The Sir Edmund Hillary of bloggers?

Blogging makes it into the pages of The Atlantic!

In the Cover to Cover section of the November issue, in a blurb-style review of a new book by Andrew Sullivan called The Conservative Soul, one of the two Benjamins (Healy and Schwarz — the reviewers) describes Sullivan thus: "a New Republic senior editor and prominent blogger."

This is the first reference I have yet noticed in The Atlantic to "blogger" as a means of identifying and establishing the credibility of a journalist or author. When I read that description, it shouted to me that a magazine that likes to regard itself, and be regarded, as one of the highest mountain peaks of top-notch journalism has accepted that certain forms of blogging (i.e. "serious," "journalistic" blogging) must be acknowledged as journalism.

AJAX — and it’s not a cleaning product

This blog is hosted by Typepad, a blog hosting service that was recommended to me around three years ago by a journalism professor back in northern California. It’s a pay-service, but he recommended it because of the greater range (at the time) of "professional" options it offered than other, free, services such as Blogger.

I haven’t explored any of those free hosting services recently, but what I do know is that when I log into Typepad one of the first things I see is a range of links to "industry" news items — often on various aspects of the "Web 2.0" phenomenon. (Not quite sure what to call it, but phenomenon will do, for now.)

A few days ago, I logged in, and this is what I saw:

One of the great things about all this Web 2.0 stuff you keep hearing about is just how easy it can be to create compelling user experiences by gluing different services together. Our friends over at Google demonstrated that recently by putting together ajaxsearch.typepad.com, a demo site of some of the great things you can do with the Google AJAX Search API and a TypePad blog.

Google’s Mark Lucovsky built demos on his TypePad blog of integrated web search, blog search, video search and even mapping. We love seeing creative uses of our Advanced Template Set functionality, and Mark lays out on his blog how you can implement the solutions he built."

I followed the link to Mark’s blog, and this is what he had to say:

Inspired by a blogger named Marjolein Hoekstra, this morning I signed up for a TypePad account so that I could demonstrate how to add Google AJAX Search to a TypePad blog. I got a little carried away and ended up building out a complete TypePad solution. Something that should be pretty easy to migrate into your own TypePad blog. Just follow these instructions:"

And, of course, he gives instructions. They assume a certain amount of basic knowledge regarding Typepad template editing, and, as far as I’ve been able to determine, doing this at all would require a Typepad "Pro" account, but the results are undeniably cool.

Down the right-hand side of Mark’s blog are customized search panes, in order: Google search; Google video search, with four panels of video stills below the search box, name links to videos that other people have uploaded, and a link to "upload your own videos"; Google map search with a picture of the map, which on Mark’s blog is centered on Santa Barbara and has links below it to "A few great places" — namely "Sushi, Lucky’s, BikeShop, TheBiltmore, Jeannine’s, Cava, SanYsidroRanch, Sunstone, Melville, PhysicalFocus." Mark’s tour of the best parts of SB, no doubt.

What’s the potential of this for journalism? For journalism in the world of Web 2.0, for "old-school" journalism, for the wild and crazy (I’ve been reading Hunter Thompson; excuse the hyperbole) frontier between the two?

I’m not sure, but I know that before too long someone like Adrian Holovaty (who created and maintains Chicagocrime.org from data extracted from the Chicago Police Dept.’s Citizen ICAM Web site melded with Google mapping software) will create a new, web-based form of journalism that breaches boundaries.

A postscript to Mark’s entry, that encapsulates the exclusivity-destroying nature of the Web-based world into which we’re inexorably journeying:

"p.s. – If you are a Blogger user, check out http://ajaxsearch.blogspot.com"

Ethics in the wild & crazy new frontier

A friend listening to NPR’s Morning Edition radio show this morning told me about this latest development in the Mark Foley-congressional pages saga:

(From the Drudge Report):

ABC ONLINE GLITCH LEADS TO IDENTITY OF FOLEY ACCUSER

FAMOUS IM EXCHANGE WAS WITH 18 YEAR OLD

**UPDATE Thu Oct 05 2006 11:54:13 ET

A posting on ABCNEWS.COM of an unredacted instant message sessions between Rep. Mark Foley and a former congressional page has exposed the identity of the now 21 year-old accuser.

The website PASSIONATE AMERICA detailed the startling exposure late Wednesday.

…

ABC explains in a statement: "On Friday, ABC News published instant messages between a former page and Congressman Foley with the IM screen name of the teenage victim redacted. Immediately, we discovered that in one instance, the screen name of the teen on one IM exchange had not been properly redacted. ABC News immediately took down the posting [version 1], redacted the screen name and re-published the posting [version 2]. We certainly believed that we had taken care of the issue quickly. Last evening, after an inquiry from Matt Drudge, it came to our attention that a blogger was able to access our deleted file [version 1] by typing in a slightly modified web address. To be clear, no one visiting our website would have simply stumbled on the old version."

Apparently, by announcing the congressional page’s screen name in its report, ABC revealed enough information for a blogger to track down the page’s real name and identity.

As I say in my post above this one: "the exclusivity-destroying nature of the Web-based world into which we’re inexorably journeying."

I haven’t had much time to consider all of the ramifications of this, but one of the first that springs to mind is this:

The immediate nature of hyper-text based journalism necessitates hyper-vigilance on the part of journalists to ensure accuracy — and to prevent ethical violations with the potential to radically alter the lives of the people we report upon.

BPD meets YouTube — and we’re all connected…more than we realise

I have previously described the Boston Police Department’s Weblog as not being particularly blog-like, as I have come to understand the term. The posts are written in standard police report format with accordingly often stiff phrasing and awkward construction: "A registration check revealed that the vehicle license plate had been reported stolen." — What was stolen? The license plate, or the car? "…the officer discontinued following the suspect vehicle. " Discontinued?

I have also noted that the information contained in the blog is nowhere near as searchable — and consequently only a fraction as useful  — as that provided by the Chicago Police Department and collected, sorted, collated and merged with Google mapping software by Adrian Holovaty on his site chicagocrime.org.

However, after a little time spent this morning cruising the BPD blog, my respect and appreciation have increased. I’m also impressed.

In an entry posted on Sept. 25, the BPD seeks the public’s help in identifying a woman whose partially decomposed body was found last year in a chimney. To this end, the BPD has inserted a video taken from YouTube. The video is of a digital reconstruction of the woman, showing what she might have looked like before she died.

I tried the video and it didn’t work. That could have been due to the age and decrepitude of the computer on which I’m composing this. However, the BPD anticipated this possibility and included below the video a link to a PDF file of still photos.

At the bottom of the entry are other links: to a PDF document with photos and identifying details; to the America’s Most Wanted page on this case (it was profiled on that show in mid-September); and to another bpdnews.com post asking for help in identifying a body found on Causeway Street (Boston) in early June.

These are the moments when I am awed by the people-connecting power of the Internet/World Wide Web.

These are the moments when I am awed by the potential power of tens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of strangers contributing their small part to work towards a whole that is much greater than anyone can envision.

And the truly stunning element of this is that most of those people will probably never know the extent of their contributions. Will never know how many lives they affect or touch.

It is, indeed, the ultimate web. (Especially once the world of the Web reaches at last the few billion "un-connected" people. Although whether that will be an unequivocally good thing is debatable — but that’s a whole other discussion…)

Craig’s a citizen, too…

Turns out Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist and $10,000 co-funder of Jay Rosen’s new venture NewAssignment.Net, has been interested in ‘citizen journalism’ for a while. He was a regular attendee at meetings held by the San Francisco-based citizens media group in April and May, 2005.

At those meetings, he joined such now well known ‘grassroots journalism’ activists as JD Lasica and Dan Gillmore in discussing "citizens media strategy".

Read the transcripts of those sessions here.

BPD blog hacked — the info.

So here it is, from a posting by Caroline Roberts on bostonist.com:

Much to the dismay of those hoping to keep up with non-fatal shootings, non-fatal stabbings, and bachelorette parties "gone wrong," BPD News, the Boston police department’s online blotter, has fallen prey to individuals who claim to be Turkish hackers. "hacked by metlak / Ownz here / F*&k papa." originally replaced the site’s content. Metlak, is that meant to be an insult of Big Papi? Metlak and company have left their fingerprints on Massachusetts news websites before – the hacker took down the website for the Greenfield Recorder back in June. Turkish hackers have been blamed for taking down even bigger fish than the BPD blog, including European websites for Sony Music and the Bolivian Foreign Ministry.

According to a Boston Police Department missive on Universal Hub and the Globe, the BPD’s hosting service is working on the problem, and the "F*&k papa" message is gone. They’re making progress as a "test post" is now up and the BPD site seems to be recovering. If you have the urge to read BPD News, you can still access older pages through Internet search engines and cached files. The BPD News site is hosted by an external company and doesn’t’ sit on a city server. Perhaps if they were under the protection of Government Center (or even the Roxbury fortress) rather than out milling about in the open sea of cyberspace they wouldn’t be a Cyprus for the Turks to invade.

And, from boston.com, The Boston Globe’s website, in the New England in Brief section (Sept. 22):

Boston police are investigating the invasion of the department’s online news blog last evening. Someone hacked into BPDNews.com and left a line that read, “hacked by metlak / Ownz here / . . ." along with some profane language. The department took down the site about 9:30 p.m., soon after it was contacted by the media. Elaine Driscoll, the Police Department spokeswoman , said she did not know when the hacking occurred. “This is an unfortunate incident," she said. “We’re going to investigate this matter immediately. It is a very important tool that we use to disseminate timely information."

BPD blog hacked?

I was told the other day that somebody (or somebodies) hacked into the Boston Police Department blog.

I haven’t yet been able to find reports on this, but will post an entry about this as soon as I do.

The power of blogs?

A photojournalist friend of mine just sent me a link to the blog of Josh Wolf, who was arrested last month in the San Francisco Bay Area on a first amendment issue. From an Aug. 7 comment posted on Wolf’s blog:

In case you haven’t heard about it yet, Josh Wolf, a blogger who covered the recent G8 Summit in Scotland where some violence erupted has been jailed for not turning over to the authorities the video he shot of the event.

Wolf was jailed in early August. In early September he was released on bail. For the past month-plus Wolf’s mother and friends, and Wolf himself, under the code name "Insurgent," have been posting updates on Wolf’s blog. On Sept. 20 Wolf was granted a 2-day reprieve, which allowed him to attend a benefit for him held in San Francisco (where Wolf has been based for a while):

In Wolf’s reply brief to the court, he and his lawyers argue:

"… a fair reading of Supreme Court precedent requires a finding that there is a “substantial connection” between the information sought and the criminal conduct under investigation before a witness may be held in contempt for refusing to answer question that implicate First Amendment rights.

"The district court here declined to engage in the required balancing, specifically refusing to view the videotape to determine whether it bears a substantial or merely a ‘remote and tenuous relationship to the subject of the investigation’ and whether its production was required to satisfy a ‘legitimate need of law enforcement.’"

Having lived for a little more than a decade in the SF Bay Area, I know that there is a vigorous freedom of the press/independent media/intellectual property protection movement there, led by Media Alliance. Media Alliance’s executive director, Jeff Perlstein, was scheduled to speak at the Wolf benefit.

The Bay Area chapter of the National Writer’s Union and Truthout.org, an SF Bay area-based organisation "dedicated to establishing a powerful, stable voice for independent journalism," are also fighting on Wolf’s behalf.

What does this fight for a relatively obscure blogger’s rights as a "legitimate journalist" signify?

It seems to be a maybe small but possibly crucial battle in the war for establishment of full journalistic rights — and responsibilities — for bloggers who view themselves as journalists and act accordingly.

(Writer’s note: sorry about the misaligned paragraphs. Cutting and pasting wreaks havoc with my typesetting.)

Is it a blog? or a Web site?

Chicagocrime.org has been renowned in the online world for some time now for its remarkable transparency and usefulness — a comprehensive, open and spectacularly searchable database of Chicago crime statistics.

The Boston Police Department has a blog — which is commendable, but it seems to be confused about what it is. When I read "blog" in the title of a Web site, I expect that what I read will contain some measure of personal opinion. This blog reads like a police report. There are statistics on the site as well as other useful information, such as a regularly updated Missing Persons report and transcripts of q + a exchanges between the BPD and The Boston Globe (for example), but why is the BPD calling this site a blog?

Why not, as with chicagocrime.org (apparently being renamed www.chicagocrime.com), just call it an official BPD database?

How about, below each (or at least some) daily incident report, including a statement from an officer involved with a little of his or her take on the incident? A glimpse inside the action… Like the TV show "Cops" but with time for thoughtful reflection?

(Note: chicagocrime.org is not an official Chicago PD site — Adrian Holovaty, a programmer-journalist for WashingtonPost.com, has written software to extract data availabe on the CPD site and re-post it in ways that are eminently useful and interesting.)

NewAssignment.Net – potential pitfalls?

Some thoughts on possible pitfalls of the NewAssignment.Net project (see my post from two days ago, below):

• how will the veracity of the citizen journalists’ reports be verified? I wonder about this particularly in cases where their reports consist largely of their observations of a situation, e.g. the "polling place" project
• again, with the polling place project in mind, how will uniformity of data collection be ensured? Will each citizen journalist head out on his/her beat armed with a form listing questions to be asked and fill-in-the-blank data boxes? IIn response to this question, Dan Kennedy, one of my professors at Northeastern University School of Journalism and media critic for the Boston Phoenix (among other journalism-related roles), observed that it could be counter-productive to limit the citizen journalists too much because then it would become like just another job — for which they’re not being paid (or not paid much).
• on the question of payment, I imagine this project would work best over the long-term if it were to have a pool of regular contributors whose submissions could be trusted to be on the whole accurate and balanced. I wonder if it’s possible to establish more than a small pool of trusted, long-term contributors if they’re not being paid. And, if a status system is established whereby a regular contributor can advance to the level of paid contributor as a reward for trustworthy submissions, what, then, is the dividing line between "citizen journalist" and "journalist"? Especially since said long-term contributor is no doubt learning many of the skills a "real" journalist has — simply by "acting" as a journalist.

That all being said, I love the idea behind this project and am looking forward to seeing it develop — and what develops from it. Tremendously exciting to think about the possibilities thereof. And with Jay Rosen guiding it and substantial financial backing from people who are savvy to the ways of the web and bringing untrained individuals together to collaborate on something much bigger than any one of them could create alone — I believe this project will succeed, although it might succeed in ways no one can yet forsee.

I’m staying tuned.