Where journalists and bloggers fear to roam

The lead off panel this morning at FING is about the media. Pretty broad, yes, but it’s interesting to see a representative of CNET paired with someone who seems to represent the avant-blog… i.e. that “citizen journalism” (which is not really journalism in my view, but local reportage) will eventually shrink the 250 or so Le Monde journalists currently on the roles (apologies if my comprehension is lacking as the French still foils me).

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the role of journalism in society lately, owing to a book called Backstory that I found on the sidewalk on my way to catch the N line. It’s helped me to reconsider and analyze my thinking and the timely discussion about “citizen media”, “citizen journalism” and the Wall Streetifcation of newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune.

Invariably there is a need for journalists, just as there is a need for chefs. Though the raw ingredients of any story are plentiful, it’s how they are assembled and the experience and presentation (as in, context) that makes something not merely palatable but actually satisfying. In that respect, the role of a journalist in society is to inform, to question, to foment debate by adding new ingredients to a story to spice things up. Additionally, they are able to expand and recontextual the main course in the context of a meal, something that “citizen reporters” rarely do — or need to, for that matter, owing to the shared local knowledge of their audience.

The guy from CNET argues that neither blogging and citizen media or journalism will necessarily continue as they are today — that instead, the media companies of the future will exploit many sources of information (including company databases that are currently private as well as authentic media), cultivate “information professionals”, and create context for stories that citizen reporters can not or do not have the time to create.

But the journalist is not going away — not as a discipline. To think so is foolish, just as suggesting that scientists are going away because Makezine is becoming popular. The rise of the amateur does not imply the demise of the professional, rather it signifies the continuation of the great sorting out that is going on, as suggested by Friedman. And in this case, it seems to me that if we are to make the best of it, we will rediscover and help redirect professionals back into the roles that they first trained for and originally desired to fulfil. Rather than writing to “please an audience” or “sell more papers”, the journalists of the future (in the original sense of the word, not the Wall Street version) will act on our behalf, helping us to understand and mediate the vast quantities of information that will surely be upon us all in short order.

Now in France

FING logoAfter something like 15 hours of flying or whatever, here I am, in France!

Things are good so far — staying with Christophe Aguiton of France Telecom and traveling south to Aix-en-Provence momentarily to meet up with the rest of the crew, I’m here to present on BarCamp, WineCamp, and Coworking at FING and BarCampParis. What I’m most interested in is what these folks are up to — and seeing how international solidarity and collaboration can further the plight of the modern independent. After all, they’ve got a bit of a head start on us, considering their history.

Change is good

oink. moo. yup.

In case you missed it (and I don’t really blog too much about personal stuff much, but it’s okay to be a little human once and again), Tara and Riya have bid each other their farewells and both are moving on to the next chapters of their storied Web 2.0 lives. Not unlike a certain fella you may know. Hmmh. Funny, n’est-ce pas?

We also packed up most of my stuff from Teh Langpad this weekend and moved it over to Tara’s place where I’ve pretty much been livin’ anyway. But yeah. Ho boy.

And, as you know, Teh Space is off and running. Like, a real workspace (but it’s still not the same as finally having something of a home). But still.

Oh, and tomorrow I leave for France until Sunday. Yowza.

And did I mention Picoformats (shuddup, yes I am serious)?

Comrade TaraWell, anyway, this whole post is really about Tara and how brave she is to be going out on her own in all this. There’s a lot that she has to figure out, but even more opportunity that she needs to figure out how to make the most of it… I’m proud to be her PiC and to watch eagerly as she ponders her next steps and where she’ll lead the Pinko Brigades from this point onward.

I’ll tell you one thing, it only gets more interesting from here.

Privacy? What privacy?

Privacy Hoax

I had an interesting exchange at the Net Squared conference last week involving privacy and tags. It came down to a question from someone new to tags: “So if you tag everything with this tag, doesn’t that mean that everyone can find what you’ve tagged?”

The answer is, of course, yes.

Which drew some rather wide eyes and a breath, “Oh”.

And that’s when I went off on my anti-privacy rant. About how privacy is like sand between your fingers and that the more you try to hold on to it, the less you really can maintain control over. And subsequently, over time, more and more spills out into the hands of others, often those who you least expect or want to have information about you.

Like the government or like your paranoid employer beholden to laws of the government. Like insurance companies or the folks who run the ATM card networks. Like people who determine how much you should pay for certain things.

Anyway, sniveling aside, a long time ago I decided that there is no privacy in anything digital (which is both a beautiful and a terrifying thing, depending on how much you know about technology). Knowing a bit myself, but not quite enough, I’ve decided to try and flood the network with as much information about myself as possible in the naive and desperate hope that by creating more positive and truthful information I can counter whatever lies may someday be advanced against what I’m really up to. I mean, when the government is spying on your cell phone calls, your boss is paying people to read your emails and who knows who’s snooping on your WiFi connection, what else can you do? Certainly not pretend that you have an iota of privacy anymore! Enh, whatev. At least the kids get it.

Stunning infringement

Stunning infringement

The next brouhaha? Or is it jsut my lack of understanding of IP law showing again? Here at the FactoryCity, we make the news, you decide (Tim would be so disappointed in me, stirring shit up again!)!

But, the point is this: is the recent collaboration between Yahoo-Flickr-Nikon a legitimate re-use of people’s photos with commercial intent? Or, in the case that photos are explicitly designated as licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license, as in the case of Flickr employee Heather Champ, is the license simply being ignored? (Heh, not to mention the fact that featured photo was taken with a Canon Digital Rebel, but I digress.)

I mean, this is really interesting. I guess I don’t care so much about there being product placement on Flickr where it’s relevant — I mean, Scott Beale and Thomas Hawk take awesome photos with Canon EOS‘ — that’s useful information! And now I want to buy a Canon EOS 5D!

But to go all out with some lame-ass big bucks ad campaign not of the community smacks of Chevy Tahoeism. And frankly, turns me off. Oh well.

So how about them licenses? Am I shooting blanks here or, if your photos are showing up in Nikon’s campaign, are ya feelin’ a bit taken advantage of? After all, the TOS say very clearly that “What’s Yours is Yours”. So what’s the deal here? Eh eh?

Teh Space kick off meeting tonight

Schlomo's pad

In case you’ve been following the work that we’ve been doing on coworking at Teh Space, we’ve finally found a place in dogpatch over at Schlomo’s pad at 801 Minnesota!

So tonight we’re having a kick-off meeting to get things going. We’ll talk about governance, the organization of the space, who’s going to serve as the initial anchors and how the heck we’re going to pay for it. Things should start at 6:30pm and if you can’t make it, no worries, we’ll post a summary on the wiki and mailing list and keep the discussion going beyond tonight’s initial kick-off.

→ Oh, and if you definitely want in, please make sure to add your desired time allotment to the wiki!

P.S. David Crow, do your homework and get out your business plan! The Innovation Commons is counting on you!

Blowing up trademarks

Ian Betteridge provides me an opportunity to clarify what I meant in my post on Why BarCamp is a Community Mark.

In strewing together patents, copyright and trademark, I created what he refers to as a specious argument, which, after having looked it up, means that it sounds good on the surface to the point of making sense but ultimately is wrong. Given the structure of my argument and how he interpreted what I said, I would actually agree with him.

But that’s because I was commenting on the need to reexamine all US intellectual property laws in light of the recent “Web 2.0” brouhaha, and in particular, trademark, since copyright is essentially debunked with Creative Commons and patents, well, they’re a whole different can of fish.

Let me rephrase my argument thus: Trademarks do not stifle innovation (unlike copyright and patents). They do, instead, inhibit distributed ownership of a mark or symbol, and when it comes to an idea that a community strongly connects with or takes at least partial ownership, trying to wrest it out of the hands of that community will result in the kind of tantrum we witnessed recently.

Have you ever taken a pacifier away from a contently suckling 2-year-old? Exactly.

(And I offer that metaphor not as a commentary on the behavior of anyone but to give you an idea of the attachment one might form with something it identifies as its own, even if, clearly, it’s the property of the parent who purchased it).

So, if we’re to move into a productive discourse about this area of IP, let’s, shall we?

Ian poses two questions to me in his post:

  1. Can anyone give an example where trademark law – NOT patents or copyright – has been used to stifle innovation or damage the interests of consumers (and no, the O’Reilly spat can’t be used – the facts of the case aren’t exactly clear, especially if you read Tim O’Reilly’s response).
  2. If trademark law was removed from the statute books tomorrow, what would be the consequences?

To the first, I’d argue that that’s not really my point, at least in terms of stifling innovation, nor the reason why trademark must be considered.

He does combine the notion of “[damaging] the interests of consumers”, but I don’t think that’s actually the argument I’m making either. In fact, I’m more interested in the plight of Tim O’Reilly — and what he might have done differently — besides sending out the C&D letter — to protect or enforce his organization’s mark. Let me be clear: it’s important that people receive due credit for the work that they do and the ideas that they generate (and, to counter Mr Douglas’ suggestion, I have always called myself a co-organizer of the first BarCamp — pfffbttt). This is a tenant of open source chivalry and at the cornerstone of a meritocratic system.

Trademark law was designed to stop people from using a mark in unsanctioned ways — and requires obvious enforcement efforts in order to sanctify your ownership of that mark: fail to protect it, you lose your legal protections.

So what the whole idea of a Community Mark is to proactively look at this situation — at the impossibility and huge expense of trademark enforcement on the web — and find some balanced approach whereby the cost of enforcement is thrust upon those who use the term most and belong to the original creative community. I don’t think that anyone would argue that the O’Reilly camp didn’t help advance the Web 2.0 concept and phrase — just like Adaptive Path-man JJG pushed forward the term AJAX for technologies that had been in use on the web forever. The difference, as it played out last week, was that the legal department at CMP decided to try to enforce their legal protections, and got biatch-slapped because the community felt betrayed (well, in particular, Tom Raftery). His response could have easily been predicted, as it was a human one, and ended up with everyone feeling a bit indignant about how the witchhunt gathered force so quickly in the absense of an official “Tim” response (just like the response to Cheney’s shotgun wedding after 24 hours of silence).

A Community Mark is a pragmatic reconsideration of the kind of laws that were written long before we had the internet and instant forms of mass communication. And just like the Dean campaign or the Spread Firefox NYTimes campaign, time and time again it’s been shown that if you rely on your community in real ways, and give them influence of your destiny, they will come out to support you — and most notably — protect you.

DHX: The audience is hacking

DHX: The Audience Is Hacking

In case you haven’t heard, this weekend is the 10th SuperHappyDevHouse, otherwise known as “DHX” and will be held at France Telecom’s South San Francisco HQ.

This devhouse is different than previous devhouses in that it’s taking place somewhere other than David Weekly‘s house and it’s also being run as a contest to see who can build the best self-sustaining and self-running money-printing machine in a weekend.

As David says in this video (from Ryanne), if you can build a business in a weekend (like he did with PBWiki) that says something pretty interesting about the time that we’re living in (not to mention the irrational exuberance picking up again).

Read the competition FAQ and then go sign up on the wiki. Oh, and there’ll be a party this Friday kicking off at 7pm, leading into the weekend-long event.

Bonus trivia: all proceeds will be donated to the CCCP.