media

There’s nothing like the term “cyberwar” to capture a reader’s attention. For those who grew up on “Wargames”, “Sneakers” or William Gibson novels, the term conjures up images of heroic hackers in shadowy basements, frantically tapping on keyboards in a life and death struggle against the enemy on the other side of the glowing CRT screen.

A media group in continuous operation since 1846 may not be the company you should look to for advice on the future of media. Or maybe they should: the Associated Press is both doing well in a digital age (when they’re not making boneheaded moves like pretending that fair use doesn’t exist) and looking towards the future, trying to figure out its role in the media ecosystem. And they’re carrying out some very interesting research to determine just what their role is going forwards.

A couple of weeks back, I was wondering what functions “we” - which could mean “media geeks,” “people who care about journalism” or “people who believe that informed citizens are important in a democracy” - should try to save from daily newspapers. This doesn’t neccesarily mean saving newspapers from fiscal collapse… though I have to admit, I’m tempted to see if a group of people could raise a million bucks and buy the New Haven Register and hundreds of other smaller papers - the Journal Register Company is down 99% percent in the past two years.

One of the best parts of this gathering at Microsoft is not the cool new toys coming from Microsoft research, but the ideas presented by nine design schools who’ve been invited to the event. In a two-hour session this afternoon, the teams present their work for critique by a group of MS and other design experts.

There’s nothing like a meeting on the future of journalism to get you concerned about the future of journalism. While there are some brilliant and exciting ideas discussed at conferences like the Knight Foundation-sponsored meeting I attended yesterday, there’s also a very clear sense that some of the very basic questions surrounding the future of journalism remain unanswered. The biggest of those questions seems to be, “Who’s going to pay for it?” and I’ve not heard any very compelling new answers to the question lately.

The venerable High Country News -- one of the leaders in North American rural lands reporting for a couple decades now -- has a new website, designed by our friends at ONE Northwest, and it pretty much rocks. Go there and you'll learn some things about the big open.
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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Media at 9:11 AM)

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation supports a huge range of journalistic programs, ranging from experimental efforts in community journalism to massive players in the media ecosystem like National Public Radio. 180 of their grantees are in Chicago today at a meeting hosted by Knight designed to build connections between grantees and encourage cross-fertilization of projects. (The Rising Voices project of Global Voices is supported by the Knight Foundation, which is why I’m here.)

David Weinberger has an intriguing post up today about the “Fallacy of Examples“. He’s reacting to a column from Nick Kristof in the New York Times titled “The Luckiest Girl“, which recounts the story of Beatrice Biira, a young woman from Uganda whose improbable journey through Connecticut College began with the donation of a goat to her family through Heifer International.

David finds the story moving - how could you not! - but points out that Biira’s amazing journey is hardly a typical outcome of livestock donation programs. Indeed, the reason Kristof is telling it is that it’s so remarkable. And that may be something of a problem:

Get it while it's still hot off the press: The Onion's Obligatory Green Issue! Here's a sample headline: 450,000 Unsold Earth Day Issues Of Time Trucked To Landfill....

Here are a few stills from a short film by Squint/Opera that illustrates proposals for urban improvements in Abu Dhabi until 2030. (more…)

Part of the fun of having an academic life based in Cambridge, MA, is that you've gotten to see a great deal of the most exciting research taking place in this insanely academic city. The last session of the MIT conference features some the superstars of the MIT Media Lab world, researchers whose work has been featured around the world as well as on the banks of the Charles. But it's less interesting to hear Deb Roy talk about his amazing project surveilling his son's language development for five minutes than for the two hours we hosted him for at the Berkman Center.

It's the third day of MIT's Future of Civic Media Conference, and I'm still finding that I can't get the phrase "civic media" to come out of my mouth. Must be all those years of trying to sell the "citizen media" meme. Fortunately, despite the fact that we've all seen several dozen demo talks at this point, there are still truly fascinating ideas and technologies coming across the stage at the (bizarre, oddly mis-shapen, maze-like) Stata Center.

This morning's session, led by the Media Lab's Andy Lippman focuses on tools that are mobile, viral, and decentralized. The ones that caught my attention were:

Chris Csikszentmihalyi is an artist and provocateur as well as a programmer, inventor and professor. The projects he's most excited about within MIT's Center for Future Civic Media focus on the interface between political action, art, journalism and technology. He offers the observation that "all technology is politics," and suggests that one of the best ways to do art, as in journalism, is to follow the money.

Yay! Dezeen is featured in The Design 100 - Time magazine’s guide to “The people and ideas behind today’s most influential design”. (more…)

It’s been a while since we talked about our visitor figures, but we’re proud to say traffic has continued to grow rapidly with 668,039 unique visitors last month - our best month yet.

The first quarter of 2008 was also our best quarter yet, with 1,712,919 unique visitors - up over 50% on the previous quarter. Traffic has grown over 500% in the past year (first quarter 2008 compared to first quarter of 2007).

Dezeen’s (only just) monthly top ten: each month we present a hit parade of stories from our archive. Here are the stories about residential housing projects that were most popular during March: (more…)

Bill Maher, the host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, posted a short video of his "new rule" for Earth Day over at 23/6. We suppose he's found the site FUH2 while preparing the show...

For the record, we don't think these tactics are productive. They just antagonize people and make them dig in their heels and reject ideas that they might support if emotions didn't enter the picture. Better to share information, show solutions, and help people see for themselves. The video can be found at: ::Bill Maher: Exclusive Video: Truck Off...

On previous Earth Days, readers were sure to expect some startling statistics about pollution, global climate change and environmental destruction from most mainstream newspapers. But on Earth Day 2008, we at Worldchanging noticed that much of this year's coverage was different. Not because the destruction has diminished, but because our knowledge of both the problems and our relationship to them have increased. With a majority of the population aware of the problems, the focus of the articles has shifted away from defining the problem to helping people discover the solutions, or at very least eco-branded products and services portrayed as solutions.

Inspired by our friends at Valleywag and their post about Time Magazine's Top 25 Blogs (in which TreeHugger.com was #4), we've decided to compile Time Magazine's list of The Top 15 Green Websites. This time, TreeHugger is #2 (though we're not sure if the list is ordered by rank or not), and many of our friends from the green web-ecosystem are there.

As Valleywag points out, they...

Dezeen’s (almost) monthly top ten: each month we present a hit parade of stories from our archive. Here are the skyscraper stories that were most popular during February: (more…)

Phorm is an open advertising exchange and proprietary ad serving technology that "uses anonymised ISP data to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time and the right number of times i.e. it gives consumers advertising that's tailored to their interests with irrelevant ads replaced in the process." Got it? And they go on to say, that the technology behind it takes consumer privacy protection to a new level by not storing any personally identifiable information, IP addresses or information on user browsing behaviour. Maybe this could be the first contender to the Google AdSense monopoly. Maybe not.

We’ve just launched Dezeenjobs, our architecture and design jobs site, with jobs listed by type, location and employer, plus an online form for submitting ads. (more…)

I was thrilled to get an email from Nicholas Kayser-Bril earlier today, introducing me to his research with Gilles Bruno on media attention. The pair are making lovely cartograms - maps distorted to show a particular factor - based on how much attention various media sources are paying to countries around the world.

Really brilliant satire of corporate environmental PR stances:

"The ship's been towed beyond the environment." Awesome.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Media at 1:17 PM)