While the internet, and its capacity for easy video and photo publication, have created this conflict, it seems to me that the central legal issue predates the “web difference”: Are professional sports matches either (1) news events that reporters should be free to photograph, record and write about as much as they want, or (2) proprietary works “owned” by the league, which a reporter can’t justify recording and posting online any more than he could a live musical. The answer, of course, probably lies somewhere in between.

Either way, I think the leagues are approaching the issue in a terribly short-sighted way. Seems to me that any damage done to their bottom line by losing eyeballs to blogs and news outlets is dramatically outweighed by the positives that come with media attention. By exercising too tight a grip on coverage of their games, the leagues risk alienating the media, and ultimately their fans.

Also, here is an old article (from last summer) about Obama’s web campaign.

1:10 JP wonders whether we are making a difference in the reshaping of the media environment. We want to take a skeptical look at whether the changes in media are also changing the world. Often we have a habit of saying there is a difference in the media, but not looking at whether this causes is a difference in the world. Perhaps the new media is just replacing the old media, with the outside world remaining the same. So how much of a difference is the Web and new media actually making?

1:15 Ethan shows us a video of Alisa Miller giving a talk on Global News. The video began with a graphic showing how US-centric the US media is (though there is a lot of news from Iraq, for obvious reasons). The video looked at why we don’t hear as much about the outside world. US media has cut back on its foreign bureaus – a factor of economics primarily. Alisa Miller works at PRI (public radio international). Like Miller, Ethan likes to map the content of information on the web – he looks at how many stories are about each country, and uses Google News to do this to get a rough count. Once he gets this rough counts, he considers other demographics about the countries. For example, he may compare how much trading we have with a country to how much media attention it receives. A nations income is the strongest indicator of how much media it will get, along with whether the US is militarily involved in that country.

1:20 Would we get the same distortion results from media outlets in other countries? We do see some distortions, everyone is parochial. A question arises though, what would news look like if it were fair? Do we need to know so much about Britney Spears? Is this helping us function in the global economy? This is the background of Ethan’s work: does the Web change this discussion? Does it change what newspapers do and don’t cover? Does it even matter?

1:25 This brings us to Global Voices. So many people put information on the Web. Does anyone bother reading it? We recall the Shirky graph, showing us that it is very few sites that get most of the attention. JP interrupts – are we just replacing an old hegemony with a new one? Answers seem to take the form of “it depends.” The turnover rate is higher, the number of alternate voices is higher, the information presented is broader but blending of soft and hard news – but with all of this information, does anyone even bother to find it? The barrier to entry is so low, but does anyone cross the line?

1:30 The question then goes to whether there is value is just knowing that the information is out there, even if we don’t read it. How do we get people to want to read the information that is out there? How to we get people to be engaged?

1:40 Global media has a collection layer and a distribution layer. The collection layer, made up partially by AP and Reuters, are very international in their design, but it is very difficult to get an organization to break away from the stories that these agencies deem to be the most important. Ethan’s point is that the blogosphere is essentially the same. They mirror the stories in mainstream media, with a few exceptions. Is there a possibility of changing the agenda through the internet as it relates to the mainstream media?

1:45 A point is made that we are trained early to be western centric – our history classes are taught with a US and Western Europe focus. Right now, in the blogosphere, the three big topics are technology, politics, and beautiful women. There is no problem in getting people to pay attention to this, but how do we get people to pay attention to other things?

1:50 JP wonders what the agenda of the blogosphere is. In the Iran paper, one thing that was clear was the clusters of people that talked about specific topics in Iran, and that they were different than what we expected. There were a large number dealing with high cultural things.

1:55 The interesting thing is that the secular/reformist voices became very popular within the right wing American blogosphere. This was because there is a belief that the opening of the Internet would bring a flourishing of democracy. The Iranian study kind of showed that that was wrong – and that we perhaps have that viewpoint because we have a distorted view (based on mainstream media) of the Iranian blogosphere. The other parts of the Iranian blogosphere are the more interesting parts.

2:00 Global Voices is designed to give a lot of information about parts of the world that don’t get a lot of attention in US mainstream media. However, it’s hard to get people to pay attention to it, and it’s even harder to get mainstream media to pay attention to it. People in our class who looked at different countries on the GV website were surprised by how little they knew about other countries.

2:10 How is GV doing with its mission? Its loved by journalists who want to change the media. Technologists have a problem with it because it is edited on so many levels – by choosing the people who report, by them choosing the blogs to report on, etc. They claim this isn’t “web 2.0.” But do things like Digg and Reddit make the problem of US-centric fluff news worse?

2:20 GV, though it doesn’t have a large audience, tends to reach more journalists and intelligence officials. Does quality matter more over quantity? Should GV be targeting the general public or a small segment of the world who can then reach more people? The press is given special protections because we recognize that they serve a specific function, and have a responsibility to serve us broccoli (the news we should want to get news about).

2:25 We see a video produced about the riots in Nepal, and the western media’s portrayal of the riots. Interesting to see the comments. Right now, the BBC is reporting on anti-BBC sentiment in China, saying they must be being directed by the Chinese government. But maybe there is legitimate anger at the BBC for the way they portray China and the Chinese people. Western media has a hard time picking up news that is contrary to the mainstream viewpoints. So a challenge exists to bring different stories and perspectives to western media.

2:30 JP’s last words – what’s the right question to be asking within the Internet democracy framework within our last few weeks of class? Ethan suggests we look at which Web we’re talking about when we discuss the changes its bringing, because there are other Webs beyond the western web.

BLOGGING

(I made no attempt to credit specific people with ideas/comments, sorry. If you really want credit, feel free to mention it in the comments to this post. –Richard)

CONNECTING TO LAST CLASS:

The relation of blogs to journalism.

Last time – we discussed what we would like in a media system if we were designing it ourselves and came up with a bunch of values (see last class’s blogpost).

· adding “choice” as a value

Kevin at the end of last class raised the point that the values we are seeking are in the system as a whole, but that any individual source need not embody them all.

TODAY: Looking at “News” sites (query whether they are news sites, and how we know):

We started with what seems like a liminal case, somewhere between a news site and a blog:

Huffington Post - · A news aggregator site, kind of like Drudge, with more of a liberal bent, with a focus on media and entertainment as well as politics, and it mixes together blogs with news.

o available at: o Powerlaw – a graph of distribution, logarithmic, not bell shaped, 80-20 rule, with a long tail

o e.g. Amazon.com can sell WAY more books because they can monetize the books which fewer people buy to more people, rather than having to stock only the most popular ones

o Netflix works the same way.

o Anderson argued that we would see more and more businesses monetizing the long tail

· Long-tail blogs:

o Technorati says that they have (4-6) links to them.

o closer relationship to the audience (not mass communication)

§ more personal connection (at least with those who comment) – can we really know that? Maybe it’s not the case at all.

§ it FEELS more attached to (a presumed intimacy with) with blog readers / audience than with book readers, for instance.

o can be more daring with a limited audience

o can deal with more esoteric / specific subjects (less pandering)

o money is less of a factor (lower costs), amateur

The Web Difference Question:

· which form of communication you analogize them to says a lot about how we view blogs.

· does comparing blogs to old media indicate a lack of a web difference or not?

Long story short, Michael Arrington (of TechCrunch fame) was having a long Comcast internet outage this weekend and was none to happy about it. The usual customer service problems ensue… long holds, non-answers, wrong answers. After crashing with a chicken for internet access he tweeted out his anger and within 20 minutes apparently has a call from Comcast.

Some thoughts and a link collection after the jump.

My first reaction is wow, Comcast is actually watching Twitter to see what customers are upset about. That is pretty amazing. However, my second and more cynical reaction is that they probably only pick up the phone and call people that are at least internet famous like Arrington that complain through applications like twitter.

Still, there is no doubt that the whole thing has been amplified by twitter in a huge (and fast) way and it is conceivable that if something was interesting enough to people — regardless of who started it — it could be similarly amped up. Pretty powerful stuff.

Then I guess to answer my first question, if we are going to talk about the blogosphere we should probably start talking about the tweetosphere as well. In fact I’d almost go as far as saying that twitter is today what blogs were about 8 years ago — an internet backwater populated by a relatively small but very tech-savvy userbase. AKA the perfect place to watch generative development.

TweetScan is just one of many interesting developments in the tweetosphere. For example, by searching for Comcast, or any other major brand, a company could easily watch what people are saying about their product in near real time. Want to know if people are a buzz about the new season of BSG? Watch to see what they are tweeting about.

Twitter has a lot of potential to allow consumers to talkback to companies about their products and it will be interesting if other companies are doing (or start doing) what Comcast apparently does — monitoring twitter and blogs generally and then actually using that to try and fix customer problems.

Blog Post about TC at BuzzMachine

TC Story, TC Tweets

UPDATE (3:57): So it seems that my (as well as many others) skepticism may have been misplaced. It seems that this guy actually has an affiliation with Comcast and is working to help a fair number of random people with Comcast issues. Cool.

Why not a pledge for lobbyist? Pledge to give information but not money. This is a good idea and Larry seems to like it as well.

How do you protect this organization from abuse and give it trust? Ummm… Larry doesn’t know. I think the key is to try and keep it bipartisan and out of the ugly political trenches. Is that doable, I don’t know, but it should be a goal.

What is the future? What about gerrymandering? Who knows.

What is the real problem with PACs? They aggregate small donors into real donations. But the problem is the lack of transparency that ends with one entity have amplified power.

6:12 Questions.

Why don’t incumbents support public financing? I think that equal dollars being spent would make incumbents even harder to out.

What do we need? Some victories. That is true. But which issues should be first?

6:10 Congressman Cooper:

The system is hopelessly broken. We have to make change happen. (and he is done, wow that was quick).

6:07 – Is this destined to fail? Can we Change Congress? Perhaps, but nonetheless we need to try. </end>

5:59 – We need lots of people to make this work. People like YOU!

Reagan and Jefferson both feared capture of gov’t. But who is capturing gov’t? It is us. And this is profoundly destructive. (oh and there is the Mickey shout out I alluded to earlier).

5:48 – Earmarks. Not mostly a cost problem, but a corruption and corrosion problem.

Earmark example in OR. I find it interesting that he has used mostly democrat examples. I wonder if this was intentional so that it can’t be easily dismissed by people on the right?

Level 1 of CC (Change Congress, not Creative Commons although that is interesting isn’t it?). A way for candidates and citizens to pledge commitment.

Level 2 of CC. The wiki like tracking function. See Congressman Cooper here.
Level 3 of CC. Emily’s list model, become an organization driving for reform.

5:41 – 88% of people (in the Bay Area at least) believe that money changes outcomes. Even if it doesn’t actually change things everyone believes it. So what do we need to do? Change the role of money.

Public Financing of Elections. Why is gov’t so big? -> B/c congressmen must get elected. Now that is clever. I like it. Could public financing be shown to pay for itself by reducing the size of unnecessary gov’t?

Might this work with “safe” districts?

5:28 – Is the gov’t stupid? Larry says no. The system is just busted. Well doesn’t that mean the gov’t is stupid right now? It just doesn’t require that is has to be stupid forever…

Congressmen are good people just working in a system that drives them to do bad things.

Story about vaccines. The vaccine process might be good,the process just looks very bad. As a result some people don’t vaccinate their kids. That ain’t good.

Shout out to Maxed Out! You go Prof Warren. (ps. Unintentional puns are the best ones.)

5:22 – (c). Gov’t always extend (c) retrospectively. Why does the gov’t get this wrong? I think I saw an ominous Mickey Mouse shadow in the background of the last slide.

Sugar. Ok, that is just scary. But what is gov’t doing telling us what to eat anyway?

Global Warming.

5:18 – <geeks>. Larry was invited to MSFT? Wow. The 90s were crazy (and oh yeah baysian filters, those were the days). But geeks solve problems without thinking about law. I see east coast code vs. west coast code showdown coming (it sort of came…). Geeks think gov’t is hopeless (or just stupid?). My money is on the latter.

5:16 – <teachers>. Drug companies spend lots of money getting doctors to like their products. They also spend lots of money on “false science”. This is a corruption of science.

5:12 – <stories>. So raise your hand if you thought that Lessig would start with Ronald Reagan? I totally dig it but I feel like I might be in the minority on that one.

5:11 – Welcome Larry! (and the lights go down). Ok, the CA weather joke is getting old everybody. We don’t need to be reminded that the weather here sucks. We know every time we look outside.

5:07 – JP giving the introduction. 10th Anniversary of Berkman, happy to welcome back Larry (he has lots of history here). So, if Larry really wants to get this Change Congress thing moving he should probably head back to the East Coast. The shuttle makes it real quick to get down to DC Larry! I’m sure Dean Kagan would go for it. We’ve hired away all of UofC and a good chunk of Yale, we need to get started on Stanford.

5:05 – Tick tock? Congressman Cooper is in the house (or at least his doppleganger)

4:57 – More people watching: room looks ‘full’ though there are a good number of empty seats scattered around. Also, Larry and Terry Fisher have an uncanny resemblance. They were just standing together at the front of the room and but for Larry having his hair slicked back you might have thought they were brothers.

4:49 – A lot more people here now, I totally suck at guessing crowd sizes but I’d say at least twice as many as earlier (maybe even more). No one really exciting in the audience yet (aside from all the Berkman folks of course). However, I probably wouldn’t recognize many internet famous people anyway aside from the Tron Guy and only then if he was in costume.

4:39 – Got a quick preview of the deck, first slide is <stories>. Good looking group so far, I’d say more than 50 people all ready and we are still 20 minutes out.

Oh and Larry just walked in.

_______________________________________________

In a little bit (hopefully around 5?) I am going to be live blogging Larry Lessig’s presentation at HLS on “Building the Change Congress Movement”. However, in the mean time I’d thought I’d throw up some links for folks to check out if they are interested:

Live Webcast! (starting at 5ish obviously)

Berkman Center Announcement

http://change-congress.org/

Since this is being webcast, and I feel safe assuming archived, there will be less transcription and more commentary (yay or boo? let’s go with yay for now and reevaluate later).