links for 2007-05-24
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David Weinberger: cool. Neil DeGrasse Tyson: cool. David interviewing Neil about categorization in science and astronomy - wicked cool
May 24, 2007
May 23, 2007
When Conde Nast builds Web 2.0
I continue to think that attending another industry’s conference is one of the most surreal experiences you can have. I’m at the Editor and Publisher and Adweek “Interactive Media” conference at the invitation of the Knight Foundation. Despite the fact that I’ve been working in interactive media, more or less, since 1994, this conference is a reminder of how vast the world of “media” is. I spend a lot of time talking with people who are looking at the big conceptual issues of media and lots of time with folks who work in the citizen media space. But I don’t generally get to hang out with magazine editors, suburban newspaper publishers or the folks on the front lines of monetizing content in newspapers and online. It’s very enlightening.
The first speaker of the day was Sarah Chubb, the president of Condenet, the set of CondeNast magazine websites and eight standalone sites produced by Conde Nast, designed to allow the company to reach new audiences. Chubb walks us through the creation of flip.com, a site designed to target teenage girls. She points out that this is an incredibly competitive market, where Conde Nast had already introduced Teen Vogue. Her goal was to create a site designed for digital natives, for kids who are as comfortable creating media as consuming it.
The site is the result of a great deal of quantitative and qualitative research, based on interviews with 1400 teen girls. The researchers concluded that teen girls live in three media worlds - the outer world of television, music, movies and other media; a world of social connections; and an inner world of creativity, self-expression and imagination. Two of those circles are highly competitive - there’s a lot of media competing for teen attention in the space of movies and music, and there’s dozens of sites like MySpace, Xanga and Facebook which want to help teens connect with each other. Condenet saw an opportunity to build a tool focused on this inner space - the creativity and self-expression world.
Chubb’s researchers observed that teen girls end up constructing “shrines to themselves”, wall and paper collages of pictures from magazines that portray images and ideas they’re interested in. They customize their clothing and their tools, “badging” to anounce their afilliations. They are “socially aware, driven and ambitious” - with the rise of programs like American Idol, they all think they could be famous. Chubb tells the story of her teenage daughter’s summer vacation: “She spent the whole thing taking camphone photographs of herself on the beach and sending them to her friends.”
So flip.com is designed to “fuels girl’s ambition to define themselves through celebrity” and market them as much as possible in the process. Flip does this by letting girls build “flipbooks” - digital scrapbooks where they can include audio, video, pictures from around the web… or from Flip’s media library. That library is richly stocked with popular images and “pictures of cool things, fonts letters” as well as “advertiser assets” connected with brands that sponsor the site. “Girls like brands,” Chubb tell us, and her goal is to tap into that enthusiasm. “How do we help girls pull brands into their own bubbles?”
It’s hard to miss the branding on the site - it’s everywhere. But Chubb believes this isn’t a turnoff for the users - one feature that every tester supported was the ability for users to choose the ad that was placed on their userpage. (She enthuses about a post from a girl who chose acne medicine Clean and Clear - “She’d picked Clean and Clear because she liked what they stand for,” a message that Chubb immediately passed to the advertiser. There are now 60,000 users, about 30,000 active flipbooks, and Condenet sees the ability to “grow them into style.com” users.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a project quite so carefully target-marketed. Talking with friends over lunch, I offered the thought that Flip might fail because the technology is insufficiently flexible. Sites like MySpace probably didn’t expect to become the new space for bands to launch themselves, but their tool was sufficiently flexible to let that new behavior thrive. One of my friends argued that Flip is actually targetted less to teens than to tweens, and the constraints on the tools might well be appealing to parents as they decide how to let their kids use the tool.
I’m used to watching tools be created by geeks, usually tools that they want to use themselves, like Joshua Schachter’s creation of del.icio.us. Flip’s about as far as you can get from this… which makes sense as most tween girls don’t write software. But it’s fascinating and a little disconcerting to watch the full power of consumer anthropology and targetted advertising aimed at kids, even in a way that encourages and rewards a certain form of creative self-expression…
Global Voices wins Knight Foundation News Challenge
I’m at the Editor and Publisher and Adweek “Interactive Media” conference today because the Knight Foundation is announcing its News Challenge winners this morning at the conference. Global Voices has won one of the 24 awards, a $244,000 two-year grant that’s going to support our Rising Voices, our new outreach program. We’re going to support projects to help diversify the range of blogs and media featured on the Global Voices site. We’re going to invite people throughout our network to suggest new projects that would introduce citizen media to broader audiences, inviting in people from rural areas, people who aren’t experienced computer users, people from outside the early adopter communities. David Sasaki, our new Outreach Director, is heading up this new initiative, and we’re hugely looking forward to seeing what sorts of outreach ideas our community comes up with over the next two years.
Actually, it’s been a brilliant day for Berkman in general, as my colleague David Ardia is here as well, representing the Citizen Media Law Project, a collaboration between Berkman and Dan Gillmor’s Center for Citizen Media, a project that will produce online materials to suggest best practices for citizen authors and track chilling effects against bloggers and citizen media. The Berkman site has our press release about the prize, and the Boston Globe points out that New England organizations took more than half the prize money from the Knight contest.
Actually, that’s mostly MIT’s fault. The Knight Foundation gave over $12 million in this grant cycle, $5 of which went to MIT in a “leadership grant”, supporting projects by Henry Jenkins in the Comparative Media Studies department and Chris Csikszentmihályi work with the Computing Culture Research Group at MIT’s media lab. They’re also responsible for bringing together the winners of these prizes together to share ideas, technology, strategies. We’ve already had a good start on this with hallway meetings over the last day - there’s a great set of award winners from around the US represented here, and a lot of ideas with exploring further.
Ian Rowe from MTV received a $700,000 grant to support a youth mobile journalism project, covering the presidential elections with youth reporters in every state. Rich Gordon at the Medill School of Journalism won a grant to extend full scholarships to computer scientists who’d like to become reporters - this is a very cool idea, and one that I can imagine considering if I hadn’t already fallen into citizen media. Lisa Williams from Placeblogger.com will be using her grant to create a pingserver for local blogs. And there’s a set of small blogging grants of $15,000 each to encourage bloggers - some unfamiliar, some well-known figures like JD Lasica and Jay Rosen - to cover new and different subjects.
One obvious critique of the 24 projects that Knight has chosen in this first round: Global Voices is the only project with an explicit non-US focus, and everyone funded is a US organization or individual. Of the 1650 applications Knight received, only 15% came from outside of the US - evidently none made the final cut. In announcing the awards, Alberto Ibargüen, the CEO of the Foundation, mentioned that next year’s contest would reserve 10% of the prize money for proposals from people under 22 years old - it might be interesting to see whether Knight will offer a percentage of future grant funds for non-US ideas. The materials for the 2008 challenge, which begins accepting applications in July, have been translated into ten languages, and the Knight folks tell me they’ve recruited an advertising firm to promote the contest in other countries.
I think it may require some more active recruiting as well, and we’re going to be urging people within the Global Voices community to take advantage of this next contest as a possible funding source for their innovative online journalism ideas. Ibargüen has announced his intention to give at least $5m a year for the next four years, and possibly much more than $5m - this is an amazing resource for citizen media projects, and I have high hopes that the support for Global Voices will be a first step towards supporting innovative ideas from all around the world.
links for 2007-05-23
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Overview of Estonia/Russia “cyberwar” by Cyrus, suggesting that we still know very little about what happaned in these DDOS attacks
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Want to choose Wolfowitz’s successor at the World Bank? Center for Global Development gives you as good a chance as you’re going to get to vote on the most important traits in a World Bank chief and evaluate ten candidates for the job.
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Astrubal has a fascinating idea for using the robots.txt file and a custom firefox plugin to allow apache servers to distribute lists of web proxies… Would love Nart’s opinion on this idea…
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My “Don’t Speak - Point” talk from Net Squared last year - one of the better talks I’ve given recently, I think, so I’m very glad it’s now online…
May 22, 2007
Tell the World Bank what to do
Got some strong feelings about who should succeed Paul Wolfowitz as the head of the World Bank? If you’d like your feelings to be heard - and possibly to influence the decision - you should check in with my friends at the Center for Global Development. The first major policy body to call for Wolfowitz’s resignation, CGD is widely respected for their careful analysis of international development policy, including their annual index of aid effectiveness.
Between now and Thursday, CGD is running a survey, asking respondents to list what traits they think are most important for a World Bank chief and ranking a set of possible candidates on those traits. The survey is open to the general public, but it’s been sent to senior development policy officials around the world and is likely to represent the views of many development policymakers. At the very least, the survey’s worth taking if only to see the ten candidates CGD considers most likely and to read their biographies.
While CGD is canvassing the world to make suggestions to the Bank, the Bank is running it’s Development Marketplace contest, an annual event that invites social innovators from around the world to the Bank to present their ideas for development. The idea began several years ago as the brainchild of my friends Dennis Whittle and Mari Kureshi, who wanted to make sure the Bank captured the wisdom of all its employees, from Vice Presidents to the security and cleaning staff. They invited anyone on the team to present ideas for international development projects and required that the projects involve teams that don’t usually work together. In subsequent years, they opened the process to include beneficiaries in target nations, not just Bank staffers.
Excited to take the idea further, Dennis and Mari now run Global Giving, a project that encourages individuals to donate directly to promising development projects. But Development Marketplace is going strong, inviting participants around the world to come to DC and pitch their project to the folks with the money. Perhaps someone should ensure that the innovators pitching their ideas at Development Marketplace take the CGD survey as well…
links for 2007-05-22
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Evgeny sees the AACS code case as cyberbullying - he makes an analogy to terrorism - and wonders if this is the rise of Web 3.0, where communities are no longer controllable by the companies that bring them to life…
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David would like to see the penalties for misusing the DMCA raised - substantially - so that it’s more expensive to bully people with takedown notices than it is to sue them for violating copyright
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The World Bank is blogging the Development Marketplace, an amazing effort that invites entrepreneurs around the world to submit worldchanging ideas for development, invites them to present in DC and funds the best of them
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Urs Gasser frames the key question from the ONI Oxford meeting - are there good types of filtering? Does it ever make sense to encourage nations to engage in “best practices” in filtering the Internet?
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Estonia may have found itself at cyber-war with Russia, facing DDOS attacks that have harmed the highly wired nation…
May 21, 2007
On being fascinated, locally and globally
I’ve been travelling less this year than I have the last two years, but I think I’m probably still on the road more than is strictly healthy. One of the best indicators I’ve had of this is a strange sort of homesickness. It isn’t the profound, all-consuming desire I have to sit on the couch and watch Red Sox games that I sometimes get when I’ve been on a road trip for weeks. It’s a desire to photograph western Massachusetts.
My Flickr sets are usually a good record of my travels. I rarely get on an airplane without a camera, and I have a rule that I haven’t actually visited a country unless I get in a good walk, which usually includes some photographs. But four of my latest sets - and some of the photos I’m happiest with - are of places in my own backyard. Yesterday, Rachel, Daniel and I set out to photograph Savoy, MA, two towns over from my town, and one of the most rural corners of Berkshire County. Driving on through Charlemont, Monroe and Rowe, MA, we photographed an abandoned summer camp, rusting railroad bridges, a long-dead paper mill and a disappearing nuclear plant.
This last destination probably requires some explanation. In 1960, the Yankee Nuclear Power Station - known locally as “Yankee Rowe” - commenced operation. Located in Rowe, MA, on the banks of the Deerfield River, this has to be one of the world’s most scenic power plants. When the plant was decomissioned in 1992, there was a great deal of local discussion and concern about how a facility located on a steep mountainside a long, long drive from any major highways. I’d always expected that, somewhere back in the woods, there would be a defunct nuclear plant, surrounded by high fences, klieg lights and tight security.
Daniel mentioned that he and his wife had gotten used to low-flying military aircraft over their house in Savoy and wondered if there was a base nearby. I speculated that the aircraft were coming from Westfield, MA, almost 50 miles south, but were likely flying over the nuclear plant. “Nuclear plant?” he asked, baffled, so we took off to find it.
And failed. I had dim memories of driving along the Deerfield River in northwestern MA and catching glimpses of the nuclear plant across the water, lit with orange spotlights. But while we explored half a dozen dams and pumping stations along the banks of the river, there was no nuclear reactor to be found.
That’s because Yankee Rowe has been decomissioned so thoroughly that there’s basically nothing left to see. There’s an amazing account of the removal of the 165 ton steel reactor core and its shipment to South Carolina in 1996 on the Yankee Rowe website - at one point, it involved driving a 365 ton load down 6.5 miles of very frightening mountain roads to load the core onto a rail car, which carried the huge package away.
While there’s very little evidence that there was ever was a nuclear facility in Rowe, MA, there’s still casks that contain 553 nuclear fuel rods, which need to be properly disposed of. Eventually, these assemblies are supposed to be placed in a permanent facility, like the one proposed for Yucca Mountain in Nevada. However, the US Department of Energy hasn’t opened such a facility yet, and so the highly radioactive assemblies are still in Rowe. In 2002, the fuel was moved from wet storage - basically storage in a giant swimming pool - to dry storage - sealed in steel canisters within concrete and steel casks. But those casks are still on site, until the DOE figures out where they should live, long-term.
Crossing the Deerfield from Monroe to Rowe, we passed an attractive wooden sign that let us know we’d found the right place. Down the road to the former nuclear plant, we found a few construction trailers, some traffic cones, and a surprisingly large colonial-style building. It looked like someone had decided that an appropriate future use for the Yankee Rowe site was either a huge private home, or a modest-sized bed-and-breakfast hotel. Either seemed like an odd choice - Rowe has a population of 351, Monroe of 102, and while both towns are very attractive, it seems unlikely that anyone would build either a ten-bedroom house or hotel here.
So here’s my theory - the sixteen concrete casks, each weighing over a hundred tons - aren’t going anywhere any time soon. As long as they remain sitting on an otherwise idylic hillside, they’re an uncomfortable reminder that there’s tons of nuclear waste in temporary storage containers in a tiny Massachusetts town. So, with some of the $32 million dollars awarded to Yankee in a suit against the Department of Energy, I’m guessing - and that’s all this is, guessing - that there’s now an attractive colonial-style building currently surrounding 16 nuclear waste casks. (Worst… B&B… Ever!)
All of which leaves me thinking about how the fractal way in which the world can be fascinating. My globetrotting lifestyle is more or less a direct reaction to my first trip to Africa in 1993 and the discovery that the world was so much bigger than I’d thought living in rural Massachusetts. Four hours of driving on a rainy Sunday has me realizing that rural Massachusetts is far, far more complicated, beautiful and fascinating than I usually think. Which leaves the inescapable conclusion that the world as a whole is likely fascinating to the extent that you choose to look closely at it.
A shot by Daniel of camp beds at the summer camp we spent an hour photographing. A good example of a view I missed completely and a gorgeous shot I probably never would have taken.
It’s rare that I get to look at the photos of two other people who’ve been looking at the same places I’ve seen. What I noticed, looking at Rachel’s and Daniel’s photos from our afternoon, is that I’m much more likely to step back and try to photograph a whole building, while they’re likely to focus in on a small, beautiful detail. I wonder if this can be read as a larger comment on my tendency to wander globally and theirs to wander locally? Or my tendency to overfocus on the big stuff and to miss the small stuff?
May 18, 2007
Never thought of using it that way…
My friends at Sokwanele - an activist organization in Zimbabwe - sent me a card:
The card commemorates the second anniversary of Operation Murambatsvina - which translates in Shona to “Operation Drive Out Trash”. The campaign, officially known as “Operation Restore Order” was designed to “reclaim” slum areas throughout Zimbabwe. The operations may have forced the relocation of as many as 2.4 million people, and were harshly condemned by the Zimbabwean opposition and the international community. Many people believe that the clearances were designed to punish slum dwellers from voting against Mugabe in the March 2005 parliamentary elections; others argue that they were designed to weaken the MDC opposition party, which had widespread support in these communities.
I probably wouldn’t have thought about Murambatsvina today had I not gotten the card - unlike my friends at Sokwanele, I don’t have this week marked on my calendar. So in that narrow sense, the e-card was effective. And it’s got me thinking that eCards are an excellent, simple tool that campaigns - like the Free Monem or Free Kareem campaigns, for instance - might consider using to spread their messages. I expect eCards to be saccharine, sweet and sent by relatives I rarely hear from - there’s something a little surprising about receiving one that’s jarring, disturbing and uncomfortable.
I’m interested in the ways that activists are finding to repurpose online tools, like my friend Sami ben Gharbia’s Tunisian Prisons map. My guess is that the folks who made it possible to mash up Google Maps hadn’t thought about their use as a human rights advocacy tool. My favorite example of repurposing recently is my friend Alaa’s use of Twitter to coordinate activities of activists in Egypt.
When I saw Alaa a few weeks ago in Doha, the first thing he did was grab my computer, log into Twitter and, as he put it, “let everyone know I’m still alive.” This is a good thing to do when you’re an activist who routinely gets detained or arrested. Alaa’s Twitter feed includes updates for his compatriots every time he goes to the police or to a demonstration so he can let people know where he is… and if they don’t hear from him, perhaps they need to reopen the FreeAlaa blog.
Twitter is also potentially useful for activists organizing a demonstration, as it’s a lightweight mass-SMS sending system, which lets you warn your fellow activists where the police are and what path they should take. Probably not the purpose the designers had, but an excellent use nevertheless.
Would love your thoughts on great examples - especially developing world examples - of people repurposing tech for activism for a workshop I’m giving in South Africa in a few weeks…
Talking with some friends here in Oxford, someone mentioned the Great Firewall Image builder as a great tool for putting banned words into images - check it out here.
links for 2007-05-18
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Eve speaks out on the relationship between Alice and Bob and the emotional pain of the man-in-the-middle attack
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Estonia is experiencing DDOS attacks on websites - is it being done with support of the government, or is it simply individual users taking botnets to make a political point about the Russian/Estonian statue controversy?
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Al Hurra criticized for showing a speech by Hamas leader, violating a policy of not giving airtime to “terrorists”. By the way, no Al Hurra senior staff speak Arabic, making it pretty hard to know what they’re airing…
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Zoot argues that stories about “dissaray” in MDC are missing the bigger story - a government crackdonw on the opposition party which is leading to this dissaray…
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A thermoacoustic engine, which could work as cooking stove, refrigerator and power generator, for $30, using bioguels. Fascinating idea, will be interesting to see if it can come to market
May 17, 2007
links for 2007-05-17
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Lovely - and almost practical - vision of the future based on the idea that storage space is so cheap that the future will never have need (or capacity) to forget the past
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Fascinating paper on how the US inteligence community might use blogs, wikis, aggregation and search to dynamically document terrorism and national security threats
