I’ll be in Washington next Monday-Wednesday, speaking Tuesday at the Politics Online conference at George Washington University.
If any bloggers or citizen-media folks are interested in getting together, send me an e-mail at dan.gillmor (at) citmedia (dot) org.
For a piece in CIO Insight magazine, “Banking on Blogs,” I talked with JP Rangaswami, chief information officer at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein about his use of modern communication tools. One takeaway:
In particular, he’s adopted a variety of conversational tools—weblogs, podcasts, instant messaging, wikis and the like—which he believes are fundamental to fostering better communication and collaboration within the bank. He’s weighed the very real risks against the demonstrated benefits, and concluded that this is the best approach.
What’s striking is how comprehensively Rangaswami has used these tools. While DrKW has an official external blog, the overwhelming majority of the company’s edge-in collaboration is internal. Beginning with some internal blogging experiments in 2003, the operation has expanded to almost 400 internal blogs today, plus a massive wiki presence, sophisticated instant messaging, podcasting and even video-blogging. DrKW’s IT people put the tools in place, explained how to use them, established some policies and then stepped back to see what would happen.
The same issue of the magazine also has a nice interview with tech pioneer Dave Winer and a cover story on Web 2.0 stuff.
HBO is using Google Maps in a clever way to promote the the Sopranos series, which starts a new season soon. At Behind the Scenes: Sopranos Maps, you’ll find locations annotated with videos, photos and episode details from Season 5. (The image here is at Shea Stadium in Queens, NY, and of course that’s the Tony Soprano character in the still-image photo from a video. You can click on the map for a larger version in a popup window.)
This is a clever gimmick by HBO, the producers and an online video-advertising company called Kilpmart, which is helping create the buzz. And it’s yet another way people are using Google Maps to help create new kinds of online content.
HBO could make this even better, by making it more interactive. The Sopranos program already has discussion boards, but the map mashup should have viewer participation as well.
I’d let people add their own commentary directly to the maps (if this could be done in a way that didn’t get out of control). Even better would be a Sopranos “Treasure Hunt” where fans could solve a larger puzzle, maybe for prizes.
Still, this is a smart approach to marketing, even though the Sopranos hardly needs all that much more buzz given its already high quality and huge audience. It’s also a view into how buzz can be fueled online, and, no doubt, it’s just a hint at what’s yet to come.
It has not been reported very well outside Southeast Asia, but Thailand is in political upheaval with protests over Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra‘s sale of Shin Corporation to Singapore’s government investment arm, Temasek Holdings, under dubious terms. People have taken to the streets in protests over the past few weeks calling for his resignation, with some notable citizen journalism efforts applying the pressure.
The Nation, an English language newspaper, had citizen reporters send pictures and text reports by cell phones using text/multimedia messages at the first rallies back in January.
The photo blog The Media Slut also helped to highlight some of the questionable stories by ITV, a Shin Corporation asset, which reported only around 6,000 to 7,000 protesters (Reuters reported 30,000 and Thai Day and Business Day up to 100,000).
It will be interesting to follow how this crisis plays out, as the protesters have vowed to keep rallying until Thaksin resigns.
George Will: Less Freedom, Less Speech. In 1989, in two speeches in Austria, Irving said, among much else, that only 74,000 Jews died of natural causes in work camps and millions were spirited to Palestine after the war. An arrest warrant was issued. Last November Irving was arrested when he came to Austria to address some right-wing students. Last week, while Europe was lecturing Muslims about the virtue of tolerating free expression by Danish cartoonists, Irving was sentenced to three years in prison.
What folly. What dangers do the likes of Irving pose? Holocaust denial is the occupation of cynics and lunatics who are always with us but are no reason for getting governments into the dangerous business of outlawing certain arguments. Laws criminalizing Holocaust denial open a moral pork barrel for politicians: Many groups can be pandered to with speech restrictions. Why not a law regulating speech about slavery? Or Stalin’s crimes?
The political left has made a mistake by not standing up for the free-speech rights of even such disgusting people as Holocaust denier David Irving. We can’t have free speech only for the people we agree with, because then it’s not the genuine article.
It’s easy to protect innocuous talk. But the entire point of free speech is that you have to protect the rights of people whose utterings you despise.
Counter the rantings of people like Irving with better speech, not jail terms. His case works against everyone, not just him.
SF Chronicle: At Berkeley theology school, evangelicals advise on using media. “Electronic Christian Media” has been taught before at Berkeley’s Holy Hill campus, but the difference this semester is that Heller, a politically moderate, interdenominational Christian, has recruited nationally known evangelical Christians as guest lecturers. Each guest will show the course’s 17 students how evangelical congregations have mushroomed with new and younger believers in the last decade, in part by putting down hymnals full of 150-year-old songs and picking up digital video cameras.
New West Network: Denver Media Offering Politicos Free PR Outlet. In south metro communities, at least, several politicians — including the House Minority Leader and a couple of wannabes who hope to be ensconced in the Colorado Capitol after next fall’s election — have discovered that they can post whatever they like in “news stories” and “columns” which carry no costs like a traditional advertisement and have a degree of implied authenticity that elevates them beyond anything a paid ad could dream to achieve. We can only hope that more local politicians discover this avenue for unadorned propaganda before the campaign season becomes hopelessly mired in attempts to seriously debate the real issues.
The question here is whether YourHub — operated by the Rocky Mountain News — is giving people a way to disguise advertising as journalism. It’s a serious issue, because how the site answers the question will help determine its future credibility.
Plainly, citizen journalism sites need to help readers distinguish PR from other content. It will take some hands-on action from the people running these sites, such as training and guidance for citizen journalists as well as clear policies on what’s acceptable, and cooperation from the communities using them.
The community involvement should include feedback systems that lets readers alert site managers to hidden agendas. It may also include creating new places on the sites, perhaps explicitly marked “Press Releases,” where such material can be moved.
This doesn’t let readers off the hook. When people read what’s on sites where anyone can contribute anything, they should be considerably more skeptical than when they read things in a professionally edited newspaper.
YourHub isn’t traditional journalism. Its users should recognize and remember that.
It’s not entirely lame, but Google Page Creator will have some distance to travel before it’s all that useful. The company describes it as “a free online tool that makes it easy for anyone to create and publish useful, attractive web pages in just minutes.”
Over at Search Engine Watch, Chris Sherman has this analysis, which sounds pretty much on target to me.
William J. Bennett and Alan M. Dershowitz: A Failure of the Press. We two come from different political and philosophical perspectives, but on this we agree: Over the past few weeks, the press has betrayed not only its duties but its responsibilities. To our knowledge, only three print newspapers have followed their true calling: the Austin American-Statesman, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Sun. What have they done? They simply printed cartoons that were at the center of widespread turmoil among Muslims over depictions of the prophet Muhammad. These papers did their duty.
The Chicago Tribune’s Eric Zorn thwacks his newspaper’s clueless editorial page:
It wasn’t exactly “Dewey defeats Truman,” but the cute valedictory “Bloggy, we hardly knew ye” in a headline atop a Tribune editorial Wednesday seems likely to take a place in history alongside such clouded crystal-ball pronouncements as “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” “Radio has no future” and “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable.”