchases I don’t even remember making. A recipe for cranberry meatballs that I know well enough to make from memory.

But I “need” all this stuff, so why not?

Dr. Clyde Bentley once did an one-week e-mail fast here at MU, and it was hilarious to read the reactions when he asked them to fax or (God forbid) snail mail him something instead of sending it through the intertubes. The process taught him a lot, he says, about how integrated e-mail is into his life and how difficult it is to “do” life without it, if only because of others’ expectations of you in a connected world.

As much as others might suffer were I to try the same thing, I might suffer more. E-mail has become more than a communication tool for me. It is now my own personal Public Storage facility where I file away information that I might need later. I don’t print receipts anymore, I just save the e-mail. And pity the poor colleague who sent me a journal submission manuscript to look over three months ago (I am SO sorry!). It’s there on my “to-do” list, of course - it’s in my inbox, not a nasty little subfolder - but it doesn’t seem to get done.

Since I’m migrating to Gmail, perhaps it’s time to set some new rules for myself. Like print out what I need and delete the e-mail, and don’t keep any any messages in my account longer than a week. My guess is that email is more functional when it’s used more like the telephone and less like that answering machine where you have 16 saved messages and have to wade through old stuff to get to the new stuff.

If anyone has any ideas for keeping my inbox lean and mean, I’ll take ‘em. In the meantime, I need to get back to my garage. Dad would be so proud.

I don’t think I can take any more news. Not in my brain, but in my pocketbook.

Like most Americans, I’ve been glumly looking at my bank accounts, retirement plan and other assets. The result is the realization that I would have done better with a coffee can buried in the backyard.


Let me preface this by noting that I am a proud member of the embattled middle class, with a professor’s paycheck that still hasn’t matched what I earned in the industry.

I am also a lover of newspapers. I subscribe to two and read others online. But it is not the newspapers that are taking the bite from my wallet. It is all those electronic services I consider basic utilities.

The National Cable and Television Association says the average price of expanded basic cable is about $44 a month and digital averages $60. I pay $84 for digital cable here in Columbia, MO. My wife and I have jobs that require an Internet connection that runs about twice the price of normal broadband in Columbia. We pay $140 a month.

Alas, it was Steve Jobs who finally did in my budget. I succumbed to those alluring Apple ads last Christmas and bought iPhones for my wife and me. Just $170 per month, paid with a nervous smile. That is not far from the national average of $60 per month – per cell phone user and a bargain since my son moved out of the house.

Hardware costs could make the total zoom much higher but the laptop, the wireless router and the cell phone handsets are not monthly charges. Yet.

I doubt that I am the only cost-conscious citizen who conducted a recession excavation of the bill basket. But, what I found surprised me. I pay nearly twice as much for digital media each month than I do for newspaper subscriptions in a year.

I also doubt that I am the only cheapskate who turned down the New York Times offer of $13.40 a week for arguably the finest journalism in the world. Too much money.

But though I could buy a sports car for the $394 I pay each month to look at passing electrons, I don’t think of it as a luxury. I put all that whizzbang technology in the same category as the light switch on the living room wall. The home wouldn’t be a home without it.

After thinking about my dependency on all this interconnectivity, I’ve come to believe that few of us even think of those technology services as “media” costs and instead lump them with our other utilities.” With apologies to my other colleagues trying desperately to monetize online news, I think we are on the wrong track. Americans only want news and information. But they value information delivery systems.

It may be time for journalists to bite the bullet and concede that content is priceless. As in without a price that the public will pay.

The television and movie industries figured this out long ago by demanding a lucrative cut of cable revenues. People are willing to pay for delivery, but not to buy a television program.

The anarchistic-by-design Internet laughs at Web-wide relief for newspapers. However, many Webheads concede that without newspapers and their reporters, there would be little news content to deliver. So there is a small chance content providers will some day be able to cut a deal with Internet Service Providers.

Perhaps, however, a better route would be to develop a valued delivery system for our legacy print editions. The Web is driving subscriptions down, but print editions still hold marketable appeal and generally outdraw newspaper Web sites.

If our problem is more in our circulation system than in our content, it may be time to blow up the tradition of kid-on-a-bike/motor route carrier/coin-fed news stand. Like cable and Internet, perhaps the newspaper should emphasize the value of an information stream rather than the content itself. Could print newspapers have a delivery structure like an ISP? For a single rate to a delivery company (Newspaper Service Provider/NSP), could I get any newspaper I wanted on whichever days I wanted?

Perhaps that “NSP” could even be the local ISP or cable company.

Far fetched, perhaps. But I once thought the idea of using my cell phone as a bubble level was beyond the pale.

MU’s own Jen Reeves, one of the most innovative minds here when it comes to journalism and social media, likes to compare the journalistic value of Twitter to a police scanner. When news sources use Twitter to follow the feeds of people in their community, they can glean what is going on in communities similar to what we have in newsrooms now, where police scanners are a window into what’s going on in the police and fire arenas.

Today I was part of a beautiful example of how it works.

My wife and I were walking across the MU campus today and I remarked how it smelled like burning wood, sort of like that first winter day when everyone in town fires up the fireplace. Soon we saw random pieces of ash-like material floating to the ground every so often. It was obvious that something was burning somewhere in Columbia.

We had seen nothing on the news, and when I got to my office I immediately checked the Missourian, Daily Tribune, and KOMU to see if there was anything going on.

Nothing.

The air quality was pretty bad at that point, so I posted the following to my Twitter feed:

Anyone know why it smells like wood burning all over campus and there’s ash coming down from the sky? I see nothing on the news.

Within a few minutes, I got an email from Joy Mayer at the Missourian, who follows my Twitter feed and had seen my tweet. She thanked me for the news tip and said the Missourian would have something shortly.

Mayer and Jake Sherlock went to work with the Missourian folks. Five minutes later, through their own Twitter account, the Missourian tweeted the following headline:

A.L. Gustin Golf Course is having a control burn until 1 p.m. today. Expect smoke, ash and burning odor in the area.

I retweeted the message and thus pushed it out to my own network of friends via Twitter and Facebook. Five minutes after that (and bear in mind, this is about 15 minutes after my original tweet), the Missourian posted a longer bulletin to their web site expanding on the information, including that they’d first heard the information from a “concerned citizen” on Twitter (that’s me, apparently) and provided confirmation that they’d verified the burn with MUPD dispatch.

So in 15-20 minutes, it went from citizen tweet to verified information on the Missourian web site. This is the anatomy of using social media to break citizen news in the age of Web 2.0. News outlets still feed the Web site as the ultimate destination, but the starting point comes from a stream of discussion, and in fact uses that stream of discussion to further push the content once it’s published.

This is the police scanner at work. Rather than listening to dispatch chatter for the cop or radio channels, news outlets can subscribe to a stream of chatter from citizens in their community and mine that data for news. While this was a minor piece of news in the scheme of things, imagine for a second the possibilities.

I hear all the time (and sometimes too often) that “this citizen journalism stuff” isn’t real news because it’s not trustworthy. Of course it’s not always trustworthy. That’s why we need professional journalism.

But Twitter and other social media sources of information present the same opportunity as a fire alarm or police scanner in that journalists can pick up bits of information, discern the news, make some calls, and push verified information into the stream of discussion for mass consumption. The principles set out in The Elements of Journalism don’t really change all that much: truth matters, and so do verification, independence, and talkback.

But the game itself has changed. This is not the journalist as agenda-setter. It is journalist as a hub connecting multitudes of spokes in the stream of civic discussion. It is this changing role that has a lot of my colleagues both in the industry and academy nervous.

To me, it’s a better evolution of stuff we already do, and it gives us a chance to do it better.

Update: An excellent blog post from Rob Weir at the Missourian gives you a look at the process from the Missourian side. My first reaction is that I’m reminded how even with all the technology in the world, it still takes journalists making decisions to make it all come together.