While professional journalism strives to be objective and unbiased, it is difficult for professional journalists to be unbiased. After all, they are not monks. But it irks me that they have financial and professional incentives to hide their biased viewpoints leaving their readers exposed to bias leak and slip between words. FYI, I am biased on this issue.
Scott Rosenberg's piece about the Davos reporter who got caught saying what she really thinks. [Scripting News]
InfoWorld's new design is driving me nuts. Despite being old, it still has stories I want to read, but the new design bothers the heck out me like I am staring at some health insurance brochure. I want to be able to view websites the way I want to and not be forced into web designer's latest whim. I want to use webskins to view webpages. Webskins can be general or site/page/fragment specific. Whenever I am viewing a site, I should be able to click on a bookmarklet like Jon Udell's LibraryLookup to find a selection of webskins I can use for a particular website or webpage I was looking at. I hope I don't have to build this myself. I got more distractions than I can deal with at the moment.
Update: I found a commercial ASP.NET component called Xheo.WebSkin that can be used to build skinnable websites. This is a server-side solution for those who have control over the website. Webskins I have in mind morph web content on the receiving end, clients and proxies, and at not the website. Legal rammifications are there but I think 'reasonable use' of web content applies here. If I listen to Madonna's songs underwater, am I violating some law?
Come to think of it, maybe I should call this WebLens or WebLenz (weblens.com is not available but weblenz.com is).
OhMyNews.com is an online Korean newspaper whose motto is Every Citizen is a Reporter. They classify themselves as a News Guerilla Organization. Their reporters are average Korean citizens who sign-up as ohmynews members to write articles for the newspaper. Members post articles and images for OhMyNews editorial staff to examine and edit before publishing. This happens four times a day.
OhMyNews is so successful that most Korean Internet users are aware of it. Even Koreans living oversea like me read it daily. All the politicians are aware of it. To say OhMyNews is influential in Korea is to underestimate its power. Recent candlelight vigil in the honor of two Korean girls overran by American tanks were started by an OhMyNews member. The vigil turned into a major anti-American and anti-conservative movement that, almost everyone in Korea admits, contributed to Mr. Roh Moo-hyun winning the presidential election over his conservative rival Lee Hwae-chang. Is that powerful or what?
OhMyNews articles tend to be biased toward liberal views and each article drips with emotions and subjective judgements. Still, they usually reveal details not reported by major newspapers. These details were collected face to face by members themselves or by a friend of a friend. You can tell that they took the time and care to sit down with people involved in the story and talked with them heart to heart without concerns for deadlines nor news worthyness.
Are they journalists? Probably not in the traditional sense. What one cannot dispute is that what they write are worth spending some of my time to read. Isn't that enough? I wish we had something like OhMyNews in America that can broadcast American citizen's voice unfiltered instead of out of context soundbytes, twisted and arranged to fit around professional reporters' objective news article, and millions of individual thoughts grounded down into a poll artificially spiked to make it interesting.
My website, docuverse.com, was down for a while for unknown reasons. Thankfully, Kattare.com admin fixed it in a few minutes. I appologize if you missed me. 😉
Three Degrees is way cool. Its website is also cool. Its so cool, its creeping me out. Why? Because its a Microsoft product. I am used to Microsoft putting out a shitty product and then polish it into a monster product while everyone is laughing at the first release. I am not used to Microsoft putting out really creative product like Three Degree. Its freaking scary!
So here I go – anxiously downloading the beta version of Microsoft's new Three Degrees product – and OOOooops – it only works with XP. This is what I've been trying to tell people – Microsoft has no intention of supporting anything before XP. [Marc's Voice]
Marc seems upset that Three Degrees works only on XP. Why not? New machines and new platforms are where the money is flowing fastest. Those outdated 800 million PCs out there are owned by folks who are either happy with what they have or can't afford to buy latest machines. Neither group are likely to buy new software. Sure its a Swiss Cheese of an argument, but I have been a consultant for 20 years and I know where consulting dollars are being readily spent: at the bleeding edge.
When I travel, I avoid travel guides like the flu. Still, I miss not learning about the history and details only locals and fellow exploreres might know. Here is a fun application of moblog and audiolog that could solve that problem.
With location service-enabled cellphones, post audiologs about the location and its surroundings for other mobloggers to listen to when they are in the area. Now mobloggers will not have to follow travel guides around when they visit tourist spots. Imagine standing in some remote spot and listening to a GuideLog post that turns out to be a suicide audiolog. Hmm. Are those bones or what?
I wrote about bloggers being ants without realizing that Joi Ito and others were having similar thoughts almost at the same time: synchrony in blogspace. Individual thoughts, shared in the past over blogs, combine to become the environment itself like the sky and the weather over ants, gently coaxing all of us to have same thoughts at the same time. Come to think of it, intellects may be as vain as people who feel compelled to follow the latest fashion.
A little exploration into how blogs and newspapers can be combined to create a new type of journalism. Your comments are immensely welcome.
NewsGator 1.0 is released and its real cool. It extends Outlook with RSS news aggregation feature. Integration is really smooth without apparent seams. I played around with something real similar sometime back, but got sidetracked into Python. Its a mixed feeling to see my own idea realized by someone else, but I like NewsGator.
Don Park's Weekly Habit 