Media: August 2004 Archive Page

After a week, Rubel -- a blogging aficionado and practitioner who writes about the narrow topic of how blogs and participatory journalism are affecting the practice of public relations -- says he definitely lacked the depth of knowledge of current events gained in a normal week. "I felt a little naked," he says, having received the basics of the week's news from blogs, but not getting the real meat. --Steve Outing
--The Blog-Only News Diet (PoynterOnline)

Of course Rubel got a shallow perspective on the news... his experiment involved only reading the blog entries (and, presumably, whatever excerpts from other sources the bloggers chose to post). He didn't follow the links that bloggers cited. The bloggers held big steaming slabs of meat out to him, but he ignored them in favor of the garnishes.

This is a fundamental misuse of the medium of hypertext. If you write for traditinal print, you have to define your terms, and put in all the necessary background and context, so that your reader can construct something of significance out of the information you have provided. When you write for hypertext, you can simply link to the background, definitions, and context -- the sequential paragraph just isn't the main conveyor of meaning in hypertext prose.

Rubel might just as well have printed out these blog entries and read them on a park bench -- he's reading the words, but the words are only part of the medium.

While it's very clear to anyone who has spent time in message forums or blogs that many people don't actually "click through" to check sources, still, to create an experiment that deliberately preculdes click-throughs probably won't end up measuring anything about blogs.

Like a good journalist, Outing doesn't offer any criticism directly, but he does link to Jeff Jarvis, who claims Rubel's experiment is a PR stunt. (Rubel responds & Jarvis re-responds in the comments.)

Blogs do serve as a platform for opinion, but there are countless blogs that I value not because I agree with (or even care about) the blogger's opinions, but because the blog is a great source for intersting links.

Via Torill Mortensen, who cautions, "Some blogs can act as news sources and contain journalistic coverage of a topic. But don't confuse the channel and the medium! A blog is a channel for many different genres, and not a newsmedium."

Maybe my next scholarly project will be an experiment in which I watch TV with my eyes closed. Or maybe I'll read only words that have no vowels in them.

It's not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials.

"As a high school librarian, part of my job is to help my students develop critical thinking skills," Stagnitta wrote. "One of these skills is to evaluate the authority of any information source. The Wikipedia is not an authoritative source. It even states this in their disclaimer on their Web site."

Wikipedia, she explains, takes the idea of open source one step too far for most of us. --Al Fasoldt
--Librarian: Don't use Wikipedia as source  (Post-Standard)

I'm teaching a brief unit on Wikis in "Writing for the Internet" this fall.

I disagree with Stagnitta's comment, "there is no editorial review of the content". I have myself edited many documents, and I have seen pages that I created modified greatly over a short amount of time.

Wikipedia is not the place to consult for original research, but then again, neither is a traditional printed encyclopedia. Wikipedia is very useful when looking for quick background on breaking news, since the chances are that someone who already knows more about the subject than you do will have been there before you and at least posted a few links.

A Wiki is a consensus builder. People who disagree on a point will keep changing each other's language until everyone is either satisfied or the dominant view takes over. A small number of dedicated geeks can have an overwhelming effect on Wikipedia. Somehow I doubt that the entry on the Amish doesn't include a lot of input from people who are living on Amish farms. It's important to be aware of that kind of bias.

Obviously, Wikipedia doesn't have the authority of a peer-reviewed academic article. I do find it useful as a research guide, though; for instance, the Wikipedia article on a particular subject may include references to names and lines of thinking that I can later use when doing library research.

Somerby's comments would seem like blasphemy in the so-called "blogosphere," but many online writers and observers agree that blogs, with a handful of exceptions, have had virtually no impact on the national conversation, mainstream media coverage of politics or large, orchestrated events like the parties' quadrennial nominating conventions. --Kevin Canfield

--Impact of blogs seen as slight (The Journal News)

The "Game Development Scholarship for Women" will help cover costs for women attending the Guildhall, an 18-month certificate program at SMU designed by noted game developers. Tuition for the six-term program is $37,000.

--School offering women's gaming scholarship (CNN/Reuters)

Kerry needed to appear on The Daily Show because the American media itself has become ridiculous and he needs the endorsement of the jokers, not political pundits. The cable news shows that Jon Stewart mocks have become absurdly partisan. The print press is going through a period of self-flagellation as newspaper after newspaper apologizes and backtracks on its initial coverage of the need to go to war with Iraq.
-- John Doyle
--Jokesters now the go-to guys for U.S. candidates (Globe and Mail)

But now, the reality of exchange rates and international income gaps has spawned a virtual version of the real-world relationship between rich and poor countries. While players in wealthier countries casually drop hundreds of dollars to buy their way into better positions in the games -- or out of tedious parts of the games -- some workers in poorer countries are playing around the clock to produce virtual goods that earn them real money.

These "currency farmers" sell their virtual goods to companies that, in turn, offer them to players who can afford to pay. --Laila Weir
--Boring Game? Outsource It  (Wired)

Participants in the games may respond to written questions from reporters or participate in online chat sessions -- akin to a face-to-face or telephone interview -- but they may not post journals or blogs until the Games end Aug. 29.

To protect lucrative broadcast contracts, athletes and other participants are also prohibited from posting any video, audio or still photos they take themselves, even after the Games, unless they get permission ahead of time.
--You're Athletes, Not Journalists (Wired|AP)

Political Machine is more a lampoon of American politics than a celebration or critique. The game leaves no room for depth or complexity in the candidates' messages; each ad sounds exactly like the next. "John Kerry (or George Bush) opposes (or supports) drilling in ANWR. Support American values. Vote John Kerry."

The reporters all look alike, too. And newspaper coverage is as simple and sensational as can be. It's actually quite funny.

But beneath its cartoonish veneer, Political Machine offers a cynical view of American politics. Every move a candidate makes is based on polling data. Don't speechify about, say, abortion because you want to protect a woman's right to choose or save some unborn children. Do it because it'll help you in the polls. --Jason Silverman

--Campaign Game Mimics Real Life (Wired)

Insensitive computer programmers with little knowledge of geography have cost the giant Microsoft company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business and led hapless company employees to be arrested by offended governments. --Paul Brown --Microsoft pays dear for insults through ignorance (Guardian Unlimited)

toronto's western skyline seen from the cn tower's lookout area. --Dark Skyline (Top Left Pixel)

Julia, a friend of mine from my Toronto days, sent me a link to this photoblog, which features the sights of a city I remember fondly. This beautiful view from what some call a skyline-dominating tourist attraction (the CN Tower) was well worth a look.

A thumbnail image doesn't do this one justice -- click the link instead.

Each post is like DNA. It carries the core of your self-hood. Never commit to the web any remark, about the goat cheese you had served to you by your comely slave, or how the grape arbor was pruned on your Sabine Farm, or how you fell off your horse, or what Pippa drew on brown paper, without considering it from within the matrix of Author/Reader, Fool/Knave, Apparent Audience/Intended Audience. Create for each post a tacit occasion, no less than did St Paul in his Epistles. And let your blog, over time, be like a Bildungsroman, the story of your gradual awakening from Dunce to Artist. Let it be a series of Parables addressed, as in St. Mark, by the Saved to the Saved, in the presence of the Damned. Let the parables be dark to the Damned, that they might burn forever and ever in hell, as God in his Infinite Goodness requires so that we might look down with Him from Heaven and gloat, like Anne Coulter to whom my work, as Fool or Knave, is meant as homage in a spirit of mutual respect. The Happy Tutor --The Art of Blogging (Horace and St. Paul) (The Happy Tutor)

Via vitia.

A major change over the years has been a declining emphasis on using search to identify good sites as such. Rather than hunt for sites to explore and use in depth, users now hunt for specific answers. The Web as a whole has thus become one agglomerated resource for people who use search engines to dredge up specific pages related to specific needs, without caring which sites supply the pages.

Search engines have essentially become answer engines. Their job is no longer resource discovery, but rather to answer users' questions. --Jakob Nielsen --When Search Engines Become Answer Engines (Alertbox)

This trend has important ramifications for the kind of "find the answer" research scavenger hunts that were an important part of the way I learned how to use the library, in the days before the WWW. My instructors wanted me to use an index to find a good source, then read that source to find the answer.

But the best-quality academic information is typically not well-indexed by Google, since most of it is kept behind a subscription firewall, with tuition fees permitting students open access to those services subscribed to by their school's library.

There are many peer-reviewed academic journals that do publish their full text online, but unless those sites have blogging communities attached to them (cf. Kairos and KairosNews), an academic journal website is typically updated so infrequently that search engines probably don't spider them very often. Thus, the freshest, best info is often going to be the hardest to find, if your starting point is a general-access search engine.

It's not surprising that marketers love IntelliTxt while many journalists despise it. AlwaysOn columnist Rafe Needleman called IntelliTxt "pretty bad news" from an ethics standpoint "because it blurs the line between editorial content, which readers should expect to be free of commercial influence, and advertising, which we know is paid-for and biased." --Adam L. Penenberg --This Headline Is Not for Sale (Wired)

The "IntelliTxt" ad service inserts inline links into the body of a news article. I'd agree that this oversteps a line, potentially blurring what should be a pretty clear boundary between editorial content and paid advertising.

The books are written by a small stable of independent authors, who receive 50 percent royalties, a rate unheard of in traditional publishing. Edited collaboratively over the Net, the books are published "within moments of going to press" as small, downloadable PDF files.

Costing $5 or $10, the books come with free updates for readers -- the electronic equivalent of second and third editions. The books are nicely laid out and designed to print well on home inkjets. They include lots of links to information on the Web.

Crucially, the books are timely. Print books, on the other hand, especially computer-oriented reference texts, are often out of date by the time they hit store shelves. --Leander Kahney --Net Publishing Made Profitable  (Wired)

[E]ach student blog was given a set of categories. If students had already had blogs before class began, these categories could have been added to their existing blogs:

• ewriting: agenda item - outside reading
• ewriting: agenda item - student assignment(s)
• ewriting: assignment submission
• ewriting: general discussion / announcement
• non-ewriting (for students who did not create other categories)

...an aggregator (Blagg) was used to pull category-specific RSS feeds from each of the student blogs, and my faculty blog. (My faculty blog had a category for ?ewriting: assignments? as well as the ?general discussion / announcement? category.) Then we created a blog that displayed all the class'sblog posts in that category in one place. --Noah Wardrip-Fruin --Teaching with Blogs (Grand Text Auto)

I left some comments on Grand Text Auto.

One member of staff, who did not want to be named, said: "East Kilbride managers were at a training day when it was announced they would replace good morning with Mahna Mahna.

"The staff had just returned from lunch and all the managers were in a training room, sitting in a semi-circle and looking really pleased with themselves. Then one of them blurted out 'Mahna Mahna' at us without warning. We just stared blankly back at them.

"Then another manager repeated the phrase, and asked what our first reaction was when we heard it. When someone mumbled back 'do doo be-do-do', they all burst out laughing and were nodding at each other, saying, 'Told you so'."

The new store will open in December employing 250 staff. --Muppet greetings fail to fire up staff  (Scotsman)

When I first saw this, I misread that last line as "annoying 250 staff."

No two signatures by one person are exactly the same in style, so the new technique involves making a 3D model of the pressure applied when a person writes.

The model translates the writing into an image showing dips and furrows of the sample so that anomalies can be detected.

Conventionally, handwriting has been analysed by forensic experts in 2D, looking at the sequence of pen strokes in handwriting, like a signature.

But this is not entirely accurate, because the exact sequence of strokes is not always clear and can vary.

"Using virtual reality and image processing, it is possible solve two of the most difficult problems in graphology: strokes superposing and strokes direction.
--3D holograms to crack forgeries (BBC)

Suggested by Rosemary, who as I recall used to refuse to sign those digital credit-card receipt machines. I used to be very pious about refusing to do that, but nowadays when I shop I'm usually with kids, and am eager to avoid any delay at the cash register.

For almost an hour Saturday morning, the Associated Press reported that a 22-year-old San Francisco man, Benjamin Vanderford, had been beheaded in Iraq. The report of Vanderford's death was based on a 55-second video clip that Vanderford and two friends had faked and distributed via the Internet. The story also was picked up by the Reuters news service, and the grainy video was broadcast by two Middle Eastern television stations.

In an interview with The Chronicle hours later, two of the three filmmakers responsible for the clip said they had never expected it to be disseminated so widely, and they blamed the mass media for publicizing the stunt without making sure that the video was genuine.

--Web hoax fools news services: S.F. man fakes beheading, proves need for verification  (SFGate.com)

To those who roll their eyes at retro gamers, I say, "What is really so great about the games you are playing?" Is there really that much difference between Soul Calibur II and International Karate? We are still mashing buttons and kicking people in the groin. Why did your game take years to produce?

I can tell you what we have lost. We have lost the slapstick animation of Sam & Max Hit the Road. We have lost the hand painted sunsets of It Came from the Desert. We have lost the lush greenery in the King’s Quest series. We have lost the clever cartoon architecture in the Monkey Island series. We have lost the eerie landscapes in Out of this World.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then high abstraction was a call to all artists to do what they do best. Big budgets and big teams don't make a good game. They don't produce good art either. --Buck Feris --In Defense of Retro Gaming: A Discussion of Abstraction (Armchair Arcade)

If you can get past the wounded, tribalist tone of the first few paragraphs (which will prompt the "Go Back Click of Death" something many eye-rolling young whippersnappers), this article makes some excellent points about the function of graphics as abstractions rather than realistic simulations.

Editors say stars do their own writing but are subject to editing like any freelancer.

Keys says she tends to "overwrite. I want to get every nuance in there."

Stiles' Guardian article needed "a couple of rewrites," the actress says, "but they were good suggestions, and I didn't mind doing them. ... I have a newfound respect for journalists. It's incredibly hard to make a living at it."
--Both sides now: Stars take on new role as journalists (USA Today (will expire))

Rosemary adds, "Especially when celebrities are being given opportunities and space that had gone to journalists."

That's yet another drawback of the aggregation of media. Celebrities have a long history of hiring ghost-writers for their biographies.

In the latest attempt by the scientific community to offer algebraic explanations for the seemingly inexplicable, mathematicians have come up with a formula for the best kind of scary movie.

Using the equation (es + u + cs + t) squared + s + (tl + f) / 2 + (a + dr + fs) / n + sin x - 1, researchers have concluded that The Shining, the 1980 film starring a homicidal Jack Nicholson, is the ideal horror flick.
--Music + chase scenes = new formula for fear  (Guardian)

Hmm... this project was commissioned by "Sky Movies," a British which just happens to be holding a scary movie marathon this weekend.

My colleague Mike Arnzen reports he was interviewed by BBC News to respond to this finding. I didn't know about it until it was over, though.

A movie trailer for Halo 2 that flashed "www.ilovebees.com" for a split second led the curious to a beekeeping site that seemed to have been hijacked by a sentient virus. Puzzles at the site are so intricate that they must be solved by people working together at ARG sites like www.unfiction.com. For example, sets of seemingly random Web addresses turned out to have phrases in common that could be pieced together into a brief story.
--Blur Fantasy with Reality and Wrap It in a PUzzle (NY Times)

Rebecca Villano, who last semester was in my American Lit class, sent me the following e-mail while I was on vacation. She was hip to the "ilovebees.com" game before this article appeared.

Dr. Jerz! I totally thought of you today! Since you had us read "Pattern Recognition" I thought that I would mention a little "Pattern Recognition" of my own.

I don't know if you know, but Halo 2 has been causing such chaos due to the extreme mystery of it all. The creators refuse to show anything for the one player mode, and they are very secretive. That said:

My fiance stumbled upon a trailer for Halo 2. In this trailer, it flashes a website for a couple seconds: www.Ilovebees.com

If one would go to this website, one would begin to read and hear sound files of bees. From what is said on this site, once you break down the pictures of this lady and her bees, you'd see a text file encripted within the pictures. These text files are supposingly the story between Halo 1 and Halo 2. Also, if you were to listen to the bees, you'd hear sounds very much like Halo.

This seems very similar to Pattern Recognition where the one film piece had a hidden map inside it. Apparently, with the creators of Halo, their favorite number is 7. Seven times seven times seven, or something like that, is 343 which is also the title of the main map in which, in one player mode, in Halo 1, one descovers that the main computer system is an AI and controls everything.

Also on this women's website is a counter for 25 days. It is believed that this is the count down until Halo 2 releases a demo for one player. All through out this woman's website is Halo information, and on one spot in this site, is an anagram for when the demo will be released. However, the anagram also spells out "I love bees" or something like that.

Also, if you would e-mail ladybee777@hotmail.com it auto respons with gibberish that's almost english but not.

Personally, I could care less, but I thought of you and Pattern Recognition and laughed. So, here you go!

CANNON, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries.

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

CONVENT, n. A place of retirement for woman who wish for leisure to meditate upon the vice of idleness.

CYNIC, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
--The Devil's Dictionary (Project Gutenberg)

A handful of entries from the "C" section of this classic work.

Update, 04 Aug: Liliputian Lillith has sampled the "D"s. Anyone want to try another letter?

Powers said he realized the love affair, which began in 1979 when his brother introduced him to the first Van Halen album, was over Saturday. While preparing spaghetti at his home, Powers chose silence over a TV On The Radio album his friend had burned him.

"Last week, my buddy went to see this band, but I just didn't feel like going out that night," Powers said. "I started to listen to their album, and even though it really seemed like my type of music?well, I didn't know any of the songs. I was just about to put Beck on when I realized that I'd rather be alone with my thoughts.'" --Lifelong Love Affair With Music Ends At Age 35 (The Onion (will expire))

I can't say I ever had a love affair with music. I recognize music is a huge part of the psyches of many of the young people whom I teach, but I generally prefer to spend my time and energy in other ways.

I am 35, by the way.

Heinz Kerry said I attempted to "trap" her. To defend her intemperance, she publicly impugned my personal and professional integrity. On national television the woman who herself raised the specter of McCarthyism with her unexplained remarks insinuated I was engaging in the same tactic....

"I hope you burn in hell," read one e-mail. "You're a (expletive) Nazi," went another. "Teresa should have told you to go (expletive) yourself," another friendly e-mailer offered. And these were among the milder communiques; those that included death threats will be forwarded to the senders' respective hometown police departments.

One of my daughters back in Pittsburgh was brought to tears by a caller to our house. The clever woman identified herself as a Washington reporter seeking to interview me but then embarked on a filthy tirade. It seems a member of the Heinz Kerry Civility Enforcement Patrol posted our home address and telephone number on the response part of my convention blog. --Colin McNickle --Killing the questioner (Tribune-Review)

It's amazing to see what people will do when they act upon what they believe are the facts.

We knew modern memory cards were durable, but had no idea they would be quite so tough... They were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child's toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy.

Perhaps surprisingly, all the cards survived these six tests. --Digital memories survive extremes (BBC News)

Given to a six-year-old boy to destroy? This is another one of those "I wish I'd thought of that" genius news features. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I took about 200 digital photos while on vacation in the last week (to Long Island, NY for a family wedding, and then a short stop in Philadelphia to see the Please Touch museum and the historic downtown), and I doubt I'll ever print more than a few dozen.