Me (to attendees from the Times and the BBC): You don’t link out to other people’s sites.

Times chap: Yes, we do, all the time.

BBC women: Yes, we do, all the time.

Me: Oh, okay…

Me (8 hours later at home): how do you explain this and this, then? (These are the top stories on the technology sections of their sites right now. Between the two of them, they manage to link to two sites. Both of them corporate websites. I don’t find any links to any blogs or CJ sites on any tech news stories right now).

Meh.

I’ve also learned the marvellous expression ‘Hammersmithing’. Say you’ve got two photos of the same two people, taken moments after each other. In the first, the first guy has his eyes closed. In the second, the other guy is blinking. What do you do? Neither picture is usable as it is. The editor might ask you to ‘Hammersmith’ the two shots — which means take the open-eyed head from one photo and stick it on the neck of the closed-eye portrait in the other shot. End result — usable photo with everyone’s eyes open.

Why’s it called ‘Hammersmithing’? Because the first organ transplant operations were conducted at London’s Hammersmith Hospital. Maybe that’s common knowledge, but I didn’t know and I thought it was really cute.

‘Hammersmithing’ was robustly defended as basically the same as editing. It’s one of the things news media do to help create stories that are worth something. No-one wants pictures of people with their eyes closed, neither reader nor publisher. The time and energy that goes into retouching photos is one of the things we pay for when we stump up the cash for a quality paper or broadcaster.

The very existence of the term and admission that it’s common practice resulted in gasps of shock in some quarters. But not here.

The ongoing ‘regaining trust in media’ agenda, as various mainstream channels are found to have falsified all sorts of things, goes too far a lot of the time. We need our stories crafted into edible chunks. That’s called editing. Imagine the cookery show where you have to wait 90 minutes before Nigella can pull out her perfect roast and serve it to her perfect friends. The showdancing competition where you wait 20 minutes for set changes between the acts. The press news story that interviews every possible person with any interest in the story whatsoever. A little leger de main is part of what we pay newspaper and broadcast people to do. It makes their stuff more entertaining and consumable. They filter the news so we don’t have to, because filtering is a full-time job and more. It’s only when stories are falsified or deliberately slanted, or when people are conned out of their voting cash, that anyone should become concerned.

1) Social Media or, “How I learned to stop worrying and love communication” by Australian PRs Trevor Cook and Lee Hopkins. A good, introductory guide to Web 2.0, blogs and social media with useful tips on getting started with blogging and podcasting. It’s only 30 pages so is ideal for students and the very busy.

2) What is Social Media? by former posh UK PR and now Search Engine Marketing guru Antony Mayfield, is also an introductory guide to the subject. In Antony’s words, “The book is a romp through a definition of social media, why it is important, and some of the main iterations (blogs, wikis, podcasts, content communities and social networks) and a bonus bit on Second Life.” Also nice and short.

3) The Cluetrain Manifesto by Chris Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger. First published in 1999, this is the book that started all this engagement and ‘markets as conversations’ palaver. It’s available as a hardback on Amazon, but students and the like will appreciate that the entire text is also available online.

4) The Long Tail by Chris Anderson seemed to be everywhere over the summer. Cheats who missed the opportunity to read it then may prefer to catch up by reading this free, super-condensed, 30-page version. There’s some repetition in the real thing, to be honest, so I’d recommend that you do.

5) From Command & Control To Engage & Encourage by NY PR consultancy Envision Solutions talks about why social media matters to companies and what they can do to take advantage of the opportunities it offers. It’s based around the healthcare industry, but is equally applicable to any other sector. (author: Fard Johnmar)

6) Web 2.0 Mindmap by development guru Ed Yourdon. Not a book, of course, but a Mind Map covering all the key concepts around this phenomenon with a wealth of links to resources across the internet. It’s updated fairly frequently so keep checking back for the latest version. I’m not really a mindmaps person, but I still find it very useful.

7) Blogs and Community by Seattle-based e-facilitation and e-community specialist Nancy White is a slightly more academic look at the phenomenon of blogs and social networks and the different kinds of communication models that they entail. That might sound a little scary, but it isn’t. And there’s a handy podcast of the paper available here.

8) We Media by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis (website here) is, as you might expect, about citizen journalism. In the authors’ words, “Historically, journalists have been charged with informing the democracy. But their future will depend not on only how well they inform but how well they encourage and enable conversations with citizens. That is the challenge.”

9) We-think by Charles Leadbetter is about “what the rise of the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations”. Published online, the idea is that readers’ comments become an integral part of the whole work.

10) New Influencers by Paul Gillin is to be published in dead-tree format next year. In the meantime, the author offers drafts of the whole thing in both HTML and MS Word format. It’s about the rise of blogs and blogging, what it means for businesses and how they can best engage with this new environment.

Any others you are aware of?

11) Thanks, Antony, for a reminder about Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. The introduction says “Production is shifting from physical products like blue jeans, to decentralized information goods, like articles on the Internet. This gives users more power (they can publish instead of just reading), creates more opportunities for democratic participation, lowers costs for developing countries, and democratizes the creation of our culture.” It should keep you busy a while longer once you’ve finished the others…

12) Since I have allowed one academic paper, I shouldn’t miss the collection of Papers and Talks published by Danah Boyd. The talk about G/localisation is especially recommended.

13) Thanks, Ed, for the good word about Knock, Knock by Seth Godin. Not social media or Web 2.0 as such. It’s about creating websites that actually work, so probably all of us want to read this one, whatever your interests. And also Who’s There?, a follow-up I haven’t read yet, but which Ed reckons is more Web 2.0ish. Two more: Everyone’s An Expert (about Squidoo) and Flipping the Funnel.

The idea is to draw “smart crowds — groups of people configured to share intelligence”into collaboration at NewAssignment.Net and get stories done that way that aren’t getting done now. By pooling their intelligence and dividing up the work, a network of volunteer users can find things out that the larger public needs to know. I think that’s most likely to happen in collaboration with editors and reporters who are paid to meet deadlines, and to set a consistent standard. Which is the ‘pro-am’ part.

Rosen has already thought through and answered a lot of the immediate objections that might spring to mind (interest groups manipulating stories, sponsors balking at ‘inconvenient truths’ & local stories, volunteers will be nutjobs with an agenda).

Clever stuff. But … there’s a cute parallel here with the ongoing debate about roles of experts and citizen contributors in the proposed Citizendium projects. In some respect, NewAssignment sounds like a Citizendium for news.

What I think the difficulties experienced at Wikipedia and those at digg.com show us is that collective intelligence and wise crowds sound great. Really, I am a believer. But that they are very difficult to orchestrate. One difficulty with news that doesn’t appear in mainstream papers is that it’s often very contentious. What will motivate the unpaid contributors to NewAssignment, if it isn’t their own nutty agendas? If the editors refuse to follow the promptings of the crowd, because they’re all nuts, what will happen then?

The examples Rosen gives of editor bloggers developing a huge following only partly help explain what will happen:

Part of it is the example now being set by liberal journalist and blogger Josh Marshall. His Talking Points Memo blog is invaluable if you follow national politics; he’s widely read on Capital Hill. During the 2004 campaign he raised money for a trip to New Hampshire to hear and question the candidates. He told readers why he wanted to go, what he thought he could accomplish.

The essential transaction I’m counting on is right there. Users fund an act of journalism because they have confidence — a lot– in who’s doing it and why; the chances of getting something really good back seem pretty good.

So the editor needs to be a maven. S/he develops a cult of personality around what they do, strong enough to win the trust and support of large numbers of readers. NewAssignment editors will also have financial backing from sponsors and so won’t need to pass the cup around their readers.

Instead, the readers suggest topics for investigation, and help provide data. Presumably, the editors then use their discretion to choose the non-nutty options. So this is a news site that might cover the plight of illegal torrent sites one day, dental amalgam the next and Panda Baiting the day after. And at the same time, despite flipping from subject to subject, the editor is developing a cult following.

No. That wouldn’t work. You’d have a number of sites. Each of them would only investigate subjects around one quite narrow area, an area the editor is already passionate and knowledgeable about. Probably with an established audience. S/he would get tips and ideas from readers which would decide the topics within the subject that get written about.… Err sounds quite a lot like a blog network, eh.

NB: there are a huge number of alternative news sites already in operation. If you’re like me, you’ve only ever heard of a handful. Why? Well, I expect you haven’t got time or you don’t find them trustworthy.

Comedian Stephen Colbert coined the phrase in a skit about Bush’s decision to invade Iraq (video here):

And that brings us to tonight’s word: truthiness.

Now I’m sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster’s, are gonna say, “Hey, that’s not a word.” Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.

Later, moving from the mainstream to social media, he expanded the theme onto the susceptibility of Wikipedia to vandalism. (*sigh* the video is here). Out of character, Colbert told the Onion AV Club, “Truthiness is tearing our country apart … Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country.”

I don’t think it’s too much to guess that he’s talking about WMDs and Osama. It means false-trust, stuff that sounds right to people but hasn’t been proven.

The American Dialect Society, the wordanista mafia, obviously felt the power of this. They selected ‘truthiness’ as their word of the year for 2005 on January 6 2006.

Back to citizen journalism, the Wikpedia slur has gained ground. ‘Truthy’ is almost always a slur. It’s drawing a massive and unwarranted divide between trained journalists, who always get it right, and bloggers, who fail at this abysmally. (can Google do sarcasm yet?).

And this is where those of us who care run into difficulties. On the one hand, many of us instinctively feel that citizen media is the way forward. Journalism is too often an old-boys’ network. Influenced by the demands of advertisers and political funding, the editorial policy of almost any commercial news organisation seems tainted. Class, gender and race agendas can delete alternative voices. And as Mark Schneider reports, there’s nothing intrinsically more truthful or trustworthy about the news you read in mainstream media:

News editors for the most part rightly assume that if the originating producer is credible, the story is credible. One might view this as a kind of “delegated trust”, obviating the need for fine-grained fact-checking or re-interviewing news sources. It certainly saves a lot of time and money. And for the most part, this shared universe of trusting belief rarely creates embarrassment for its members.

The days of ‘three independent sources’ for any news story are over, thanks to Murdoch and the pressures of having two journalists produce ten stories a day. It’s not their fault, but journalists have been undermined. Nonetheless, someone employed by a media agency of some sort is assumed to have papal infallibility over time. They are journalists, they have press cards, so obviously they check facts, get three independent sources and report alternative points of view. Yeah, right. We have all read and seen such biased, unresearched crap in mainstream media that I don’t think any educated person really believes that any more.

And then there’s the other side of the coin, Colbert’s wikiality and truthiness. Some guy posts that it’s America’s 750th year of Independence (they didn’t — but it’s the best piece of satire I’ve seen all year and I want you to read it — come back in a minute, eh?). Can we just make stuff up? It’s on the web, some other guys link to it saying it’s true, so it has to be true, right? People start to believe it. Back in the mainstream. Somebody makes up a reason to invade another country. They get the press to spread it, and they will because that someone is newsworthy to the mainstream. That’s dreadful too. It’s in the mainstream and it’s in the blogosphere. A shared universe is a question of trust. And who do you want to trust? Two shared universes collide in the debate between citizen and mainstream journalism.

Recently, Seth Finkelstein wanted to do some research into the recent ‘non-lethal arms to be used on US civilians’ story. He had a hunch that the story wasn’t quite true. Then, in a shock ‘blogger-does-more-than-write-about-others’-views’ move, he actually did some work that he wasn’t paid for. He phoned the military, obtaining a transcript from the Defense Writers Group. What the transcript proves IMHO is that military tacticians should *never* speak to any kind of press, badged or otherwise. They are just too cold. But Seth ultimately feels his time was wasted — his research wasn’t going to get mainstream coverage — so what is he, some sort of unpaid freelancer for those who happen to find what he’s done? He’d uncovered some sort of truth, but was it truthy?

So where are we? Are we condemned to a truthy perspective? I don’t go down the ‘everything is relative’ line, because the prevailing truth is always connected to power. But maybe we always were. Hello French postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard:

Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major – perhaps the major – stake in the worldwide competition for power.

Knowledge as a commodity = truthiness. It’s a market we all have a stake in, finally. That’s the good news.

The bad news. I am also thinking about Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars. He says a successful marketer (publisher, journalist, blogger, advertiser) finds a story that fits their audience’s world view. I am scared by this book, though I know a lot of what he writes is correct (some of his other books are more empowering). We can’t just give up on more truthful, though, even if we are all truthy.

To wrap up and get things back to what’s real now, the big deal is checks and balances. Who has the most and best of these? People who broadcast? They’re trained, full-time and might get fired in the case of a cock-up. Or maybe, when push comes to shove, it’s easier all round to brush mistakes under the carpet. Or is it people who narrowcast, like bloggers. The people who open their own truthiness to comments, debate and trackbacks, people who are picked up on mistakes (even here) in a level playing field?

We believe a fork is necessary, and justified, both to allow regular people a place to work under the direction of experts, and in which personal accountability–including the use of real names–is expected. In short, we want to create a responsible community and a good global citizen.

While Wikipedia has come under continuous fire for its open editing policy, most notably, perhaps in Nick Carrs’s essay The Amorality of Web 2.0, this is quite shocking news. The extent to which it is greeted by existing Wikipedia contributors and editors remains to be seen, of course.

From the FAQ:

Are you attempting to shut Wikipedia down?

No. That makes up no part of our aim. We wish instead to leverage the fantastic resource that is Wikipedia and use it to create something better.

Aha! So you are trying to outdo Wikipedia, aren’t you?

Well, of course. Why else would we be proposing a fork?

If you’re not trying to shut Wikipedia down, then what relationship do you want with Wikipedia?

A mutually complementary one, in which we occupy different social niches, as it were. Those who want to work in a system committed to the maximum empowerment of amateurs should always be able to do so on Wikipedia. Those who, by contrast, want to work shoulder-to-shoulder in a bottom-up system with experts, in which the experts are able to settle content disputes, will soon have the option of doing so on the Citizendium. Furthermore, those who want the option of working anonymously and in a wild-and-woolly atmosphere in which rules are not necessarily enforced should always be able to do so on Wikipedia. Those who, by contrast, want to take personal, real-world responsibility for their efforts, and to work in a dynamic but rule-governed environment, will soon have the option of doing so on the Citizendium.

On the internet, stories increase in value over time, rather than disappearing, the way they do in printed newspapers and magazines:

In a weird way, [the internet] completely inverts the calculus of news, which is that the new stuff is what matters and the old stuff doesn’t matter — because the good old stuff gets more relevant over time as more people flag it and link to it.

I guess this is the Long Tail of news, except it’s an interesting shape. Online, news lasts forever. You could say that the most influential articles online are the short head, and the rest of what gets written is part of the tail. Time — when the piece was written — is only a small part of the equation.

The home page is dead:

The day that you could, as a media organisation, expect people to come to your home page, to navigate to news within your site, make you a part of their daily routine — that day is going.

Increasingly people are going to be getting their news from a broad menu of many sites. You can’t expect them to come necessarily to your home page. They will be coming, instead, to individual stories that they find out about in any number of ways — possibly from a blog, possibly from another site, or from Google.

People aren’t visiting websites any more. They’re dipping into stories, flipping back, skimming through. Internet ‘surfing’ is alive and well, as much as the advertisers and advertising managers on mainstream sites might wish it were otherwise.

Your blog won’t make as much money as a successful print publication:

No single blog that we start is going to generate significant revenues in terms of advertising.

QFT.

Why people read blogs as an alternative to mainstream media:

Mainstream interests are often served well by mainstream media, but niche interests are usually not served at all by mainstream media. And that’s a case where the blogosphere is basically filling that gap, and that’s why I prefer it for those subjects.

A lot of the time mainstream media also makes a pretty hamfisted job of covering niche interests. Online, you can find experts on anything. Most journalists are generalists, on the other hand.

Is blogging journalism, and should anyone care:

Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter what journalists think — this is happening anyway.

Blogs have an extraordinarily wide spectrum of styles and technique and it’s not like our world, and yet it’s competing with our world for readership.

The whole citizen vs. professional journalism thing is a red herring, as I see it. If people write interesting, useful stuff then they have got my vote. I don’t care if they are NCTJ accredited. For useful information, I don’t even care if it’s well-written. (Watch a short documentary about citizen journalism here).

How journalistic style might change as a result:

I think the AP style, which has become New York Times style, has dominated the culture of journalism in the US as one of objectivity or being dispassionate, is going to evolve simply because they’re [in] competition from very passionate voices.

An interesting idea. But not always true. A lot of bloggers model their style on what they’re used to in newspapers. Be nice to see a bit more excitement in the papers, though…

This algorithm update will look at the unique digging diversity of the individuals digging the story. Users that follow a gaming pattern will have less promotion weight. This doesn’t mean that the story won’t be promoted, it just means that a more diverse pool of individuals will be need to deem the story homepage-worthy.

The digg thread reporting the post has already — after 11 hours — garnered 211 comments. The current top user P9 — submitter of 1344 stories and 1113 comments — has apparently decided to resign:

As a direct result of your blog this evening. I will no longer no supporting Digg going forward. I bequeath my measly number one position to whoever wants to reign.

I’ve written before about digg friendship groups, as have a large number of other people. After a certain point, it seems they did more harm than good. After becoming enormously popular very quickly, growth of the site had petered out. These changes seem designed to bring more people into digg and restore the perception that stories are promoted on their merits, rather than because of who submitted them.

Generally speaking, postmodernists deny the validity of claims to objectivity, the power of reason and what they call grand narratives. Grand Narratives are the stories we use to structure our lives. We also find the idea that the media creates our reality, that there’s no originality left, only copies of what there’s been before.

It’s a little bit flippant, but if that isn’t a description of much of the blogosphere, I don’t know what is. The idea that each of us can become a publisher. That every individual blogger’s thoughts have equal weight and validity. “We, the media”. And some postmodern ideas also seem an apt description of the continual annotation and comment on each other’s ideas — like this post. You might also think about things like digg and RSS — where the reader is also editor.

More seriously, Dr Byers notes that some parts of what we call Web 2.0 are better described as belonging to an alternative and very different ideology, collectivism. Collectivists can potentially believe lots of things, but we’re talking about the idea of an “emphasis on collective rather than individual action or identity” (Merriam Webster). This would cover things like social bookmarking, networks and projects that depend on collective intelligence — be that a collection of people, machines or databases.

There’s a handy list:

Harnessing collective intelligence: collectivism
Data is the next Intel inside: collectivism
Meeting the needs of the long tail: postmodernism
Postcasting, narrowcasting: postmodernism
The perpetual beta: (arguably) postmodernism

Why does any of this matter? Who cares if it’s postmodern or not? In many ways it doesn’t matter. People will keep trying things — some will stick and some won’t. It only matters when we try to ask “what would be the web 2.0 approach to X?” Because it’s formed from two competing ideologies, you might end up with two very different, equally valid, answers. But that still doesn’t matter, you might say. Try them both and see which one works. That would be the postmodern answer, I guess. If you were a collectivist, we’d probably have a vote.

Frankly, even though I’m supposed to be an investor, the ideas that excite me most are not necessarily the ones that make the most money, but the ones that blow away evil old monopolies. For example, I love collaborative news sites not so much because they make a lot of money — though they might — but because they’ve shown what a bad job the ‘old media’ were doing.

Most people don’t understand what a social force startups can be. There are a lot of changes that can only happen through companies. One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies. You know your business model is broken when you’re suing your customers. The new business model must be out there somewhere, and my guess is that the way to beat the bad guys is not through political action (or at least, not only that), but by inventing
whatever replaces them.

(Parochial headline alert: PG Tips is a brand of English tea.)

It’s well worth a read. Perhaps of especial interest is what he says about training for these new journalists:

Other sites have done more extensive training, but we specifically made ours “training lite” based on earlier misgivings from interested people about doing “journalism.” Plus, we had concerns about where “citizen” ends and “journalist” begins when the training becomes more extensive (we also felt our turnout would be very light if we went beyond a half-day).

[…]

Keep it simple, short, focused and effective. Do not expect to turn your contributors into journalists; just help them learn to use your site so that they do not feel intimidated.

It’s interesting that despite pitched battles between the champions of citizen journalism and old guard media elitists, the actual practitioners of citizen journalism here felt that they were more citizen than journalist. There’s no judgement in that about the readability and relevance of the publication, it’s just that the people involved didn’t feel that they’d automatically become journalists despite their power to publish.

There’s lots of other very interesting information and advice in the guide, from the costs of setting up to the attractions and perils of hiring professionals to help to seed the content.