cybersoc.com

jestem dziennikarz, autor internetowego bloga

Last week as I was stopped on Oxford Street by a crew from TVP1 (Poland) and asked to give a vox pop (comment) on the attire of British politicians.

Gordon Brown, I told them, tends to look quite stuffy and grey - in line with the perception most people have of him. Cameron, I had to admit, is the better dressed of the two but David Milliband, who I explained had recently been in the press as a possible contender in a future Labour leadership race, is the best dressed of the lot.

After the interview I handed the TVP journalist my moo card in the hopes that he'd send me a link to the video clip. He did, and it turns out that TVP decided that rather than calling me an ordinary man on Oxford Street, which for all intentions and purposes I was that day, it would actually lend weight to the piece if they referred to me as "dziennikarz, autor internetowego bloga":

Download (14mb)

interesting debate on transparency and journalism

Two weeks ago, Mayhill Fowler, who had gained access to a fundraising speech by Barack Obama because she had previously donated to his campaign, rocked Obama's campaign by posting audio of his controversial speech about blue collar Pennsylvanians.

Fowler's recording captured Obama as he "described blue collar Pennsylvanians with a series of what in the eyes of Californians might be considered pure negatives: guns, clinging to religion, antipathy, xenophobia."

Fowler was, it transpires, not just an Obama supporter but was also one of the bloggers following the primaries for the Huffington Post sponsored citizen journalism project, Off the Bus, stirring much debate within journalism about whether some things can and should be off the record, and raising questions about transparency.

In response to this debate, the Guardian organised a debate between Jeff Jarvis, a leading proponent of citizen journalism and journalistic transparency, and Michael Tomasky, the Guardian's America editor. I  highly recommend reading the whole debate on Comment is Free but, if short of time, I've excerpted a few of the bits I particularly enjoyed below:

Jarvis thinks we should be concerned about the effect that giving and receiving access can have on journalism:

"I believe the rules you long to carry into the new world are inherently corrupting for journalism: We journalists have long traded in the currencies of access and exclusivity with the powerful. But the price we pay is complicity in a system of secrecy. That's what off-the-record talks and unnamed sources add up to: secrets."

Tomasky argues that, sometimes, keeping things off the recorded and sources anonymous actually gives journalists greater, less inhibited access to stories. And he's not convinced that having legions of people recording and publishing the news is inherently better than the existing model:

"But I admit that I'm a little less persuaded that it's such a great and necessary thing that we know every single word public people utter. People say dumb things and things they don't really mean. They misspeak. Whether constant recording of such missteps, and the inevitable intense fixation on them, will over time serve the public interest and help voters make more "informed" decisions is not yet settled in my view. That it will lead to more "gotcha!" moments on the campaign trail as candidates are caught saying naughty things isn't a particularly stellar claim to make for the blogosphere, which actually does far more important work in the areas of media-monitoring and community-building. "

But Tomasky isn't an old school "mainstream media vs the bloggers" - he sees real value in what bloggers do:

"What I like about the blogosphere is that, at its best, it elevates the debate. Mainstream journalists would think I'm out of my mind to say that, but it's true - there are, for example, all manner of policy experts with blogs who shed real light on substantive questions, or bloggers with the intellectual chops to make really interesting and important observations about something happening in the news."

Jarvis' main argument seems to be that anyone who observes and tells a story can, if they remain transparent about any potential sources of bias within their report, make a positive impact - with the results of their efforts becoming "one more ingredient in what it turning into a bigger and bigger pot of journalism stew." For Jarvis, it's not important who or where the story comes from so long as the highest amount of transparency is evident in it's presentation.

For Tomasky, the fact that Folwer got in the door because she had made a campaign donation and then, once there, began acting as a journalist is problematic. There is, he argues, a difference between being a witness and being a journalist. He doesn't, however, explain exactly what he thins that difference is.

Both Jarvis and Tomasky agree that transparency about any possible source of bias, and of how access to a story or it's actors has been gained, is essential to the validity of the final product. Whether we call that product "journalism" or "someone's account", the crux of disagreement between Jarvis and Tomasky is, to me, entirely academic.

bbc london puts audience video questions to mayoral candidates

In the run-up to the London Mayoral Election, BBC London has been giving Londoners the opportunity to submit their questions, via youtube video, to each of the main candidates. A selection of questions are then put to the candidates and aired on BBC London's evening news opts at 6pm and 10pm.

It's a nice idea for getting people engaged with politics but I couldn't help but notice that the trailer (below) has had over 68,000 views on youtube whilst the video responses of the three main candidates have had just 16,000 views combined. That said, the television audience for all the clips will have been hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of viewers.

uk political bloggers charged over stats porn

Jemima Kiss, a friend of mine over at the Guardian, seems to have kicked off quite a blog storm with an article challenging the visitor statistics disclosed by Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, two of the UK's most widely known political bloggers.

In the comments you'll find Guido, Iain, Tim Ireland, someone from messagelabs and a host of others all taking bites out of each other over something the vast majority of bloggers and web publishers have known for a long time - website visitor statistics aren't particularly reliable or meaningful.

KingOfMyCastle hits the spot with a comment making this point rather nicely:

[Note: "stats porn", as appears in the title of this post, has nothing at all to do with pornography and is a term used by bloggers to describe the navel gazing that they often do with regards to visitor statistics for their own and other blogs.]

techpresident: tracking the us presidential candidates use of social media

At last October's Networked Journalism Summit, organised by Jeff Jarvis, I had the pleasure of meeting Micah Sifry of the Personal Democracy Forum which is described on their website as a "hub for the conversation already underway between political practitioners and technologists, as well as anyone invigorated by the potential of all this to open up the process and engage more people in all the things that we can and must do together as citizens."

PDF is the organisation behind TechPresident. When I met Micah, he seemed almost surprised when I told him I'm a huge fan. Which I am. I think it's one of the most interesting projects to emerge in the last year.

For the uninitiated, TechPresident tracks the American Presidential candidate's use of technology - in particular blogging, youtube, and social networking - in their campaigns.

There's stats porn aplenty, for example the graph at left which plots the number of facebook friends each candidate has and shows whether that number has risen or fallen in the past week. You'll also find aggregations of candidate blogs.

But what I enjoy most are the original posts by Micah and his team that provide insight into the clever ways some of the candidates are really trying to leverage the capabilities of social media in their campaigns. For example, yesterday's post by Michael Whitney points out a facebook widget developed by the Barack Obama campaign to help users find out which of their friends might be eligible to vote in the important Iowa primaries (today) so that they might remind their friends (and influence) their vote:

With the US Presidential Primaries taking place over the next two months, and the actual election following in the autumn, TechPresident is likely to get a lot more notice in 2008 and I can't wait to see how the site continues to develop.

threat of libel suit sends uk blogs tumbling down

A number of UK bloggers, including the Tory London Mayoral Candidate Boris Johnson, had their blogs taken down by their ISP Friday following threats of legal action by Uzbek billionaire and major Arsenal shareholder Alisher Usmanov.

The bloggers, who were unlikely to have previously heard of or mentioned Mr. Usmanov, were unwittingly caught up in a dispute between Mr. Usmanov and blogger Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan.

London law firm Schillings, which represented actress Keira Knightley in another recent high profile libel case, complained to Fasthosts, a UK based ISP, about the content of the blog of Craig Murray, a former British Ambassador to Uzebekistan, the home country of Usmanov.

Under the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, an ISP threatened with a libel suit can claim to have acted as a "mere conduit" so long as they:

• did not initiate the transmission;
• did not select the receiver of the transmission; and
• did not select or modify the information in the transmission

However, under the Act, an ISP could lose this defense if made aware of the presence of potentially libelous content.

In taking down Craig Murray's blog in response to legal threats, Fasthosts also took down a number of unrelated sites that, apparently, had been sharing the same hosting account. Blogs affected include that of Boris Johnson, Sandwell Labour Councillor Bob Piper, Tim Ireland's Bloggerheads and others.

I response, Hundreds of UK bloggers have now rallied round and added buttons showing their support for free speech rights.

Many content creators and hosts in the UK would argue that here it's far too easy to get an ISP to remove content rather than face the potential of a long and costly libel defense. In the USA, ISPs and those who host content on them are better protected from spurious takedown notices by the US Communications Decency Act which basically makes content hosts immune from suits arriving from the content that passes through their servers.

It's easy to understand the action taken by Fasthosts although it does seem like a bit of careful pruning, rather than the machete wielding that appears to have taken place, would have gone over better with bloggers.

And it's easy to understand the upset of bloggers who, like Craig Murray, have been silenced by take down requests made directly to their ISPs.

What is difficult to understand is why UK law hasn't evolved to the point where content producers, authors and bloggers are held directly responsible for their words - and those who host those words, whether it be a website, blog or post on a message board, can do so with immunity until which time the content has been shown by the courts to break the law or infringe upon someone's rights.

Anything less puts content hosts in the uncomfortable position of having to make extra-judicial decisions about what content is and isn't a breach of the law; decisions which, in many instances, will pit the responsibility of the ISP's decision makers to maintain corporate economic security against the rights of individuals to express themselves freely.

[Please Note: Although I hold a law degree and am currently a Non-Residential Fellow of Stanford University's CyberLaw Department, I am not qualified to provide legal advice. Please seek the advice of a legal professional before acting on anything you might have read here or elsewhere. I've written this post without knowing or, indeed, caring about the content or accuracy of the complained about blog posts.]

[Disclosure: Tim Ireland, one of the bloggers affected, was one of a dozen people I invited to give a presentation at the We Media Fringe event I organised in early 2006 and was subsequently hired to give a presentation at the BBC following my recommendation. Earlier today I was interviewed about this story by Chris Vallance for BBC Radio 5 Live's Pods and Blogs. Bob Piper, mentioned in this post, and another blogger who goes by the name of Mr. Eugenides also took part in the same interview by phone.]

getting news out from the floods: pick up the tools and run

A few days ago, I posted about BBC Berkshire's google maps mash-up showing areas affected by flood warnings, the location of council emergency centres, places where BBC Radio Berkshire has reported from (called outside broadcasts or OB's), videos of the flooding on YouTube and photos emailed to the website by audience members.

It turns out that Ed Parsons had already spotted and blogged about it (see the comment from BBC Berkshire's Oliver Williams on the post). The Guardian's Bobbie Johnson linked to Parsons and then got a link himself from Jeff Jarvis. (Thanks Martin for the call alerting me to all the coverage)

It's on a comment on the buzzmachine post that I found a link to the blog you see to the left - created by Cheltenham Borough Council to keep citizens informed in the time of crisis. The quote, which appears to come from a Council employee involved in setting up and using the blog, explains:

"We’re using the skills we have to help in a difficult situation and the response has been outstanding. The blog was a quick decision made in a crisis. We’re raising awareness and giving our community support. Thanks for watching."

Sometimes you've just got to pick up the tools that are already out there and run with them.

alan johnston is released

The BBC's Alan Johnston, who was taken hostage on his way home from work in Gaza, has been released after 114 days in captivity. Upon his release he thanked his supporters and described his experience by saying:

"It was like being buried alive really, removed from the world and occasionally terrifying..."

I first heard of Alan's release on my way into work this morning when I read a Tweet on Twitter from Richard Sambrook, the BBC's Director of Global News:

"When the phone rings at 2 in the morning its not usually good news. Last night was a great exception...Welcome back Alan..."

According to a post on the BBC News Editors blog by Jon Williams, World News Editor, writes that Alan was able to draw great strength from the knowledge that so many people out there were concerned for his safety and supporting efforts for his release.

Many bloggers showed their support for Alan, and helped raise awareness of his plight, by displaying a button bearing Alan's name and image on their blog or profile page. Congratulations to everyone who took this small step, or did other things, to help bring about Alan's release this morning.

 

tony blair steps down as prime minister: some flickr photos

  Outside Tony's new gaffe 
  Originally uploaded by Azeem Azhar

I'm listening to the BBC News coverage of Tony Blair's final minutes at the British Prime Minister. It's exactly what you expect to see - big name BBC reporters doing a good job of interviewing big name politicians on what is a very big day in politics. They're talking about the extraordinary standing ovation Blair was given as he finished his final Prime Minister's Question Time and asking the usual questions about how much Blair has or hasn't achieved, how things might change under Gordon Brown's leadership, etc etc

For an alternative view, I turned to flickr to see what, if any, photos people have been taking and uploading. Surprisingly, there isn't much there yet which tells me, perhaps, that either not as many people as I thought are uploading their photos directly to flickr from their cameraphones OR people are using their dedicated digital cameras to capture what are historic events. Hopefully in a few hours, when people get home, we'll see more uploads but for now there isn't much. Here are a few of the best I've managed to find:

mar00ned's Bye Bye Bliar
IanFromBlighty's Downing Street Movers
M.J.S.'s Blair's Departure from Downing Street

Here are some places to start looking on flickr - if you find any good photos do post a comment below:

Tony Blair
Gordon Brown
Parliament
Downing Street
Buckingham Palace

Update: Just spotted this nice bit of multimedia, a 360 degree quicktime VR of moving vans at Downing Street, on Marcus Warren's Daily Telegraph blog

social impact of the web @ the rsa

I'm one of the half dozen BBC people attending The Social Impact of the Web event today at the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce) in London.

The central theme is:

"With e-democracy and new forms of on-line consultation and community mobilisation still to become a reality, how can new internet technologies empower us to interact with each other in novel ways?"

The first panel to get a crack at answering this question includes Georgina Henry, Editor, Comment is Free & Editor, The Guardian; Andrew Chadwick from Royal Holloway, University of London; and Tom Steinberg, Founder and Director, mySociety and other projects.

Audio and video streams of the event are available here.

---
Andrew Chadwick

Three things we should celebrate about web 2.0:

Citizen Journalism - 250,000 public comments posted on the Guardian in a month alone (and, quoting Stephen Coleman, the BBC gets over 1 million messages a month)

Little Brother - Discusses Conneticutt Bob... a blogger who followed a candidate around and blogged every moment... "we should really like it" that people can turn the public gaze upon politics and politicians

Low threshold, co-present, co-production online: wikipedia model (with editors and structure), digg (simple vote) and other forms of collective action such as last.fm

Three things we shouldn't celebrate about web 2.0:

The production/consumption divide: Pew study said only 8% were deep users of social media (median age 28), only 7% were connectors. 26% were "indifferent" and/or "disconnected" - and the median age was 64. The vast majority is not producing and the older are more likely to be excluded.

The shift to video: Back in the old days, we spoke about how text only communication broke down barriers (eg. text frees you to be who you are, not who you look like). Is worried that the sound bite politics of today will be put on youtube and will limit deep political discourse.

Social network narcissism: one of the interesting things that people do on bebo, facebook, myspace, etc they are arranged around the idea of socialability. Yet most of the interaction is individualistic. They tell people about themselves on "absolutely bizarre minimalist" sites like twitter - "the greatest manifestation of social network narcissism if I've ever seen one"

---

Georgina Henry:

"If you take a broad view of politics -I like to think of it as what people want to debate, rather than what you want people to debate..."

"My feeling of the web is don't expect too much of it... if you don't expect too much, you won't be disappointed with what it gives you, and then it becomes facinating..."

"I've learned more in a year working on comment is free about the audience than I did in 18 years working on the print side..."

"access to it [writing for comment is free] is an important part of it"

"Whilst I've got quite a dim view of some of the stuff that's posted on the site... [some of it is good]"

"even if you are a journalist who specialising in something for quite some time, there are times when people come along and tell us something we didn't know, which is quite humbling...it throws [named columnists] into this big forum with thousands of other people... the feedback has been quite rewarding for journalists, but quite challenging too..."

"... newspaper sales are going down... the discussion is online and you've got to be there... I think it is a very skewed audience... you need broadband, which isn't universal... tends to be much more male... skewed by people who are often posted in the day, doing the sort of jobs where you can sit at your computer and do this... I never see it as this is life, I see it as this is a slice of life, which doesn't mean you shouldn't engage with it..."

"people who are close to politics [and are asked to blog] can find it a difficult space... you can recieve this barrage of hostility... that has been very difficult for people... it's skewed by anonymous screen names... but it does reflect a bit of the times I think, and you can't blame the internet wholly for that... it's also reflected in the letters for the editor which you don't see because they are edited out... the difference with blogs is that it's there for everyone to see..."

"If you look at political activity in Britain at the moment... people finding it a lot easier are people in opposition... partially because there is cynicism aimed at authority..."

"I don't think its a substitute for all the other forms of political debates, but it's going to absorb more and more of people's time so you've just got to get in there and shape it."

---

Tom Steinberg

The people who make mysociety happen are the coders and people in the background.

A friend sent him an email a few days ago saying he wanted to post on Comment is Free but was worried about doing so. Eventually he did it... Tom says: "There are no winners on comment is free, only losers"

Bloggers and News Media are "accelerators": "for people like me, political junkies, this is just brilliant... it used to be like a drip feed, not it's like a drip feed filled with whisky..."

"News is getting much cheaper...."

"Politicians have known that if they made a mistake [people would find out about it a few hours later]... now they know people will find out about it a lot sooner..."

studies don't seem to show that the internet is bringing new people to politics

"tool-smiths" - people who build tools that make it possible for people to find out who their local politicians are and how to contact them - a Netherlands based voting recommendation service had nearly 5 million users, in a country with about 3 times that in population (a massive percentage)... it's a tool, not a piece of journalism. Or moveon in America that helped mobilise masses of people.... largely driven by web 1.0 email.

the things that the toolsmiths create challenge the way we do things... and because more people will be looking at these tools when they make their voting decisions... theyworkforyou will make it clear not what politicians say, but what they actually vote for, which will - hopefully - represent a challenge to soundbite politics

it is the tools that are transformational

"we built, as a independent contractor, the Number 10 petition site... 25,000 people a day are coming... what I'd like to do is be able to point people to a debate about what happens next... petitions, a very low form of political engagement, can help get people more engaged..."

I've just noticed that Sandy Walkington, a Lib Dem councillor from St. Albans where I live, is sitting in the row in front of me. He runs a few web based campaigns, including one called Hands off Herts which raises awareness of development issues in the county of Hertfordshire.

The second session is on Web 2.0 and Social Innovation

Bronwyn Kunhardt

Quoting Heidegger: "The social character of man is determined by his use of technology"

10 years ago technology was objective, now technology is subjective... "social software"

government, corporations and parents all have problems with Web 2.0 because they tend to think in authoritarian ways

Edelman has released a study showing that bloggers are very connected to their local communities. And there is a study of 14,000 in Australia saying the same thing. We need to pull all this stuff about online social networks doing good into one place...(thus her new venture "social media consensus")

MT Rainey

In 1995 Rainey addressed a News International conference and told them that:

People won't seek out brands and organisations that they have never heard of or that their friends don't use.

There will always be the need for a shared media experience because that has value

Now, she says, the great things about the web - web 2.0 - are that:

ability to share and exchange information with each others
strong viral effect basically mimics the mass media affect... and is arguably more valuable because it's more personal.

breakdown of user/consumer boundaries... information trails... "is turning consumers back into people"... "we express and display nearly all our choices now, and we are people first..."

broadband... price of participation is very low. "Your facebook page can look the same as coke's facebook page"

[Robin Note: Ok, enough. I didn't realise that users of social media were meant to be in competition with coca cola's efforts to market beverages to us via facebook profiles.]

...pitch for some project...web 2.0... "wisdomocracy"... "if google's model is do no evil, our's is no wisdom wasted" ... etc etc... "relieve the health burden and GP visits"... etc etc

Nico Macdonald

"Contrary to the widely held view, technologies in general, and the Web in particular, do not transform society. Society transforms society, and it develops, consciously or unconsciously, tools such as the Web to effect changes, which themselves may be conscious or unconscious. The Web was not developed to transform democracy. It was developed to share scientific research. While many earlier proponents of networked hypertext systems may have had more high-flown hopes for such tools, Tim Berners-Lee had quite pragmatic objectives."

Read his presentation in full (yay!!!) on his blog...

(battery dead... sorry!)