A weekly podcast on news and technology with Jay Rosen and Dave Winer.

Rebooting the News #21

A brief report from Jay on attending the Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh. "The most successful online community I know of."

An update from Dave the loosely coupled 140-character message network and its eventual breakout from Twitter.

A discussion of the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook and what it may mean for a rebooted system of news. Dave: FriendFeed could have partnered with a major news company and created "the Twitter for news."

The url shortener absurdities. Dave: Every news site should do what Wordpress announced it would do with wp.me.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress, as an inspirational figure.

Why are we seeing all this action now around the live web, the real time web, streaming and the like? Dave and Jay offer their different answers.

Jay: The combination of horizontal sharing and vertical information delivery is just so novel it takes a while for us to figure it out.

Dave: When Twitter breaks apart into four or five Twitters one of them will be a system where a very few people author posts and most just receive them.

The health care mess and the press: As Dave said on Twitter. "If journalism weren't dysfunctional people would be learning how health insurance really works."

Jay: Underneath the fight something has drastic is going on: some people are deciding to "run against reality." The deliberate denial of established fact is an energizing force, a kind of motor. The press is still catching up to this, but there is progress.

Jay: If journalists aren't willing to tell us who's deceiving us more they cannot remain out truthtellers.

The inspiration of the week is from Dave and it is.... the users themselves, who "have to take the leadership role" in changing tech and rebooting news.

reboot09Aug17.mp3 (audio/mpeg, 10.3MB) Monday, August 17, 2009.