How to survive the nibblers

Piranhas. Image: Chandra Marsono on Flickr/Some rights reserved

 

Brilliant blog by Stijn Debrouwere on “the mess the news industry is in.” The thrust? Journalism is being eaten away by a sea of nibbling sites and services. Read it. The “how to survive” bit is on the money, too:

• Amp up storytelling and personality, because those things are irreplaceable. This American Life, for instance, or The Awl.

• Acknowledge that you provide less value than you used to, downsize and capitalize on scale. What national newspapers are doing, albeit unwittingly.

• Join the revolution. Adrian Holovaty comes from journalism, but EveryBlock isn’t journalism.

• People read because they’re bored. Un-bore them, like Gawker does.

• Write to people’s passion, and they will gobble up just about anything. MacRumors and many other niche sites do this.

• Do stuff that does still matter. People are happy to support ProPublica and the Texas Tribune.

Hat tip to Jay Rosen for the link.

Internet, I love you but you’re bringing me down

I’ve got a piece in tomorrow’s G2 on what happened when I did everything the internet told me for a day. In writing it, I came across lots of interesting/troubling articles on how the web is, well, turning. Here’s a handful of snippets…

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“Left to their own devices, [the web's] personalisation filters serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar, and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.”

Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble, CNN

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“Our attention is well directed these days…  thanks to good algorithms and great curators… but it’s like a flashlight whipping around the room. Never resting, Never returning…we catch and release…”

Robin Sloan, Fish

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 “Everything that makes cyberflânerie possible — solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking — is under assault by Facebook. And it’s not just any company: with 845 million active users worldwide, where it goes, arguably, so goes the Internet.”

Evegeny Morozov, The Death of the Cyberflâneur, NYT

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“Google has become so good at meeting our desires that we spend less time discovering new ones … you can always get what you want. But you may not get what you need.”

Ian Leslie, In Search of Serendipity, The Economist

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“As we start to understand how people actually use the Internet, the cyberutopian hopes of a borderless, postnational planet can look as naive as most past predictions that new technologies would transform societies… A central paradox of this connected age is that while it’s easier than ever to share information and perspectives from different parts of the world, we may be encountering a narrower picture of the world than we did in less connected days.”

Ethan Zuckerman, A Small World Afer All, Wilson Quarterly

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“The internet promises the idea of actualising ourselves in an essential way, but in fact we fall victim to a much cruder kind of sorting.”

Will Self, The Internet is a false friend

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“Unlike more Luddite critics, Lanier complains not that technology has taken over our lives but that it has not given us enough back in return. In place of a banquet, we’ve been given a vending machine.”

What Jason Lanier thinks of Technology, The New Yorker

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“The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.”

James Whittaker, Why I left Google, MSDN

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#JustSayin.

*Benji retreats to shed in garden to draw lines between torn out newspaper articles.*

The web and the Minimum Viable Message

I started writing a post on how the web is the perfect delivery mechanism for a Minimum Viable Message – a highly-digestible, simple, powerful idea that invites you to ‘like’ it, or sign a petition, or re-tweet it. I was just getting into how troubling this is. I was going to muse on whether a million-strong Facebook group is more or less meaningful than a dozen activists who storm a building – an actual one, IRL.

There was probably going to be a bit about how terribly easy passive support is compared to active support, and how the internet, worryingly, is much more suited to the former than the latter.  I was going to wheel out the rise and fall of #StopKony2012 as an example of just how powerful – and fickle – an online movement can be, and how this was the perfect illustration of the web exponentially disseminating highly-polished polemic, steamrolling any nuances or critique that might have stood in its way, and then doing the whole thing again in reverse. Black, then white.

I was going to maybe conclude that the web is disappointingly bad at doing debate and discussion compared to real life, where the squidgy bits in between two sides of an argument can be fully aired and indulged, at the same time, on top of each other.

Then I got a bit tired and realised I should probably go to bed, and that this has probably been written hundreds of times before, and that Matt Andrews has more or less said all this recently. Read that.

What does it mean to love something on the internet today?

Wonderful stuff from Robin Sloan. Will get you thinking.

Trouble in the house of Google

Image: Aray Chen on Flickr/Some rights reserved

The Developer: Why I left Google

“The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.” more

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The Designer: Goodbye Google

“Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle…I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.” more

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The Platform Guy: Google Doesn’t Get Platforms

“The problem we face is pretty huge, because it will take a dramatic cultural change in order for us to start catching up. We don’t do internal service-oriented platforms, and we just as equally don’t do external ones. This means that the “not getting it” is endemic across the company: the PMs don’t get it, the engineers don’t get it, the product teams don’t get it, nobody gets it. Even if individuals do, even if YOU do, it doesn’t matter one bit unless we’re treating it as an all-hands-on-deck emergency. We can’t keep launching products and pretending we’ll turn them into magical beautiful extensible platforms later.” more

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Related posts:
• The pollution of Google: an impending tragedy?
• Flipboard, Taptu, Zite, and the rise of Curautomation
• Coming soon: a journalisitic state of nature

Anonymous URLs … do you care?

In the age of twitter, URL shorteners (like bit.ly, is.gd, tinyurl.com etc) have proliferated. I’ve often wondered whether this is impacting the breadth of what people are reading on the web. Historically, a passionate anti-Guardian punter might refuse to click on a Guardian link they came across it, or a liberal chin-stroker would be worried about what their colleague think if they were caught browsing the Sun or the Daily Mail. But often these days we don’t know where we’re going. Yup, many sites now have their own bespoke short URLs (gu.com, huff.po, tgr.ph etc), but most don’t. I’m fascinated to know if you care. Thanks.

• Here’s another thing I wrote on media loyalty in the internet age. I’m not sure I agree with myself anymore, but there you go.

Street View art: 9 Eyes

A truly wonderful selection of Street Views from Google Maps. 9-eyes.com

Flipboard, Taptu, Zite… and the rise of Curautomation*

Image: luc legay on Flickr / Some rights reserved

It’s noisy out there. Links fly at you from all angles – news sites, email, Twitter, Facebook, yadda, yadda. Inevitably, from time to time, the wood and the trees merge into a thick internet soup. Any web addict will be familiar with this brain fog. Pawing at our keyboards, sweating, outnumbered, sinking. WHAT SHOULD I READ NEXT?!?!?!?

RSS readers were supposed to fix this. Sign up to your favourite feeds and wait for them to roll in. But I’m sure I’m not the only one who has abandoned their Google Reader to fend for itself. I was a gluton. I signed up for too much. I figured Twitter would replace it – the wheat would rise to the top, and my stream would deliver me the goods, naturally. But this is too much too. I tried culling the people I followed, but there are too many interesting folk out there.

Which is why I’m excited about a (quite) new breed of app that aims to filter through the noise. They curate, then automate. Curautomate. Sorry. Quixotically, I’ve downloaded three of them. Flipboard, Taptu and Zite all pretty much do the same thing – inviting users to select topics they are interested in (News, Design, Tech etc.), after which we can sit back, relax, and trust the app.

Flipboard for iPhone

Flipboard is probably the sexiest, with its eponymous vertical flipping interface. You choose your subjects, or sync your Twitter account, and it renders it all beautifully. Flip, flip, flip….

Taptu for iPhone

Next up, Taptu. Again, it invites you to choose your feeds, based on subjects or sepcific publishers, even breaking down into sub-sections such as the Guardian’s tech section, the Telegraph sports section etc. Each article is presented within the app, with “related topics” stapled to the bottom of pieces, allowing you to add to your chosen feeds, and, um, up the noise. Oh.

Zite for iPhone

And finally, Zite. It plugs into your Twitter account and chooses the subjects it thinks you are interested in. It was fairly spot on for me, offering travel, tech, social media, journalism, world news and a few others, which I added to. From there, your topics are arranged horizontally – swipe to see the next batch. Swipe, swipe, swipety swipe…

I like. But I’ve already made things a bit noisy. And perhaps therein lies a problem. Your noise-reduction app is, ultimately, only as good as your noise-reducing discipline. These things are supposed to dampen our habits, like methadone for the interweb, muffling the babble, but I managed to make them into mini cacophonies within hours of downloading. Must try harder.

And, just to add to the irony, I’ve started working on my own little noise reducer, more on which soon. There’s a market in stemming the flood, and I predict it will soon be flooded.

*Please note that I am well aware of just how wanky the word curautomation is. Let’s get it trending and then gamify** the shit out of it.

**Please note that I am well aware how how wanky the word gamify is. Let’s get it trending and cloudify*** the shit out of it.

***Please note that I am … ok I’ll stop now. For more wanky words, click here.

NYT’s Reveal – A mirror into the future?

Impressive stuff. More on it at NYT Labs.

Envisioned as a key fixture in your home, the mirror uses face recognition to call up personalized data, including health stats, a calendar, news feeds, and other information relevant to your morning routine. Voice commands switch between views, and gestures (via an embedded Kinect) activate content, including fullscreen video messages from other mirror users. An RFID-enabled shelf responds to objects that are placed on it, such as medications and personal care products, revealing personalized data. The mirror will recognize certain behaviors, such as when you schedule a trip or fail to get enough exercise, and recommend contextually-relevant content. If you’re interested, you can tap your phone on the mirror to sync the article for reading on the run or on our Surface Reader application. Read more