Journalism as remix?

Is it art ... or appropriation? Creativity or theft?

Take a look at the web's latest phenom, Kutiman, who makes music videos by mashing up and remixing short clips of other people's YouTube videos.



Daniel Sinker, a member of the journalism faculty at Columbia College in Chicago, comes down on the side of art. So do I.

In a recent Huffington Post piece, Sinker said, "If your reaction to this crate of magic is 'Hm. I wonder how we'd go about suing someone who did this' ... instead of, 'Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,' it's probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page."

Perhaps the Associated Press might want to consider taking that advice. Instead of acting like RIAA gestapo and suing Shepard Fairey for "copying" an AP photographer's campaign photo for his now-iconic Obama "Hope" poster, the AP might want to consider adopting similar techniques instead. Instead of regarding Fairey's poster as "a threat to journalism," the AP might want to lighten up and bask in the glow. After all, I doubt anyone would remember that photographer's name, or that photo, if it weren't for Fairey's poster.

I think Kutiman's music ... video ... whatever you want to call it ... is seriously cool and creative. But I also like Sinker's larger point ... that musicians and artists aren't the only ones who can take advantage of the proliferation of raw material on the web. He says journalists should be tapping into that mother lode of material too, instead of viewing the web as a threat.

Sinker advises journalists to "Be like Kutiman: use the millions of blog entries, photos, tweets, and videos that find themselves on the web every day to build something new."

• See Daniel Sinker's "Where is Our Orchestra? What Journalism Can Learn From the Mind-Blowing Remixes of Kutiman" on Huffington Post

• YouTube remixer Kutiman may be the best mashup artist yet -- on Gawker's Things We Actually Like

• AP, artist feud over famous Obama poster, on USA Today

• tags: music, web, youtube, mashup, journalism
  

Hack the debate?

Perhaps you've read Dan Gillmor's account of the comeuppance of "poor Joe Nacchio," a financial guy who happened to be speaking at an executive conference in 2002 when bloggers first flexed their muscles.

As Gillmor tells it in the introduction to his book, We the Media (available online), he and a couple other bloggers were live-blogging the event, commenting on Nacchio's speech. When Gillmor and another blogger started pointing out some discrepancies between what Nacchio was saying and what he had done, they noticed the audience started getting hostile. Turns out that a lot of them were following the blogs while listening to Nacchio's speech, and they didn't like what they were reading.

We could see something similar take place via microblogging during this Friday's presidential debate (or town hall session, if McCain pulls a no-show).

Current TV and Twitter are planning to run real-time twitter messages ("tweets") over Current TV's live broadcast of the debate. So instead of just listening, viewers can comment on what's being said and see what others are saying...in close to real time.


The Current TV website notes that it will broadcast "as many of your debate tweets as possible right over Obama & McCain, in real time, on our live broadcast."

If you want to take part, all you need is a Twitter account and an internet connection. Then just tweet to your heart's content...and add "#current" to your tweets so they'll be queued for broadcast. You can also follow these tweets by searching #current on Twitter search.

Check it out at: http://current.com/topics/88834922_hack_the_debate

Media matters

Yes, the media does matter. And so does the truth.

It was good to see a major media outlet like ABC News fact-checking aspiring VP Sarah Palin's speech to the Republican National Convention last night. As this ABC news article notes, Palin's speech "bent the truth on her record and on the opposition."

Not surprisingly, she left out the part about her remarkable skill at bringing home millions of "earmarked" federal dollars (our tax dollars at work!) to her community, and her support for the $398 million "bridge to nowhere." So much for being a "reformer."

Continuing his record of our-reporting most of the MSM, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show used Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly's own words about candidate Palin to demonstrate their hypocrisy in defending her. Palin gets to demonstrate a fine veneer of hypocrisy too.



On a related front, the organization Media Matters for America has 'deconstructed' and charted the Republican smear campaign against Obama, calling it "Swiftboating 2.0" both for its resemblance to the 2004 smear campaign against John Kerry and for their use of web 2.0 techniques to spread the smears.

Media Matters notes:

Just as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth unleashed on the public a dossier of lies about John Kerry in 2004, this new campaign is on a mission to spread misinformation about a presidential candidate.

We call it "Swiftboating 2.0" not only because it is the latest model of a political smear campaign, but also because it shares features of "Web 2.0" sites like Facebook and MySpace: significant portions of the content are generated by ordinary people and are spread from peer to peer. Swiftboating 2.0 combines these new information pathways with traditional media -- books from conservative publishers, right-wing radio, and conservative pundits and strategists on television -- to spread the smears as widely as possible and force them into the mainstream media.

If you don't want to see America get suckered again, don't help spread the lies...instead, spread the word.

Twittering around

Lately I've been using Twitter, that short-form (140 characters or less) cross between blogging and instant messaging.

I don't post that many "tweets" myself; I mostly use it to keep track of some colleagues and former students. But I'm finding it interesting to see how others are using it.

For example, I see people using Twitter to:

• Keep in touch with friends and colleagues
  
• Promote themselves or their latest blog posts, videos, podcasts
  
• Pass on breaking news, or to link to interesting items they've found on the web
• Request information or assistance
• Network

Here's a new wrinkle: One of my former students, a newly minted grad, is using Twitter as part of his job search (see below). He's already gotten one helpful plug. I hope networking on Twitter helps him find a job.












PS: Here's a link to Kyle Hansen's resume.


PS2: You can find me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/cynmc...or read my latest tweets in the sidebar of this blog.

PS3: Here's another recent post I wrote about Twitter -- A Twitter shout out? -- on one of my class blogs.

PS4: If you're interested in Twitter, you should also check out Twitterific, a fun Twitter application for Macs, and tinyurl.com.

Open-source science?

The collaborative, open-source approach that's worked so well online -- think Linux, Wikipedia, Wikileaks and countless other open source software and social media development projects -- is now being applied to scientific research.

That's the first thing that popped into my mind as I read an article about the Myelin Repair Foundation in yesterday's SF Chronicle.

The Myelin Repair Foundation is a nonprofit organization that's trying to speed up the development of new drugs and other treatments for multiple sclerosis (MS), a disabling autoimmune disease, by changing the way research is conducted.

The foundation has focused on one key aspect of the disease: the destruction of myelin, the substance that protects our nerve fibers. The organizers developed a research plan that focuses on the kinds of research needed to understand how myelin works, how MS disrupts it, and how to repair it. Then they found scientists with the expertise needed to do that research. The researchers share their results and brainstorm the next steps. The approach is collaborative, not competitive.

That's quite different from the typical scientific (or corporate) research model. Since scientists and research institutions compete for government funding (or with other companies), most are unwilling to share their research ideas and approaches. In this model, their results may be propriety or may be kept under wraps pending publication in a scientific journal.

The result: It can take years, decades even, for promising results to work their way through the system and actually become available as a new drug or treatment.

The folks at the Myelin Repair Foundation hope to get their research far enough along that a for-profit drug company can clearly see its potential and will be willing to complete the process. They also hope other non-profits will see the merit of this approach...and help produce faster results for all the people now waiting for a treatment or a cure.

Podtech CEO's predictions for PR

"The press room of the future is going to be driven by broadband."

That's one hint about the future of public relations from a guy who ought to know...because he's one of the folks who's changing it.

John Furrier, CEO of PodTech.net, spoke last night about the future of PR and press rooms to a group of about 50 PR professionals and other interested folks at the Third Thursday social media meet-up in Palo Alto. The discussion was moderated by Giovanni Rodriguez, principal of HubbubPR.

Third Thursday focuses on the use of social media in marketing and PR.

Furrier started out as a tech guy, not a PR guy, and he didn't intend to change PR. He just wanted access to a decent press room at the big Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a space where he could quickly upload his podcasts and videos.

Hey, it's timely info, and people are interested...so why would you want to wait until you got home (or could find a local Starbucks with a good wifi connection) to publish it? News ought to get out fast!

So in January, for this year's CES, Furrier decided to create his own press room...a couple of rooms actually, at the Bellagio...with wireless, of course, mega broadband access, plus some plasma screens... and food, lots of it, because he noticed the food at the official CES press room tended to run out fast. He called it the Bloghaus. It was open all three days of the CED, 24/7.

CES opened its traditional press room to bloggers this year, but...it was crowded, the food ran out and the wifi crashed. So a funny thing happened...a lot of the bloggers, podcasters and video bloggers started hearing about this swell place over at the Bellagio and migrated to the Bloghaus.

Soon, Furrier had a full house. And the Bloghaus was operating more like a studio than a traditional pressroom, with bloggers and video bloggers conducting interviews and uploading them right away. By the end of the three-day show, 750 video clips on CES had been uploaded from the Bloghaus.

Even some mainstream media (MSM) folks showed up to check it out, like Stephen Levy of Newsweek and John Markoff of the New York Times. A few savvy CEOs showed up too, and gained some street cred for being willing to talk to bloggers one-on-one. Maybe they'd figured out this was a way to reach millions of people within a few hours.

One thing Furrier noticed is that bloggers and video bloggers tend to work a little differently from mainstream media (MSM) reporters...they talk to each other more, they collaborate. He described it as "conversations among influencers who form opinions."

"It dawned on me that this is the press club of the future," Furrier said. "I think you're going to see more of this...we are in the early stages of a transformation."

What's changing is the relationship between traditional and emerging media, he said. It's getting more symbiotic. MSM reporters are recognizing that bloggers can simply get a lot of information out faster. Also, they're recognizing that communities of bloggers who focus on specific issues can uncover good stories...and help them percolate up into public awareness. Then, as Furrier put it, "the mainstream media comes in and fossilizes the story for the public."

Coming up next in my next post: Furrier on the death...and rebirth...of the VNR.

How do we feel?

Part art project, part social media...wefeelfine.com tracks the current mood of blog posts.

Organized like a musical piece in a series of "movements," this web site lets you sample the mood of what's currently being blogged. In the first movement, "madness," a swarm of dots, colored bright to dark, represents the varied moods of current blog posts. Click on a dot and you'll get a random, representative sentence or photo from a blog.

The "Mobs" movement displays the most commonly blogged feelings. Creators Jonathan Harris and Dep Kamvar write: "In this movement, the particles self-organize into rows of shared feelings. The rows are sorted by the number of particles they contain, and the particles within each row are sorted by the length of the sentence that each particle contains. The rows are colored to inherit the chosen color of the feeling they represent. Any particle can be clicked to reveal the sentence within."

When you click on a specific word, you get a sample, an excerpt from someone's blog. It's oddly fascinating, and very voyeuristic.