Toluu

Web 2.Oh. . .really?

A Skeptical Look at Emerging Web Technologies, by Craig Stoltz

It’s not 2.0bama. It’s You.0November 20

I’m surprised that so many social media professionals are discussing how the Obama administration can “use” social media to govern, how it can engage in “two-way” conversation with The People.

The very formulation, which posits a top-down approach to government, misses the whole point.

Let me explain this from the viewpoint of how I advise clients–some publishers, big companies, small ones, non-profits, bloggers and so on–to deal with social media. I believe the approach applies to governments and political machines too.

1. What the new social platforms have changed, in ways we’ve hardly begun to appreciate, is how people now communicate among themselves, without the permission, endorsement or encouragement of major institutions. There is now a digital infrastructure that allows a transparent, global, real-time, multimedia conversation moderated by. . .nobody.

People are not being organized on the social web as much as they are self-organizing.

2. Social media tools are lousy “broadcast” media, and most people who interact on social platforms freaking hate marketing, advertising or commercially-self-interested messages. Some of them enthusiastically punish the perps in public, god love ‘em, with disastrous results to the messengers.

3. So: The primary values of social media to institutions are mainly the following:

a. They provide the opportunity to listen to the unmoderated public conversation. With th

Apps for Democracy:November 19

The Washington-based Apps for Democracy competition surfaced some creative, useful mash-ups worth a look.

A contest was sponsored by the D.C. government’s [comical government redundancy nomenclature alert!] Office of the Chief Technology Officer, Mashable, and local a firm called iStrategy Labs, whose owner, Peter Corbett, is fast becoming a social grandmaster in the Washing2on ™* scene.

The event asked people to mash-up public information into applications that might actually be useful.

The “Indie” Gold Medal winner: iLive.at

Nothing truly new here–not all that different, on first pass, from a Mapquest map. It layers on some demographic pie-charts and parses facilities into useful categories–errands, recreation, Did You Know?, etc. [The location specified on the map above is the "starter" house my wife and I bought in a then-dodgy D.C. neighborhood called Mt. Pleasant. And no, I didn't know the Embassy of the Czech Republic was .7 miles away.]

Other winners pull together data for

NewsTrust: Wisdom of the . . .FewNovember 18

From where I sit, NewsTrust is like Digg for thinking people–a way for an engaged, attentive usership to surface high quality journalism on a website for the world to see. Great premise. Solid execution. [Excellent usability!]

But. . .there are precious few contributors. The story that has the most user ratings–a widely-renowned, much circulated, 13-screen [!] New Yorker opus titled The Joshua Generation by editor David Remnick–has been reviewed 12 times. Most stories on NewsTrust have between 2 and 4 reviews.

NewsTrust is a non-profit organization, funded largely by grants and donations from, among others, the MacArthur Foundation. Its advisers and supporters include esteemed members of the digitelligencia.  It intends to become a self-sustaining business at some point. [Interest revealed: I used to work for PBS Engage, a NewsTrust partner, and have exchanged friendly e-mails with NT founder and digital pioneer Fabrice Florin.]

I’m sure there are ways to read the metrics–page views, s

The Latest Death-of-Journalism Spat, Condensed for Easy Reading!November 16

Many pixels were spilt in last week’s sh*tspatter feud between digital news evangelist Jeff Jarvis and veteran print author Ron Rosenbaum.

I read the whole damn thing and, as a public service, present this tidy downboil. Links provided for future-of-news geeks and shut-ins.

1. Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi writes in AJR that neither journalism nor journalists are responsible for newspapers’ death spiral.

2. Jarvis responds in the Guardian, to Farhi and others, that inflexible print journalists are indeed at least partly culpable for the crisis.

3. Rosenbaum writes in Slate a bitter, personal attack on Jarvis, accusing him of profiteering and excessive glee at journalists’ misfortune.

4. Jarvis retaliates with a condescending, personal rebuttal of Rosenbaum, depicting Rosenbaum as sentimental and ill-informed.

5. The digisphere responds mostly with reflexive defenses of print journalism, from both mainstream and sidestream sources.

6. Digital news consultant [!] Amy Gahran does some

From Each According to His Ability to Buy an Obama T-shirt…November 10

So I got another e-mail from Barack Obama. I get ‘em all the time.

This one asked me for $30 to help replenish the funds of the Democratic National Committee, which apparently blew all its money exterminating the GOP.

I know the campaign is over, but I’m missing the fray. I’m sort of warming to this whole “permanent majority” idea. And since I’ve applied for a job with the Obama administration, I figure another donation can’t hurt.

Besides, the e-mail says, if I donate the $30 I’ll get this cool Limited Edition T-shirt.

Okay, it’s a hideous T-shirt, but still.

Funny thing, though: It turns out that a friend of mine got a similar e-mail today. But she was told that to get the same hideous Limited Edition T-shirt, she’d have to cough up $100. Look:

It doesn’t take a political scientist to figure out what’s going on here.

My friend mad