Catching up with NAN

Hey, I’m only a month late on congratulating Jay Rosen on the launch of NewAssignment.Net (“an experiment in open-source reporting”). My excuse is I was finishing a novel and working full time, but what about the blogs, Christian? And who will think of the children?

Here’s some tidbits from Jay’s update of the time, which have no doubt been superseded by new news that I will be sure to report sometime in mid-2007:

The launch package includes…

• an interview by Amanda Michel with Regina Lynnn, sex device columnist for wired.com who uses a forum she runs to do one type of smart mob reporting
• my announcement of the launch (yesterday) of the Polling Place Photo Project, which will attempt to collect digital photos from polling places across the USA
• a feature by David Cohn on what Netscape.com is doing, which Jason Calacanis calls “meta-journalism”
• my interview with Asa Dotzler
• Steve Fox, formerly of washingtonpost.com, explains why he quit there and agreed to work with us; and more.

Our plans for the test site are…

• daily content, M-F that tracks new & noteworthy developments in open source journalism and networked, pro-am reporting, plus any related Web. 2.0 stuff;
• interviews with key people (practitioners like Asa Dotzler of Mozilla and Regina Lynn, observers like James Surowiecki of The Wisdom of Crowds)
• lesson-learning from prior projects that definitely bear on NAN
• we will introduce elements of NewAssignment.Net’s operating style, preview and critique some possible projects for 2007, and begin to recruit participants and contributors - i.e., build the network during Nov., Dec. and January 07.

One thing you will notice is a tab section for NewAssignment Lab. That will be the section of the site where we invent stuff, run experiments and trials, try to break ground. Matthew Burton’s proposals on reading the laws open source style will go there. Reports on the Poling Place Project will go there. Anything have to do with invention.

Christian Crumlish

What's a 'community advocate'?

Last month I posted an entry about Platial and commented that “I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general.”

This prompted Tracy Rolling to write me a long interesting email message about how she became a community advocate and what the job entails. I asked for her permission to reprint it here on the blog and she agreed:

It’s a really interesting question because it’s one that those of us in these roles are asking and answering for ourselves as we go along. I know another person who does a similar job at another site, and what she and I both have in common is that we were underemployed, educated moms for a couple years, spending way too much time on social networking sites and blogs and such. We are online community junkies. I was a latecomer to the internet, partly because I lived in France during the 90s and partly because the internet never really seemed that compelling until I found my first online community (an egroup of friends of a friend, all from Iowa like myself). Email? I was and still am an avid epistolarian (is that a word?). Buy train tickets online? I pass the SNCF outlet every day. But yack it up with a bunch of new and old friends, gossip, tell secrets, discover that the imaginary people are actually real… that’s compelling. Both myself and my friend got our jobs by writing a lot of free feedback for friends’ websites and having the friends say, “Hey, want to work on this project with us?”

There’s an interesting problem in the social web boom. Often the people who are most knowledgeable and savvy about the politics, functioning, and workings of online communities are people who have been spending a lot of time slacking off in front of the computer in recent years. How does a new blogging network service, for example, go about recruiting these slackers? Or even understanding that it would be a good idea to have one on staff? I know of one site that had a guy in my role whose background was in e-commerce. He had never belonged to or even heard of any major online communities except for Friendster. He didn’t even really use the site he worked for that much! But he was recruitable.

I do a lot of different things at Platial. Marketing to be sure, but specifically grassroots-style, relatively low-impact marketing. I contact people who have great content and try to help them make maps. I write to online community mods and ask them to post about maps that I think are interesting to their communities. I write to bloggers.

The most important thing I do in my job is I communicate with users. That’s the community I’m advocating for. I make more maps than anyone and know how to use the site best. I gather feedback, I chart feedback, I follow up on feedback. I’ve got some kind of friendly relationship with most of our main power users. If I notice someone on the site having trouble with their images or something, I send them a message offering help. I answer ever single feedback email we get within a week, usually faster. I listen to people and I advocate within the company for what the users are asking for. Because I use the site myself every day, I know their frustrations when things are broken and I know the excitement when a long-awaited feature gets added.

I also try to make connections between users sometimes. We have a beta tester club comprised of people I’ve chosen to invite because of the high quality of their feedback. These people get early notification of new features and often get to test drive stuff on a testing site we set up. It’s great having a bunch of extra hands on the site looking for glitches in the hours before a new site launch, and we really appreciate how much those people care about what we do.

I keep the faq updated, I make how-to screencasts and instructables, I blog, and I do a ton of qa. We’re a small company (5 full time, one part time, and a design intern), so everyone ends up doing a lot.

Thanks for your time (if you made it all the way to the end—I know it’s long). When I read your post it set me to thinking.

So there you have it.

Christian Crumlish

Grattan School evening lecture program (SF)

Robert Birnbach, who shot the awesome author photo on the page-cover book-jacket flap of The Power of Many writes to tell me about an evening lecture suries he is helping start called The Grattan Speaker Series, “featuring locally and nationally renown authors, educators, activists and thinkers, and focused on themes that resonate with San Francisco families, neighbors and concerned citizens across the City.”

Here’s more about the series:

Offered 4 times during the school year, the series seeks to grow a sense of community and demonstrate Grattan School’s commitment to being a place where the well being of children and families are addressed at the highest level, where dynamic thinking occurs, and where community is engaged. The talks will be held in the school’s auditorium and a suggested donation of $8 will be asked for at the door, with all proceeds benefiting the school. No one will be turned away.

In addition to the evening adult audience, each speaker will also be asked to commit to time with Grattan kids during regular school hours, thereby integrating the speaker themes into our student community. These kid forums may take the form of general assemblies or small classroom audiences and will be offered at an age-appropriate level.

Dates:

• Thursday, September 28 - Tim Redmond, Editor-in-Chief of the Bay Guardian
• Thursday, November 16 - Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist
• Thursday, January 18 - tbd
• Thursday, March 1 - tbd

Newmark will be speaking on the topic “craigslist (community in the 21st century).”

Christian Crumlish

Raw notes from technology roundtable with former Presidential candidate Mark Warner in San Francisco on November 17, 2006

When I have a moment, I’ll upload the lo-qual cellphone pictures I snapped and embed them here. Maybe I’ll even get around to cleaning up these raw notes into something coherent or even listing who all was there. For now, all I have time to do is dump the notes I t9’d into my “smartphone” and gmailed to myself:

warner:
tech change cuts through everything

fundamentalist fear of sweeping change… how to prepare people for the inevitable change?

beyond tech industry policy issues

how to help people get their voices heard

most politicians lesson from Dean is fundraising, meetup, and something vague about blogs

danah:
media, always a generation gap

natural to kids, unnatural to parents

adina:
industry issues more about incumbancy vs innovations

warner:
i fought the incumbents on the telecom issues

i think we need a national policy re broadband and need to protect innovator’s ip

??:
a creative commons model plus individual choice

adina?:
principles going back to the founders

anil:
tech industry is politically incompetent

we look to politicians for leadership

tech change not inevitable

warner:
i would argue america got seduced by the tech bubble

but it’s happening now… evangelism is called for

jon:
and education

danah:
we are behind in mobile because of carrier lock down

politics needs to get beyond money

me:
how to get politics beyond money???

warner:
tech = economic promise but the issue got elevated beyond national leadership

mary:
i disagree

craig:
i strongly disagree

mary:
1890s railroads bubble (analogy), then carnegie

was approached by a candidate in 2004 but not interested in campaigns… unless it’s taken straight into governance… but they were scared

craig:
acceleration… viet nam 8 yrs, iraq 3 yrs
in the next 3 wks i’m scared of a gulf of tonkin

i believe just get the bad guys out of the way…

kaliya:
overarching theme is freedom

anil, wagner james:
techies exhibit real unseriousness about terrorism and predators

wj:
partisanship

space race target analogy

cultural not political the 30s

danah:
parks analogy

me:
freedom opportunity national greatness

Christian Crumlish

Glorum, a tagged forum about anything

Mario Rizzuti pointed me to his vaguely Digg-looking discussion-forum project called glorum. I asked him to describe the purpose or “mission” of the site and he responded thusly:

It is an attempt at building a concept for online discussions alternative to the usenet model.

The key ideas are

1. using tags (no groups)
2. +/- feedback (no moderators)
3. browsing (tagged) users (social networking potential)

Hopefully it would reach some kind of critical mass, prove some value and take 1 of 2 directions:

1. a delicious-like database. Ideally this would make niche discussions possible, something like a long tail of discussions.
2. an open source piece of software that would compete with current message boards. In this case the news would be that discussions and users could now (at least theoretically) be aggregated thanks to tags.

It’s online since 4 weeks. It is currently just a prototype with about 30 users.

Sounds like an interesting experiment.

Christian Crumlish

Reuters grant underwrites NewAssignment.Net budget

Here’s Jay Rosen’s announcement of a $100,000 grant for his NADN project: PressThink: Editing Horizontally: Thanks to Reuters, NewAssignment.Net Can Hire Someone

My first thought was, “This sounds like a job for George,” but George already has a job….

I like that Rosen wants to have both a paid editor and a paid “network wrangler” to pull off this “pro-am” journalism experiment.

As I disclosed last time I posted about this, I am an advisor to this project. Rosen was in SF recently to do some brainstorming about the NADN website. I wasn’t involved in that meeting (it sounds like it was a very fruitful meeting) but I did have a chance to get together with Jay over dinner last week and I’m very excited about the potential of this project to catalyze an evolution in journalism beyond how it’s currently practiced.

More on this when I have time to reflect and write.

Christian Crumlish

Maps for the masses, now with custom stylin'

Tracy Rolling, the community advocate for Platial.com (“the people’s atlas) recently sent me a heads up about a new styling feature for the DIY maps that Platial makes it so easy to, er, make.

And, by the way, I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general. They usually seem to understand, though, that I’m a sucker for people who’ve read my book or follow my blogs or both and say they like my writing. Still, I won’t blog about anything! I’m not a total flattery whore.

OK, so back to Platial. Tracy demos the new feature in her own blog, The Sputterly Utter, and describes the service and the process like so:

Platial, the website which allows people who don’t know what an api is to create their own Google mashups, has just launched a new feature called Mapstyler. Now you can build your own map and then give it a custom style for publishing on your website or blog. People can also upload their own css files and custom markers, to have their way with Platial maps and integrate them into their blogs and websites.

Note to Woody: Investigate for Bikr?

Christian Crumlish

Blogs United supports local bloggers

Blogger (and former Kos front-page poster) Kid Oakland has been gradually building a network called Blogs United to help local political bloggers learn from and support each other:

Local bloggers are citizen journalists and activists. They are a vital part of the emerging netroots infrastructure. My goal this election season is to show how local blogs are changing the political landscape of the United States. And my goal with Blogs United is to try to provide a forum that is useful to local blogs and bloggers themselves. Something is going on here just below the radar. I’m committed to tracking it and helping to explain it.

Disclosure: I’m a member of Blogs United and am helping K/O with some technical stuff.

Christian Crumlish

Jay Rosen discusses NewAssignment.net

Back in late July, NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen announced an initiative called NewAssignment.Net. (Full disclosure: I am one of a medium-sized set of advisors to this project.) The goal of NADN, in my words, is to leverage blog networks and traditional editorial expertise to define, assign, write, and edit news articles covering assignments that might otherwise go unreported. To hear the project explained much more effectively, in Jay’s words, check out this interview with NPR’s On the Media.

Christian Crumlish

The web is inherently social

Karl Martino says “paradox1x: Social software can’t be a fad since the WEB is social software”:

The fact is the most successful web services - since the beginnings of the web - were social software applications. The Web’s participatory architecture lends itself to them. It’s always been a Two Way web as Dave Winer would say. We’re simply seeing an evolution of what’s come before. The revolution is that so much of it has become mainstream (MySpace is mainstream) and the barriers to launching a service that incorporates participation have fallen so low. Not that there is some new fangled set of features that everyone must go out and implement to stay relevant. Knocking some hot air out of the hype is warranted. Some of these newer services resemble those dot coms that launched in the late nineties that didn’t grasp what Amazon.com, eBay, Blogger, and others, were *really* doing. You know, those sites that thought if they had a clever domain name, niche, and a particular set of features, they were on their way to riches. … By and large it was “social media” that survived the original dot com crash. And I expect that, by and large again, the best “social media” will survive whenever next bubble pops. So when the next time of reckoning comes, and it will, look at what lives on. And think about why. Burn this in your brain - the Web *is* social software.

Can I get an amen?

Christian Crumlish

Outing Sen. Ted Stevens

My friend Freeman Ng alerted me to this post at Slashdot: Slashdot | Bloggers 1, Smoke-Filled Room 0:

MarkusQ writes “A few days ago a bi-partisan bill (PDF) to create a searchable on-line database of government contracts, grants, insurance, loans, financial assistance, earmarks and other such pork was put on ‘secret hold’ using a procedure that does not appear to be mentioned in the Constitution or in the Senate bylaws. This raised the ire of bloggers left and right and started an all out bi-partisan effort to expose the culprit by process of elimination. As it turns out it was our old friend the right honorable Senator from Alaska, Mr. ‘Series of Tubes’, Ted ‘Bridge to Nowhere’ Stevens.”

Christian Crumlish

Brief audio interview with me from last year

The day after last year’s Personal Democracy Forum I attended a Civicspace workshop event and Gregory Heller conducted a brief interview with me talking about PDF, Civicspace, and how to run conferences with an “open API” so that other events can plug-in and piggyback.

Christian Crumlish

Stolen phone automatically uploads photos of thief's family to Flickr

practicalist: authentic media, exhibit b — pictures of the family of the person who stole my cell phone posted to my flickr account:

…what a great illustration of how social media, inadvertently or not, blows away all normally private separate identities and separate worlds! I don’t just know something about the person who took the phone, I see some of the more intimate details of their family and life. Social media and applications create conditions which would otherwise be impossible. These technologies are only beginning to have a profound impact on social norms and behavior.

Christian Crumlish

Social software provides buffer for shy people

I think 12 frogs is onto something here with Why social software is good for introverts.

Christian Crumlish

Jason Scott on 'the great failure of Wikipedia'

I was looking at the Haddock blogs aggregator and in their links gutter I came across a transcript of a presentation given at Notacon 3 (whatever that is) in April of this year by Jason Scott. You can listen to the audio if you prefer.

I tend to like the Wikipedia idea, warts and all, but this talk is a pretty compelling look at its flaws. Here are a few choice excerpts that jumped out at me:

What Wikipedia has taught us now, is that in a vacuum of politics, politics will be created. There is no vacuum of politics. People who are encountering this space where they can not lord over others for technicalities and gain power for themselves will then proceed to invoke technicalities, take power from other people. They just do this. This is what human beings do.

and

One of the big fallacies that people currently have is “well, even if people undo your work, at least you can see it.” It’s not true. People will go to the history of an article that’s disputed, and they will find that that history’s actually been utterly and completely purged from Wikipedia. The history is gone.

and, also

Wikipedia tends to be, at this point, the first hit for most proper and non-proper nouns. Putting in anything gives you the Wikipedia entry. In fact, if you have Trillian, Trillian has an automatic setting so that any word you have in there that matches on Wikipedia ends up as an underlined word. You click on it, and it tells you what the answer is. To someone who’s using instant messaging, they don’t know where this entry came from when they clicked on it, they also tend to be out of date because they index it across the Trillian … and so on. So as a result, you can’t say just go in and change it, because it’s actually using older and older indexes. That’s what I mean by the concern I have, the worry that I have, when I make these big points.

Christian Crumlish

OpenID info evening (for developers)

Kaliya “Identity Woman” Hamlin writes:

Webwide distributed SSO is finally happening… Learn more from the core guys behind this emerging standard for user-centric digital identity. August 10th 6-9 in Berkeley at 2029 University, Upstairs. RSVP to me kaliya (at) Mac (dot) com and please pass this along to those who might be interested… OpenID is the emerging standard for web wide distributed single sign-on. It works with OpenID enabled URLs and i-names. The goal of the evening is not to geek out on identity but to connect with developers working on applications that require users to log in. Find out more about what it is… how it works… how you can install it. The incentives to learn are high with the $5000 bounty for having OpenID in Open Source projects. Presenting and answering Questions:

• David Recordon formerly of Live Journal/Six Appart now of Verisign will be presenting a bit about the origins of OpenID but most importantly how it works… and how you install it.
• Andy Dale from ooTao will talk a bit about i-names and how they work with OpenID2 and looking forward to what comes next after authentication - profile sharing. ooTao is also data sharing, are running ibroker services.
• Scott Keveton from Jan Rain a development shop in Portland that has been ond of the leading instigators of OpenID. He just posted a walk through on his blog.
• Mary Hodder CEO of Dabble will talk about the work happening around the development of itags.

If you know a developer - pass the word along.

Perhaps the vision of a universal single sign-on on the Web isn’t just a utopian pipedream after all?

Christian Crumlish

Democratizing the art market

David Hinojosa has got a project called Stock Artist that offers a simulation (for now) of a rationalize the art market.

I’m not sure I fully understand the concept, but this appears to be the nut of it:

The central nucleus of Stockartist is the “transformed art piece’s concept.” This concept consists in dividing the value of one work, or a group of them into little pieces called “stock-art.” The stock-arts have two characteristics: they represent one part of the value of the “transformed art piece” and they are themselves art works. In other words, the stock-arts are at the same time art works and an instrument of investment that besides of representing their own value, they represent other’s. The stock-arts share some common physical characteristics as: maximum weight, maximum size, security codes, etc, and they contain unique characteristics imposed by their creator.

Christian Crumlish