Cit Media

Take a look at the great “Video speech matching” project at TheyWorkForYou.com. They’re combining BBC video of the British House of Commons and official text transcripts, and asking people to match keywords and phrases with the videos, to create a time-stamped archive of important debates.

Tom Steinberg, one of the organizers, says the community has responded in force, and people keep signing up to help. There’s no way to do this (at least not yet) with machines, he says, because machine speech recognition can’t (yet) handle all the different accents and dialects in one bite.

This is reminiscent of NASA’s wonderful ClickWorkers project, which relies on human perception to handle what machines can’t do as well. I love it.

UPDATED

The Dallas Morning News implores its readers, “Help us examine the lost JFK files.” Why?

Given the volume, we haven’t been able to review most of the files. That’s why were calling on you. Here’s your chance to review never-seen-before materials related to the JFK assassination.

This is a breakthrough in the traditional media — though as Jon Garfunkel notes in his comments below, the implementation leaves a huge amount to be desired.

Some organizations, notably several Gannett papers, have asked for audience help in looking into issues. But as far as I know this is the first time one of them has asked the readers to help analyze a pile of documents.

Nothing new elsewhere, of course; Talking Points Memo has done it many times, to good effect. To see a Big Media company wise up to the audience’s potential, however, is excellent.

Should the DMN pay people who come up with the best material? Yes, as they’d pay freelancers. Complicated, but the right thing to do.

Whether they do or not, this is still a great move.

Adrian Holovaty and his team at EveryBlock (subtitle: “A News Feed for Your Block”) have launched in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. This is a solid start to a project that has enormous potential.

Congrats to all…

Glenn Greenwald accurately explains the grotesque result of laws that seek to curb that amorphous problem of “hate speech” — a concept that turns free speech on its head. And unlike many of his colleagues on the political left, Greenwald explains why he’s defending people whose speech frequently deserves contempt:

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing “offensive” or “insulting” or “wrong” political ideas. The mere existence of the “investigation,” interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.

How many times can we say this? If you care about your own free speech rights, you must defend the rights of people whose speech makes your blood boil.

I’m with educators, news people and others at the Knight Digital Media Center in Los Angeles for several-day session with National Public Radio personnel. NPR got a big foundation grant to retrain its entire editorial staff to understand and do multimedia.

Just learned this is not to be blogged…

Journalists, it turns out, go off the record as much as anyone else.

Paul Conley is telling trade journalism honchos to, “No More Training” — a plea to employers to stop offering training in Web journalism to their employees. Huh?

There’s reason for this apparent madness, though I don’t entirely agree with it. Conley says:

First, “You cannot train someone to be part of a culture.” He means the Web culture.

Second, he says, “When the fighting begins, the training must end.” Here he means that it’s too late to start getting journalists web-savvy.

On the second point I could not disagree more. Soldiers train in between battles, to stay sharp and learn new tactics.

The first has more logical appeal, but even here I can’t go along. Some people don’t realize they’re naturally part of a culture until they see it close-up. I didn’t know I was going to gravitate online until I’d tried it.

A provocative piece, worth reading…

Dan Froomkin urges, “Citizen Journalists, Start Your Engines!” Without any fanfare, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has started posting preliminary transcripts of many of its hearings on its Web site, giving everyone a chance to pore through testimony and find news the MSM may have overlooked.

This a great step forward, and props to Dan and others who’ve been pushing for it.

Even better would be real-time streaming from all congressional hearings, plus immediate public archiving of those videos. Some folks are working on this, too.

Slowly but surely, the opaque nature of governing is becoming a bit more transparent.

Jay Rosen’s new experiment: These Beat Reporters Will Try the Social Network Way.

Thirteen sites want to see if it works: from the Houston Chronicle to the Patriot-News in Harrisburg, PA, plus ESPN.com, MTV, the Seattle Times… Some of the beats: Child welfare, Dallas public schools, “green” tech, Big Pharma, digital music, Procter & Gamble.

This is going to be an important test of new media. Can’t wait to see how it works.

Clark Hoyt, the paper’s public editor, notes the NY Times’ continuing publication of pieces by Henry Blodget, one of the Internet bubble’s most notorious characters. In “Taint by Association” Hoyt asks two key questions:

One is whether The Times properly identifies Blodget when he writes for the paper. I don’t think so. His name was big in financial news at one time, but many readers do not know him.

The bigger question is whether The Times should be publishing him at all. Like Nocera, I believe in second chances, and Blodget seems to be doing fine establishing a new career. But why would The Times give a former analyst who lied to investors a platform to write about financial markets? If he wanted to write about how investors can spot phony reports by analysts, that would be one thing. But each time the newspaper uses Blodget as it has, it is conferring greater expert status on him.

These deals work two ways. The Times’s luster may help Blodget. But some of his taint rubs off on The Times.

Hoyt has it exactly right here. The newspaper is sullying its own name by lending Blodget its columns.

(Note: I own a small amount of stock in the company.)

In this morning’s piece in the Boston Globe, reprinted below, is a suggestion for new kind of political debates that would:

unfold online over the course of days, or even weeks and months. Imagine that one candidate takes a position and poses a question. The opponent would answer with a written response of some predetermined length, but with the help of staff, experts, and the general public. Then the first candidate, again with the help of anyone who wants to join the process, would dissect the response and reply with (we’d hope) a truly nuanced update. Continue this process at length - and repeat it with many other topics.

Here’s a bit more detail on how such things would occur:

While they’d include audio, video and other media, they would exist primarily in the more traditional form of text, which is still by far the best for exploring serious issues in serious ways. Questions would be posed by candidates to each other, as well as by journalists and the public. But an answer would not be the end of that round; in fact, it would only be the beginning.

Rebuttals and further rejoinders would be the meat of these conversations. They would not be done on the fly, but would come after the candidates and their staffs had some time to consider their responses. They’d point out flaws and inaccuracies in their opponents’ statements, drilling down into details where warranted. Wherever possible, people would use the Internet’s elemental unit — the hyperlink — to point to source material or other supporting information.

The public’s role could be crucial in this system. They would help their own side come up with rebuttal arguments, offering corrections, new facts and other supporting material. Candidates could use this, or not, as they wished. Wise candidates and their staffs would encourage as much participation as possible.

These moderated events would run for days, maybe for the entire campaign season. They would not be debates in a classical sense, but would definitely be the kinds of conversations that would illuminate the public sphere.

What technologies should we bring to bear on this? We’re limited only by our imaginations. We might, for example, use a “virtual world” such as Second Life, where people would create avatars (representations of themselves), helping personalize what might otherwise feel too remote. We could use online forums for part of the conversation. Wikis, which are sites where anyone can edit the pages, are another potential venue; among other intriguing recent ideas, the International Debate Education Association has launched “Debatepedia,” and its work could help us sort out the possibilities.

But if I were organizing such an event, I’d start by asking smart people from the political and tech worlds to work together, and with the public that cares about such things, on identifying the best methods. This itself would be a useful debate, and could be a template for a portion of what’s to come.

Again, active moderation would be essential. These online communities could self-police to some degree using tools that work well for this purpose, but the events would likely need some help from people whose role would be to intervene on the side of maintaining civility. Sadly, some people like to wreck anything they find, and politics can be particularly poisonous in the online world.

I’m going to be thinking harder about this in coming months, perhaps in a project format. It’s a start, anyway.