Category Archives: Media

Why WordPress is so Important

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This is a WordPress blog — created and maintained using the great open-source team at WordPress.org. I’m a huge fan both of the software and the people behind it.

In my latest Guardian column, pegging off the Yahoo buyout of Tumblr, I explain why WordPress matters so much, and why I hope its founders never sell out. Key quote (from Matt Mullenweg, a WordPress founder):

“We still need this platform for longer forms of self expression, and a place that people can have their own domain on the web, that really belongs to them, that they have complete control of it, all the way down to the software, the actual code executing on the server someplace in the cloud. You should be able to control every single line of that. And that’s the beauty of open source.”

Is Twitter’s Suspension of Journalist’s Account a Defining Moment?

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(Note: There’s an expanded version of this post at the Guardian.)

UPDATED

Twitter has suspended the account of a British journalist who tweeted the corporate email address of an NBC executive. The reporter, Guy Adams of the Independent, has been acerbic in his criticisms of NBC’s (awful) performance during the Olympics in London.

Adams has posted his correspondence with Twitter, which claims he posted a private email address. It was nothing of the kind, as many including Deadspin have pointed out. (Here’s the policy, which Adams plainly did not violate, since the NBC executive’s email address was already easily discernible on the Web — NBC has a firstname.lastname@ system for its email, and it’s a corporate address, not a personal one — and was publicly published over a year ago.)

What makes this a serious issue is that Twitter has partnered with NBC during the Olympics. And it was NBC’s complaint about Adams that led to the suspension.

Twitter has been exemplary in its handling of many issues over the past several years, including its (for a social network) brave stance in protecting user privacy. So I’m giving the service the benefit of the doubt for the moment, and hoping that this is just a foolish — if well-meaning — mistake by a single quick-triggered Twitter employee. If so, Twitter should apologize and reinstate Adams’ account immediately. If it does so, there’s little harm done — and the company will have learned a lesson.

If not, this is a defining moment for Twitter. It will have demonstrated that it can be bullied by its business partners into acts that damage its credibility and ultimately the reason so many of us use it as a platform. And if that’s the case, there will be much less incentive to use it.

Why LinkedIn’s News Site Could Be Huge

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LinkedIn Today Image

UPDATED

What big-time Internet social-media company is creating a valuable news site? I’m not talking about Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, though of course they are among major players in the news sphere these days.

I’m talking here about a company you won’t typically connect to news: LinkedIn. When it comes to news about business, technology and economic issues I follow, LinkedIn Today is becoming a useful source of information.

Useful, but not nearly what it should be on a site that could just about own aggregated business news. And later today, when I moderate a social-media-in-journalism panel at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, I’m looking forward to hearing one of the site’s editors, Chip Cutter, describe his view of the service’s future. (Update: He spent more time, as a good panelist should, on broader issues than just his own company’s site.)

When I’m signed in to LinkedIn and select the LinkedIn Today menu tab, I get a nicely arranged aggregation, shown on this page. It’s compiled from topics I’ve designated and from people in my LinkedIn “connections” list — more than 500 people with whom I have some kind of business connection. It goes beyond that, including links from the industry I’m interested in and even from outside that industry.

LinkedIn’s aggregation algorithm doesn’t strike me as particularly great; in many ways Google’s produces (subjectively) better results. But when I combine it (rather, when LinkedIn combines it) with the choices made by the people to whom I’m connected by reputation or personal knowledge, plus the shares of others who care about the topic, something new happens. I get much better results.

LinkedIn Today is only the latest example of what I’ve been wanting for years — and wrote about most recently in my book, Mediactive – the notion that combining human and machine intelligence will get us closer to the kind of news aggregation that truly serves our needs. We’ve seen progress with blogs, Twitter (one of my most essential news feeds in a variety of areas), Google+, Facebook and other services.

What makes LinkedIn so intriguing is the way it leverages business contacts, not just social ones. These folks are connections whom I’ve chosen because I trust them in some way, not as friends (though some are) but as people in another kind of circle that is about professional life.  And others in the same industry will be more likely than not to be noting interesting or at least relevant news.

I’m not especially interested in what they think, for the most part, about topics outside the ones I’m choosing. Their likes and dislikes in, say, film won’t be in my feed, because I want to keep this site’s news content strictly organized by the professional part of my existence.

Like its competition, LinkedIn Today is way, way short of what it could be. Users need to be able to make much more granular choices about sources (including people) and topics (and more), and user-interface customization features are at best crude in this early version.

In general, the product feels and operates like a side project, not a truly core feature. If I were running the company, I’d move it higher on the list of things that are strategic as opposed to tactical. I’m told that news is strategic, but I don’t see remotely convincing evidence.

It also seems obvious Google and Facebook are going to try to capture the aggregation-recommendation space — and they have at least as much ability to do so, if not more, when it comes to technical talent and user bases. Google, in particular, needs to figure out how to combine Google+ with Google News ((and other parts of the empire). Facebook’s news feeds send huge amounts of traffic to linked items, but in my experience (before I closed my FB account) the value of those links to me was low at best.

What neither Google nor Facebook can boast — yet — is the business-oriented membership base that LinkedIn has made its unique selling proposition. Again, it’s essential who makes the recommendations, along with who’s doing the programming in the cloud, and that’s why LinkedIn still has every chance of being preeminent in business/economic news aggregation if not more.

Bottom lines: Aggregation and curation — sorting the good from the bad, the useful from the useless — are still in their early days. But LinkedIn Today is an extremely interesting step forward.

Japan Next Week

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I’m heading to Tokyo this weekend for some events and talks about the recently published Japanese edition of Mediactive The following events are open to the public. All but the Digital Hollywood event are free, but reservations are required in each case.

Tuesday, Oct. 11: 7-9 pm at Asahi newspaper

Wednesday, Oct. 12: 8-10 pm at Digital Hollywood (School of Media Art)

Thursday, Oct. 13: 2-4:30 pm at Digital Garage

Thursday, Oct. 13: 6:30-8:30 pm at Nikkei newspaper

Mediactive Book is Published

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Mediactive CoverI’m happy to say that Mediactive, the book, is now available in print (Amazon and Lulu) and in a Kindle edition.

And because this project lives under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, I’ve also published it in full on this site. In addition, you can download it here as a PDF.

This is only the beginning. I’m working on an epub edition to use with other online services, and will be creating a variety of e-book editions that include other kinds of media. Beyond that, I intend Mediactive to be an ongoing, iterative process — with updates here on the website and, eventually new versions of the book itself.

Lots of people have helped me get this far on the journey. I thank you all, and look forward to the next steps.

Salon and Me

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I’ve been a fan of Salon since the day it started, and a paying subscriber as long as the company has offered that option. If you visit Salon often, you already know why.

So I’m delighted to be bringing some of my blogging there, including many of the items I’d normally be posting here. My arrangement with Salon gives them exclusive access for one week to new posts, after which they’ll appear here — as always, under a Creative Commons license from this site.

Here’s my first post.

John Wilke, R.I.P.

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Sad news: The Wall Street Journal’s John Wilke has died at age 54.

John Wilke worked at the Journal for two decades, and did some of the best reporting on how business and politics merge in unhealthy ways.

My own connection to him was tangential but memorable. In the 1990s, when I was writing about technology and business, and raising a continual stink about the predatory ways of Microsoft, the Journal seemed disgracefully in the tank for the software company and its lawbreaking leaders. (I don’t think they actually were in the tank; my guess is that they fell victim to the syndrome that often leads reporters to unwittingly go too easy on the people they cover, for fear of losing access.)

Then came the federal antitrust lawsuit, and Wilke — the Washington reporter who covered antitrust — eagerly jumped into the fray.

The more he read the documents available in the case (which were also available to the Journal’s Microsoft reporters in Seattle), he told me one day on the phone, the more excited he got at the amazing story he was covering. He couldn’t believe the stuff the company had been doing, and he wrote by far the Journal’s best coverage of the company and its behavior.

This wasn’t the only excellent work he did by any means. His tenacity and talent were well-known, and will be much missed.