Video of the Day

Spider "documentary":

Video of the Day

Dream come true, maybe.

Picture of the Day

This is an image of a ferrofluid taken by Felice Frankel of the Sante Fe Institute. She's known for her scientific photographs. To make this particular picture, she took seven small magnets and placed them below a glass plate with the fluid above. She then added a bright yellow Post-It note below.

Grokker

Searching the Web can be a very unsatisfying experience if you are really wanting to do something long term with what you've found. One tool that attempts to help with this problem is Grokker - as in "to grok" from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.

This seems helpful, but by no means any sort of real answer. Grokker lets you prune out unhelpful results from your search and then saves off the list of links for later use. You still have to click on each of them, over and over. But, you could save this off to a file and make notes to go with the links. I'm a database person, myself, so I want a database out of this somehow - not a file. But, then, that's me. Others might find grokker to be all that they need.

Picture of the day

This one is not really a Web thing - it's a picture of my cousin's daughter in L.A. that will be shown on those big picture screens in Times Square. My cousin has lots of fun with his kids and indulged them when L.A. had a rare freeze, letting them ice up the whole backyard! So, congratulations, Sarah. You are famous.

Video of the Day

Meet the Press for Idiots. If you admire President Bush, you should skip this one.

Web News Vs. Print/TV/Radio Media

Pre-Web Media has spent the last several years critiquing Web media - especially blogs. This is much like the criticism the buggy whip manufacturers must have made against the automobile industry back in the early 20th century. Pointless. They're doomed, regardless.

Web news is just beginning to find its capabilities. There is so much more to come. Just think of the advatages that Web news immediately has over print:

• Minimal incremental cost to add readers/viewers vs. printing and distribution costs
• Instant update and correction
• Ability to include video
• Color photos are free to add - and look really good
• Links to other news, including archived news
• Searchable
• Ability to be linked to by other media
• Automatic global distribution
• No real format limitations - i.e. the page - articles can be as short or long as desired
• No trees killed

These are really huge advantages. As dramatic as the difference between telling sagas around the campfire vs. paperback books. As cars vs feet. As jet planes vs. wagons.

Journalists (don't you think it's interesting that the name is all about journals - sort of "log"-ish, as in "Web log") have barely begun to exploit the possibilities of the Web, though. Since the Web can be programmed to do fairly fancy things, the news could "do" things: keep track of things for you, calculate stuff. The news could make news automatically with polls or data gathering. It already automatically updates data for things like the stock market and elections and the weather. There will be more of this to come. And other things I can't imagine yet.

And what about the big criticism that the traditional journalists have made about the reliability of the information in the blogs? In my experience, the Web is more reliable than print. In the last year, the Web has clearly demonstrated that it is more efficient at uncovering incorrect quotes, data, or plagarism than print media. The wikipedia model has become the norm. Good Web information is self-correcting. Readers of the information can report errors and cause them to be corrected quickly. Blogs have been correcting print media this year. This criticism is working against them now.

Another big difference is competition. The Web is brutally Darwinian - or blessedly open - depending on your point of view. Anyone can be a reporter on the Web. If you are good enough. If you write well and investigate effectively on a topic of interest to a sufficient number of people, you can be a Web journalist. You can just start your own blog for free on Blogger. If you are a left-wing political commentator, you can just write a Diary at Daily Kos. Daily Kos has a blog model that is unsurpassed for functionality. It's so ingenious that it deserves several posts of its own - later.

The Anonymous Real Estate Blogger Disappears

Here's an example of the Tyee's unusual reporting - a mysterious Vancouver real estate blogger - getting 10,000 hits a day - just up and quit. People are upset. This is interesting from so many angles. First of all, it's amazing that a blog about a particular city's real estate bubble would get so many readers - such a narrow topic - in a relatively short time. Why would that be? The article gives us a hint. The usual real estate "new" is mostly happy talk from conflicted sources. People need and appreciate real information.

So here's my thesis. What succeeds on the Web is reporting that you can't get from traditional media - for whatever reason: timeliness, length, bias, self-interest, expertise.

"Local newspaper" - Webby Way version

While there are a couple of Web-only magazines - Slate and Salon - The Tyee is the first local newspaper I've seen that does not have a print version. The Tyee covers British Columbia local news, but has some interesting reporting and commentary with a broader appeal.

Video of the day

Personal Loans the Webby Way

What I call "the Webby Way" is a particular mode of interaction for humans that is fostered by the Web. This way is always intrinsically different from the non-Web world in some key ways. Webby Way systems connect people directly. They are Darwinian, in the sense that competition is unfettered and good ideas or good things rise quickly to the top and succeed. They evolve rapidly. They are personal. They are fast. They are global. They cut out middlemen. They are information rich. They are empowering.

So, how would personal loans work on the Web. Why, the way Prosper.com does it! It's sort of the eBay for loans. Anyone can apply for a personal loan. Anyone can loan money. The rate is set by the lenders. You can contact the lenders or the loaners directly - ask them more details, find out how they are doing - even get or give advice! Prosper and the groups are middle-men here in the picture, but their fees are obvious and you can see why they deserve them.

Being an investor, I was interested in Prosper, drawn both by the fascination with such a personal way to make money and the relatively high returns. When I emailed one of the bigger investors there, with a lot of loans, all 100% on time, he says he's making 13.6%. Win, win. That's the Webby Way.

Feeds

I've been meaning to use a feed subscription service for some time, but just haven't taken the time to figure out how to do it. Forgive me if I don't have the terms just right - I am new to this capability.

I am always checking my favorite blogs to see if anything new is there. Some of them post quite often - several times a day - which only makes things worse, since it rewards you for frequent checking. Today, I set up a google reader for my favorite blogs and went throught the process of "clearing them out" of the posts I have already seen. I can already see that this will be a big time saver for me and keep me from missing good posts. One stop shopping, so to speak.

The way this works, for the uninitiated, is you add feeds to your reader. This is just the urls of the websites you visit frequently. The reader will then notice for you whenever a new post shows up and provide you a copy of it at the reader page. It's a fairly faithful rendering of the post, with images, videos and links.

This seems to run counter to the revenue model used for these sites to me. You can read the whole post at the reader and therefore avoid visiting the site? Hit counters are not incremented? After all, you won't be seeing the ads at the original site.

The Inevitable Evolution of Reporting to Blogging

UPDATED BELOW:

Having been a blogger for several years now and a blog participant for even more, I have a deep appreciation for the value and advantages of blogging as a communication media. It is fundamentally different - and better - than print media. It has all the advantages of the Webby Way. It's intimate and yet global. It's personal and still collaborative. It's free to both blogger and bloggee. It's instant. It's timely. It's as detailed - or not - as the situation calls for. It's self correcting. I could go on. You can see that I love blogging.

So, it's very gratifying to me when the grand dame of print media, the NYT, gives credit where credit is due to blog news. This article on Firedoglake's coverage of the Libby trial gets it right.

Why is Firedoglake's coverage of the trial better than the NYT? The legal and political savvy of the bloggers frankly exceeds that of NYT's journalism staff, for one. In an era when newspapers have just become a business - and no longer the fourth estate - they've lost their ability to act as guardians of the people. They're not a free press any more. Bloggers are free in a way that papers no longer are. And TV news even less so. Firedoglake paid for their coverage by asking for contributions directly from their readers . They were bankrolled on this effort by loyal readers who knew what they would be getting would be worth it. And they knew they would be frustrated and disappointed by the traditional media.

My prediction is that the real talent in the current print media catches on to this. Once they all realize that they can start their own blog, and make money off adds and contributions - and be free to report - and investigate - whatever they want to - many will join the Webby Way. Regardless, the blogs are here to stay and the newspapers will go away.

UPDATE: A ditto from the sports world.

UPDATE 2: While the NYT was very complimentary of Firedoglake's reporting, she's gone to war with the Washington Post!

Wish For It and There is ClinicaHealth

I have been helping Life With Cancer, a non-profit that supports cancer patients here in the Washington, D.C. area, to plan an enhanced Web presence that meets the needs of young adults, 18-39. I've been coaxing them to use the more or less free capabilities: blogger, wikis, social networking, groups. It's hard to convince the nurses that the free services are the best. It's counterintuitive to non-netizens.

There were some elements of LWC's concepts that were likely to need a costly custom environment - until I ran across ClinicaHealth. ClinicaHealth has designed a service, supported on an advertising model, that is targeted directly at organizations like Life With Cancer - support for patients and their families. The service provides both organizational and patient blogs, personal pages, and groups discussion threads. Organizations can customize the look and feel to match their existing logos and webpages. Security and control is perfect for this application, with user control of information sharing that is very complete. They've got all the legal framework built in - terms of use, privacy, etc.

And what sincere guys! While I can tell they want to make a real business out of this, there's a real element of community service behind it all. They're really excited about the benefit they can provide - since the founders both had a need for exactly this sort of service.

Life With Cancer's board had some understandable reservations about supporting patient blogs and pages. What if patients said derogatory or hurtful things about doctors or other patients? What if people gave each other bad medical advice? They didn't even think about scam artists selling quack medical treatments - which ClinicaHealth worried about. ClinicaHealth has thought this all through and has good answers for all these problems.

Research and Testing on the Web

Researchers have just begun to exploit the Web to do medical and psychological research. It's not that easy to devise an experiment on the Web that can't be cheated or "freeped". A good example of an effective research area is tone-deafness. It's easy to devise a relatively cheat-proof test for that. The NIH has one here . Jake Mandell, a medical student at UMass has a more elaborate one here. Jake worked at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he developed this test to screen for the tonedeafness. Jake's test has been taken by 100,000 people and he's published his test results here.