Slashdot Mirror

wyldeone writes "In an interview with the New York Times, Steve Jobs confirms reports that the recently-announced iPhone will not allow third party applications to be installed. According to Jobs, 'These are devices that need to work, and you can't do that if you load any software on them.' In a similar vein, Jobs said in a MSNBC article that, 'Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.'"

Several readers have let us know about a report on MSNBC that France's space agency has announced plans to publish its archive of UFO sightings in a month or so. The archive includes some 6,000 reports relating to around 1,600 incidents over 30 years. In a separate development, many readers have sent in word of the reported UFO that at least six United Airlines workers saw over Chicago's O'Hare International Airport last November. National Public Radio picked up the story with an interview with the Chicago Trib reporter who wrote about it yesterday. United is, strangely, denying that any such incident was ever brought up. The FAA admits there was an incident but is not investigating it.

MSNBC is carrying a story looking at YouTube's failure to follow through with a promised 'content identification system' by the end of the year. The article goes on to discuss the possible impact this failure will have on the site's (so far) good relations with television, music, and movie studios. From the article: "If the delay lasts for more than a week or two into the new year, suggesting more than just a slight technical hitch, 'this is certainly going to be a serious issue', [Mike McGuire, a digital media analyst at Gartner] added. Leading music companies have already made clear they see completion of YouTube's anti-piracy technology as an important step in any closer co-operation. Failure to build adequate systems to protect copyright owners could also add to the risk of legal action against the site."

Apocalypse111 writes "Chinese scientists have successfully bred partially green fluorescent pigs which they hope will boost stem cell research. A research team at the Northeast Agricultural University in Harbin managed to breed three transgenic pigs by injecting fluorescent green protein into embryonic pigs. Xinhua quoted Professor Liu Zhonghua as saying. 'The mouth, trotters and tongue of the pigs are green under ultraviolet light'."

Adolytsi writes "MSNBC has an interesting article on an Italian study on alcoholism. While the obvious notion of overconsumption of alcohol being detrimental to one's health is supported, apparently drinking it in moderation can actually extend your lifespan. A study on over 1 million drinkers and 94,000 deaths yielded the results: "According to the data, drinking a moderate amount of alcohol — up to four drinks per day in men and two drinks per day in women — reduces the risk of death from any cause by roughly 18 percent, the team reports in the Archives of Internal Medicine. However, "things radically change" when consumption goes beyond these levels, study leader Dr. Augusto Di Castelnuovo, from Catholic University of Campobasso, said in a statement. Men who have more than four drinks per day and women who have more than two drinks per day not only lose the protection that alcohol affords, but they increase their risk of death, the data indicates.""

KingSkippus writes "Stephen Colbert calls it 'truth that comes from the gut, not books.' Merriam-Webster calls it their 2006 Word of the Year. The word, first introduced [Windows media] on 'The Word' segment of The Colbert Report, won by a five-to-one margin. In spite of Colbert's ironic dismissal of dictionaries and other reference books, will Colbert's coined word actually be added to those books? With media outlets like CNN and MSNBC covering it, the idea may very well have truthiness."

GamePolitics has the somewhat unbelievable news that German Minister of the Interior Gunther Beckstein is seeking jail time for violent game developers, publishers, and players. MSNBC has further coverage of the issue, which has pro gamers in Germany quite worried. From the article: "The draft law, a reaction to a school shooting that shook German public opinion last month, will come before the upper house of parliament next year. But it is already sending shockwaves through the 2m-strong German online gaming community. 'We have among the most drastic censorship rules for games,' said Frank Sliwka, head of the Deutsche E-Sport Bund, an umbrella federation for German online gaming teams. 'Now we are being labelled as a breeding ground for unstable, dysfunctional and violent youngsters.'"

Luban Doyle writes "In an age of multimillion-dollar high-tech weapons systems, sometimes it's the simplest ideas that can save lives. Which is why a New Jersey mother is organizing a drive to send cans of Silly String to Iraq. American troops use the stuff to detect trip wires around bombs, as Marcelle Shriver learned from her son, a soldier in Iraq."

UglyTool writes to alert us to an initiative by the state of Ohio and the city of Columbus to lure Canadian rocketeers PlanetSpace to launch from an area airport (the former Lockbourne Air Force Base, now called Rickenbacker International Airport). A decision on the incentives could be made by January. From the article: "Such a package could include tax credits, financing programs and training grants amounting to millions of dollars... PlanetSpace's chairman, Indian-American entrepreneur Chirinjeev Kathuria, told MSNBC.com he expected the incentives to amount to 'somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million.'" Five other states have spaceports approved or planned.

UglyTool writes to alert us to an initiative by the state of Ohio and the city of Columbus to lure Canadian rocketeers PlanetSpace to launch from an area airport (the former Lockbourne Air Force Base, now called Rickenbacker International Airport). A decision on the incentives could be made by January. From the article: "Such a package could include tax credits, financing programs and training grants amounting to millions of dollars... PlanetSpace's chairman, Indian-American entrepreneur Chirinjeev Kathuria, told MSNBC.com he expected the incentives to amount to 'somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million.'" Five other states have spaceports approved or planned.

Brad Lucier points out a Financial Times report (carried by MSN Money) that Citigroup is rolling out a network of biometric ATMs aimed at illiterate Indian slum dwellers. From the article: "The machines will recognize account holders' thumbprints, eliminating the need for a personal identification number, and will have color-coded screen instructions and voiceovers to help guide them through transactions... Though India's population exceeds 1 billion, Citigroup estimates that there are only about 300 million bank accounts in the country... 'It's not a philanthropic exercise,' [PS Jayakumar, a Citigroup business manager in India] said. 'For it to be sustainable, we should break even and make a little bit of money.'"

jonerik writes "Space.com (via MSNBC) has this article about the declining prestige — and size — of Russia's cosmonaut corps in these post-Soviet years of wild 'n' woolly Russian capitalism. Where at one time the mighty Soviet space program could count on thousands of applicants offering their services as cosmonauts, today the vast majority of young Russian civilians prefer more lucrative private sector careers, though recruitment among Russian Air Force pilots is still good since the pay is higher in the cosmonaut corps. Russia currently has a total of 37 active cosmonauts in three units, and though these numbers are considered sufficient, there would be fewer available reserves if the ISS crew expands to six, as had been originally intended. 'In the 1960s one would dream of becoming a cosmonaut, now the young men are dreaming of becoming bankers,' says Sergei Shamsutdinov, an editor at the Novosti Kosmonavtiki magazine. 'The romantic aspect of the manned space exploration is no longer there; it has been replaced by gray daily routine.'"

RobertinXinyang writes "MSN's MoneyCentral has an article on the possibility that the $100 laptop project fails to meet its goals, and the potential of the project to harm people in developing nations. The article goes on to liken the project to 'good-natured showboating', and cites the unreality of a family using the glow from the laptop's screen as the only source of light in their hut. Perhaps there are better things to do with our time and money in developing nations?" From the article: "The entire idea may be misguided and counterproductive. At least that's what Stanford journalism lecturer an Africa watcher G. Pascal Zachary thinks. The basic argument is that with $100 you could almost feed a village for a year, so why waste that sum on a laptop? What are they thinking? The fact that these people need electricity more than they need a laptop is only part of the problem. The real problem is lost mind share. The people are harmed because these sorts of schemes are sopping up mind-share time of the people who might be doing something actually useful."

Rei writes "Today, the Cambridge Energy Research Associates released a report dismissing the Peak Oil theory, suggesting that world oil production will continue to increase for the next 24 years, and then only level into a plateau. The report, which suggests that world reserves are enough to last 122 years at our current rate of consumption, also blasts Peak Oil theorists for repeatedly making unscientific predictions and then shifting them whenever their predictions fail to materialize."

Earlier this month we ran an article linking Christopher Monckton's attempt to discredit global warming. The submitter asked plaintively, "Can anyone out there go through this piece and tell me why it might be wrong?" George Monbiot has now done so. From the article: "This is a dazzling debunking of climate change science. It is also wildly wrong... In keeping with most of the articles about climate change in [the Sunday Telegraph], it is a mixture of cherry-picking, downright misrepresentation, and pseudo-scientific gibberish. But it has the virtue of being incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric physicist... As for James Hansen, he did not tell the US Congress that temperatures would rise by 0.3C by the end of the past century. He presented three possible scenarios to the US Senate — high, medium, and low. Both the high and low scenarios, he explained, were unlikely to materialise. The middle one was 'the most plausible.' As it happens, the middle scenario was almost exactly right. He did not claim, under any scenario, that sea levels would rise by several feet by 2000." And on the political front, the only major ally for Pres. Bush's stand on global warming, Australia's Prime Minister John Howard, is now willing to look at carbon trading.

theodp writes "Little slashdotters may find teacher a tad more upset when they screw up on a test. The Dept. of Education just launched the first federal program that uses bonuses to motivate teachers who raise test scores in at-risk communities, awarding $42M this month to 16 school systems. Any fears that teachers might cook the books to score a typical $5,000 payoff? Not to worry, says Chicago's school chief, there are statistical analyses in place that spot testing irregularities, presumably better at catching Cheaters than those used in the past."

Bengt writes "The sounds of Vista took 18 months to get right for Microsoft. Artist Robert Fripp recorded hours of sound, and assisted Steven Ball in choosing between several different options. A clapping rhythm was rejected for 'sounding too human', and a techno beat was removed from considering because it was just the opposite." From the article: "If it seems like overkill to go to all that trouble for a few seconds of sound, consider this: Microsoft estimates that the clips such as the e-mail alert will be played trillions of times in years to come. That's a lot of opportunity to annoy, offend -- or, if the job is done right -- please or appease computer users the world over. One major concern was that the startup sound not grow grating after a time. You want a sound that people will love the first time they hear it, but it's a paradox to also say, 'Oh and by the way, we need people to love it the tenth, or the hundredth, or the thousandth time they hear it,' Ball said."

ChelleChelle writes "'Cybercrime is pervasive, nondiscriminatory, and dramatically on the increase.' So states TEAM CYMRU, an altruistic group of researchers focused on making the Internet more secure. This article is a look into the root causes of Cybercrime, its participants, and their motivations, as well as suggestions on what we can do to stop this epidemic." From the article: "Many victims do not seem to draw the correlation between their losses and cybercrime; worse, they often view it as a crime that is impossible to investigate and prosecute. For cybercrime to be acknowledged as an important issue, the victims must report such incidents to a receptive law enforcement community with a well-informed judiciary. Attempts such as the president's National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace represent a significant first step in the right direction. To have the desired impact, however, the detailed provisions delineated as action/recommendations must be implemented."

Reuters has some last minute discussion on the high price of the PS3, as well as their plans for shipping 2 million units by December. From the article: "'We are very comfortable with the pricing we have announced and have gotten tremendous support from retailers for that price point,' Hirai said on the sidelines of the Dow Jones VentureWire Consumer Technology Conference. 'So it is full steam ahead with the pricing of $499 and $599.'"

With Microsoft's Xbox Live service more popular than ever and the other two next-gen consoles almost here, news about the companies' download services is plentiful. For Nintendo, there's word of more Virtual console titles slated for early next year. NES titles include Kid Icarus, Punch-Out, and Kirby's Adventure. Sony has announced that one login will work for every game on their online service, though what you'll find behind the login will differ with every title. Finally, Xbox Live will see even more classic games in the near future. Contra hit the service yesterday, with titles from Atari slated for later this year. A version of the player vs player combat game Worms is also planned for the service. Interesting times for all three online offerings.
Update: 11/09 19:20 GMT by Z : Errr ... you might want to stay away from Contra.

ChelleChelle writes, "In an interview in ACM Queue, Douglas W. Jones and Peter G. Neumann attempt to answer the question: Does technology help or hinder election integrity?" From the article: "Work in this area is as politically loaded as work on evolution or stem cells. Merely claiming that research into election integrity is needed is seen by many politicians as challenging the legitimacy of their elections... One of the problems in public discussions of voting-system integrity is that the different participants tend to point to different threats. Election-system vendors and election officials generally focus on effective defense against outside attackers, usually characterized as hackers. Meanwhile, many public interest groups have focused on the possibility of election officials corrupting the results."

Two Web 2.0 companies' acquisitions were announced today: JotSpot by Google, and Reddit by Wired. hpcanswers writes, "Google has bought JotSpot, a maker of wiki software. From the linked FAQ: 'Google shares JotSpot's vision for helping people collaborate, share, and work together online. JotSpot's team and technology are a strong fit with existing Google products like Google Docs & Spreadsheets, Google Apps for Your Domain, and Google Groups.' The purchase price has not been disclosed." Coverage of the JotSpot deal is everywhere; Cnet's and the AP's are thorough. And MattSparkes writes, "The user-generated news site Reddit has been bought out by Wired's parent, Condé Nast, for an undisclosed sum. As the great big Web 2.0 bubble continues to inflate towards the popping point, and Boston sees a few more young millionaires move west, who will we see bought out next?"

nebaz writes "MSNBC has an article saying that there is tension between NBC and Ron Moore and team about the royalties on the 'Webisodes' of Battlestar Galactica. The episodes have been seized by NBC, balking at Ron Moore's refusal to produce any more episodes, due to compensation issues."

Tonight AMD will be reporting results for Q3 2006, and 'the Fool' (Motley Fool) is helping to set the stage for us. What are the analysts saying? The majority of them marked the stock 'buy' or 'hold'. What is management saying? COO Dirk Meyer says that the "average selling price (ASP) has increased and we believe we continued to gain unit and dollar share, as the server market continues to embrace AMD solutions across a broader industry footprint." And the Fool? "AMD is still in a very strong position in the corporate data center, and while that 30% goal might once have sounded audacious to a fault, it now looks rather realistic. And sneak a peek at those margin trends up there. It's hard to argue with the cold, hard numbers of great financial performances."

IAmTheDave writes, "This morning MSNBC's home page is topped by the opening story in a series, Privacy Under Attack, But Does Anybody Care? Privacy rights have been debated to death here on Slashdot, but this article attempts to understand people's ambivalence towards the decline of privacy. The article discusses how over 60 percent of Americans — while somewhat unable to quantify what exactly privacy is and what's being lost — feel a pessimism about privacy rights and their erosion. However, a meager 6-7% polled have actually taken any steps to help preserve their privacy. The article's call to action: '...everyone has secrets they don't want everyone else to know, and it's never too late to begin a discussion about how Americans' right to privacy can be protected.'"

twofish writes "In an interview at Newsweek marking the approaching 5th anniversary of the launch of the iPod, Apple CEO Steve Jobs seems unconcerned by Microsoft's wannabe iPod killer Zune. Earphone sharing will prove a more potent force for social networking than the iPod rival's wireless song-sharing feature, he reckons. 'I've seen the demonstrations on the internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever,' he says in the article. 'By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of headphone cable.'"

knowhow writes "Tom Taylor took the risk of dropping out from high school just to play video games. The guy who is just 18 years old, was prompted to take this step; because of the reason that emerged from his love for gaming. After playing for six months on a full time basis the guy signed a contract for a staggering $250,000." From the Article:"Now Tom taylor is known as Tsquared on the gaming circuit. He's earning six figures and has product endorsements and a video game tutoring business. He's one of about 100 professional gamers associated with Major League Gaming, a video gaming league founded in 2002. When they're playing well, pros might bring home a few grand a month."

Ant writes "MSNBC reports that to help make up for sleep lost during marathon night flights, migratory birds take hundreds of powernaps during the day, each lasting only a few seconds, a new study suggests. Every autumn, Swainson's thrushes fly up to 3,000 miles from their breeding grounds in northern Canada and Alaska to winter in Central and South America. Come spring, the birds make the long trek back. The birds fly mostly at night and often for long hours at a time, leaving little time for sleep."

An anonymous reader writes "The number of Americans will surpass 300 million this month, a milestone that raises environmental impact questions for the only major industrial nation whose population is increasing substantially. The US census bureau says the 300 million mark will be reached 39 years after US population topped 200 million and 91 years after it exceeded 100 million. That makes US the third most populous country behind china and india. It is noteworthy that sheer number of human beings do not necessarily have the heaviest impact on the environment. Instead environmental impact is a calculation that involves population, affluence and technology. The US consumes nearly 25% of the world's energy though it has only 5% of the world's population and has the highest per capita oil consumption worldwide. Each American produces about 2.3 kg of trash a day, a rate about 5 times that in developing countries."

We posted Jay Rosen's Call for Questions on September 25. Here are his answers, into which he's obviously put plenty of time and thought. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in the growing "citizen journalism" movement either as a writer/editor or as an audience member -- and please note that Rosen and many others say, over and over, that one of the major shifts in the news media, especially online, is that there is no longer any need to be one or the other instead of both.

1) Where do you see newspapers' role in this?
by Stick_Fig

First off, my credentials: I'm the former employee of an experimental newspaper, Bluffton Today, located in Bluffton, South Carolina. It's an exciting place, let me tell you. The focus has been on reverse publishing but at the same time tempering blogs with traditional journalism. The staff still writes articles; they still edit heavily. They use the web only to the degree where it doesn't dip into libel and slander and builds on its strengths. My question to you is, do you think Bluffton is on the right track? It felt like, in the 15 months I was there, they definitely were, but I'm a biased party. I left thinking, "If only newspapers did more of this..." I know what I'm betting the farm on in my career, and it isn't tired, boring, traditional journalism. It isn't the straight and narrow of blogs, either. Rather, I feel that it's important to look at both sides and find how they can work together, because God knows there's some 60-year-old editor somewhere who won't look at Bluffton as anything more than a gimmick. I'm gonna be that guy in the newsroom fighting the good fight to get more untraditional voices into the the paper in more places than the editorial page.

Rosen:

Bluffton Today (Bluffton, SC is near Hilton Head Island) did several things that were important to try in 2005. They said the editorial engine would be the online edition; it would "produce" the printed paper. This is the opposite of how newspapers did things for the first ten years of their Web lives. They just re-purposed the content from the print edition, and called that an "online newspaper."

By reversing what's primary in production you change head sets in the newsroom because a professional newsroom engineers everything--including the talents of its employees--around the production ordeal. The "daily miracle" it was once called, because making the newspaper required such a fantastic act of just-in-time coordination. Many things had to be routinized for the miracle to occur. (Including ideas about journalism and the user's place in it.)

Steve Yelvington of Morris Digital Works, who worked on the Bluffton Today site, called it an "inversion" because content would flow from the Web to print rather than vice versa. The editorial engine should be the more interactive one, in which more of the community can participate. The goal was a virtuous circle. "Community conversation feeds professional journalism. Journalism feeds conversation. And around, and around." I think there is something to that idea.

How well it works is for people in Bluffton to address. I like that Bluffton Today tried to go Lessig on the news industry. It ditched the read only platform and re-built on read/write. Yelvington said at the launch: "Everyone gets a blog. Not just staffers, but everyone in the community. LeMonde (France) and the Mail and Guardian (South Africa) are doing this, too." Giving everyone a blog may be an obvious idea. But it's a different track. "Everyone gets a photo gallery. Everyone can contribute events to a shared public community calendar...." The site was built on Drupal technology. It had free classifieds. It was different.

If the experience of doing Bluffton Today has tempered some of that initial boldness, that's as it should be. I'm not surprised that the staff still writes articles; they still edit heavily. A web-to-print, highly-interactive, low barrier to entry, read-write, everyone-contributes newspaper is still a daily production headache. Articles, photos, headlines, and ads have to come together. Unedited, the site would have almost no value, although it can have unedited parts with high value.

"It isn't tired, boring, traditional journalism. It isn't the straight and narrow of blogs, either. It's important to look at both sides..." I agree with that, Stick. My new adventure, NewAssignment.Net, is a hybrid site for that reason. (Pros and amateurs collaborate on reporting projects.) In January of 2005 I wrote Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over for the same reason.

Bluffton today was a first wave attempt at innovation. Today initiatives like that face some second wave facts. Bringing capacity online does not itself create activity, so if you're counting on user activity, you better come with more than nifty new capacity. Create more writers and suddenly you may need more editors. "The conversation feeds journalism, journalism feeds the conversation" is a powerful idea, but we are several steps away from knowing how it works to create a live, intelligent filter in the newsroom.

There's just a long way to go. But yeah, you were on the right track working for those guys. Deeply so.

2) How to Get More Respect
by NewYorkCountryLawyer
I am convinced that online media have made a huge contribution to getting out the truth when the corporate media are seeking to suppress the truth. While there are a growing number of people aware of this phenomenon, reports in the 'blogosphere' just do not get the same respect and currency received by reports in the 'major' or 'corporate' media. What do we, as a community, need to do to enhance the respect internet journalists receive in the world at large?

Rosen:

Well, "suppressing" the truth is not how I see the failures of modern journalism, or of our current press. I think it's bigger than that.

Bob Woodward, who is in the news this week, is at the top of the reporting game, an industry unto himself. In two books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, he failed to tell the truth about the Bush White House because his methods were not up to the obstacle they met: an administration that had broken through all the reality checks normally placed on a president and his closest aides. One by one these measures came under abnormal stress. The policy-making process used by presidents got subverted. The normal channels for sounding out opinion were just disowned. The intelligence community came under extreme stress when asked to supply facts for a decision already made.

A Congress controlled by the same party was expected to go along, which meant accepting the president's definition of reality. Oversight got evacuated. The normal tensions with the press were driven deeper: keep them back, keep them out, tell them nothing, tear them down. If someone does break a story from inside you immediately punish and isolate anyone who spoke to the reporter. You make them disown their words. You make them repent.

This is the story Woodward missed because he got inside it, so to speak. Ron Suskind, one of the few in Washington who did not miss that story, called it "the retreat from empiricism." To me, it's the big narrative yet to come out about the Bush White House. Attack Without a Plan was too crazy to be credible to Woodward. So he wrote Plan of Attack instead. I haven't read his new book yet, just the reviews and excerpts. But from early accounts, State of Denial is his attempt to get back the ground he lost, despite having the best access.

Woodward didn't "suppress" the story. Rather, he couldn't imagine it. Those are the kinds of failures that interest me. Sometimes things are suppressed. Often, the truth eludes professional journalism because no one thought to look for it. I welcome your question, What do we, as a community, need to do to enhance the respect internet journalists receive in the world at large? My first answer is: we have to look for it.

You know how, when you've really mastered something and there's a news account of it, the news story will invariable get several (basic) things wrong? Eliminate the several things and respect will rise. If you want to inform the world of something, grok it before you rock it is a good simple rule.

Correct ourselves early and often. Correct the reporting in the major media, early and often. Fact check your own ass first, then your neighbor's. We should major in transparency; the "major" media will take a minor in that. Diversity of outlook in the reporters ultimately improves the reporting. The blogosphere has advantages there, especially as it does more reporting.

I think we have to accept that Big Media, which isn't going anywhere, is society's default legitimacy-distribution machine. But that doesn't mean it works well. The machine itself can lose legitimacy without exactly falling apart. If you're an upstart publisher of news and you suck at it, Big Media will try to ignore you. If you're an upstart publisher of news and you're really good at it, Big Media will try to ignore you. Then when you assume the shape of a writes-itself story--first bloggers to go to the political conventions!--Big Media will over-cover you, spreading a small bit of understanding over lots and lots of stories. Six months later it's time to debunk the trend they missed, then over-hyped and finally misdescribed. It's not personal. It's protective. It's also cheaper than figuring out what's going on.

We can win a lot of points for Net journalism just by being the opposite of that.

3) What about mob-rule journalism?
by Chas

What sort of safeguards are in place to do fact-checking and prevent false/obviously slanted mob-rule style reports from being propagated as fact?

Rosen:

People hear phrases like "an experiment in open source reporting" and they see it immediately: What's open to the wisdom of the crowd is vulnerable to the actions of the mob. Wanting to be helpful, the volunteer may slant reports without realizing it. Through the portals marked "citizen," the paid operative can also go. How do you prevent all of that?

To me this is a puzzle with many pieces. It won't have one solution; it will take many overlapping systems working together. I can't tell you--yet--how we're going to build a fact-checking and verification system into NewAssignment.Net. But I can tell you that the site will fail without one, so we'll have to try to figure it out, with help from a lot of people. To simply pass along unchecked reports received from strangers over the Net would be fantastically dumb. To discount the possibility of people trying to game the system would be dumb, too; the more successful the site is, the more probable the gaming is. Not to mention spam, duplication, all kinds of junk.

What sort of safeguards are in place? Here are my answers so far. You tell me what is missing or cracked in this foundation:

One: The editors are full time on it. Assignments flow through editors several times before they are published by NewAssignment.Net. That's the pro-am way. It's an editor's job not to be gamed, not to publish bum facts. Everything that goes out has the editor's name on it. It's not an answer to everything--this reliance on "good editors"--but it's a proven system, a simple one, and a start.

Two: Users Self-Police. I'm not sure "community" is the right word for the eventual users of New Assignment. People use that term too loosely, in my opinion. But if NewAssignment.Net develops a base of active, loyal and intelligent users, it's not unreasonable that they can help police the site, especially if they understand that verifiying information and preventing fraud are basic to everything we're trying to do. And so a second answer, after editors, is a culture among users: catch errors, catch mistakes, catch fraud and manipulation. A mob mentality has to be met by something stronger; if you attract the right kind of users, that can happen. It would be foolish to think it will just because you're counting on it.

Three: Given enough eyeballs, all facts can be checked. I think there is every chance of developing a special subgroup of users who are effective fact checkers of the larger base of contributors, including new and casual contributors. One thing we are definitely going to do is see whether retired journalists and ex-journalists will volunteer to work with other natural born sticklers and operate our fact-checking system, which not only has to work, but eventually be better than industry standard. I don't know yet what that system will look like, or how systematic it will be. One of my advisers is interested in this puzzle and working on some ideas, assisted by a professional fact checker who emailed me offering to help. That's how we are going to solve this. Social scientists call it "muddling through."

Four: The site itself has to make verification easy. I mean in the way it is built and meant to operate. For example, editors have to be able to sort the raw from the initially verified from the double checked. This is one of the challenges for the developers of the New Assignment site, which will be Chapter Three. It's a new partnership--here's an about page for them--formed by Zack Rosen, who is my nephew, one of the originators of Dean Space and the co-founder of CivicSpace on the Drupal platform; and Josh Koenig, a co-founder of DeanSpace who started Music for America, a non-profit. They are both Drupal developers, active in that community. The third partner is Matt Cheney, who is trained as a librarian and worked as a researcher at National Center for SuperComputing Applications.

They're going to build the site with open source tools. Josh Koenig has a post up about the New Assignment project. It promises an Open Practice model: "posting tutorials, video screen casts, interviews, and write ups as our own work progresses and as we research others." Verification and fact-checking have to become open practices themselves. The developers understand that.

Five: The one percent rule.. Experience suggests a small slice of users will do most of the volunteer work. According to the one percent rule in social media, which is more of a tendency than a law, "if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will 'interact' with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it." This bears on the verification puzzle because we're not talking about "checking" vast hordes of people. If regular contributors provide most of the contributions, their reputations for reliability can accumulate at the site. In a well-designed system that will happen.

Six: How have others solved the problem? You tell me: has creating a reliable system of volunteer contributors ever been faced before on the Web? Did it prove unsolvable? I would expect NewAssignment.Net to look at prior cases first and find the key lessons.

4) Money
by truthsearch

Do you believe that as money flows into civic journalism that it'll change the equation? Obviously there are some people who's primary goal is to become famous and/or make money through more open journalism. Will the large community of contributors flush out those with less altruistic intentions? I guess I'm really asking will civic journalism be self-correcting as it gets bigger? Or is there a way it may become just as corrupted as much of the current mainstream professional journalism?

Rosen:

I doubt there's any incorruptible system, just different kinds of pressures, with greater and lesser freedoms for the journalists involved. We can certainly hope for a self-correcting system, but it's not likely to happen on its own.

There's nothing wrong with seeking recognition for great work. People who want to be become famous or make a salary through the more open forms in Net journalism aren't the enemy. Not at all. But they are going to have to work with users under conditions that build trust and permit collaboration. It's hard for me to see how the bad actors will succeed at that, but I am not discounting it, either.

Here's a site called Sportingo. It says it's a "new type of sports media company," which is "focused on telling the story from the fans' perspective." Users can write articles, which will be "professionally edited." They can rate and comment on articles written by peers.

Sportingo will own all the content published on the site. There are no plans to pay contributors. The company is for-profit. Tal Rozow, the marketing manager, told me that that "Sportingo authors aiming for a professional writing career will be able to benefit from having by-lines appearing on our website." He said he's confident that a strong network of independent sports writers will emerge at the site, and maybe that will happen. But I'm not sure it's a system designed to build trust among all the players involved.

Everyone I have consulted about open source projects of any kind has stressed one thing over and over: the importance of understanding what would motivate people to contribute to the gift economy of the project. You have to get that right, they say. Ultimately I believe a non-profit foundation is a more secure one. If there are profits and they are extracted by the owners, not distributed to co-creators; that's a problem. If there are profits and they go into doing more and better journalism, that's different.

5) What's wrong with other extant examples?
by crush

I'm assuming that you evaluated and rejected some of the other high-profile citizen journalism outfits that predate the founding of your own project. Off my head I can think of:

* The Indymedia network is one of the longest standing examples of an attempt to have a large citizen journalist network.

* The Pacifica Network (especially the Democracy Now show)

* The New Standard

What was it that you found lacking in the above and why did you decide to start a new project instead of reforming and adapting one of the above? Do you think that your decision to accept corporate sponsorship (which is rejected by the Pacifica Network) will see your organization's focus inevitably drift toward the anodyne ineffectiveness of e.g. NPR?

(And of course, how could I forget WikiNews?)

Rosen:

There's nothing "wrong" with these prior examples. I admire them all. I was especially pleased to see that the New Standard met its do-or-die fundraising goal last week. That site is an experiment with reader-supported, totally independent, strenuously-factual reporting. High standards of verification are meant to prevail. I think the New Standard has a lot in common with professional journalism, except it rejects the political economy of commercial news media entirely. It's run as a collective among those who do the work. I am thrilled that it will remain around, because we need to try lots of solutions to how to fund serious reporting. Just as I'm thrilled that Independent Media Center and its collectives around the world keep humming. I agree with Chris Anderson that what blogging begat--citizen journalism--Indy Media begat, too.

I didn't "evaluate and reject" the New Standard, Indy Media, Pacifica and Wiki News. Nor is it my place to decide they need fixing. They don't. The people who founded those organizations deserve a lot of credit for creating something new and daring-- and genuinely alternative. They inspired me. So did lots of others. (New West, for example, or Witness.org.) NewAssignment.Net is really about a single proposition: that if journalists and networks of users can report stuff together that neither could easily do alone, the public sphere will benefit and the site will build trust. I think there's room for that.

My decision to accept $100,000 from Reuters means we'll have an editor who can test the possibilities in networked journalism, as Jeff Jarvis calls it. My job is to make sure that Reuters has no influence on that person. The company has said it will have no editorial control, and no claim on the content. I agree: it won't. I think we can persuade users that it works as advertised. But people are free to draw their own conclusions about what the gift means, and I'm sure they will.

6) Plagiarism and Ethics?
by goombah99

Lately there's been a few incidents of Plagiarism in the news, not to mention some wholesale ethical breaches of faked stories (e.g. Blair at the NY times and "a million Little pieces"). But the thing is, the reason those are news is that they are both exceptional and something that is specifically drummed in to any professional journalist not to do. Indeed, breaking this taboo is probably even more of a sin to the the fellow journalists than to the general public because of this entrenched ethic.

Yet we know that on college campuses, where we can measure the phenomenon, plagiarism is comparatively rampant. So evidently the common man cannot restrain himself.

It seems to me this is a serious issue for any new journalism form with a low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author. How does this ethos get enforced in such a realm?

A related question is the ethical division of commentary and news. We know that's become a problem in the media for some outlets where management has a thumb on the content. But the traditional news organs, especially newspapers, still refrain for the most part. Indeed, the NY times just went so far as to remove the typeset justification from any article that contained any sort of analysis or opinion, reserving the justified typesetting for only traditional factual journalism stories so the difference is apparent to the reader from the start. How do we reinforce that ethos in the untrained journalist?

Rosen:

When people plagiarize they do it for a particular self-interested reason: to meet a deadline, get an unwanted task out of the way, get their full time salary with limited work. These motivations will probably be rarer in the New Assignment model. Why volunteer for a project only to cheat at it?

"The common man cannot restrain himself." Sorry, I don't trust that kind of language. Beyond that making stuff up is not a way to develop a base of users on the Web; people aren't that dumb! You speak of a "low barrier to entry and a high degree of anonymity for the author." But for most users the higher the anonymity factor for the author, the higher the barrier of trust.

What some people can't seem to get over is that other people can say any damn thing they want on the Internet! How can you trust any of it? is their natural reaction to all open systems. Closed systems--and professional journalism is one--develop trust in one way. Open systems have to do it a much different way. Expecting one to look like the other is unreasonable.

We aren't going to learn much about this puzzle by asking how the "common man" can be trained to imitate his betters in the news media. I refer you to sociologist Raymond Williams, who once said, "There are no masses, there are only ways of seeing people as masses." It is these ways of seeing that are retrograde. But they show up in the most surprising places.

7) Scale
by FuturePastNow

First, I'll admit that I haven't read much about citizen journalism other than Jeff Jarvis' [buzzmachine.com], but as a non-blogger thinking of getting in to it, I was wondering:

Much of the discussion seems to be about getting out from under the control of "gatekeepers" like publishers and media owners. Yet, while the internet is less concerned with money, it has its own form of currency: popularity, in the form of the link.

Doesn't this just turn the highest-traffic sites into new gatekeepers? Especially as the number of blogs increases, the gap between "rich" and "poor" expands?

I suppose what I'm really asking is, it's hard enough to get noticed today- how will someone just starting out get noticed ten years from now?

Rosen:

Ten years from now? Jeez, I have no idea what the world of media access will be like then. But anyone who is just starting out in self-publishing should consult Clay Shirky's Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality, so as not to become prematurely disillusioned by discovering its truths later on.

Certainly there are new gatekeepers. (Slashdot itself is one. But does it work the same way the old system did?) Traffic-wise, there's still rich and poor. (But is this list as static as that one?) Hierarchies have not gone away. (And who said they would?) Inequality has not disappeared. (But did you really think it could?)

You still have to fight to be noticed, good work can still go unnoticed. Life online is not entirely fair, or completely different. There's a new attention economy to replace the old. The sooner we reconcile ourselves to these common sense conclusions, the easier it will be to see what is actually different today.

Here are some things that stand out for me: Amateurs have joined professionals and they own a part of "the press." An audience that was once connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other is now connected both ways. The cost for like-minded people to locate each other and collaborate has fallen dramatically. The tools of media production have been widely distributed, and broad distribution of content is no longer impossible for small, upstart producers. For professionals, they're not required to affiliate with Big Media in order to operate as a journalist, though most will. They can be stand alones and independents. The people formerly known as the audience (as I call them) are now a productive force to be reckoned with, and Big Media has just started that reckoning. The Net has new ways of distributing attention, which have taken their place alongside the old.

Still, there's a long way to go before we can say that our media system has been made more democratic, responsive and responsible.

8) What impact would this have on national elections?
by StressGuy

The Electoral process seems to be more of a "marketing contest" and marketing takes bags and bags of money. There's commercial time, signs, billboards, radio, etc. Let's face it, a commercial is, at most 90 seconds to tell me why I should vote for you - hardly enough time. So, all we see are glittering generalities or, all to often, "don't vote for the other guy" spots.

If "Citizen Journalism" takes off, do you see this as a way that candidates without the massive financial resources normally required to sustain a traditional campaign could actually compete? Could this make the "third party candidates" a credible threat? Could this actually serve to "level the playing field"?

Rosen:

We should be cautious here. I think the most we can say is that a system that was almost entirely closed and self-sustaining--in which a handful of people raised the money, took the polls, handled the candidates, made the ads, narrated the campaign and talked about the candidates on TV--has been disrupted. The people who ran it are not as confident as they once were in their ability to manage things and get the outcomes they want. Their party has been crashed, but it's not "over." Nor is it "ours."
It's possible that insurgent candidacies--not backed by current players in the system--will have an easier time of it in the years ahead, just as insurgent news providers have more of an opening now. That's as far as I would go on the leveled field.

9) Dilution of Protection
by ObsessiveMathsFreak

How long before corporations and wealthy individuals start employing goons, lawyers and wiretaps, a la HP, to threaten and intimidate citizen journalists with no real legal recourse? If faced with this, should a citizen journalist just back off and let the guilty win? How can the protections now enjoyed by the fourth estate be extended to citizen journalism without diluting them?

Rosen:

As a matter of law and public policy, I think "fourth estate" protections should focus on significant acts of journalism, not people in pre-fab categories or the kind of organization that surrounds the giver of news. All those who are engaged in the act of informing a broader public of what's going on deserve to be under the First Amendment umbrella that protects the press. The press itself is composed of amateur and professional wings.

But that's no answer to goons with lawyers who threaten to sue. Citizen journalists are definitely vulnerable there, which makes you realize why we have big media organizations in the first place. We have to be more creative. Robert Cox, head of the Media Bloggers Association (I am a founding member of the group) has shown that "an orchestrated campaign by bloggers to defend a fellow blogger in what appears to be a frivolous lawsuit" can work. That's encouraging but not a complete answer, either. Legal intimidation will happen, and I'm sure there will be times when the bad guys will win.

10) Blogging
by From A Far Away Land

When asking a primary source for information, I find that telling them I'm doing so to create a report on my blog tends to make them clam up, or continue to be unwilling to provide information that ought to be publicly available. What technique or phrases should I use to convince the interviewee that I both have a legitimate use for their information, and the right to obtain it?

Rosen:

Sometimes you have a right to obtain information from a primary source. Sometimes it's not a matter of your rights but their decision to recognize you and cooperate. If search costs are high for making an informed decision about whether to trust a blogger who shows up with questions, sources will seek to reduce costs by using reputation and even stereotype (bloggers: ugh) as proxies.

I don't think there's a proper technique or a magic phrase that will solve this problem. There's only one solution I can see. Send the guy the URL for the "about" section of your site. That page ought to persuade potential sources that legitimate use will be made of their information. It should tell them what you are up to, and why. The site itself, the reporting and commentary there, is the best reason any source has to cooperate. Ah, but how do you convince them to take the time and look?

There's at least one way. Break a story so that the source's world is talking about it and next time around the source will speak to you-- and go to your About page. I asked Dean Wright of Reuters what the biggest obstacle for NewAssignment.Net will be when it launches. "The same one that the more minor players in the mainstream media have: getting your calls returned," he said. "Then when you complete a project and publish, you may find that other media outlets are reluctant to pick up your stories." The only answer to that is "do some compelling projects that cannot be ignored."

NewAssignment.Net will try to take that advice. It will do stories developed by users into assignments that are given to journalists. It could also do stories developed by journalists and divided into parts for users to assign themselves. (Mechanical Turk meets the Center for Public Integrity.) I hope it will do stories where teams of users and journalists figure out the division of labor together.

Sometimes the network will be the knowledge producer, the journalist the enabler. Other times the journalist will be the producer, and the network the enabler. Pro-am journalism is not inherently better than am-pro. Amateur users could in some cases do it all themselves, with editors watching and giving the green light in stages. Different combinations beg to be tried. It's unwise to say in advance that we know how it will work, or that it can't.

snafu109 writes "Since the laptop battery recalls initiated by Dell, Apple, IBM/Lenovo, Toshiba & Fujitsu, some may have wondered whether the entire lot should be recalled. Well, over at MarketWatch, a new article reports just that. 'Sony said Thursday it will initiate a global replacement program for certain battery packs that use its lithium-ion cells in notebook computers in order to address concerns related to recent over-heating incidents.' In related news, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has released some tips on how to lower the risk of your laptop batteries exploding, no matter who the manufacturer."

prostoalex writes "Inspired by the fast growth of social networks such as Facebook and MySpace, Microsoft is launching a test version of its own social network. Wallop brands itself as 'the exclusive social experience,' and is technically a separate company, a startup that's based on technologies developed by Microsoft Research. As far as revenues, Wallop 'plans to sell graphics and other features people can use to decorate their personal profile pages,' says MSNBC."

nieske writes "CNet reviews Microsoft's new video site, Soapbox. Though browsing and uploading is easy, CNet isn't very enthusiastic about the beta, mostly blaming this on the fact that Soapbox has nothing more to offer than other video sites. From the article: 'It's a slightly better sharing service than YouTube in some small technical ways, but it doesn't help users make money from their content like Revver does; it doesn't have granular privacy controls like Vox; it won't post directly into blogs for you like VideoEgg; and it won't show videos from other networks like Yahoo Video. Given Microsoft's position in the video sharing market (dead last), I expected a more aggressive product.'"

nieske writes "Rumors are spreading about Google and Apple teaming up to form a video alliance. Google might provide streaming video content for Apple's upcoming iTV, which was revealed in last week's Apple event. The only thing that seemed to be missing in the iTV preview was streaming video, and with Google's Eric Schmidt on the Apple board of directors, this alliance might actually not be so far-fetched."

Oxen writes, "From the article, 'Warner Music has agreed to make its library of music videos available to YouTube, marking the first time that an established record company has agreed to make its content library available to the user-generated media company. Under the agreement, YouTube users will have full access to videos from Warner artists. They will also be permitted to incorporate material from those videos into their own clips, which are then uploaded to YouTube. Warner and YouTube will share advertising revenue sold in connection with the video content.' This is in contrast to how Universal is handling the situation."

jagger writes "According to an article on MSNBC a report, written by two economists in the FCC's Media Bureau, showed local ownership of television stations adds almost five and one-half minutes of total news to broadcasts and more than three minutes of 'on-location' news. The conclusion is at odds with FCC arguments made when it voted in 2003 to increase the number of television stations a company could own in a single market. Senior managers at the agency ordered that 'every last piece' of the report be destroyed."

walnutmon writes "Newsweek has published a three page article asking whether World of Warcraft is more than just a game. Though some spend their time in WoW grinding, others take a break from the monotony of gaming to interact with others from the community in a meaningful way. From the article: 'Generally, though, players of the game enjoy a form of community rarely seen in the real world; higher-level players go out of their way to tutor newbies and accompany them on quests. Deep friendships are forged. Relationships begin that flower into marriage, with Tauren brides and Undead grooms tying the knot in some virtual tavern in Thunder Bluff.' I guess the question is, does a game become more when people do more than play to win, or is this just an added feature?" Raph Koster has been of the opinion, for quite some time now, that all MMOGs are virtual worlds; it just so happens you can play a game inside many of them. What's your view on this? Are Massive games just another kind of game title, or are they something special?

theodp writes "In The Boss Who Spied on Her Board, Newsweek likens HP Chairwoman Pattie Dunn's attempts to escape culpability with her I-knew-nothing defense to both a head of state, who wants 'plausible deniability' while ordering an assassination plot, and to Henry II, who had the Archbishop of Canterbury removed by simply muttering 'Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?' in front of his knights."

rufey writes "It is now being reported that the HP boardroom spying incident that occurred earlier this year also involved obtaining phone records of journalists from at least two news outlets. Journalists from CNET and the Wall Street Journal had their phone records obtained through a method called 'pretexting' to see who, if any, of the HP board members the journalists may have been in contact with."

WebHostingGuy writes "As reported by MSNBC, the FTC has fined Xanga.com $1 million dollars for repeatedly allowing children under 13 to sign up for the service without getting their parent's consent. This is the largest penalty ever issued for violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act." From the article: "'Protecting kids' privacy online is a top priority for America's parents, and for the FTC,' FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras said in a statement. 'COPPA requires all commercial Web sites, including operators of social networking sites like Xanga, to give parents notice and obtain their consent before collecting personal information from kids they know are under 13. A million-dollar penalty should make that obligation crystal clear.'" What impact, if any, do you think this will have on other community sites that may not always follow the COPPA statutes?

theodp writes "As word spread that HP was dumping Board member George Keyworth for press leaks, Newsweek broke the bigger story: HP Chairwoman Patricia Dunn was so obsessed with finding the leaker that she authorized a team of independent electronic-security experts to spy on the phone records of calls made from HP Directors' home and private cell phones. Not only that, phone records were obtained via pretexting, the controversial practice of obtaining information under false pretenses. After Dunn laid out the surveillance scheme for the Board last May, HP Director Tom Perkins quit on the spot, characterizing Dunn's actions as illegal and unethical. HP is also coming under fire for playing dumb to the SEC about the reasons behind Perkins' resignation. Perkins, who helped launch HP's computer division in the 60's, has asked the FTC, FCC and the Justice Department to investigate."

ChelleChelle writes with a link to IBM research on the limits to and lessons learned from two context-aware computing projects: "As the researchers Moran and Dourish put it, 'Context awareness is fine in theory. The research issue is figuring out how to get it to work in practice.' The article lays out two attempts by IBM to do just this. Grapevine and Rendezvous are services offered to IBM employees as a means of looking into the promise and perils of context-aware computing. From these two experimental services the authors have drawn several valuable lessons." From the article: "What computer scientists commonly call context often has more to do with technology than with work situations, people, or frames of mind."

ChelleChelle writes "Starting with the Xerox Alto and the Star, ACM Queue briefly covers the history of human-computer interaction from past to present. It doesn't stop there, however. Using a hypothetical situation involving context-awareness in cellphones, the author lays out his thoughts on the future of HCI, offering opinions, advice, and examples."

ChelleChelle writes "Rather than focusing so much on an explanation of ubiquitous computing and its history, this article presents an actual experimental system designed to operate within a cell biology lab. The application, known as Labscape, was intended to function as an 'invisible assistant,' using context to organize and record information and predicting what would be needed by the researchers as any point in time. The author nicely sums up the article at the end by providing several important lessons about building proactive applications."

davidwr writes "It's official. Pluto's been demoted. It's now one of several 'dwarf planets.' I guess we can drop the 'Period' from 'Mary's violet eyes make John stay up nights.'" (Of course, no one says you have to privately agree with the International Astronomical Union.) Several readers have contributed links to the BBC's coverage of the downgrade, as well as the usefully illustrated story at MSNBC.

butterwise writes "MSNBC reports that a new scanning technique could revolutionize paleontology. The new technique is allowing researchers a virtual dissection of half-billion-year-old fossilized embryos." From the article: "The Chinese, Swedish, Swiss and British researchers on Donoghue's team used a 1,640-foot-wide (500-meter-wide) particle accelerator in Switzerland to scan the minute fossils, and then fed the information into a computer that generated complete 3-D images of the internal structures in fine detail."

theodp writes "Newsweek reports that high-schoolers are being denied the joy of ordering unhealthy lunches thanks to their schools' adoption of services like MealpayPlus. New web-based services allow moms to prepay for cafeteria food, specify what their kid can and can't buy, and go online to track his purchases." From the article: "If the child tries to buy a prohibited item, an alert flashes on the cashier's computer. Of course, the system isn't foolproof. According to a KRC Research survey, 73 percent of 8- to 12-year-olds are throwing out part of their lunches at least once a week; 36 percent are trading them." All I ever got was PB&J.

ennuiner writes "Over at Newsweek Steven Levy has a column commemorating IBM's introduction of the first hard drive 50 years ago. The drive was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, and had a vast 5MB capacity. They also discuss the future of data storage." From the article: "Experts agree that the amazing gains in storage density at low cost will continue for at least the next couple of decades, allowing cheap peta-bytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage to corporations and terabytes (thousands of gigs) to the home. Meanwhile, drives with mere hundreds of gigabytes will be small enough to wear as jewelry."

ChelleChelle writes "In an entertaining yet well thought-out article, software architect Alex E. Bell of The Boeing Company lashes out at the so-called 'Silver Bullets' and those who rely on them to solve all their software development difficulties. From the article: 'the desperate, the pressured, and the ignorant are among those who continue to worship the silver-bullet gods and plead for continuance of silver-fueled delusions that are keeping many of their projects alive.'"

ChelleChelle writes "When it comes to managing and deploying large scale systems and networks, discipline and focus matter more than specific technologies. In a conversation with ACM Queuecast host Mike Vizard, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says the key to success is to have a 'relentless commitment to a modular computer architecture that makes it possible for the people who build the applications to also be responsible for running and deploying those systems within a common IT framework.'"