Bloggasm

“Crowd sourcing” is a buzz phrase often employed in conversations about new media. In theory, online media outlets will be able to utilize the wisdom of the crowd (i.e. their readers) to find out first-hand information about certain subjects. One of the most famous examples of this is the blog Talking Points Memo utilizing its readership to uncover the U.S. Attorney firings scandal.

Lately, though, I’ve seen a number of stories highlighting another way of using online crowd wisdom: Crime solving.

The latest example of this appears in a New York Times article. Two thieves pull up to a car dealership and take a relatively rare car on a “test drive.” They never return with the car, and not long afterwards the dealer posts a note on an online forum giving the details of the theft. After multiple sightings of the car, the implementation of both Google Maps and Facebook, and several camera phone pictures of the thief, the guy was nabbed and the dealer got his car back.

The NY Times article has dubbed this tactic “open source crime solving.” Now if only someone could create a website specifically for this specific kind of crowd sourcing.

Anybody who has spent considerable time on the internet knows that one downside to online life is how easy it is to get caught up reading (and possibly participating in) an internet flame war. What’s most frustrating about this tendency is the fact that once you snap out of it and force yourself to stop, you come to this self-realization that you’ve just completely wasted an hour of your life performing an utterly inconsequential task. Despite the fact that you’ve spent the entire time reading, you haven’t learned anything new and chances are you’ve managed to get yourself annoyed with anonymous people, most of whom never even bothered giving their real names.

So the reason I’m telling you all this is because that’s my excuse for why I have so few links for you today. So here are (a small number) of media-related links for your amusement.

1. This year’s Pulitzers have been announced. Given that these link lists always result in me having to post news a day or two late and just about every media blog out there has already reported this news, I’m boring myself right now just by linking to it. Okay okay, here’s a link to Gawker trashing the Pulitzers and calling them worthless. You didn’t think I’d let you leave without a little red meat, did you?

2. Now here’s the real news. It turns out that the Huffington Post has surpassed The Drudge Report in unique visitors. I have long despised Drudge, not for his politics but because I could never for the life of me understand why he became so popular. He had an absolutely ugly site and most of the links he posts are to mainstream news sources. I could easily do his job for him by just subscribing to the RSS feeds of all the major news sites. Every now and then he publishes his own scoop, but they’re usually factually inaccurate and relatively rare. In fact, the only time I ever visited his website was when I was reading some news feature about how Drudge rules our world. Then I almost had to visit the site just to confirm, in my head, “You mean that Drudge?”

3. A new study released recently shows that news readers and newspaper editors widely disagree on how comments should be moderated on news websites. It brings up the good point that if editors are expected to avoid anonymous sources unless absolutely necessary, then anonymous commenting should be similarly shunned. I’m not necessarily against anonymous commenting, but I rarely, if ever, engage in it myself.

4. Will Feminism and porn ever be compatible? I explored this issue a long time ago over here. I think the problem with trying to remain PC when making porn is the fact that a lot of sexual turn-ons are non-PC. I’m not an expert on sexual theory, but I would think there’s some (dark) correlation between what is forbidden and what turns us on. This provides a dilemma for pornographers.

Posted below is a screen shot for today’s most popular technology stories (linked to by bloggers) at The New York Times. As you can see, nearly all of them center around online media rather than offline gadgetry (the only one not about online media focuses on a new kind of camera). That’s not surprising, since bloggers tend to link to articles about the media in which they work. This trend could possibly explain the “blogger” stories like the one I wrote about earlier today.

Of course the newspaper can’t ignore the traffic numbers. And the editor of the paper has already said that one day, in the not so distant future, the New York Times will be an online-only news source. Given this, will more and more of its focus shift away from the real world to this virtual one? Will they just start churning out ego-boosting profiles on bloggers knowing that they’ll reward them with lots of links?

Here’s the screen shot:

This is my first night getting home at a reasonable hour since Monday. I start nights like these with an overly ambitious to-do list and then it’s three hours later and I’m watching Youtube videos while eating oatmeal. So much for productivity.

Here are some media-related links for your amusement:

1. Romenesko gets the award for quote of the week: “”60 Minutes” creator Don Hewitt told a lunch crowd in Seattle that he once told Dan Rather to sock Abraham Zapruder in the mouth, “grab his film” recording the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, make a copy, apologize to him and then give it back. Hewitt said he called Rather back to nix the plan.”

2. Hypocrite sighting. Fox promotes a new film that is sympathetic to the immigrant experience and in the preview makes several jabs at CNN’s Lou Dobbs for his anti-illegal immigrant stance. But given that Fox News is a right-wing breeding ground of immigrant hatred, I’m surprised that they didn’t take the opportunity to engage in some cross promotion.

3. Maxim publisher, Felix Dennis, told a journalist that he once killed a man. But after reading about a thousand words of the profile you begin to trust this assertion less and less. Every journalist interviews someone like this once in awhile; a man so hyped on his own amazingness that he’ll shoot out every bullshit claim imaginable to try to shock and awe.

4. Remember the Craigslist hoax that resulted in an entire house being illegally looted? Well, the police nabbed the perpetrators by tracing the IP addresses through Craigslist. The internet wins again.

5. Here’s the first person account of a citizen journalism news room. While some might read this and feel inspired about the future of journalism, I react with a feeling of “bleh.” To me, this account boils down to “convince a bunch of amateurs to write mediocre copy for free and let you profit off it.” Why can’t citizen journalism result in all those amateurs starting their own individual blogs and creating the content themselves?

6. Venture Capitalists are apparently distraught because they can’t find enough websites to dump millions of dollars into. For some reason they’re upset they don’t get to create a new tech bubble of over-valued Web 2.0 companies.

7. Given my latest problems with Google, I’ve been of course thinking a lot about web traffic lately. Given that the internet is a form of media that is more measurable than any other, it’s odd that those measurements are so unscientific. Maybe this sheds light on how idiotic Nielsen and subscription numbers really are for other forms of media.

Uh oh. If the figures published by Techcrunch are correct, then Digg has a lot more serious competitor than Reddit. It turns out that a Digg-style feature called Yahoo Buzz sends more than 20 times the traffic than a Digg-linked story.

The problem is, there isn’t a small website out there that could handle that kind of traffic — I wonder if that can be a negative for Yahoo because it limits its news sources. The one time this website made it to the front page of Digg (it has since been banned for some reason, or at least it was last time I checked), I got 40,000 visitors. My servers could barely stand it. Bloggasm would be toast under the weight of a million hits.

If I were to list my top 10 blogging pet peeves, bloggers that respond to and criticize other online writers without linking to them would be at the top of the list. There are few things that are more childish and inexcusable in the blogosphere.

This tends to happen most often in political blogs. For instance, in 2006 conservative blogger Michelle Malkin wrote a hit piece accusing the NY Times of needlessly endangering the life of Donald Rumsfeld by publishing pictures of his house. It wasn’t long before several bloggers tore her argument to shreds by showing that just about everything she had asserted was demonstratively false. At one point it even came to light that the NY Times photographer had received permission from Rumsfeld for taking the photo. Eventually, Malkin was pressured to write a follow-up post so that she could respond to her critics.

The result? A post that went to every length to never link to the blogs that destroyed her arguments. Instead, she sets up strawman after strawman and then knocks them down with a back-sliding flourish of intellectual dishonesty, a whirlwind of arm thrashing and punches in the dark.

The wonderful thing about the internet is that it’s easy to provide context. The mainstream media is often criticized for providing out-of-context sound-bites. But when I’m criticizing an article, say, in the New York Times, I have the benefit of not only providing choice quote soundbites, but also linking to the article so that skeptical readers can read it in full. I can have my cake and eat it too.

Which brings me to a recent email exchange I had with a writer for the National Review.

I had been skimming through its Media Blog when I came across a post titled “Metrics for Success” In the post, Kevin D. Williamson provides a throw-away criticism of an article on LewRockwell.com.

As you can probably predict, Williamson criticized the article without ever linking to it, an action that annoyed me enough that I shot him an email:

Kevin,

I’m curious; you wrote about an article on leerockwell.com but didn’t link to it. Why? Don’t you think that if a blogger is critical of an article that appears online, that he should link to it so that his readers can read it in its entirety if they want to weigh the merits of his criticism?

–Simon

His flip response that arrived a few minutes later was entirely predictable:

I don’t always link to everything I mention, especially if I don’t think the item worth reading. I believe everybody knows that they can find lewrockwell.com articles at lewrockwell.com, if they are so inclined.

Thanks for writing.

Yours,
Kevin

To which I responded:

Somehow I think that if the tables were turned and another blogger started criticizing one of your posts by cherry-picking quotes from it and not linking to it you would be quite annoyed.

And sure, I could criticize something at nytimes.com and assume that if a reader really wanted to he could visit the website and do an archive search, but those assumptions are silly considering I can take the five extra seconds to link to it.

You say that it’s not an item worth reading, and yet it’s an item worth responding to?

–simon

You see, Williamson. Even though your blog post violated one of my biggest pet peeves — and would therefore qualify as a post “not worth reading,” as you put it — I still linked to it anyway. You know why? Because I have respect for my readers and allow them to read your post in full to get context.

Given that you’re writing for a “media blog,” I shouldn’t have to give you lessons in Blogging 101.

About a year ago I published an article titled “The Creative Commons Confound: Whether releasing your book for free will help boost your sales.” I wasn’t the first person to offer this theory — early Creative Commons users have been praising the power of “free” for years.

Chris Anderson, editor for Wired and author of The Long Tail, has just published a new feature article that serves as a preview of the book with the same title: “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business“