Wednesday, January 19, 2005

If you're blogging the Harvard conference on journalism, blogging and credibility, we'd like to include your feed in the aggregator. 

A new version of OmniOutliner for the Macintosh. 

Scott Rosenberg: "I hate to think Web journalism will be reinventing its own wheels every few years." 

For once Phil Ringnalda gets it, when the rest of the gear heads are still looking up their own butts for the answer to everything. Never has scratching your own itch been more the wrong thing to do. Aggregator developers wake up before you're a "third party" -- I actually heard an employee of one of the big three refer to you guys that way yesterday. Here we go, can anyone spell RSS Wars? Guess who loses. 

BTW, the bigco's will whisper sweet nothings into the ears of their "third parties" but as they're doing it, you're being guided into the trunk of the car, while they ride up front. The clicking sound you hear is the lock engaging. The whooshing sound is the air supply being cut off.  

We've got a Radio-style aggregator up and running for Friday's conference. It's still populating but already is somewhat interesting. 

Question: If reporters for objective news organizations bring none of their own experience or bias, or personal opinions to the articles they write, then presumably given the same set of facts and the same amount of time, every reporter would write exactly the same story. Then why do news organizations generally put the name of authors on articles they publish? Isn't the name of the author irrelevant? 

Scott Rosenberg: Blows against the spampire. 

Rebecca MacKinnon's FAQ on the Webcred conference, now just two days away. Interesting to hear her perspective, every other participant has their own story of the road that led them to this discussion.  

If you'll be in Cambridge on Saturday night please come to a geek dinner at Bombay Club, 6:30PM. Dress warmly, bring your ideas, bring a friend. It's open to all bloggers, and people participating in the conference.  

What about plagiarism? 

In academia, to take someone else's work and put your own name on it is a very serious matter. However among professional reporters, it's common practice, and not much debated. One reporter writes a story one way, and then the same story, with the same spin, appears in every other paper.

Isn't it plagiarism when there's no original reporting, when the same mistakes appear in article after article, as if no reporting were actually done in any but the first? Shouldn't they acknowledge that they did this? Do they care that the experts in the area they're covering know that they're doing this?

If a story is to be written N times, aren't we, the public, entitled to N times the amount of vetting and fact-checking?