I’ve decided that I’ll resume doing Stilgherrian Live Alpha and will record episode 6 live on the Internet tonight at 9.30pm Sydney time. See you then.
Links for 13 July 2008 through 17 July 2008
Stilgherrian’s links for 13 July 2008 through 17 July 2008, gathered with moss like a rolling stone doesn’t:
- Flat Earth News: The official website for Nick Davies' book, which various people have suggested I read.
- Straw man | Wikipedia: "A straw man argument is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position." Tagged as a reminder to certain blog commenters.
- Zappos.com: Who'd have thought that people would buy shoes online? Who'd have thought that a company would use Twitter and other social media to do great customer service (or so I'm told)?
- Journalism: A Toxic Culture? (Or: Why Aren’t We Having More Fun?) | contentious.com: Amy Gahran helps explain why journalists are so defensive about their craft these days, and posits that they have "Priesthood Syndrome".
- The plastic buttons we push | Amit Gupta likes you!: How do you make a living? Is it by pushing plastic buttons all day?
- Is Social Media The Ultimate Buzz Kill? | Awake At The Wheel: Are we becoming so addicted to telling people about what we're experencing that we actually forget to experience it?
- Principia Discordia Hardback | Synaptyclypse Generator: The central Discordian text, "Principia Discordia", is once more available in hardback. I am well pleased.
- DIY carbon change | Unleashed: "Sometime in the last two weeks I stopped believing in government," says Mark Pesce. If governments are failing to respond to this vital issue, then we can ignore them and handle this ourselves.
Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu!
[I promised Crikey that I’d write something about the Future of Media Summit 2008. This rant is what emerged. You can also read it over at Crikey, where there’s a different stream of comments.]
What is the future of journalism? To judge by the discussion at this week’s Future of Media Summit held simultaneously in Sydney and Silicon Valley (and every other “new media” conference I’ve been to lately) it’s endless bloody whingeing. Whingeing about how journalism has standards and bloggers are all “just” writing whatever they think.
The panels in both cities covered the same, tired old ground. The new “participatory media” and “citizen journalism” would never be Real Journalism, because Real Journalism is an Art/Craft/Profession. Real Journalism involves research and fact-checking and sub-editing. There’s a Code of Ethics. But “these people”, as bloggers get labelled, these people just sit around in their pyjamas and write whatever comes into their heads.
Bollocks.
Continue reading “Note to “old media” journalists: adapt, or stfu!”
Twitter buys Summize!
Summize, the Twitter search engine, has just been bought by Twitter and rebranded search.twitter.com. Read all about it.
Exhausted by the Future of Media
Whew! The Future of Media Summit 2008 was exhausting yesterday! I’ll be writing something this morning, but I’m not sure what yet. Stand by. Meanwhile you can get a taste of the action by reading Mark Pesce’s thoughts on the Future of Live Television (Part 1, Part 2), and Erin Moss’ notes on the Sydney Future of Journalism session and plenty more linked from the Future of Media Blog. Plus of course there’s the Summize feed of everyone’s Twitter traffic.
Future of Media Summit 2008: live blogging etc
OK, I haven’t even regurgitated all the information I devoured at PubCamp Sydney and the Politics & Technology Forum, and now I’ll be spending all day tomorrow at the Future of Media Summit 2008. Get ready for the overload!
I’m not quite sure exactly where I fit into this. However I do know that I’ll be one of several people providing a Twitter feed tagged #fom08, and Mark Pesce wanted to make sure I had a live videophone feed via Qik, which I do now.
The attendee list is a veritable Who’s Who of New Media Cleverness, plus me. So something interesting is bound to happen… stay tuned!
Oh, and for some bedtime reading, try the Future of Media Report 2008 [PDF].Update 22 March 2014: Technologies come, and technologies go. Qik is no more. Its video messaging functions have been absorbed into Skype, and Qik will cease to exist on 30 April 2014 — although videos embedded in websites are replaced with the message “video unavailable”. The future of the media doesn’t last very long at all.]