Story time?

This post is more anecdotal than related to citizen journalism - I know the latter has become the focus of the class but an article and slideshow in the NYT about metafilter gatherings reminded about an online community I was active in while I lived in London.
The site is accessible by invitation only though one can browse at leisure, you just have to be invited in to participate by someone. It was created as a forum, originally, to explore London by Londoners (LBL) and morphed into a community called fridaycities, then meetings started to take place at people's homes and eventually a real-world interaction formed (though fueled by far too many pints). There was a name confusion going on though. Since people on the site have screen-names, at meetups (at least the first few I attended) people referred to each other by their avatar. So i spent some time looking for 'litro-kay' and this was not uncommon.
Social capital is earned by means of 'kudos' which you accumulate and trade for witty comments or adding new people to the network. The people with the most kudos are displayed on a special page.

In any case, i thought it interesting so I'm posting a link to the page
Fridaycities

Méfiez vos voisins!

In a unique twist on citizen journalism, an internet service has cropped up to help potential home buyers discover the real dirt on the neighborhoods in which they are considering home purchase -- rottenNEIGHBOR.com. This collaborative zip code- and map-based database allows you to rat out on your bad neighbor(s) so that prospective house buyers will know what to expect if they move to your neighborhood.

A simple search box allows you to enter the zip code of a potential neighborhood and see whether others have made any comments about their neighbors. When I checked out my own zipcode (27278), I was provided the following map:

Mostly I was relieved to find that we weren't added to the rotten neighbor list. Otherwise, it reminded me a bit of the World War II posters used in France to exhort good citizens to report any bad citizenship on the part of one's neighbors.

That was before I started wondering why I would ever want to reduce the chances of one day selling my own home by pointing out the unattractive aspects of my neighborhood -- unless of course I wanted to advertise it by saying, "You know that nosy lady on rottenNEIGHBOR.com? That was me, so don't worry."

For your reading pleasure

Slate Magazine published an article on Facebook friending ettiquete - of defriending, declining or otherwise limiting the number of friends to a community a-la-dunbar (no joke)

Just thought you would enjoy.

CLICK!

Storage is cheap, why select?

Tomorrow (well, technically today now, I guess) I will be participating in the ASIST student chapter's panel discussion in Wilson Library. The topic is, "Storage is cheap. Why select?" Below are the general comments I plan to make in my 5-minute time slot.

Saying that because storage is cheap we should therefore save everything suggests that at its heart, the issue of selection is a technical question driven primarily by resource constraints. It suggests that we select because we know that we can’t save everything and we therefore need to privilege some records above others in order to create coherent collections. It also suggests that when we have reached a point where it is technically and economically possible to “save everything,” that it is good to do this because it allows us to avoid arbitrary selection decisions, and thereby create a world where information is free and people can pick and choose knowledge objects as they will. This is an attractive belief, but at its heart it’s false. First, the issue of selection is as much an ethical issue as it is a technical and economic issue; and second, selection is inevitable. So the important question related to selection is not how we can avoid it -- we can’t. The important question is two-fold: who will do the selection and how transparent are the selection rules to the people that use the information objects.

In his now-classic “The Documentation Strategy and Archival Appraisal Principles: A Different Perspective,” Richard Cox explicitly highlights twelve primary principles of an archival appraisal theory. Principle 1 is this: “All recorded information has some continuing value to the records creators and to society.” He then notes that this is an assumption held widely by archivists, probably because of the frequency with which they come from the humanities, in particular history. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to get rid of any information because its very existence implies that it holds some value. In our less than perfect world we have time and resource constraints and must engage in selection and appraisal to determine what will provide the most value.

Archivists, because of their training and expertise in making selection decisions, naturally believe that they are best qualified to make such decisions. Nonetheless, archivists in the digital age are facing selection decisions that they did not face prior to the 20th Century. The other day on O’Reilly Radar Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation Peter Brantley discussed a workshop he participated in at UC Berkeley in which a policy was being sought to determine how to preserve and publicly host incidental war footage from Iraq and other sites of armed conflicts. The Internet Archive took place in these conversations, and Brantley noted:

“of around 250 videos being posted daily at the Internet Archive, approximately 30-50 could potentially be called into a process of review. These include images of hate speech or obvious propaganda, guns, victims, or long distance violence (snipers, car bombs, etc.) Some of the videos are excruciatingly violent (Trust me: extremely graphic and intimate portrayals of war and harm). In some of these videos people are identifiable through the explicit use of names, passport photos, or through questioning that reveals personally-identifiable information.”

A number of questions arise with a situation like this, such as “can someone get killed using information in this video?,” or alternatively, “Could someone get killed because they are seen in this video?”, “Am I helping terrorists recruit or communicate?,” “Am I helping the public understand?”, and “What is the archive’s or curator’s personal responsibility?” for the consequences of this video being publicly viewable?

It seems that with potential information objects such as this, three primary possibilities with regards to the “save everything” approach exist; the first is to save everything and allow it all to be publicly searchable and viewable. I have problems with that – in a society, for example, where a woman’s life could potentially be ruined if not snuffed out because it becomes public knowledge that she was raped, I would hesitate to allow that kind of information to be either publicly searchable or viewable. The second possibility is that everything is saved, but access is restricted. It seems to me that this approach really doesn’t do anything more than push the selection decision to a different rung on the ladder. In other words, a repository could keep the information, but it would still require active data management to ensure that highly sensitive material doesn’t reach the wrong hands. This now implies that the economic constraint of selection still exists, it has simply been pushed to a different level. It also muddies the waters with potential censorship issues and concerns about what will happen if some other organization ends up owning or controlling a given repository? Can we still trust that this unknown “third party” will “do the right thing”? The third possibility is that we wait for some governmental restrictions to be put in place and then we can just pass the moral buck on to the government – a really reassuring thought.

At their heart, selection decisions are decisions that reflect the ethical and culturally ingrained assumptions and values of the people in control of the knowledge objects. To pretend that just allowing a free-for-all will allow us to avoid these types of decisions is somewhat akin to believing that if we just line up all those in power and shoot them, that we will have inevitably changed the moral structures of our society. If not during this revolution, then maybe during the one next decade.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Being from the School of Law and all, I couldn't resist posting this. The EFF 's site is great in general, but this little banner is cool, too. Not sure if we'll be getting into the legal issues surrounding blogging and citizen media, but in any case...

BackFence.com...no wonder...

I was curious about why backfence.com seemed to die such a miserable death seeing as how it was poised to become the facebook of citizen media a couple short years ago. So I just spent some time exploring what's left of it. I actually like the interface, and it seems to have been kept fairly well up-to-date with current Web 2.0 sorts of trends, at least as far as the UI is concerned (that's user interface for all you non-geeks out there). Nice clean look and feel, intuitive navigation, the requisite RSS feeds, etc. But each of the regional microsites within backfence (Bethesda, MD and Arlington, VA were two that I explored) seem to have been abandoned as of June 29, 2007.

Then I stumbled onto the link to the company's Advisory Board:
http://backfence.com/about/index.cfm?page=/investors/advBoard&mycomm=AR

Talk about your old guard warriors! Sorry to be so ageist and maybe sexist (in reverse?), but these guys are too old and stodgy to be driving innovation in citizen media...and where are the women?? Not the type of gang I would expect to be able to stir up interest, participation, and commitment at the local level.

Yes, it looks like a breadboard, but is it art?

With the current debate about Star Simpson's "t-shirt art", I thought I'd add my two cents. (A good description of the incident can be found at boingboing.)

(1) Yes, Boston overdid it yet again.
(2) Yes, I believe that she wore this around campus and that it wouldn't be an unusual thing to wear at MIT.
(3) Having raised two kids past the 19-year-old age point, I suspect that a 19-year-old MIT comp sci/engineering student (who are already known to be more politically active than their peers at other universities) knew exactly what she was doing when she went to the airport. This is what made the t-shirt "art" and not (k/c)raft.

It suggests that whenever you think you may have underestimated the common sense of the Boston authorities that you need to just try, try again.

However, I want to play my part now, so I really want a hoax device t-shirt of my own and I think this one will do nicely:



It can be purchased at ThinkGeek.com.

Google to out open FaceBook and unleash the Brazillians

TechCrunch reports that Google will "out open" FaceBook in November as they release APIs to iGoogle and Orkut as a first step. Orkut is famously, or infamously, because Brazillian quickly much to the apparent surprise of Google and the "cool kids" who first rushed to the social networking site as it was growing.

Michael Arrlington further writes:

The short version: Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. They’ll start with Orkut and iGoogle (Google’s personalized home page), and expand from there to include Gmail, Google Talk and other Google services over time.

On November 5 we’ll likely see third party iGoogle gadgets that leverage Orkut’s social graph information - the most basic implementation of what Google is planning. From there we may see a lot more - such as the ability to pull Orkut data outside of Google and into third party applications via the APIs. And Google is also considering allowing third parties to join the party at the other end of the platform - meaning other social networks (think Bebo, Friendster, Twitter, Digg and thousands of others) to give access to their user data to developers through those same APIs.

Dare Obasanjo adds some more detailed insight and speculation on his blog.

This just in...

FCC: U.S. Doesn't Need Free Wireless Broadband

"The FCC once again is siding with big telcos at the expense of consumers. This time around, it killed a plan that would offer free wireless broadband to 95% of the U.S., making use of a piece of the wireless spectrum that's unused. Are you surprised?"

Read more...

iScream, youScream, we all scream for iPod touch

Believe it or not, I've been so busy what with the law school falling apart that I completely missed the boat on the new iPod touch. A friend had actually emailed me a week or two ago and mentioned it as an aside, but I was honestly too busy to bother investigating. (It's pretty amazing, of course, and since I don't need another mobile phone, I may just get one.) Which brings me to the point of this post...

Given all that we know and all that we're learning about social networks, staying "connected," and whatnot, I'm wondering if we can come up with a sort of informational equivalent to the Dunbar number. I mean, how much information can we possibly process on a daily basis at any kind of meaningful level of engagement? That's part of what keeps me from diving headlong into blogging and social networks and why I'm only halfheartedly committed to either Myspace or Facebook. I simply don't have enough time to digest all this stuff! Granted, I keep a pretty insane schedule and sleep less than I should. But I don't find myself quite so drawn to these virtual gathering places or even my favorite blogs as much as I do to good old-fashioned email, major news sites, and hard copy. So old school, I know...

As for the local citizen media sites Paul pointed out, I have to say that I prefer the tried and tested approach of the News & Observer, which is less like citizen media and more like typical newspaper coverage targeted to more local audiences. But it works for me. The STP site seems a bit snarky and somewhat dormant. I do appreciate the OP site, but even though I live in Orange County, I can't see myself turning to it terribly often.

Community Content in Orange County

I know of three different sites serving the Orange County communities online with a variety of reporting.

Orange Chat is the blog collection by the writers of the Chapel Hill News. It's fairly traditional news and you can see from the comments how much reader interaction that's engendered.

But even at that, Orange Chat serves as a jumping off point for the more lively and older Orange Politics (know to insiders as OP). OP articles are posted by a small collection of editors and the OPers, the readers, are highly engaged in most subjects giving a lot of comment and discussion. Of particular interest from our readings is the Question of Trust thread in which a meta-commentary on anonymous postings has drawn over 50 comments so far.

Anonymous posters are more the norm at Squeeze the Pulp (aka STP) which uses more traditional forum software for their discussions. While there are not perhaps as many posters at STP as at OP, STP seems to have attracted a sort of opposition party tone (in opposition to OP management).

Know of others? Have a different take on any or all of the three?

For the Authors

I've sent invites to the whole class, you need only to approve and to sign up to become an editor of this blog. I will give you full authority to change the look, to add and remove block of information (notice that I've added my del.icio.us feed for articles tagged with jomc490 from smalljones), and to post new articles.

Enjoy your new powers and use them wisely.