The future of news in a flash piece? This simple but effective animation works from technology that is here and builds a scenario of the future of customized feeds where "news" is threatened if not dead. It warns us that "it doesn't have to be that way." I liked the animation and Robin's discussion of how it became view de jour is instructive. Poynter Online - Convergence Chaser

Future talk beyond the zigbee which is a form of technology, here are some predictions and scenarios of how technologies will play out in the world of work. Still pushing the "lone wolf" model of work? Forget it. Social collaboration mediated by devices is the direction we are headed. On the tech radar | Tech News on ZDNet: "Gartner's prediction that by 2010, 70 percent of the population in developed nations will spend 10 times longer per day interacting with people in the digital world than in the physical one is not surprising. Coincident with that trend, collaboration tools for enabling electronic interaction -- ranging from Wikis to sites that can identify and provide specific expertise to a group -- will take on more prominence"

Oh yes. Interesting way to solicit the wisdom of crowds for commercial use. receiver

The big story that is lurking in the blogs and online. Was the election flawed? How bad were the errors? Why is the mainstream media, especially the TV news acting like nothing happened? For media mavens, this is the story to watch.BuzzFlash > Maureen Farrell > Election Angst Update: Clark Kent Vs the Media Wimps

Zigbee: new topic. You know me and my curiosity about new technologies. I like to watch the new technology as it tries to establish its own tipping point and become ubiquitous. Zigbee seems like it is at the beginning of this move. You will read about zigbee in Current Buzz from now on. Wi-Fi, which I followed from its beginning is just about ubiquitous, so it is of less interest to me now. When whole cities (Philly, for example) are getting wired, and every coffeeshop is a wi-fi zone, even journalists who are often the worst type of close-minded techno-phobes probably are using Wi-fi, so I am going to write about it less as I shift my interest to Zigbee. Just in case you are thinking, who would want to use zigbee, I note my husband would like to be able to sit at my computer and monitor the efficiency of oury heating system and set the thermostat setback to its most efficient setting. I think it would be fine to use zigbee to send a shopping list to my phone's "to-do" list from my refrig, based on what products are running low. So much for the news from geek central. What Is ZigBee?

E-voting issues. Statistical analyses by several experts suggests that e-voitng machines produce trends that are not likely to have happened at random. This is a simmering story, but "legacy media" seems to be ignoring it. Maybe they are waiting for experts and the blogosphere to finish reporting the story before they dive in. Report: Florida data suggests e-voting problems | CNET News.com

Search tools. For the academics in the crowd, finally a place to "google" your name. It is Googel Scholar, a search of academic work on the Internet. According to Google, this web search tool sorts your results by relevance according to full text of the article, publication the article appeared in, and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Thus, it is like a version of Social Citation Index. The tool locates document references to print citations, too, so that your search can locate older (pre-Web) works and seminal articles which are cited by many in a field. (I was relieved to find at least some of my work on there.) Google Scholar

Whoa there advertisers. Looks like DVRs or PVRs (personal video recorders) are changing the face of mass media. No more 30 sec. spots? Worse things could happen. MediaPost Communications

This study of TV and Print collaboration demonstrates that there are lots of people who have not grasped what the "continuous news cycle" means. MediaDailyNews 11-17-04

RSS or real simple syndication was one of the Online News Association buzzwords in Los Angeles at the conference. I have done overviews, introductions, and How-to's for our faculty on two occasions, but I don't think a single person has tried it out, or set up feeds. I was using Amphetadesk, but I found it took more time than I was willing to give it to go through the massive list of feeds available from the Amphetadesk site. Now I am using bloglines because it features one of those menu bar tools you drag to your browser. Now when I find a site that I want to see feeds from, I just click on bloglines, and if the site has an RSS feed, it gets added to my bloglines. This is a pull program because you choose when you want to view the feeds. Here is a simple explanation and guide to using RSS News Aggregator programs and getting feeds set up. Download.com: How to read RSS feeds

Votes, voting. At the Online News Association conference in Los Angeles, the story lurking in the shadows was the one about the vote count and whether there were problems with it. When Tom Curley of AP was asked about it, he didn't answer, he just ignored the question. If the Green Party has the money to pay for a recount, then the story would seem to have to become news on the AP and elsewhere. t r u t h o u t - Recount in Ohio a Sure Thing Here's a link to an MSNBC video report from November 11, 2004 on voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida which features an interview with John Conyers (D. MI) and documents what the questionable issues are.

Trippi and Winer are at odds. Beyond the Internet, politics still counts. People still vote on issues and not based oon web campaigns. Huffington: Used "Benedict Arnold" line in New Hampshire but was dropped at national level so that big funders wouldn't be offended. Jehmu: Dean is responsible for rise in young voters. But blogs can keep extremism continue--savage parodies. Trippi: The big problem is money. That is why we don't have health care, etc. If one candidate got lots of money from the poeple, then her/she wouldn't need special interests. Winer: Says the money to advertising on networks is no solution. How can we finance reporting on the Internet? CBS guy says we can't answer this yet. There is no model for orignal work on Interent. Trippi: Lots of blogs are self-sustaining, not from subscriptions but from donations.

Live from L.A. and ONA. The Internet in politics 2004 is the topic. Joe Trippi, Arianna Huffington, Jehmu Green (Rock the Vote) Mickey Kaus (Kausfiles on Slate) and Dave Winer are the panelists. So, this geek gathering is called a PowerPoint Free zone. Bloggercon was last week and Kaus says he is an optimist, though he meets lots of others who aren't. Winner tells the story of the video of Dean's scream that showed Dean's scream in context and could have been released on the web and might have influenced the outcome. Kaus: Vote fraud. Conventional response wait for facts. By not waiting as conventional media would wait, the truth came out (he asserts that there was no voter fraud.) Huffington: Loves the blogosphere. Greatest breakthrough in mainstream journalism because it allows passion to come through. Contrasted stories that play on the front page and dies, but how bloggers stay with a story and keep on it until they get some effects. She says it is bad to put stuff out that you never check--don't misquote Lincoln. Joe Trippi: Information is power. Internet in a top-down world passing information is a power transfer, not just information transfer. Money is what's wrong with our system--he talks about the vote by folks to urge Dean to abandon the campaign limits. Kerry abandoned public funding too and that made the election close. Jehmu Green: Who benefitted most from electronic and online technology--young people. They built a register the vote tool and gave it out to all kinds of yount people. They got a kick-ass email list. The message about young people coming out is false, they did come out and did vote in big numbers. Kaus: Linked to recount sites without checking their accuracy, but he holds that this led to a quicker fixing of the truth through all the blogs Winer: Media of all kinds were wrong before election because it was the moral values. Huffington: Election wasn't decided on moral values. Bloggers disproved this. If a state had the gay marriage limit, they voted for Bush less than other states. CBSNews and ABCnews showed that the moral thing wasn't the issue, but it was terrorist threat issue. Joe Trippi: rumors have always existed, blogs just make the concerns more obvious. Blogosphere is the canary in the coal mine--indicates the stories that the main media need to cover. Winer: Completely legitimate form of journalism. Not top down. Opens door for anyone to be powerful. Blue staters got told "you aren't liked" and now we need to create a dialogue with the red states. Moderator: Lippman said the television is a truth machine, but this isn't true anymore. Did the Web contribute to being a "truth machine?' Huffington: Yes, because they showed discrepancies in polls were just reported win main meia without analysis. Trippi: Mainstream media created the need for blogs on the Internet. The embedded TV journos set up a situation where the only place you could go to get more news or different perspective was web. "The only place to get stuff that wasn't rah-rah." Exit polls--mainstream media paid lots of $$ for exit polls but now bloggers can grab the exit polls and run with them. Then eyeballs ignored mainstream sites because eyeballs went to blogger sites. Kaus: Swift boat debunking and truth finding about Kerry and Bush record came out of blogs. CBS acted like blogger with the memo story, but then pretended they weren't just floating a trial balloon. Jehmu: Young voters trusted internet info more than mainstream media. Amount of info 53% from TV/43% from Internet in the young groupl. However, they are using sites run by partisans. Have more confident in their info, but they don't take into acct bias in the sites. Opensecrets--not biased. Question: Is internet contributing to partisanship? Huffington: Sees new voters as a unifying force. They are the "purple" voters. Money that can be collected from little people via internet is a new big force. Trippi: Polarization already existed. Internet just reflects the acase of real life. Blogs are communities of like-minded people finding their group. Kaus: is the web less polarizing than talk radio? Atrious is example that it might be. Winer: Presidential blogging is ineffectual. Blogs will be felt in local community. Local bloggers will be asked to run in elections because there isn't any local coverage now. Local coverage is the big idea

Wonkette uses Movable Type. Asked for advice from Wonkette on how news orgs should or should not embrace blogs? If you are a Journo, when you blog, blog like one, follow ethics.

Questions to the Wonkette Bush admin is inaccessible to press. Will Blogging community be able to open it up the communication process? Only if bloggers were conservative, and if folks inside the admin started wanting to leak. What's the career track for bloggers? She meant to quit after the election, but now she's "addicted" to the style of writing, She said she wouldn't want to write for an editor again. Exit poll question: CBS guy claims they have never depressed the vote or made a diff in the outcome. The CBS guy points out the need for exit polls to see if the election votes are being counted correctly. He challenged her on what she said about publishing exit polls. She dodged the question, Jay Rosen: Notes that the gap between the way Washingtonians see themselves and the way they are is at the heart of her appeal as a blogger. So what does she think of the relationship between media/press crowd and bloggers. Wash press corps as "AV crowd" at HS, where washington is high school with nukes. Mary Meeks talked to Joe Lockhardt -- so what, she says? The flaws and foibles of the politicians are the same as those of the media. Don't mind if she ruins someone's day, but don't ruin someone's life. She sees the community part of internet and interactivity as the important part. Focus on "blog" is as stupid as focus on "printing press." What values from J did whe bring to the blog? She can use a telephone, claimed she didn't know what the values of a J are. In the area between paper readers and paper writers. "Blogs aren't supposed to be fair" and she doesn't have to be. She doesn't want to lie but doesn't feel she needs to get both sides of the story. You can use the format of the blog to write journalism or anything else. Never pretends to be a journalist.

Real-time blogging Sitting at lunch, I am listening to Kos introduce Wonkette. Here is a gathering of journalists and they have chosen a Blogger Queen to address the group. This was the year of the blog in politics and so its appropriate to feature them. Kose tellus us that Wonkette is better than he. Wonkette: the old joke about getting out of her pjs. How have blogs had an impact on ploitics and journalism. She noted that her raison d'etre for being the MTV rep on TV at the convention was simply to talk about herself, and that it made bad TV. What will stand out is the "rag-tag" band that brought down the mainstream media. Joked around the bulge in the back story. Blogs have sped up the bar. They probably have made mainstream media think harder about IGNORING blog stories. Blogs raised lots of money, and served a sort of PR or activism story. Blogs have "de-professionalized" journalism. They have in her opinion made bias in media something that needed to be regarded. Bloggers showing up journalism as a flawed first version history, Bloggers eliminated gap between always getting it right, versus mostly getting it right. The speeding up of news cycle leads to stories like the CBS document one. Exit polls: she published the polls to "kill them" in the public mind. Playing field has changed for journalism. but she isn't sure what the changes have been. Shortest speech I've heard recently. She is cute. Kind of thin, with reddish hair. She seems better in answwering questions, than in giving a speech, Just to note, we are in the Salon where she is speaking, there is wireless access, and at my table alone, there are two people beside myself blogging.

Online News Association conference is is L.A. So far, the sessions are fantastic. One on journo education, and a presentation by Tom Curley of AP about "disintermediation" and how AP is going to use RSS to try and beat out Google news and other search services.

Here is a link to the conference blog: ONA conference attendee realtime blog

. So much for transparency Big media seems to take its own case to the public, but fails to disclose its business interests...Free Press News : Printable Format

Check this out. Mishmas or convergence? Poynter Online - Convergence Chaser

This isn't the spin we always hear in the USA. Read Robert Kaplan's Ends of the World and you can find out more about the Unocal oil pipeline plans. His discussion from the 1980s foreshadows the current situation in an eerie way. AFGHANISTAN: The Adventure of Building an Independent Press

Voting irregularities. Interesting story. Must do more looking into this, but I have to admit that finding Dick Morris on Fox suggesting irregularities, is cause for pause. t r u t h o u t - Thom Hartmann | Evidence Mounts that the Vote Was Hacked: Fox's Dick Morris, writing in The Hill claims this about the 204 election and the discrepancy between exit polls and the actual results: "This was no mere mistake. Exit polls cannot be as wrong across the board as they were on election night. I suspect foul play"

Blogs, blogging. And voting. Here is the pulse I have my finger on now. I'm not sure it will pan out but Greg Palast is a credible journalist. We'll see.t r u t h o u t - The Ultimate Felony Against Democracy Greg Palast's "Kerry Won" story

Blogs, blogging. Post-election analysis picks blog exit polls apart. I agree with Prof. Rosen that people need to be able to triangulate to judge the likelihood of any given piece of information, from whatever source, being true. I think many of the multi-tasking generation, the under 25's, already live in the world of likelihood estimates, rather than the world Walter Cronkite truths.MercuryNews.com | 11/04/2004 | Election results humble bloggers: "It's so much harder to control information today, we have to stop putting our hopes in controlling it and start seeding people with the knowledge of how to use it,'' said Rosen, a professor at New York University."

Geek chic as Tim Russert's new electronic "tablet pc" gets its own interactive flash coverage. The tablet pc is flexible, takes pen input, and includes data security because you swipe your fingerprint through it to login. The tablet pc debuted about three years ago, and will grow in popularity with reporters because it is light and accepts handwriting, drawing, and typing as input. It is Wi-Fi enabled, too, so you can use it in the soon to be ubiquitous Wi-Fi blanketed spaces we inhabit. Poynter.org - Tim's Tablet

Election. Note to the anonymous European who sent my blog the "stopbushstopbushstopbush" message on election day: I did my best, but to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, every decent person is ashamed of the government he or she lives under. I won't beat a dead horse, I have managed to live through Nixon and Reagun, but here are a couple of more of Mencken's quotes that ring true today:

Each party steals so many articles of faith from the other, and the candidates spend so much time making each other's speeches, that by the time election day is past there is nothing much to do save turn the sitting rascals out and let a new gang in.

Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.

Every normal man [I'd add "women, too"] must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

Mostly in the USA, we are tempted, but fall back on our democratic process, with all of its all too human faults, to avoid bloodshed.

Blogs, blogging. The blogosphere was aquiver with election predictions. Most of them were unconfirmed and proved to be rumor, not news at all. ctnow.com - Home Page

Blogs, blogging. Charles Madigan's blog is a pretty good read. In an election race this close, the man on scene p.o.v. might yield more insight than yet another poll. Chicago Tribune | Election Day: Stormy weather

The last word. So, the Bush bulge has been examined by experts, including a real rocket scientist. There certainly is evidence that the President was wired and getting help in the debates. Let's hope that the voting is done the old-fashioned way, without any technical help to either side. Was Bush Wired? Sure Looks Like It.

Alex Darbut, technical and business development vice president at Resistance Technology, Inc. of Arden Hills, MN, a company that makes back-mounted transceivers that link to wireless earpieces hidden in the ear canal, says he is certain the president was wearing such a device. Darbut, whose company sells such a device to "the military and to professionals," including actors and people in communications, says, "There's no question about it. It's a pretty obvious one -- larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability."

Check out the competition at Temple in Philly. Maybe some ideas for our work? MURL: Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab

Party hearty on election night. In Chicago, politics is our entertainment. Here is a list of places to hangout on election night around the city.After you cast a ballot, there's a lot more election fun than just watching the tube

Votes, voting. Here is a preview of what the coverage about the election will be like on Television. We can compare what the networks are saying with what they do. The first person to comment on this story makes a good point. He takes the mass media to task for reporting about the news about news on the election, not real news...good point.Poynter Online - Monday Edition: Election Night Projections & Exit Polling