Cloud computing and its affects on free speech

As journalists maybe we should be a bit worried about major software giant’s who champion the development of cloud computing. Journalists really only have one stock to trade on and that is trust, although they should also have some shares in honesty. Without these it’s unrealistic to expect people to be interested in what we’re writing, broadcasting or blogging.

Now if all your work was published on Google’s mainframes does that not mean that Google is your editor? Only thing is I’m not too sure about having Google as my editor. Its principles aren’t really the same. You may well remember that Google, along with Microsoft and Yahoo, has been complicit with the Chinese government in blocking pages which criticise the regime. There are powerful economic reasons for doing this but it is not a course of action that is compatible with good journalism.

Would I trust them to publish my content if it was on a hot topic of the day? I have little reason to believe that the UK government would pressure Google to remove my controversial stories from its mainframes in the same way, but we are talking about instituting a system for many years to come, not just the here and now. Make no mistake, cloud computing is expensive and it would take some time to disperse it if it were to become the norm.

Google works at the whim of the market and what is good for business is not always good for free speech. Robert Petson has been accused of playing a part in the financial crisis arguing that his reporting of it further undermined markets which led to companies failing. Is it possible that had Google been publishing his material they might have been inclined to remover or sabotage it for fear of affecting their stock price as markets slumped. Obviously we don’t know, but we do know that they are inclined to chose economic advantage over an ethical one, as their part in China’s great firewall shows us.

If google were to do this to sure up their own stock, it would affect journalists stock of trust in the oposite direction. The question is: Do journalists really want to be put in such a vulnerable position, for the sake of a bit of convenient file sharing? Let us write for to improve our own market price not someone elses.

Image by mellowbox

Personal branding: Peston and Coke

It is quite possible that journalism has entered a virtual world where the brand of an individual has the potential to be as powerful as the brand of a multi national. Martin Lewis and Robert Peston are perhaps the two most obvious examples of this. They have become the go-to-pundits for money saving and impending financial doom respectively.

What do these two have in common? Besides an in-depth knowledge of their subject, good journalistic skills and some flare for self promotion. They all have an audience which is pretty web literate.

It is fair to assume that Mr Peston’s business audience are likely to be tech savvy. Mr Lewis’s audience is less easy to identify but given that he has built his reputation off the back of a website, they are obviously big web users.

Is it possible to build a personal brand using web publishing (no-other means allows you to be a one man band in this way) in an area where the your audience is less tech savvy? The truly great brands, such as Coca Cola, have a recognition which goes further than their immediate customer base. Is it really possible for an individual to do this?

This study claims that web users are primarily 18-49, which seems fairly logical to me. So is it possible to sustain a self branded career if your audience is pensioners.

Taking the risk that is resorting to stereo type, I have tried to find any blogs or correspondents who write about crown-green bowls, this being synonymous with retirement. I have resolutely failed to do so. However i did turn up a number of news and views pages from local clubs or larger umbrella sites.

This in itself is far from conclusive. It's possible I've identified a gap in the market but i think it more likely that we are not about to turn the brand model on it's head just yet. Until the digital revolution reaches a larger spread of the population Mr Peston's brand is unlikely to rival that of coca-cola.

Everything you ever needed to know about online journalism

This took a couple of weeks for Eva and I to put together but finally here it is. There's a lot of talk in the online world about how this web 2.0 malarkey is going to change the way journalists work. You could read about it on thousands of blog posts or you could just watch this.

Policing contempt law on the web

This last week the web has been coming into quite a bit of conflict with the law. The cases of Baby P and the leaked BNP list raise questions for how our legal system safeguards information in a world where it changes hands so rapidly with only minimal accountability.

In both cases information that is potentially damaging to people involved has found its way into the public domain in spite of the co-operation of the big media channels. To distribute either the BNP list or certain information in the Baby P case would be breaking either an injunction or court reporting restrictions and potentially leave you open to being found guilty of contempt. It’s still happening.

So there are two options either further cyber police are needed to lock all the virtual doors, or we just let everyone have it.

The first is too expensive and most probably won’t work.

The second option could leave all sorts of sensitive information in the public domain. The names of the people in the Baby P case are widely available, even by text, despite the fact that they may threaten future legal proceedings.

Perhaps what we need to do is move towards a system where the onus is on the jury to exclude this material from their decision, rather than ban the press from distributing it. After all is the reason that people want to know this information not at least partly linked to the fact that they are not allowed to.

Derren Brown knows the power of this all too well.

What might this new law look like?

Well I should probably start by saying that no-one really knows. Even any solution devised today may well be outdated tomorrow. The internet moves fast; Westminster does not.

It seems clear that we have to trust jurors to do their job properly and stop viewing them as the weak link in the chain. Perhaps the only way to gain that trust is to study their workings. This is still prohibited by today’s law.

New contempt laws might:

• Allow publication of material, but put emphasis on the jury to exclude this information.
• Include provisions for extra days to give jurors detailed guidance on what they can and cannot consider.
• Put up jurors in a hotel without access to the net or other media.
• Monitor media use from their homes for the period of the trial.
• Allow for jury members to be struck off or replaced at early stages if they are found to be taking onboard outside influence.
• Include harsher penalties for obvious use of outside influence.
• A thirteenth lay person to monitor impartiality in each case.
• Allow better external monitoring of decision making to refine the system, but not to influence individual cases.

These are just ideas and at this moment in time there is nothing more concrete in place. The contempt of court laws look set to remain inadequate for some time yet.

Ten Commandments of Successful Blogging

This week I was lucky enough to be at a lecture by Adam Tinworth on the art of the successful blogger. Drawing on some of the things he and a few others have said, my own experience and the bible; I give you my Ten Commandments of Successful Blogging.

1. Thy god is SEO
Everything you write has to be found. Make sure that happens.

2. Thou shall always be honest
Even in cyberspace it’s still the best policy.

3. Thou shall choose a subject and stick to it
People don’t want to wade through all your thoughts on 100 different things. If you have that much to say get 100 blogs.

4. Thou shall be informed on your subject
If you don’t know say so, then get to know.

5. Thou shall have a conversation with your readers
If they bothered to read what you write and then write back it’s the least you can do to do the same.

6. Thou shall link, link and link again
No one knows your here unless you link to stuff, then they’ll link to you and everyone is happy.

7. Thou shall keep it short and simple
Size really doesn’t matter.

8. Thou shall be visual
Pictures speak 100 words (video speaks more) and blog posts should never be 100 words. The conclusion is obvious.

9. Thou shall post regularly and often
If you want to keep people coming back.

10. Thou shall occasionally break the rules
No one ever got successful sticking to the rules on silly blog posts.

Image by Ben Brown

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Swansea Accordion Orchestra

Ever wanted to hear famous show tunes played by a group of accordions? Well that's exactly what you can get at the Millennium Centre on 16 November. I went to have a chat with Swansea Accordion Orchestra last night for alt.Cardiff and they were both highly entertaining and welcoming.

Who’s setting the media agenda?

It’s a question that seems to become more pertinent by the day: is the blog sphere now setting the media agenda or is it just reacting to the stories of the mainstream media?

This week we have seen a good example that could be used to make either point. The hysteria induced by Jonathan Ross and Russel Brand’s calls to Andrew Sachs would, on the surface, appear to be a case of public outcry fuelled by YouTube. Real grass roots indignation that sent complaints at the BBC to record numbers. That is until you remember that this was prompted by, the guardian of all our moral fibres, The Daily Mail.

Before we get any further into this I should add that my position is one of total ambivalence. I fail to see how this is offensive to anyone other than Andrew Sachs, who has to date accepted the unqualified apology given and even gone as far as to say he understands the that performances sometimes go wrong.

A quick cruise around the blogsphere reveals quite a similar story. Many seem non-pulsed by all the fuss. Even the BBC’s own feedback ghetto is more balanced than most of the media coverage. Presumably the multitude that wrote complaints do not write blogs.

It seems odd given the extraordinary amount of coverage this has generated (I’ve seen BBC Director General Mark Thompson on TV twice this week, having returned early from holiday) that this view does not seem to have gained more prominence. Instead the papers have firmly set this agenda of going for Aunty’s jugular. Yet curiously the voice of the bloggers seems to be ignored.

Perhaps the most telling thing is how this demonstrates big media’s desire to pick and choose its areas for interaction with its audience. Along with its refusal to give up the reigns of agenda setting. On this occasion it seems that a witch-hunt led by the newspapers has won out over a much more balanced view from people’s couches.

Telling stories with pictures

‘A picture is worth 1000 words.’ At least that’s how the saying goes. So how many words does a video say; or stills plus voiceover; or interactive clickable maps containing video, pictures and audio? It all depends what you’re trying to say I guess. Journalists are in the business of telling stories and, more often than not, telling them efficiently. So anything that says 1000 words while keeping me in my word count sounds like a good idea to me.

It would seem that the best, and most obvious, application of multi-media is for human interest stories or to give a personal angle to universal issues. All this week BBC Breakfast's Richard Westcott has been running reports on how the credit crunch has hit real people. This has been done in a pretty traditional way. I can't help but think that they've missed a trick here. This is an ideal opportunity to get people involved in the reporting of their stories. Instead they remain the subject rather than the creator of their own news.

It seems there is a real lesson about the difference between timeliness and topicality here. Many of the times when users create their own stories with big media it's relegated to either stories that aren't time sensitive or soft stories which may not even fall into the category of news. While working with citizens to tell their own stories is unlikely to be able to cover breaking events, it could be used to deal with harder issues which are still relevant in the here and now.

There would be huge scope for a series of citizen generated stories to move into an online environment after its 1 week run. People will still undoubtedly have stories to tell and I suspect there will still be people willing to listen. The recession is not about to disappear tomorrow. It'd offer a new perspective on a series of events that has, so far, been focused very much on the elites of bankers, politicians and big businessmen.

Could we not have a patchwork of storytelling from everyone else affected by it? Would that not be an interesting angle and perhaps it would tell that story in a more effective way than traditional talking heads ever could.

Just because we are not in the business of writing history does not mean we cannot help people document it. Westcott's reports will most probably be consigned to the archives in future years. If the public had ownership is it not possible they would create a documentation that's timeless?

The Revolution Will Not Be Blogged

Is the idea of networked journalism really so different? Has it not always been the case that “professional journalists” have sought to maintain a set of contacts in their given specialism? Have these contacts not always informed the journalist's reports as either source, specialist or outspoken viewer? Sure the internet has made this process more fluid and we now have an instant means of reply, (which we did not have before) our networks of contacts are now bigger, more global, but it’s still just people that are typing those tweets to you.

Fact is that journalist have always needed participation of other people in order to report news. We have always needed to know how houses were blown away; what it felt like to lose a son or where those pesky kids really went in their bus at the weekends. We’ve also always had the means to listen back through the traditional means of communication.

So what’s changed? Well the speed with which all these stages can take place seems to be a key factor. We are writing news not history here, by the time the mail bags get heavy enough with reaction a story may well have run it’s course. In the net age however people demand up to the minute information and so we need to give them up to the minute reporting. One of the only ways to do this is to have big, mobile, communicative networks of people. This means the information more and more has to come from those individuals with the shortest time lag between them and events. That, more often than not, is the public. Consumers demand it and so journalists must supply it, this much is clear.

Not so clear however is how, if at all, the public should be involved in the editorial process. Do they decide what they want to see. Well I’m fairly sure they do this already, by not reading the stuff they don’t want to. Could they suggest story ideas, like on spot.us? I’m pretty sure they already do that as well, isn’t that what comments sections are for? If journalists just aren’t paying attention that’s a different matter. They already write up their own stories on blogs, so what is the role of the professional in this exchange?

It seems professionals are destined to be the dispensers of the seal of approval or the teachers in a new age of journalism as a collaborative classroom. Our role is to facilitate the telling of people’s stories in an accurate, articulate and informed way. That to me doesn’t sound far from what has been going on for years, it’s just we may not always be doing the telling anymore.

Can web 2.0 win the US Election?

There is much to be said for and against the democratic potential of web 2.0. Now the masses own the means of productions what’s to stop them really taking over? The potential is clear but the situation is unprecedented, so it’s not possible to be sure how it’ll affect things.

There is however a very important political event on the horizon and its interesting to note how the world of web 2.0 is going to play it’s part. The US election seems to generate just as many blog posts as the impending recession (possibly because no-one really understands the latter). The two candidates seem to suffer quite a gap in their use of this medium. Obama has substantial list of web 2.0 applications on his FrontPage to engage supporters with. McCain’s site, by comparison, does link out to Facebook but seems to have little else, even though he does have a Twitter account (which I have found) and a MySpace page (which I haven’t). This is not to say they don’t exist but it does make it difficult to see them as part of a joined-up campaign. McCain even seems to be taking on these established names at their own game with McCainSpace. Here you can share opinions, post videos and watch his campaign adverts. It seems unlikely to me that this would attract a wider audience in the way the MyFace complex would, but it may galvanise his present supporter base.

The number of supporters that they attract online is also vastly different. The numbers of supporters on their respective face book profiles differ so radically I have to question their accuracy. Their Twitter accounts are less marked by Obama still has nearly 50 times more followers. Unfortunately membership numbers for McCainSpace don’t seem to be published.

So it looks like a landslide for Obama. Maybe he can just sit back with a G ’n’ T until November 4th. However some polls have them as close as four points apart. This serves to highlight how web 2.0 is not yet functioning as the engine of democracy which it has the potential to be. McCain has focused on traditional media and it arguably has done him little harm. Obama on the other hand has a strong web 2.0 presence which may be (at the risk of confusing correlation and cause) a decisive factor in his popularity amongst younger voters, who are more likely to be engaged in it’s applications.

There are other factors concerning the socio-political breakdown of web users; the suitability of the web as a forum for meaningful discussion and it’s increased compartmentalisation, than there is room for here. However the numbers do a lot of the talking for themselves. Web 2.0 will not decide this election, but it is still evolving and it’s importance may well grow to a point where no candidate will be able to ignore it.