Tag: Technology

Got their mojos working

Pardon the link to a press release, but this bears watching. Reuters journalists have been trying out a Nokia smartphone that lets them write stories, shoot video and still photos, and record audio, and then edit everything and upload it right from the field. I first took note of this trend last December, when it was written up in the Online Journalism Review. Now it’s becoming a reality.

Reuters has put together a site showing off the work of their “mojos,” or mobile journalists. Check out “Robots R Us,” and note the high-quality video and sound. It’s easy to imagine watching this on your own smartphone.

The mojo tool of choice at Reuters is the Nokia N95. With a list price of $699, it’s not cheap — unless the alternative is to outfit a journalist with a laptop and a video/still camera. Compared to that, it’s ridiculously inexpensive.

The press release says that the N95 “provides everything journalists need to file and publish stories from even the most remote regions of the world.” Well, OK. But I suspect such tools are mainly going to be a boon for community journalism, as both professionals and amateurs seek to add more multimedia to their sites.

This just in: No sooner had I posted this than a blog item from the Guardian showed up in my inbox. The writer, Jemima Kiss, goes into quite a bit more detail than the press release does.

The corporate Internet

I have an essay up on ThePhoenix.com on how the democratic, grassroots, participatory media that the Internet has enabled is threatened by efforts by giant telecommunications companies to control the next-generation Net for their own, profit-driven purposes. An excerpt:

The Internet is the single greatest threat to corporate dominance of the media since the industrial model was established a century and a half ago. It would be naïve to think that these corporations wouldn’t fight back. In so doing, they are embracing (as Neil Postman predicted they would) not the strategy of Orwell’s 1984, but of Huxley’s Brave New World. By ensuring that all the latest, richest, coolest content is on the new, high-speed, corporate-controlled Net, they’ll deprive the independent sites of the oxygen they need to survive. And we’ll be so overloaded with entertainment that we won’t care.

Obama’s cell-phone problem

Is technology costing Barack Obama points in the polls? National Public Radio yesterday broadcast a fascinating report on the looming meltdown of polling as we know it.

Officials with the Obama campaign believe their guy is receiving disproportionate support from young, black and Hispanic voters. All three of these groups are more likely than the rest of the population to have ditched their land lines in favor of a cell-phone-only lifestyle. And pollsters rarely call cell phones, for obvious reasons. (How would you like to receive a cell-phone call from a pollster?)

According to the NPR story, polling experts believe the cell-phone conundrum isn’t out of hand yet, and that the sampling population can be adjusted by weighting it differently. Clearly, though, technology is changing the face of polling. If Obama does better than his polling numbers in New Hampshire, we’ll know one of the reasons why.

Living in the fishbowl

Students already know — or, least, they should know — that their Facebook and MySpace profiles can and will be used against them when they’re looking for a job. Now Ross Kerber reports in the Boston Globe that personal information posted to employment services such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com is ending up in the hands of marketers.

Which has me thinking about LinkedIn, a professional social-networking site that I joined about a year ago at the invitation of citizen-journalism pioneer Lisa Williams. As best as I can tell, I haven’t gotten any sales calls due to my LinkedIn profile. But I suppose it’s only a matter of time. We’re all living in the fishbowl now.

Paying for the news

“Recovering Journalist” Mark Potts has a great post on New York Times executives’ decision to get rid of their pay service, TimesSelect.

I’ll confess that my glee over the demise of TimesSelect earlier this week was a bit knee-jerk. For consumers, there’s nothing not to like about free. As a blogger, I like being able to link to all Times content. And since the Times Web site is by far the largest news newspaper site, it may be uniquely suited to the advertiser-only model.

But the Times’ move still doesn’t address the question of how to pay for journalism, especially at news organizations that lack the Times’ cachet. (That is, everybody else.) Even Times executives may not have thought this through completely. Potts writes:

[C]ommitting good journalism is expensive, and so far, there’s no indication that advertising will pay the entire way, especially for premium content from the likes of organizations like the Times. By dropping TimesSelect, the Times is walking away from more than $10 million in annual revenue, and it remains to be seen how quickly the resulting traffic bump — and attendant advertising — can make that up. A blanket statement that “content is now and forever free,” as Jeff Jarvis put it in his triumphant posting is just misguided — and belied by ESPN.com, ConsumerReports.org and Zagat.com, not to mention countless high-end subscription-based information and analysis services that serve professional markets. Oh, and print media are still successfully enjoying a revenue stream from subscriptions, you may have noticed.

Typical news junkies may regularly visit five, 10 or more sites. Given that, I think the subscription model remains impractical. (And thus I still don’t lament the passing of TimesSelect.) But microtransactions of some sort — that is, an account from which some small amount of money, perhaps on the order of less than a penny, would be deducted for every article you read — loom on the horizon as a possible solution of how to pay for the news.

Bill Densmore, the founder of one such system known as Clickshare, has further thoughts here.

Cellphone smackdown!

New York Times columnist Joe Nocera doesn’t like his Treo (sub. req.) — and he blames Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg. To wit:

Maybe I should never have believed The Wall Street Journal’s technology guru, Walt Mossberg, who wrote in early 2006 that “Palm’s Treo smartphones have been the best high-end cellphones on the market, with the finest combination of voice, e-mail and Web-browsing capabilities in a hand-held device.”…

Maybe, if my due diligence had gone beyond reading Mr. Mossberg, I might have realized that the Treo was far more trouble than it was worth.

Whoa! Nothing yet on Mossberg’s Web site, All Things D, but I imagine he’ll fire a return volley before the weekend is out.

But hold on. Here is the January 2006 Mossberg review to which Nocera refers. It’s a review not of the 700p, which has made Nocera’s life such a living hell, but of the 700w, which runs a completely different operating system — Windows Mobile rather than the Palm OS, which Nocera fingers as his culprit (other than Mossberg). True, Mossberg said nice things about the Palm OS, but the 700p hadn’t even been released yet.
Then, in June 2006, Mossberg was back with a review of the then-brand-new 700p, a good seven months before Nocera made his purchase. Here’s an excerpt:

In our tests, over a couple of weeks, the Treo 700p performed well. Web browsing was a pleasure at the new high speeds. Our only complaint was a short but annoying lag in displaying the text of emails and in performing certain other operations. Also, our test unit crashed twice and had to be restarted. (It didn’t lose any data in the crash.)

It crashed twice in a couple of weeks, eh? Did Nocera notice that? Sounds like a pretty good harbinger of the problems he describes today.

Nocera has complained about his toys previously without taking, uh, due diligence. If he can’t slip one past a tech doofus like me, he ought to find another subject.

On the map

The New York Times today has a good and important front-page story on how simple mapping tools offered by Google and Yahoo! are changing the way we communicate. If you want more, Wired went deeper last month.

The revolution in free, Web-based software tools is astounding. Less than a year ago, when I showed my students mash-ups such as ChicagoCrime.org and this Boston.com mash-up of political contributions in the governor’s race, the likelihood of a non-programmer pulling off such a feat seemed nil. Now anyone can do it, and publish the results to the world.