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.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB-MzaUmlps

The minister of state said Wikipedia had banned them for making “too many edits,” even though two edits a day sounds pretty reasonable for a major government organization. From now on, anyone from the DoH will have to sign in with a username, which should make it harder for anyone to notice if the department’s trying to push any certain message. Thanks, Wikipedia, for making sure governments don’t get too transparent, and ensuring that it will be easier for my cousin Mac to spread the truth that humans are solid all the way through, like potatoes.

I agree with Gawker that this move reduces transparency: after all, wasn’t much of the amazing information that came out of the Wikiscanner project a result of looking at what edits had come from institutional, shared IP addresses? And if Jimmy Wales thinks Wikiscanner is the best thing since sliced bread, (assuming that Mr. Wales can speak for all of Wikipedia, which the article I link seems to suggest, but is certainly arguable) why would a Wikipedia policy work to undermine the Wikiscanner mechanism?

So I did some research. Note that while I am not a Wikipedian (and therefore am unfamiliar with these policies), the only info I pulled up relevant to blocking shared IP addresses as a matter of course was a note that blocks on shared IPs are typically shorter than on individual users to avoid side-effects on other users sharing that IP address, an admonition to exercise caution when suggesting a ban on a possibly shared IP, and lists of shared IPs that Wikipedia knows about and presumably does not ban. Unless the DoH was persistently “vandalising” Wikipedia like the Washington Post, I don’t see a reason why they should have been banned.

If my admittedly brief reading of Wikipedia policies is correct, I think the ban on the British Department of Health’s IP address was less in concordance with the general operating policies of Wikipedia than the interests of the DoH itself, which probably wants to avoid its employees’ personal actions creating the appearance of a DoH agenda. (The DoH denied editing Wikipedia at an institutional level as part of any communication or information strategy, and stated that any edits coming from their IP address were the result of personal use.) Other institutions have in fact banned employees from editing Wikipedia, likely for this very reason. My personal belief is that the true reasons for this block have been obscured as a result of a miscommunication from the DoH, either intentional or unintentional, because I just cannot reconcile their statement with how I understand the Wikipedia policies.

This example highlights some of the underlying tensions in how we think about authorship, online identity, institutional identity, credibility, and anonymity. I think the Wikiscanner project is a fantastic example of the kind of research that would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate outside of the Web and, while it is wise to hedge conclusions involving attributing institutional authorship to individual comments coming from a shared IP, the data it has produced so far is incredibly interesting and valuable. If Wikipedia does in fact have a policy (or at least some administrators are interpreting their policies) to ban shared IP addresses, or if organizations continue to ban edits to Wikipedia that can be attributed to their IP address, Wikiscanner will certainly have much less to tell us in the future. It’s probably already the case that the Wikiscanner coverage has reduced the potential for scandalous edits from institutional IPs, but I think the way that institutions continue to interface with Wikipedia will itself provide some interesting insights.

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else. Tell us what you think so we can figure out what that is.

Try it, you’ll like it. Find out more in the FAQ, or on the weblog .

Not so incidentally, I found out about this via a post by JP Rangaswami following up on a really terrific post about the incredible capacity of our new circulatory system (capillaries, not a fire hose, says JP). The follow-up post gives an example of capillary action at work. The first post frames the Net as how conversation — taken not just as chin-wagging but as how much of the the work and play of sociality are accomplished — scales. [Tags: jing screen_grab screen_capture jp_rangaswami conversation web_2.0 messiness ]