Google Press Center: Press Release: Google announces free in-home wireless broadband service — “Dark porcelain” project offers self-installed plumbing-based Internet access.
If anyone knows of a site collecting the best such gags, please note it in the comments.
Dave Winer was one of the first bloggers, and an unquestioned pioneer in developing blog tools and other key technologies we in the “read-write Web” world take for granted today. His blog, Scripting News, is 10 years old today — and he’s put up what looks like the page that graced the site a decade ago.
Here’s a toast to Dave’s great work, and wishes for decades more to come.
Slate’s Jack Shafer offers an April Fool’s Day defense kit, saying, “This year, don’t be taken for a sucker by the media.”
I tend not to indulge in these things, but couldn’t resist back in 2000, just as the tech stock bubble was peaking. My friend Michael Schrage and I used my San Jose Mercury News column — in a double-bylined piece (which should have been an immediate tip that we were up to something) — to “reveal” that Stanford University was aiming for an initial public offering (IPO) of shares to the public.
I heard that day from a venture capitalist of some renown. I don’t have his email any longer, but he wrote to the effect that “You had me going just long enough to wonder if it was real.”
Washington Post: McLean Students Sue Anti-Cheating Service.
The lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, seeks $900,000 in damages from the for-profit service known as Turnitin. The service seeks to root out cheaters by comparing student term papers and essays against a database of more than 22 million student papers as well as online sources and electronic archives of journals. In the process, the student papers are added to the database.
Turnitin.com provides a service, but its archiving — copying and reusing — the copyrighted work of others in this way is at best problematic.
Howard Weaver, McClatchy’s VP for news, explains in “Foreign correspondence for Yahoo! News” why the deal the companies have made breaks new ground:
McClatchy, the country’s third largest newspaper publisher with 31 daily and 50 weekly newspapers and a big Internet portfolio, is going to start providing next-generation international news for some of the Yahoo! News pages. To start, we’ll be looking especially to our foreign bureaus: Baghdad, Cairo, Jerusalem and Beijing are first in line to contribute, scheduled to begin early in the second quarter.
They won’t just be sending news stories, though that’s a foundation for the plan. In addition, they’ll produce blogs available only at Yahoo! and McClatchy that take readers deeper — “behind the headlines” is the applicable cliché. Called “Trusted Voices,” we’ll encourage them to color outside the lines of traditional journalism in their blogs, offering readers a boots-on-the-ground perspective from the Arab street in Egypt or the increasingly crowded slopes of Everest (to name two of their recent datelines). Maybe Hannah Allam will provide a list of the Egyptian websites or blogs she finds most useful in understanding politics there; Dion Nissenbaum might help you unravel the political connections of those Israeli newspapers you always hear quoted. Tim Johnson, who covers China and Asia from Beijing, could offer insight into obstacles facing people thinking about going for the Olympics in 2008.
Some of these will be new efforts launched especially for this Yahoo! partnership; others are already under way. Tim’s been blogging from China for years at China Rises. The Iraqi employees at our Baghdad bureau offer a gritty, street-level view of the war no non-native reporter could duplicate at their group blog Inside Iraq.
This is the kind of thing news organizations should be doing as a matter of routine. McClatchy and Yahoo are changing the industry with this move. Let’s see who follows.
JD Lasica points to some excerpts from a public conversation he and I had last week in Palo Alto: Citizen media: Where is it heading?
(Hat-tip to Elliot Margolies, director of the Community Media Center for his hospitality and technical work at the event, and for posting the clips. His center is doing amazing work.)
The Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident site reports convincingly in “YouTube Gets Pwned: Obama’s Numbers Don’t Add Up” that the viewership numbers for an Obama campaign video are being inflated by people gaming the system.
It was inevitable, and there’s precedent in the analog media world. Newspaper circulation numbers have been fraudulently hyped, for example.
The inevitability of this kind of thing stems from the fact that it can be done. And what can be done will be, despite violating the site’s terms of service.
The real issue is whether it matters. It does, if people start trusting the YouTube numbers as indicators of anything serious. It does, if people focus on the questions that don’t matter and not the ones, such as candidates’ actual positions and intentions, that do.
Good for techPresident for spotting this anomaly, for committing actual journalism while the traditional media organizations slept.
In the past 24 hours this blog has received more than 1,600 comment spams — fake comments with links to the usual sleazy Web operations that pollute the online world. The spam-control system I use, Akismet, has trapped almost all of the spams, so you won’t be burdened with them.
Unfortunately, it’s also possible that you posted a genuine comment that got inappropriately identified as spam. If so, it may have been deleted in a bulk-delete operation that I do once a day or so. I don’t have the time to go through the comments identified as spam one at a time to un-mark them, because of the horrible volume of this crap.
If you’ve tried to post a legitimate comment that didn’t make it through, let me know. If I haven’t run the bulk-delete before you tell me, I’ll be able to retrieve your posting and make it public. If not, I apologize.
But the spammers — such slime they are — have left me little choice.
At the Kölner Journalistenschule today in Cologne, Germany, I’ve received a polite but not entirely warm reception in discussing the citizen media shift and its value to the business and economic journalists who are attending this one-day conference. This is not a shock. Germany remains perhaps the most traditional media market in western Europe, and this group is the most traditional of all.
My talk was more structured than some I’ve done lately. I suggested five points of departure:
The last of those was, as usual in gatherings where I participate, the focus of significant debate. Traditional journalists tend to assume they are uniquely qualified to be the arbiters of truth and trust. We disagree on this.
But we don’t disagree on the need to preserve the best of what these folks do. I can’t solve the business-model issues that don’t seem to be getting any less worrisome. But we can work together to help people get the information they need.
Increasingly I believe that one of traditional journalism’s vital roles will be to help society become more media literate. This will rebound to the benefit, perhaps, of professional journalists, but that’s not a good enough reason by itself to do it. Society needs the help.
This morning we’re happy to announce a new project, “Principles of Citizen Journalism” — a look at the key principles that we believe are at the basis of journalistic work for professionals and non-professionals alike.
The project was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The principles also appear as part of the foundation’s Citizen News Network, which Knight intends to turn into a major hub of this activity and which, in turn, is being hosted at Jan Schaffer’s excellent J-Lab site at the University of Maryland.
Here’s the J-Lab press release.
Many thanks to JD Lasica, who spearheaded this project for the center, and the rest of the team that worked on it during the last few months. And very special thanks to all the folks who agreed to be interviewed; as the saying goes, we couldn’t have done it without them.