What happened to my followers?

That's weird. I was tooling around with the "followers" function -- checking out who was following me, trying to follow Pitt Cohort 10 students -- and I somehow lost the collection of people following me.

Hopefully this gets restored. I would like to start engaging with other students going through the same assignments as me.

Technology.

Are humans necessary for info "serendipity"

The Neiman Journalism Lab broke the story this week that Google was introducing an editor feature with some partner news sites that introduces "Editors' Picks" to the Google News aggregation site.

Google, which has been under fire for sucking readers from newspaper sites with its high-powered aggregation system, appears to be experimenting with putting humans back in story and information selection for readers.

What does this mean for librarians? I think it says information specialists may actually be either in demand as information navigators, using humanly intuition and reasoning functions, or they may still offer a gatekeeper role. Although the gatekeeper role would be optional. People still need shortcuts with all the information in the digital age (add all the info from the analog age, too) that will need sifting through.

Here is a blog post by Matthew Ingram "In defence of newspapers and serendipity" who argues that newspapers serve a legitimate function in serendipity and there is a method to the madness of myriad story selections and newspaper features.

Ingram was responding to digital age information thinker Clay Shirky's claim that the news editor rationale in story selections make no sense.

And third — deepest down — the coherence of newspapers is not intellectual, it’s industrial. Which is to say, if you’re running a website and somebody’s on your website and they just done a crossword puzzle and they seem to really like it, what’s the next thing you’re gonna show them? Is it news from Tegucigalpa? No. It’s another crossword puzzle, because that’s the only thing you can [inaudible]. The idea that someone who is doing a crossword puzzle may also want news about the coup in Honduras or how the Lakers are doing — it doesn’t make any sense. It’s never made any sense, in terms of what the user wants. It’s what — it’s what print is capable of as a bundle. What goes into a print newspaper is the content that, on the margins, produces commercial interest in the least interested user. So, in the language of my tribe, the aggregation of news sources has gone from being a server-side to a client-side operation — which is to say, the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is made by the consumer and not at the level — and not by the producer.

Geotagging New York tourist areas

Gawker.com posted the above image, "This Map Shows You How to Avoid Tourists in New York," that was created by geotagging photos collected on Flickr. The photos were sorted by ones posted by locals and ones posted by tourists, then the data was coded for a color key (blue for locals, red for tourists).

The result is a striking visual of Manhattan from above that suggests all kinds of information: Where to avoid crowds, where the action is, what part of the city is most visited.

This project is a great example of presenting information easily available online. How can librarians use Flickr to tell a story about local information. What kind of information can be presented in the library setting using geotagging and Flickr or some other vast socially networked database?

Everything is Miscellaneous

I am reading this book, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, by David Weinberger, Ph.D., for my MLIS Understanding Information class and it is so correct.

Dr. Weinberger, who is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, argues that finding and sharing information in the digitally networked age is subject to the whims of the individual thinker and in order for us to make sense of the information before us, we need to get out of the way. That is, remove the historical linguistic constructs that lead us to information sets because arbitrary navigational cues could negatively affect the integrity of our search.

Look sideways and create your own criteria for what you need.

The FTC and journalism

The federal government -- namely the FTC and FCC -- last year opened a public debate about what to do about American journalism in the digital age.

The context of course is the the massive contraction in the market-based news industry over the last several years (2008 and 2009 were especially brutal), where thousands of news jobs were eliminated and papers closed their business or shrank the physical size of the newspaper.

The FTC, and FCC, convened a series of workshops on the matter and invited stakeholders from around the country to discuss where to go from here. The FTC will meet June 15 to review what they have heard up to now and have released a draft of policy proposals.

Among concepts: What changes, if any, should be considered for copyright and Fair Use; an examination of government subsidies, proposals for increased public funding, legal changes to encourage new news organizations, hybrid corporations, and innovations lowering the cost of journalism.

Some of the potential changes to media law could affect library science as copyright and fair use doctrine will be re-examined. Also, if some of these proposals become law, they could shape how information users find material, and how would that affect the modern library?

We are in an age of constant news and information creation, from millions of individuals. We are well networked and our tendency now is to share what he have and seek what we want on our own.

Tweets eclipsing some print newspapers?

I was at a fellows retreat in May and an interesting factoid was presented to the group during a bar-style trivia game.

We were asked: What is larger? The average number of Tweets posted in one hour or the daily circulation (M-F) of The Washington Post and The New York Times combined?

Your guess might depend on your age. The answer, if you follow the links above, is Twitter. The livestreaming social networking tool clocks about 1.8 million Tweets per hour while 1.53 million print copies of the two major metro newspapers are circulated daily.

What does that kind of number tell us about our news and information dissemination habits? I would guess a lot of our Tweeting includes information found in those newspapers.

What do you Tweet and how often?

According to this funny graphic of the Social Media Mullet, Twitter is all party in the back while LinkedIn is business in the front. However this is not the case for me. First, I never check my LinkedIn account, but I rely on Twitter for business and new-journalism networking (I am a former newspaper reporter and I am a media policy fellow studying ideas about the future of news). And I find Twitter connects me to well vetted information supplied by the people I follow. You could say Twitter "circulation" has replaced traditional newspaper circulation today.

New Yorker magazine to offer tablet platform editions, set pricing

One of my favorite magazines, The New Yorker -- the culture weekly that piles up quickly but is still fresh months, even years later -- will be available on digital tablet technology as well as in print, and Editor David Remnick is holding steady on pricing and content, according to an Advertising Age article published online today:

Mr. Remnick also said The New Yorker won't bow to any dictates over its content from Apple, which has been blocking iPad and iPhone apps that it deems too racy. "We're going to publish what we're going to publish," Mr. Remnick said. "If the Pentagon isn't going to talk me out of a story, then Apple in Cupertino isn't going to either. If they throw me off, they throw me off."

Mr. Remnick should be uncompromising on content, but he may want to reconsider charging customers of the print edition ($5.99 single copy, $39.95 for one year subscription) for digital access. According to the article, The New Yorker Kindle edition is $2.99 per week, and an iPad application may cost the same as the single copy print edition.

How will reader behavior be shaped by this? If I traveled a lot and wanted the convenience of a digital reader, would I abandon my print subscription altogether? How much do I really value having the paper product in my hand --enough to pay double for the product in two versions?

And will this pricing structure create a sustainable publishing model?