Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Once upon a time, the news was something big media gathered, filtered, and delivered to a respectful audience. 

Heh. The biggest big-media story today is the rise of
the journalist-blogger. First with the conventions, then with the
ongoing Rathergate, newscasters and dead-tree pundits want you to know
that news is being reported–and even made–by just plain folks.

OK, not every Juan (or
Jenny) Q Public has email, let alone broadband access to blogworld.
Still, it’s exciting that more of us can now grab
front-row seats when news is made–maybe even hop into the onstage
spotlight.

So what’s the backstory of this “new” phenomenon? What dangers and opportunities does it bring?  No three-minute
soundbite or fluffy op-ed can tell you.

But blogger/journalist Dan
Gillmor can, in his new book We the Media. It’s full of decisive moments and smalltown heroes–an exciting,
principled, savvy, and practical page-turner. If you haven’t read it
yet, you are missing out.

I met Dan at Bloggercon II
and got a free copy of his book. And I was thrilled to see I’m one of
the many people he cites as a source, though that’s probably because of
my live-blogging Hoder rather than for anything useful I said over dinner at Legal Seafood. Is this a
proper disclosure of possible conflicts? Well, I’m no journalist, just a
hard-working blogger.

Excellent news from Feedster’s J. Scott Johnson, who just jump-started his FuzzyBlog to tell the world that he and Shelley Johnston are getting married!

Shelley and her cute son Alex are an amazing “find”–hey, for that matter, so is the Scottmeister!

If Google could give people search results like this, even I would be out there trying to buy their stock…

Congrats to Scott, Francois, and Scott, aka Feedster, for a whole new site look and lots of great new RSS search toys!

Time magazine online lists “50 Coolest Websites“, a pleasing
combination of old friends who deserve even more recognition and new
stuff I hadn’t tried yet.

No time for 50? Here are five from their list that were pretty new to me:

Factcheck.org

Campaign ads and speeches everywhere–many hot-air-filled
trial balloons get punctured by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (U
Penn).

iPodlounge

Fun and temptation for iPod addicts with product reviews, accessories, and more.

TriggerStreet

Flashy (I mean that in a good way) resource for indie filmmakers and those who love them.

Newseum

News trivia game with three levels, kinda fun.

yoox.com

International
Internet clothes shopping–I wonder if the catsuit of jewel-studded
chainlinks comes in my size…of course, if it costs as much as the
Armani blazer, I’m not really interested.

Thanks to Tara Calishain and ResearchBuzz for the link–and congrats to Tara (co-author with Rael Dornfest of
Google Hacks) for a recipe Google-hack that made Time’s list.

Visualizing weblog conversations (see Judith Meskill and Mary Hodder)
means tracking a meme from blogger to blogger. Who linked to whom? Who
quoted but failed to link? Who said what first? How fast and how far
did the conversation spread?

Visualizing search results is less ambitious–sometimes a good
thing. Dropping cannon balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa is less
ambitious than launching millionaire space tourists, but the stuff
you learn from one benefits the other…Not that Judith and Mary are
launching space tourists–sorry, irresistible wise-guy impulse there.

If one picture is worth a thousand words, that’s probably because words
get processed in linear sequence but pictures end up on your retina,
which has billions and billions [TM]* of generations of tricks for
processing two-dimensional information in order not to get eaten.

Here are a few sample interesting ways to display search results:

Geographical (works only if search results contain geographical info):
Mikel Maron’s WorldKit (Sample: Phil Wilson’s British blogger map)
GeOrkut mapper of Orkut friendship nets (closed down, alas, but here’s a sample.)

Word-linked:
Kartoo (you can play with this one online)
Touchgraph (interesting static samples)

Haven’t tried these:
Grokker/Groxis (looks Boolean)
Inxight (This looks more like a
very good database than a visualizer per se. It’s a commercial app with
some really big customers including the Department of Defense.)

Leave a comment to let me know about some of the billions and billions more–

* “Billions and billions [TM]” technical term in Betsy-speak meaning “lots and lots and I don’t plan to look up how many.”

Incredible you-must-read-this geeky resource: article on history of search by Ramana Rao of Inxight Software:

Never work for a start-up.

Now, from the Feedster side of my work and play life, Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion just posted an interview that we did about using Feedster as a PR tool and how people get to be Feed of the Day.

Steve asks very good questions. He’s running a series of Bloggerside
Chats as he explores the blog universe, and I’m looking forward to
reading a lot more of them.

For the interview, Steve asked for a picture, so I drove over to Mickey’s lab late at night with the digital camera and then came home and removed from my favorite photo a background full of white lab coats, old filing cabinets and etc. I sent Steve a nice professional-looking photo, but I couldn’t resist tampering with it some more, just for you. It symbolizes my efforts to look professional as all the wonderful crazy excitement of blogworld goes on around me. I hope my imagined self has the good luck to notice, don’t you?

Once upon a time and long ago, my grandfather (and every other trustee of the University of New Hampshire) got an irate handwritten letter from Colebrook, NH. A high school student’s girlfriend had been turned down for admission. He wanted to let the trustees know–that was a big mistake!

That boy’s work, tracking down all those trustees, was much more impressive than the letter itself. My grandfather chuckled at his flowery prose–but made sure the boy himself got into college.

My point–and I do have one–is inspired by
something Scott Johnson blogged today about Fundrace:

Eek fricking Eek. I saw over on Slashdot a mention of Fundrace 2004, a new website which lets you see how your neighbors are donating funds to politicians. So I tried it. Eek….

Yes this may be publicly available information but by wrapping it into a web front end and essentially “democratizing it”, its scary. Yes I know I have no privacy but even so…

There goes yet another “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Those of us who were around in the mid 1850s will recall that the secret ballot is there for a reason. Experience shows that employers can get pretty nasty if you don’t support their favorite candidate.

Now people who thought they were giving personal data to the US government wake up to discover it’s out there on the internet. And not just the name of the candidate they support–their home addresses, job titles, and employers. The potential for abuse seems huge to me.

I don’t like the feeling that things that for years have been private are now up for sale, or given away for free. It’s like waking up one morning and discovering that someone has given away my lawn chair and is digging up my tulips–“Hey, they weren’t nailed down.”

I’d like to see the presumption of right reversed. Instead of assuming that people have a right to broadcast the name of my candidate and the color of my bra–couldn’t we assume that I have some common law (or Fourth Amendment) right to privacy?

Is anything really private? Probably not. We can’t block the boy from Colebrook who cares enough to find the addresses of 10 college trustees. But we can put a stop to the presumption that after finding that information, he owns a right to publish it to the world.

My blog has a Creative Commons license–stuff I put out here is public. You can quote me and even create derivative works so long as you credit my work as a source. If you’re planning to sell my stuff–you have to ask me. But there’s a lot of stuff in my life that I don’t put out here, and I don’t want to see out there. I think that choice ought to remain with me.

• Boston
  Globe just added a list of feeds.

  

• BBC News has a list
  of its feeds and a huge OPML
  file.

 

• Christian Science Monitor
  has a list of
  feeds.

 

• CNet News has a list
  of feeds.

 

• DanGillmor’s column has a feed.

 

• dotJournalism has a feed.

 

• Downing Street
  Says has a feed.

 

• Guardian
  Unlimited has a feed.

• Inter Press Service
  News Agency has a list of
  feeds

 

• National
  GeographicNews
  may have a feed at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/index.rss

 

• New
  Scientist has a feed.

 

• NewYork
  Times
  has many feeds created by Userland.

 

• Philly.com
  (Philadelphia Inquirer) has a list of
  feeds.
   
• The
  Register has a feed.

 

• Salon has a feed.

  

• SeattlePost-Intelligencer
  has a list of
  feeds.

 

• Slashdot has a feed.

 

• Slate just
  got a feed and
  offers a reading list in OPML.

 

• Telegraph has a  list of feeds.
   
• US National Weather Service offers regional weather alerts as RSS feeds.

 

• Wayback Archive
  Collections has feed of
  its most recent acquisitions

 

• Wired
  News has a list of feeds.

 

• World Press
  Review has a list of feeds.

 

• Yahoo News has feeds for non-commercial
  use

• Dave
  Barry has a feed

 

• This is True
  by RandyCassingham has a feed

 

• Tapestry
  has cartoon feeds including Dilbert
   

*  This list of newsfeeds is based on the excellent list at http://www.djh.dk/ejour/arkiv/RSS.html#udland, and on many ongoing updates from Dave Winer. Your corrections and additions are very welcome!