Posts under ‘Techniques’

Radar: Inside Cryptome, the website the CIA doesn’t want you to see. Young is a mad scientist of secrecy, working with little more than monomaniacal focus and an Internet connection to turn the tables on the spooks and expose what he regards as a worldwide criminal network of intelligence operatives. And the spies don’t like […]

Wired News, in “See Who’s Editing Wikipedia – Diebold, the CIA, a Campaign,” cites an intriguing new software tool called Wikipedia Scanner: the brainchild of CalTech computation and neural-systems graduate student Virgil Griffith — offers users a searchable database that ties millions of anonymous Wikipedia edits to organizations where those edits apparently originated, by cross-referencing […]

Salon’s Farhad Manjoo, asks, “Is network neutrality a fake issue?” No, he says, at least for people in the U.K. who want to watch BBC videos online: As several British papers reported over the weekend, large ISPs have threatened to shut down people’s access to the BBC’s online videos — unless, of course, the BBC […]

(Note: This is updated from a column I wrote for PR Week magazine last winter.) This week is the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, better known in the field as AEJMC, where journalism and communications educators gather to ponder their profession. This will be my fourth such event, […]

UPDATED From the Google News blog comes news of a new initiative “Perspectives about the news from people in the news.” We’ll be trying out a mechanism for publishing comments from a special subset of readers: those people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question. Our long-term vision is that any […]

The BBC Berkshire’s interactive flood map: takes the best photos and video sent in by you to berkshire.online@bbc.co.uk, alongside reports from our correspondents around the county and flood warning information from the Environment Agency. This is a good example of how traditional media organizations — working with their audiences — can use mashup technology to […]

MSNBC: Advocacy mashups harness power of mapping. Advocacy mashups are tackling the most vexing problems of our time, from New Orleans post-Katrina clean-up to the possibility that some 2,300 Islamic mosques and schools across the country pose a homegrown terror threat. The Gentilly Project, which we’re helping with, is one of the most intriguing such […]

The map at left comes courtesy of the Cato Institute, where Radley Balko has been looking into the increasing number of botched paramilitary-style police raids on private citizens. This presentation starkly shows how common this kind of thing has become — and, as Balko has testified before Congress, this data may only be the tip […]

New York Times Magazine: All the News That’s Fit to Print Out. Nothing is easier than taking shots at Wikipedia, and its many mistakes (most often instances of deliberate vandalism) are schadenfreude’s most renewable resource. But given the chaotic way in which it works, the truly remarkable thing about Wikipedia as a news site is […]

My keynote this morning at the Print, Internet and Community conference in Tel Aviv had three main points, at least several of which are no surprise to regular visitors to this site. First, we have moved into a democratized media culture, where the tools of production and access are widely available. On a read-write Web, […]