December 04, 2006

The demise of the professional photojournalist

Ucla

Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media: The demise of the professional photojournalist. (Video above: UCLA police taser a student.) Excerpt:

The pros have a problem. They can’t possibly compete in the media-sphere of the future. We’re entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratized, and when updated business models connect the best creators with potential customers, many if not most of the pros will fight a losing battle to save their careers. ...

In a world of ubiquitous media tools, which is almost here, someone will be on the spot every time.

And there will be business models and methods to support their work.

Today, YouTube is the site of choice for all kinds of videos, including newsworthy ones such as the recent abuse-by-taser of the student at the University of California, Los Angeles (more than 764,000 viewings as of today), and the racist nightclub rantings of Michael “Kramer” Richards (more than 1.2 million viewings). Both were captured by mobile-phone video cameras.

Others will make their way to sites like the newly announced projects such as YouWitness News (a joint project of Yahoo and Reuters), or operations like Scoopt or NowPublic. ...

Is it so sad that the professionals will have more trouble making a living this way in coming years? To them, it must be — and I have friends in the business, which makes this painful to write in some ways.

To the rest of us, as long as we get the trustworthy news we need, the trend is more positive.

I agree. I, too, have many photojournalist friends in the news business. Their work will continue to be important, but increasingly, they will no longer be the first eyewitnesses on the scene of a news story.

December 4, 2006 at 11:11 PM in Citizen media, Photography | Permalink | Comments (0)



Yahoo partners with Reuters on eyewitness news

Reuters: Yahoo partners with Reuters on eyewitness news.

Yahoo Inc., in partnership with Reuters, is inviting the public to contribute eyewitness photos and videos of news events, in the latest move to turn spectators into on-the-spot journalists.

The Internet media company said it has created a news contribution system called You Witness and is working with news and information company Reuters Group Plc, which will edit and distribute selected photos to other news outlets.

Yahoo plans to run selected images contributed by users as part of topical packages on Yahoo News, which currently offers news from dozens of professional news organizations including Associated Press, CNN and Reuters.

With hundreds of millions of camera phones in circulation, consumers are able to take high-quality photos and videos.

The South Asian tsunami, the London Underground bombings and the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans have showcased the power of people who happen to be in the wrong place at the right time to capture history as it happens.

"There is already a lot of quality amateur journalism being created by our users," said Scott Moore, head of news and information at Yahoo Media Group. "Yahoo needed a more efficient process for soliciting and publishing user-contributed photos and video."

While focused initially on news, Yahoo aims to expand the You Witness system to solicit user contributions for sports, entertainment and other sections of its site, a spokesman for the Sunnyvale, California-based company said.

Yahoo and London-based Reuters are working out a plan to compensate contributors when their images are selected for commercial syndication, the two companies said.

Meantime, look for some exciting new things from citizen media site NowPublic in the next day or two.

December 4, 2006 at 10:58 PM in Citizen media | Permalink | Comments (0)



Gannett looks to 'mojos' for local online news

Washington Post: Gannett Looks to 'Mojos' for Local Online News

The Fort Myers News-Press is deploying more than a dozen "mojos" -- mobile journalists -- that don't have an office or even a cubicle, but use their car as a newsroom. Owner Gannett hopes the mojos' local focus will drive readers to its community-specific Web sites. 

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

December 4, 2006 at 10:45 PM in Citizen media | Permalink | Comments (0)



Scoopt woos Flickr users

Scoopt woos Flickr users.

December 4, 2006 at 10:42 PM in Citizen media | Permalink | Comments (0)



'Daypop down until further notice'

Looks like Daypop is out of service for at least a month. 

December 4, 2006 at 10:15 PM in Search engines | Permalink | Comments (0)



Ask: The retooling of a search engine

Ask_1

NY Times: The Retooling of a Search Engine (with CEO Jim Lanzone, above). Today, Ask.com is introducing AskCity, a service that integrates maps with information about local businesses, restaurants, concert and movie listings and reviews. I tried it out, and it worked surprisingly well on a number of search queries. Check it for yourself.

Search_engine_rankings

December 4, 2006 at 09:59 PM in Search engines | Permalink | Comments (0)



Woodward and Bernstein 'hated each other'

San Jose Mercury News:  Two opposites who `hated each other' changed the course of American history. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the movie ``All the President's Men,'' starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

December 4, 2006 at 09:10 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0)



Azureus' HD videos trump YouTube

Wired News: Azureus' HD Vids Trump YouTube.

December 4, 2006 at 11:46 AM in Video/videoblogging | Permalink | Comments (0)



December 03, 2006

Amateurs, big media and online video

Journalist Scott Kirsner in the San Jose Mercury News: As online viewing booms, the amateurs give way to big media.

At the recent Web 2.0 summit in San Francisco, Mary Meeker, an Internet analyst at the investment bank Morgan Stanley, defined three different categories of video content on the Internet: amateur, semi-professional and professional. She said she would expect that viewers might divide their attention equally between those three categories. An example of semi-professional content might be a series of yoga videos made by a local studio, or a low-budget feature film that is well-made, but was never shown in theaters. ...

I think Scott sometimes sells the amateurs short. Meeker's right, there will be a strong mix of amateur, semi-professional and professional video material in the coming years.

Jon Healey of the LA Times in the San Jose Merc: MySpace, YouTube hope to escape the fate of Napster.

December 3, 2006 at 08:27 PM in Video/videoblogging | Permalink | Comments (2)



Second Life founder's appearance in SF

Philip Rosedale

I couldn't make the appearance by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale at Ft. Mason in San Francisco on Thursday night. (Above is a shot I took of Philip last year.) But Stewart Brand, who organizes the Seminar About Long-term Thinking  sessions, provided this account by email:

What is real life coming to owe digital life? After a couple years in the flat part of exponential growth, the steep part is now arriving for the massive multi-player online world construction kit called "Second Life."   With 1.7 million accounts, membership in "Second Life" is growing by 20,000 per day.  The current doubling rate of "residents" is 7 months, still shortening, which means the growth is (for now) hyperexponential.

For this talk the founder and CEO of "Second Life," Philip Rosedale, tried something new for him--- a simultaneous demo and talk.  His online avatar, "Philip Linden," was on the screen showing things while the in-theater Philip Rosedale was conjecturing about what it all means.  "This is a game of 'Can I interest you more in what I'm saying than what's going on on the screen?'"

He showed how new arrivals go through the "gateway" experience of creating their own onscreen avatar, explaining that because intense creativity is so cheap, easy, and experimental, the online personas become strongly held.  "You can have multiple avatars in 'Second Life,' but the overall average is 1.25 avatars per person."  The median age of users is 31, and the oldest users spend the most time in the world (over 80 hours per week for 10 percent of the residents).  Women are 43 percent of the customers.

The on-screen Philip Linden was carrying Rosedale's talk notes (handwritten, scanned, and draped onto a board in the digital world). Rosedale talked about the world while his avatar flew ("Everyone flies--- why not?") to a music club in which a live song performance was going on (the real singer crooning into her computer in real time from somewhere.)  The singer recognized Philip Linden in the on-screen audience and greeted him from the on-screen stage.

"More is different," Rosedale explained.  People think they want total and solitary control of their world, but the result of that is uninteresting.  To get the emergent properties that make "Second Life" so enthralling, it has to be one contiguous world with everyone in it.  At present it comprises about 100 square miles, mostly mainland, with some 5,000 islands (all adding up to 35 terrabytes running in 5,000 servers).  Defying early predictions, the creativity in "Second Life" has not plateaued but just keeps escalating.  Everybody is inspired to keep topping each other with ever cooler things.  There are tens of thousands of clothing designers.  Unlike the aesthetic uniformity of imagined digital worlds like in the movie "The Matrix," "Second Life" is suffused with variety. It is "the sum of our dreams."

The burgeoning token economy in "Second Life" is directly connected to the real-world economy with an exchange rate of around 270 Linden dollars to 1 US dollar.  There are 7,000 businesses operating in "Second Life," leading this month to its first real-world millionaire (Metaverse real estate mogul Anshe Chung).  At present "Second Life" has annual economic activity of about $70 million US dollars, growing rapidly.

As Jaron Lanier predicted in the early '90s, the only scarce resource in virtual reality is creativity, and it becomes valued above everything.  Freed of the cost of goods and the plodding quality of real-world time, Rosedale explained, people experiment fast and strange, get feedback, and experiment again.  They orgy on the things they think they want, play them out, get bored, and move on. They get "married," start businesses with strangers--- "There are 40-person businesses made of people who have never met in real life."  Real-world businesses hold meetings in "Second Life" because they're more fun and encourage a higher degree of truth telling.

Pondering the future, Rosedale said that every aspect of the quality of shared virtual life will keep improving as the technology accelerates and the number of creators online keeps multiplying. ("Second Life" is now moving toward a deeper order of creativity by releasing most of its world-building software into open source mode.)

Real-world artifacts like New York City could become regarded like museums.  "As the fastest moving, most creative stuff in our society increasingly takes place in the virtual world, that will change how we look at the real world," Rosedale concluded.

The next SALT talk here in San Francisco will be on Friday, Jan. 26, 02007: Philip Tetlock, "Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters than Hedgehogs."

December 3, 2006 at 08:08 PM in Games | Permalink | Comments (0)



December 02, 2006

America's media bubble

An op-ed by Lawrence Pintak in The Boston Globe (via the IHT): America's media bubble: A willful blindness.

And another piece by Pintak in CJR Daily: Will Al-Jazeera English Find Its Groove?

December 2, 2006 at 02:50 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0)



December 01, 2006

Liking NetVibes

Robert Scoble says he's gobbling up new RSS feeds thanks to the new Google Reader. But I've grown tired of reading RSS feeds through an RSS reader. (And I've been writing about this stuff for years.)

My new info-gathering toy? NetVibes. It's a personalized start page that lets you add as many of your favorite sites (via their RSS feed) as you'd like. MyYahoo has 60 million users, but Netvibes -- launched in early 2006 by Paris-based Tariq Krim -- expects to have 15 million users by year's end. Wow.

With Netvibes, users can quickly change the look of their start page, select content, add RSS feeds, and custom-build features from other Netvibes users. Any email feed can be put on Netvibes. I'm liking it.

I'm also still playing with Megite. They created a page for me showing a few dozen of the feeds I subscribe to (after exporting my OPML file from Bloglines). They also have a "River of News" feed -- based on a post a few months ago by Dave Winer, I'm guessing -- that's pretty nice.

Last week I tried to set up a Google start page, but I was surprised and disappointed that Google doesn't let you couldn't figure out how to add your own RSS feeds to it. They also let you add media partners' content. (How geeky is this page talking about Subscribed Links feeds?)

December 1, 2006 at 11:15 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (6)



'The Future of Web Video'

From Scott Kirsner:

After a year of work, and more than 100 interviews, I've just published a book called The Future of Web Video: New Opportunities for Producers, Entrepreneurs, Media Companies and Advertisers. It's available in eBook/PDF form (which you can download immediately), or as a paperback, which requires a few days for shipping.

December 1, 2006 at 10:24 PM in Books, Video/videoblogging | Permalink | Comments (0)



One buck per pixel adds up

Have you heard about the Million Dollar Homepage? This dude went out and sold a billboard-like website home page for $1 per pixel -- and pocketed a cool million. Now he's trying to do he same thing at a new site called Pixelotto at $2 per pixel. TechCrunch doubts he can do it.

December 1, 2006 at 10:22 PM in Amusing | Permalink | Comments (1)



The future of books

Corydoctorow

Author Cory Doctor has an op-ed, Giving It Away, in the new special issue of Forbes magazine on the future of books. He writes about it in BoingBoing.

December 1, 2006 at 09:15 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (0)



Take control of your airwaves

FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps writes in an op-ed in the Seattle Times: Take control of your airwaves.

December 1, 2006 at 11:51 AM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0)



Dan Rather: HDTV will change TV news

Rather

TVPredictions: Dan Rather, the former CBS anchor who now hosts a news program on HDNet, predicts high-definition television will change TV news forever. Viewers will be "less removed" from the news, he says. "The realities of war will hit home in a way it has never done before."

December 1, 2006 at 11:46 AM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0)



Bad news ahead for Old Media in 2007

MediaPost:  Traditional media companies will struggle to maintain their audiences in 2007.  "We really need to think about what it means to be in an interactive environment," says Michael Rogers, futurist-in-residence at the New York Times.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

December 1, 2006 at 11:35 AM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0)



Take that, National Book Awards!

MediaBistro: Take That, National Book Awards!

December 1, 2006 at 11:27 AM in Books | Permalink | Comments (0)



Google/YouTube: Don't sue us

BusinessWeek Online: The Google/YouTube Come-On. Google and YouTube are dangling nine-figure sums in front of major programming and network players. Google calls these monies licensing fees, but some executives characterize the subtext like this: Don't sue us over copyrights. Take this (substantial) payment, and trust us to figure out how we'll all make serious money once we get advertising and revenue sharing worked out.

December 1, 2006 at 11:25 AM in Video/videoblogging | Permalink | Comments (0)



YouTube's purged videos migrating elsewhere

Forbes.com: YouTube now performs frequent purges of television shows and other proprietary content uploaded by users. Those forbidden files are largely migrating to DailyMotion.com, another video-uploading site. The Paris-based DailyMotion appears to do little if any regulation of copyrighted material. Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.  

December 1, 2006 at 11:00 AM in Video/videoblogging | Permalink | Comments (0)



November 30, 2006

Google abandons online answer service

Associated Press:  Google to abandon online answer service

November 30, 2006 at 08:43 PM in Search engines | Permalink | Comments (0)



One Laptop Per Child effort moves forward

Walter_bender_nicholas_negroponte

NY Times: For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate. (NYT photo of MIT's Walter Bender, left, and Nicholas Negroponte) Excerpt:

The nonprofit project, One Laptop Per Child, [has won] over many skeptics over the last two and a half years. Five countries — Argentina, Brazil, Libya, Nigeria and Thailand — have made tentative commitments to put the computers into the hands of millions of students, with production in Taiwan expected to begin by mid-2007.

The laptop does not come with a  Microsoft Windows operating system or even a hard drive, and the screen is small. And the cost is now closer to $150 than $100. But the price tag, even compared with low-end $500 laptops now widely available, transforms the economic equation for developing countries. ...

The idea is also that children can take on much of the responsibility for maintaining the systems, rather than relying on or creating bureaucracies to do so.

“We believe you have to leverage the kids themselves,” Ms. Jepsen said. “They’re learning machines.” As an example, she pointed to the backlight used by the laptop. Although it is designed to last five years, if it fails it can be replaced as simply as batteries are replaced in a flashlight. It is something a child can do, she said. ...

Mr. Negroponte said the manufacturing cost was now below $150 and that it would fall below $100 by the end of 2008.

Laptop2

November 30, 2006 at 01:47 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)



Yahoo launches mobile social-networking service

Information Week: Yahoo Quietly Launches Mobile Social-Networking Service

Yahoo is quietly launching an experimental site, called Mixd, that allows mobile-phone users to send text messages and share videos and pictures with friends. Yahoo plans to market Mixd on U.S. college campuses. News Corp.'s MySpace is developing mobile services for its users.

Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

November 30, 2006 at 08:36 AM in Mobile | Permalink | Comments (0)



November 29, 2006

Om Malik to launch two new blogs

Ommalik0613

TechEffect: Om Malik to launch two new blogs.

November 29, 2006 at 03:58 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0)