A site to behold

A very interesting site investigating the notion of user-led content – http://produsage.org by Axel Bruns. Especially Snurb’s blog featuring his presentation on produsage and business: blogging from next09.

First blogger to win Australian prize

Blogger Alison Croggon of Theatre Notes, mentioned in my second blog as ‘my taste’ in blogs is the first blogger to win the Pascall Prize for excellence in arts journalism, the sole award for arts criticism in Australia. The prize is $15,000, and for background on the prize and Alison’s forthright and inclusive approach to ‘curation of a public conversation’ (per prize judges) see her invaluable Theatre Notes. The Age reports that Alison is ‘particularly pleased because the award “validates what blogs can be.”’ Note her vivid disclosure of who she is, what she does, the ‘financial’ status of her blog and her use of a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Official Twitter coverage of the Future Summit is an important comment on the increasing popularity of this medium as a seriously interactive and a ‘real-time’ connection for the future, although I find the notion of a conference paper being reduced to a tweet of 140 characters challenging. See the Age report.

San Francisco Chronicle considers ‘how much information is too much in cyberspace’ as syndicated to the Age, a question that will develop and transform as we move rapidly into the future.

Meanwhile Professor Todd Gitlin's keynote presentation at the University of Westminster, London's Journalism in Crisis Conference entitled "A Surfeit of Crises: Circulation, Revenue, Attention, Authority and Deference," makes for good reading. Professor Terry Flew's presentation this week in Chicago offers another perspective on changes in media "The Citizen's Voice: Albert Hirschman's Exit, Voice and Loyalty and its Contribution to Media Citizenship Debates".

From cultural convergence to analysis paralysis and beyond arts

“The Poachers and the Stormtroopers: Cultural Convergence in the Digital Age” is a fascinating study of the intersection of media and culture in the area of fandom and paves the way for Henry Jenkins’ eloquent book published in 2006 Convergence Culture: where old and new media collide. In an era when 'convergence culture' has spread across all forms of media and entertainment (fandom is no longer an underground activity) and media is in transition it is difficult to assess how creators can be financially rewarded for their creations, the notion of intellectual property and copyright are ‘punitive models’ that are inadequate to deal with the contemporary media environment. Corporates e.g. Star Wars/ LucasArts have had to negotiate a balance with fandom enthusiasm and investment in production and protecting intellectual property.

Jenkins’ paradigm for understanding media change spans franchises (corporates top-down) and grassroots level (bottom-up) as media producers as well as consumers. “This book is about the relationship between three contexts – media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence,” he writes. He discusses the migratory experience of audiences who will go ‘almost anywhere’ to find the entertainment experience they desire – and the unpredictability of the appropriation of cultural images and their circulation – in a complex media environment which depends on active participation “by a new set of rules nobody really fully understands”. Convergence is not simply a technological term. Jenkins covers the notion of divergence as part of the same phenomenon, and while his focus is on popular culture, he understands that the lines between this and politics have already blurred (Obama’s election campaign is a prime example).

As Pool predicted before Jenkins, convergence does not imply stability, rather as media cultures compete and diversify, it is predicated on tension with change. Jenkins’ aim is to understand some of the ways in which convergence is impacting on popular culture in America, “in particular the ways in which it is impacting on the relationship between media audiences, producers and content.” He describes us as living within a ‘convergence culture’ which will lie somewhere between the world ‘without gatekeepers’ and the world with ‘too tightly controlled gatekeepers’. A world where audiences empowered with new technologies are part of the landscape and producers will be rewarded for embracing participatory culture.

I found Douglas Bowman’s ‘abrupt exit’ (The Sunday Age, Business syndicated from the New York Times) from Google very well-handled by the designer who explained on his blog that when user data wholly dictates the engineering of a site, it leaves little room for designer innovation (is this an example of ‘analysis paralysis’?). The question is how textured the feedback is and whether reactive data when taken to an extreme, is the most useful in building web design. Certainly, Bowman is not suggesting that designers should ignore user feedback which he states informs valuable insights.

The website I’ve been following Arts Hub has become slightly more streamlined but has not improved aesthetically. News is divided into latest reviews, views and profiles with the first and last being free content. It still carries advertisements including the easy stray click to Deakin University on the right hand side. It is a straightforward click on reviews to ‘free content’, but ‘premium content’ – e.g. latest Australian news takes the user to the beginning of the article with only one line displayed before it asks you to sign in or join now. I guess it’s the balancing act of piquing interest as discussed last week. Partial feed is not saleable, however, just look at the presentation of Crikey's new aggregated content.

Arts Hub has a flash through of top stories that seems to be regularly updated but features many media releases. It is optimising business opportunities and resolving copyright issues (although Fairfax has attempted to claim copyright over headlines and bylines) by making the user click through directly to other publications to see full stories from national or international publications (the view remains clunky and aesthetically unappealing with the summary, link and comment box). It features an arts directory with many entries ‘that have not yet provided a profile’. CEO Lisa Watts was announced in early April. Under events, classifieds and arts directory users are invited to browse or lodge an advertisement. It is offering a free 60 day trial for companies. It is encouraging members to keep in touch with Facebook page (for latest giveaways) or Twitter in its e-bulletin. Central to driving its subscriptions are employment and volunteering opportunities, residencies and auditions etc. However, it does not sort employment opportunities from voluntary and other opportunities for members except to offer a volunteer search for the user actively seeking voluntary positions or a breakdown of industry sectors. It offers a browse job function without specific organisational details to all users. Arts Hub charges for job and volunteer listings.

Having looked at mediabistro.com, although overwhelmed, I find the content much more tantalising and it’s skew more creative than Arts Hub, while it targets a broader, more textured demographic and showcases more interesting offers.

Some must sees

The Age, Insight, Saturday 25 April made interesting reading for a world that is shedding newspapers at an accelerated rate. The convergence of global financial crisis and advanced digital technology has meant that well-known titles such as The Scotsman institutionalised during the Edinburgh Festival is ‘shuddering as advertising collapses’ in Britain and in the US the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune are ‘in administration.’ The article “Who will blow the whistle” by Mary Riddell of The Telegraph focuses on Russell Crowe’s performance as a charismatic ‘downtrodden journalist’ in State of Play. Riddell describes it as a ‘lament for truth, honesty and courage’ and a ‘death notice’, although she acknowledges there are ‘sceptics’ who see these qualities as redundant in modern journalism. It talks of papers’ leading role in democracy; at a time where ‘amazonfail’ speaks volumes about the power of numbers to check power bases.

In another excerpt from The Telegraph Insight looks at ‘death on the net’ and three new websites looking at the implications of death and ‘bequeathing your digital footprint’. The principal one under discussion is legacy locker which works by holding and supplying information including usernames and passwords to be made available your ‘family’ after you have passed on. It raises the question how well do you trust the supplier to be repository of accounts, perhaps, but passwords and PIN etc.?! keepyousafe is a safety deposit box online designed also for travellers which raises similar concerns, and deathswitch acts like a ‘pre-scripted’ advisory service to a list of names – of automated messages including passwords when you stop entering your password at prompts and the computer ‘deduces you are dead or critically disabled’.

Meanwhile my attention has been drawn to a lighter subject, magician and ’unusualist’ South Australian Raymond Crowe, who thanks to a chance YouTube video of his low-tech magic in August 2007 (see Sydney Morning Herald report) was featured on David Letterman (YouTube video) early last year, and has succeeded in developing a one-man show premiered last week at this year’s Melbourne International Comedy Festival for broad international touring.

Bloblet's 2014

Bloblet’s take on EPIC 2014 reflects much of my response to the piece. I too find the 'doomsday' tone of voice and music irritating but apt for the post-apocalyptic setting in which it posits the world of journalism.

And as Sloan would readily accede this is not a so much a prophecy about an all-encompassing online world information system as a tool to engage consideration of journalism in a state of flux. Google’s extended reach is clearly topical – renewed talks between Microsoft and Yahoo! to provide a viable alternative search engine were reported in this week’s Age Business section syndicated from the Guardian.

In these critical economic times, with media monopolies contracting and carrying more organisational-biased comment, and diversifying if they’re savvy – online media needs to be seen as a serious route. Moby Capital, which owns Tolo TV Afghanistan’s most popular television station, is an example of ‘independent’ media (since last May broadcasting also to North America and Europe) increasingly present online (ironically thanks to aggregation) and further diversified into a growing chain of internet coffee shops.

The New York Times example may illustrate that speculations like EPIC 2014/2015 are necessarily simplistic, but the growing collaborative media model is not.

In the global environment, Google aggregated news is usurping control and power of print media ironically while engaging print media content and 'traditional' print advertisers to do so. Print media’s tardiness to embrace the potential of the internet and to realise income opportunities (combined with the unwieldy and often localised pathway of copyright law) has allowed the information superhighway to increasingly displace print media.

In perhaps the greatest irony Rupert Murdoch, one of the world's biggest media moguls, argues that content is becoming more 'quantitative than qualitative', meanwhile shrinking newsrooms of his dailies and Fox News in a formalised content sharing portal that will see copy 'shared' from New York to London to Sydney. Certainly newsprint is becoming leaner with the global push for free content.

Like Wikipedia, content may be largely user-generated with abundant resources but a paucity of focussed research/rigourous editorial processes leading to questionable accuracy and to the infiltration of bias. If content is paid for according to demand i.e. popularity (GoogleZON) and customised to demographics, preferences and interests it has potential to become incredibly insular and trivialised as well as unimaginably powerful and nuanced for those prepared to sift and scrutinise voluminous content from a range of sources. It may also be susceptible to 'technical glitches' and/or 'hoaxes' that skew rankings.

EPIC is a very credible paradigm, if a little too easily bought into.

A Flattening World

“The Ten Forces that Flattened the World” in The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman has given me a context for the Web 2.0 platform and a growing understanding of the history of the internet and worldwide web. I found the analogy to panning for gold particularly salient pre dot.com bubble bust.

This historical perspective explains how this collaborative, inter-connective approach to the creation of software applications and content came into being. The book, written in November 2005, anticipates the kind of developments we are currently experiencing, for example, an environment where open-source software namely Mozilla Firefox has become the most popular browser, overtaking Internet Explorer, some three months ago (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp).

The discussion of Wikipedia just touches on some of the contemporary issues. Obviously its ‘open architecture’ can be misused, but it has facilitated a library of researched information previously unimaginable in scale. Virgil Griffith’s WikiScanner updated last year has helped to uncover controversial edits, usually by insiders in relation to their own company. The idea of IBM ‘safeguarding’ information on itself could lead to conflict-of-interest information, as seems to have been the case with organisations spanning the CIA, the Vatican and Diebold, an American supplier of voting machines and the Australian government in 2007, all accused of editing Wikipedia entries to improve their public image.

Scoping a website

I would argue that Jonathan Lane in "Information Architecture - Planning out a website" misses some of the main points about creating a useful website. The first decision you need to make is to decide on the purpose and context of the site. It’s fundamentally a publishing project in a dynamic environment enabling added functionality.

Design and functionality are necessarily interrelated, (they shape the look and feel of the site) and are driven by the motivations for the site and what you want it to do. You cannot determine the functionality of the site without understanding the reason for the site. Back to the purpose and context of the site, including its potential audience.

Clarifying the purpose of a client can be a challenge. You need to define the scope of the project and to work with this expression of purpose and manage it in both a financial and technical way. You also need to manage a client’s expectations.

In his diagram, Jonathan Lane is confusing the mind map of the purpose with how to structure the site. For example, there is an underlying assumption that there is only one entry point to the site. “The Dung Beatles” would want fast easy entry into dates, store or discography. Just as abc.net.au/news takes us immediately to breaking news, or the Encyclopaedia Britannica has multiple entry points, we need to be able to enter /store /tours /forum /music. The “Dung Beatles” would probably also require a good interface with social networking such as Myspace and Facebook. Structure is integrally related to clarity of purpose and a good understanding of context is crucial.

Jonathan Lane has designed static pages and the high level business needs, could best be represented with bits of content in different places, some of that dynamic e.g database powered. Is international touring in their sights, do other languages need to be considered? General accessibility including disabled access needs to be considered.

If you begin with a scope, design and content emerge from that.

For example I worked on a site for an Australian media commentator and as part of the briefing we analysed 11 comparable (some potentially ‘competitor’) sites in terms of content and design. The purpose was to review baseline sites and understand the purpose and content and points of difference of the site being built.

I believe Jonathan Lane’s article is simplistic in its approach.