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Josh Young, on Twitter, would like us to discuss how, when "Sources Go Direct," we will be able to tell truth from deceit. Here's a link to his twit. http://twitter.com/jny2...

May 15, 2009 - Comment - Like - Share

Lizunlong, David HC Soul, Andy Angelos and 6 other people liked this

To which I said, it doesn't seem like a question, more like a pointed comment. That there's a belief behind the question that it won't be possible to do so, and that's why we must not... and that's where I drift off in confusion. I'm not advocating something as much as I'm observing. If I thought the 20th century model for news was viable, I'd STF up about the new ways news is flowing. But I see myself more describing what happens with the rainfall on the mountains. I can't influence which way the water flows, but I can, if I see how it works, advise the people with the resources to "build a dam here" because I think it will work. - Dave Winer

16 more comments

ChandersI would like to third @jny2 suggestion for @jayrosen_nyu & @davewiner at "rebooting the news" - Jay Rosen

This fallacy happens in the tech business all the time. On mail lists where you discuss new formats and protocols, they "decide" that everyone will, from now on, do things the way they say. They even get so far as to ratify these things, publish the spec and then well What Next? How will we tell everyone that they must now do what we say? Nothing ever comes of this. - Dave Winer

Now, with all that preamble, I suspect we will tell deceit from truth the same way reporters do now. Badly. :-) - Dave Winer

I think it's a good question. Very worthy of our talents and critical to our subject: re-booting the news. And since it's the first, last and really only question journalists ever ask about "sources going direct," we should work up some pretty good answers. Now one of my replies would be: how is that done now, in the "traditional" systems where sources speak through reporters? How is deceit from sources handled? And if deceit somehow gets through the filter and is dumped on readers, how do they handle? - Jay Rosen

There is one other interest I have heard pro journalists express about sources going direct (besides: "sources lie, spin and puff themselves up, and this is what we want the news to be?...") and that is to patiently explain to us that they don't think such a system can REPLACE the news system we have now, and that they wish to disagree with the many, many voices that have been raised in support of the "can replace" hypothesis. These people I call Replaceniks. - Jay Rosen

If journalism is the patient many people are trying to save, then the noises that come from the Replaceniks' performances are an hysterical symptom, a bizarre acting out of other fears and fantasies. Those fears and fantasies may be relevant to the challenge of re-booting professional journalism, if we could ever discuss them directly, but the discourse the Replaceniks wish to have is distracting in the extreme. A troll's paradise. - Jay Rosen

I'm not a doctor, and I'm not interested in saving the twentieth centery per se. This question may be complex, but it doesn't have to be intractable or fraught with outmoded assumptions. It just seems wildly pluasible to me that there's an important role to be played between sources within a story and others who are not souces within that given story. The intermediating role may be... more... - Josh Young

Think of journalists like police (though please do squint seriously with your mind's eye). When citizens play together nicely, no one needs a cop around, monitoring the scene for abuse. But we like police because if a problem does arise, they have codes, rules, and laws that tell them how to adjudicate between citizens and their problems. Imporantly, then, the mere threat of the police... more... - Josh Young

I think there have to be filters, for sure. Filters, curating, editing, verification: different names for different parts. Whatever we call it, how those things get done is to me crucial, which is why I said I think your question is a good question, Josh. What we have now is a completely dysfunctional conversation focused on 1.) "OMG, OMG sources have agendas!!@!!!&^&%$#@ and 2.) Replacenik performance art. As long as we can ditch both 1.) and 2.), we're fine. - Jay Rosen

"There's an important role to be played between sources within a story and others who are not souces within that given story.. Even open systems need verifiers and third-party synthesizers, no?" With both statements I couldn't agree more, Josh. - Jay Rosen

It used to be easy to demo Technorati to J-Profs and others who asked the same question, which, around 2006, was: "Hey, so how do you know what all these bloggers are saying is accurate?" I'd fire up Technorati and say "Hey, so I can tell you how many people think they're accurate. If it's in the thousands, I'm willing to bet on the hive mind, generally. If it's in the single digits, I might need to verify with someone else, just like I would if I were writing a story." - Ryan Sholin

Nowadays, it's easier to show off a social filtering system, like FriendFeed or Twitter, and say, hey, I've manually assembled this collection of sources I trust. Hand-picked. By me. Soylent green is made of people, rinse, repeat..." - Ryan Sholin

One obvious problem - in the current system and potentially in Daves "direct" NYT system - is that decisions about which sources to include are made for reasons exterior to credibility. Sources with credibility issues - those who are known dissemblers and those who lack insight into the given topic (and those who meet both criteria like Newt Gingrich) - are given access because they represent powerful constituencies, factions and/or audiences that the news organization can't afford to piss off. - gnarlytrombone

@gnarlytrombone So Newt Gingrich gets his own blog at the NYT, in Dave's repeated vision, and is subject to the same organic, open process as every other source. - Ryan Sholin

My only criteria is that if they're good enough to get quoted in the Times they can have a blog. You guys underestimate people's bullshit detectors. We don't need anyone to hold our hands, we suspect everything we read in the paper and hear on radio or TV no matter who's saying it. Even well-intentioned people lie deliberately sometimes and often unintentionally. - Dave Winer

Right. But what then is the point of the "Times?" Isn't that just a brand name for a closed system of "editorial judgment," whether that judgment lies in selecting sources for an article or in selecting sources to blog? - gnarlytrombone

It's worth noting that wrongly detecting non-existent bullshit is probably approximately as harmful as missing it. False positives are bad too. Trust is (obviously) critically important, since it's what helps protect against the false bullshit positives, and third-parties who report, verify, synthesize, filter, curate, etc., multiple stories over time seem like great resources for... more... - Josh Young

Dave Winer

Re: RSS is dead? My ass... (Scripting News) - http://www.scripting.com/stories...

May 7, 2009 from Disqus - Comment - Like - Share

CyberCoder and Andy Angelos liked this

"I use Twitter as an RSS aggregator. http://twitter.com/friends... Literally that's what it's doing here. Reading the RSS feeds of my friends and posting a tweet with a link when one of them updates. My regular RSS stream only has news feeds in it, not feeds from my friends, and I found I was missing them. So I created this and folded it into my Twitter flow. It now has its own bookmark in my chrom, the third link after GMail and Twitter. Dave" - Dave Winer

Chris Brogan

There's more than one way to skin the revenue cat - http://www.37signals.com/svn...

July 7, 2008 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

LinkingIndiana, Andy Angelos, Chris Bonney and 2 other people liked this

selling a product or service has yet to go out of style - joshuabacker

Social Media Club: Kristie Wells

Simple sabotage | Everything is Miscellaneous - http://www.everythingismiscellaneous.com/2008...

June 12, 2008 from Bookmarklet - Comment - Like - Share

Andy Angelos, Chris Heuer and Francine Hardaway liked this

This is quite an important post from David Weinberger - great ammo for explaining why being social, being courageous and embracing change is valuable. - Kristie Wells

Louis Gray

Will RSS Ever Go Mainstream? - http://feeds.copyblogger.com/~r...

April 9, 2008 from Google Reader - Comment - Like - Share

Christopher Yeo, Franklin Pettit, yuzuru and 12 other people liked this

No, I don't think so. Most people just like to kick back and watch TV. However, those who rabidly consume RSS will be better prepared and advantage. - Mike Reynolds

15 more comments

RSS is already mainstream, but requires disguise via personal homepages and updates of Facebook or MySpace. People are intimidated by acronyms for some reason. - Andy Angelos

Eventually our refrigerators will be transmitting, or receiving, something very much like an RSS feed. (And it won't be a Flickr meme.) By definition, under the hood communications are under the hood. Then there is the 10% of the population like me that can spell RSS, and the 1% of the population (the rest of you) who actually understand it. - Ontario Emperor

Most of my family and friends would give me a funny look if I asked them what RSS is. They still just use email for sending messages and mostly only read MSM websites. I don't see them using RSS unless it's for things like what Andy said above in Facebook where they don't know that it's RSS, only what it does. - Devin Anderson

Wait a minute - how did refrigerators get involved? RSS will need to be called something else and painted in a different color (I nominate puce) before it's accepted by the general public. I love my GReader but it's going to have to get *much* prettier than that. - Carla Thompson

I *like* Ontario's comment. - Mike Reynolds

How about when companies use it more? You get employees used to RSS feeds at the office, they'll start to understand them. I think exposure is key - setting up an RSS reader isn't as interesting as say...joining Facebook. Left to their own devices, it's going to take a while for consumers to adopt. - Hutch Carpenter

RSS is such a daily part of my life, that I think I mistook it as being mainstream. I had no idea it wasn't. That said, I'm pretty sure my mom doesn't know what an RSS feed is. For me, though... if it doesn't have RSS, I'm not really interested. - Vince DeGeorge

RSS as a protocol, for behind the scenes stuff, will. But raw consumption of RSS feeds will not. Traditional feed readers are for geeks - Aviv

I'm interested to know if people are using "RSS" here in a generic way, to mean a feed. Ontario Emperor is right that it will be under the hood, but it will be Atom (syndication and publishing) doing interesting and pervasive things rather than RSS. - Michael C. Harris

Will SMTP ever go mainstream? Most people I talk to have never even heard of it. - Paul Buchheit

@Jason Kaneshiro Even casual users like the idea of a one-stop shop for all your news, though. At least the ones I've spoken with. I do think Ontario and Alltop are on the right track, that we can't call it RSS and we need to shove it under the covers. - Carla Thompson

/me likes integration of RSS into XHTML2 e.g. <h1 rel="rss:title">My blog post</h1>. HTML is already designed to be media and layout neutral so there's nothing that says it can't be used as a subscription format too, as that would get rid of an additional redundant output format. - Philipp Lenssen

Mainstream doesn't care what RSS is or how it works, as long as it fills a need. Yes, it will go mainstream but probably not as RSS. To Paul's point - email is what matters, protocol (technology) is irrelevant. - MiaD

As more and more services do interesting things with RSS, the usage will continue to increase. FriendFeed is a great example of a site that users don't have to know what RSS is to take advantage of the benefits. - Caleb Elston

I'm thinking this through. "Email" and "IM" have become generic terms that don't hint at the underlying protocols. Perhaps the word "feed" will become genericized in a similar fashion, probably as a verb (I'm gonna feed my car's gas consumption). And Carla, I'm not a fan of puce. - Ontario Emperor

@Ontario lol. cerulean then? persimmon? - Carla Thompson

Dave Winer

They're talking about creating jobs in the US. "Insourcing."

April 2, 2008 from Twitter - Comment - Like - Share

Andy Angelos liked this

Isn't the US still #1 globally for the number of insourced jobs? - Cornelius Toole

Dave Winer

Where did you have your great idea? - http://www.scripting.com/stories...

March 31, 2008 from Scripting News - Comment - Like - Share

Varun Mahajan, Tom Carroll, Andy Angelos and 2 other people liked this

Louis Gray

Can you tell me some twitter secrets? - http://readburner.wordpress.com/2008...