Hypercamp - blogging as the backbone of news in the future?
“Sidebar to last Sunday’s Rebooting The News podcast with Jay Rosen, relating the blogger assignment desk idea to Hypercamp, which is a more comprehensive blueprint for how blogging becomes the backbone of news in the future. Also a response to Kevin Marks.”
Dave discusses the Hypercamp idea, where there would be a permanent newsroom as an open resource for the blogging community, allowing bloggers to collaborate and cover news events together. He envisions this as a way to apply the principles of amateur journalism and citizen reporting, cutting out the middlemen of traditional media. Dave believes this approach will lead to more direct access to sources and diverse perspectives, rather than the single viewpoint of professional journalists. He sees this as the natural evolution of how news and information will be shared in the future, enabled by technology and the willingness of people to contribute their time and ideas.
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Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
Hello everybody, it’s Dave We
iner here and I wanted to do a
midweek podcast, of course
today is only Tuesday, but it’s
kind of the middle of the week.
I’ve been doing these podcasts every Sunday with Jay Rose and they’ve been getting some interesting places and people I think are starting to pay attention and they’re starting to write about them.
We’re only on the sixth one or the seventh one now, I’m not sure, they’re losing count, but I think that we’re figuring things out and now the podcast actually has a name, it’s called Rebooting the News and I ’m sure there will be a website at some point in place to comment.
I still want to keep the feed at scripting. com/rss. xml because that means that not only do you get that podcast, but you get all these other podcasts that I think of doing every once in a while and sort of add a sidebar to each of the discussions that we have and try out new ideas, like for example I have some music playing in the background and I have no idea whether you can hear it or not and whether it’s too loud or too soft, I don’t know, but it’s Fire on the Mountain, The Grateful Dead from the Shaked own Street album and this goes out to one of the reviewers, you see I’m so bad with names, let’s see if I can find this, hold on, give me a sec, this is funny, see of course I didn’t prepare and that’s one of the things that this review er called me on, let’s see, I think I used the word appreciated, there it is, Tim Windsor at the Neiman Lab, reviewed our last podcast and let’s see what he said about me, he used the word obstreperous, which I looked it up, I had to look it up, it’s not entirely bad, it’s not how I would describe myself, he says Dave Winer the occasionally obstreperous, you’d have to go with that because everybody is occasionally everything, often brilliant, well thank you, developer and provocateur, which I go for, with the surfer y hippy voice and that I totally resemble, I love that, that people hear my voice as surfer hippy, that’s why I play in the grateful fit in the background today as a tribute to Tim Windsor and to help people get in the groove of, you know, it’s like maybe I’ll play, I think the Beach Boys would be a little bit too, excuse me, well too, I almost played the Beach Boys, I used to, whenever I’d get back to California from a trip I would always play California Girls, which I thought was a way of saying, hey, you know, it’s good to be back, you know, because the East Coast girls are whatever and they really keep you warm at night, but there’s nothing I can’t wait to get back to the stage to the cutest girls in the world, California Girls. Anyway, so what I wanted to talk about very briefly, I think this might be a very short podcast, is something that came up at the very end of Sunday’s podcast where we were talking about, you know, applying the principles of blog gers/amateur journalism, that’s why I much prefer amateur journalists to citizen journalists, because citizen, I don’t know what it is, citizen journalist sounds like naive, pie in the sky, you know , true believer type stuff, where , I mean, when you come down to it, everybody’s a citizen, so what are you really saying about somebody to say that they ’re citizen journalists, it’s really not saying anything else , and I think there’s a subtext there that, you know, somehow you can dismiss this as just being an act of civic, you know , it’s like the people who go to city council meetings, and they’re kind of wacko, you know, whatever, I don’t know, it’s apologies people who go to city council meetings. I think that it’s going to be a lot bigger than that than just people who are doing their civic duty, I think that this impulse to tell your story, and to have other people hear it, I think that journalism’s been tapping into that, that’s how they get us all to work for free for them, I mean, how many hours do you spend on the phone with a reporter to get one measly little quote, you know, well, the payoff is that you want your ideas out there, but of course the journalism system so thoroughly disappoint s on that, because they never get your ideas out there, they get your name out there perhaps, but they don’t get your ideas out there. So this news system I think is going to be a lot better, because you’re going to get closer to the sources with less interpretation, and we’ll get to decide for ourselves who we like and we don’t like, and until then we’re just getting the sort of one perspective news, and it’s all for the perspective of a soon to be unemployed professional journalist, and so it’s increasingly becoming more and more about their plight, and it’s more visible, whereas I don’t think it’s really any more present than it has been before, it’s a lot more in your face, it’s harder to avoid, but I think that the story has always been about the journalist and not about the story, and that of course isn’t really good. If other professions did that, then you’d see some really terrible results, and other professions of course do it. We ’re dealing with this whole financial catastrophe right now , because the financial industry looked at our homes as being just another sort of instrument to manipulate, and where were their consciences? Would these people have anything like a conscience ? Because these are people’s homes, their lives they’re trading on, and the same way that the journalist is thinking about themselves more and more, and less about the service that they’re supposed to provide.
The medical industry, well they want ACS’s drug consumers, and they reward physicians appropriately. Accordingly, lawyers, don’t get me started on lawyers, but lawyers exist to perpetuate lawyers for the most part, well I won’t say for the most part, but I’ve had my nose rubbed in this recently , where I paid a huge amount of money to lawyers because they could really fuck me up, and that was the way it was explained to me. You could be right Dave, but if you pay, you get to keep some of your savings account. If you don’t pay, you could be proven right in court and end up penn iless. Well, so you all know what I did, right? I went and fought for the bigger principle ? No. I said I think I’ll keep my savings account, and I ’ll live to find another day.
But I think that our system is finally completely coughing up the air balls on all of this . I will just look the other way while everybody fucks the system, and just take my little piece of it, and somehow worry about how it all shakes out later. Well, the bills come due folks. Shaking out now.
Everybody said, they like to say, well we’re going to pass this mess on to our grandchildren.
Yeah, sure. If we’re lucky, and that’s what I always said, and it seems to me like that’s been disproven. We’re not passing it under our grandchildren. We’re doing it to ourselves, or we are the grandchildren.
How about them apples? Anyway, so back to the positive stuff.
Not that this isn’t all fun, and it’s kind of interesting, I think, no matter what the outcome is. Jay said something, and I hate to say that I had come to exactly the same conclusion, and just didn’t want to put that much in at the end of a podcast, that the way to do the coverage of the Boston Marrow race, this is like flipping all the way back, is to have a simple sort of assignment desk, the equivalent of an assignment desk, in today ’s newsroom, or in yesterday’s newsroom, and instead of alloc ating professional reporters' resources to covering a story, it allocates the amateur reporters’ resources. So what you do is you get a bunch of bloggers to sign up and say, I ’m interested in covering the Boston Marrow race, okay? And you get your name on the list, and in return for volunteering to do this, you will get some assignments, and your byline and your story will get some flow. And the more people that are signed up to do this, the more events we can cover, and I think the more flow you ’re going to get. And it’s the obvious next step. It’s one of the ways of getting the structure. And we’re already well-schooled at how to do this kind of stuff. We’ve been practicing this whole art called “Unconferences,” you know? They’re all about volunteers. And I think that once you have a mission to the structure, you’ll get a lot more people participating. I think because people are anxious to make a contribution. You saw that in the last year’s election, that once there was a candidate who at least had the veneer of being a cause, or having ethics , or standing for something, that people stood up and said, okay, I’m going to give my time , I’m going to give my money, I’m going to endorse this guy, I’m going to write about him on the blog, I’m going to do whatever I can to get this guy elected. I think that spirit is, it’s never going away, and it never has gone away. It ’s just been waiting for something for it to hang on to.
And so, anyway, the point was, the reason why I got so excited about this is that it’s the hyper-camp idea that I started talking about a number of years ago of this permanent newsroom as an open resource for the blogging community, and it ties bloggers to a geography .
And it says, okay, if you want to work today on news, get on the BART and go to downtown San Francisco, get off at the Powell Street station, and head over to some office, okay, and I’m making this up, of course, there is no such place.
But there will be such a place, in my humble opinion. And get off at the 14th floor, and in that room, you don’t know who you’re going to find. There will be some people that are pitching stories, and there’ll be other bloggers, and there’ll be great networking, and there’ll be coffee and donuts, maybe, and a big conference room table in the middle, and some tables off on the side, and then at either end of the room, podiums, and everything’s being webcast so that people can tune into this room. So you want to know what’s happening in San Francisco today. You can either get on the BART and go there, or you can tune in to the webcast, there’ll be two streams, and the cool thing about it is that a lot of people in the room are going to also be tuned in to the web streams, because rather than go sit at the other end of the room, listen to the press conference that’s going on there, you can sit at the table, at the main table, and be able to talk with your colleagues, and that’s the most important thing. The eye contact, the ability to look them in the eye, and to talk directly to them without any latency, or any glitches, or whatever, go off on the side. By the way, there probably would also be little sound rooms there for doing podcasts, quiet rooms, where you can sit down one-on- one with somebody and do an interview, or have a little discussion. Like, for example, yesterday, Steve Gilmore and Kevin Marks both questioned me on a blog post that I put up, and I understand I re-read my blog post, and it was pretty sketchy. The main reason why it was so sketchy was because I’d written about this before. I think I’d even done a podcast about it before, and I get kind of lazy. If I’ve already done something, then I ’ll do it one more time.
I’ll do it over and over again.
Anyway, I’m noticing that the audio is about to switch to another Grateful Dead song called “Stagger Lee. " It’s another live version, and it’s going to switch right now.
There you go. It’s a great song . I think the Grateful Dead make superb background for this stuff. Then, of course, at this room, there’s the great whiteboard that says, “These are the stories we’re covering right now. " Volunteers, if you’ve got some time today, there’s a rally down at Market Street at the Ferry Building, or the Olympic Torch is coming through San Francisco, or go over. You’ve got some free tickets for the Giants game over at Packbell, at AT&T Park, or whatever they call it these days. If you’re an American Leaf fan, the A’s are playing over across the bay, and go cover it for us. Take some pictures, upload it, and there will be processes set up for everything, and it will run very much like a wiki-pedia, or like an unconference. Only better, because we’re learning.
We’re going to learn. Sure, the reporters are going to say, “Well, what’s to stop one of the people who is creating news from coming and covering him or herself?” Nothing other than the believability that comes from having such a huge conflict of interest. Sure, it all has to be disclosed. When that person covers their own event, you know that you’re reading the story written in the first person by somebody who is making the news, or believes they’re making the news. Find an interesting, don’t read it, and then you know what? The readership statistics will indicate whether or not there’s value in it or not. People will or won’t read what they believe or don’t believe. A lot of times, people will read things that they know that they don’t believe, just so they can hear the words come out of somebody ’s mouth, the same way a reporter does it. It’s funny how the assumption is that in order to have a sense of a good bullshit detector, you have to work for one of the big media companies. In fact, I think that kind of numbs out your bullshit detector, we’re all born with it. To some extent, we certainly get it whipped into us that you just can’t take anything at face value that you read in the news or you hear in the news. I don’t think it’s a unique skill. I think we can all apply our filters. This is something I’ve said rather than ringing my hands. I think it’s going to be a lot better in the future because you’re cutting out the middlemen and the middlemen have not been serving our interests. I’m excited. I’m also excited that it’s one of the things in mathematics that I loved about mathematics is that if something’s true, no matter how you approach it, you’ll get to the same place. If there is a physical law in the universe, you could come at it from, I can’t think of a good example, but it happens over and over and over again. If by just following the thread of the dev olution of the professional news world, you end up at hyper camp , but if I end up at hyper camp, the way I ended up at it was I happened to be at a blogging event or an event where there were a lot of blog gers.
This just happened spontaneously. We were sitting in a room, me, John Udell, and Doc Searles and probably a handful of other people. This was a long time ago. This was like 1999, like 10 years ago. I think it was ‘99. I just noticed it was this sort of magic element where instead of talking on the phone or sending emails back and forth or reading each other ’s blog posts, when you’re physically present in the same place, there’s this really powerful thing that happens. I come at it from that standpoint. Jay comes at it from the standpoint of how do you reassemble what the news process is using am ateurs? We both agree that this is the way to do it. No matter how you get there, it’s going to be the same damn thing.
Now, with Steve Gilmore and Kevin Marks, we’re talking about oddly, it’s the same thing there, too. The fundamental question is, I’m just using two examples here because it could be a lot of different entities could do this. But right now, the two most obvious candidates are Facebook and Twitter. Google easily could be the proponent of this idea or the implementer of it. So could Amazon. Amazon’s a natural, although it would conflict with their current business model, I think. The idea is this, okay, where are we storing our data? So you take something like TwitPick, for example. It’s storing the data, picture data over on its own servers and then posting pointers to Twitter.
That’s a real low tech. I do that myself. I actually did it before TwitPick existed, a thing called Twittergram that I did that does pretty much exactly the same thing, only I think mine’s a little bit better in some ways. Of course. I’m a pride of auth orship.
And I don’t think for pictures, it much matters whether you shoot a pointer up there to the cloud or whether you shoot the bits of the picture.
And so that’s never been what I ’ve been arguing for, okay? I don’t really care. And I could see where they might have thought that’s what I was saying, because I said it was a YouTube-like opportunity. But that’s not really what I was thinking, although I certainly wouldn’t object if Twitter or Facebook. And of course, Facebook does let you upload pictures now. As does Friend Feed, which I just learned about recently. Maybe they just added it recently. It’s possible that it worked that way. But so no, what’s important is that the apps that build on these platforms all work on the same data.
So that when you’re editing an aspect of a user’s profile, it ’s not their profile in my space , it’s their profile in Twitter’s space. So that when another app allows the user to change their profile, they start with the data that my app put up there and they work from there. And it’s this sort of cooperative working on the same data approach that is much more powerful than everybody has oh, we’re going to switch songs again. This is now going to be in 3, 2, 1. This is all new Minglewood Blues, another live one. And this is going to last about four minutes. And I should wrap this up by then because see how far into this we are.
Yeah, we’re at 20 minutes. So for a short podcast, it would be really nice to wrap this up in four minutes.
So you go back to like my first experience with this was Unix.
In the Unix, you have all these command line tools. And yeah, they all operate on the same data files, which could be C source code, or they could be e-mail messages, or they could be just , you know, RTF, I think those are called.
It was the Roth, sorry, N-Roth, all the print formatting stuff that they did in Unix, that they all operate on the same set of files. Of course, you don’t want each one, each one of these little utilities to have its own file format. And you have to, in order to be able to convert all the sentences to their proper case, upper lower case, whatever, assuming there was a tool to do that, that you ’d have to like copy the file into some other place, do it, and then copy it back out. See, that’s the world we’re living in right now, and it kind of sucks.
So if I post a comment on my blog using the Discuss app, D-I -S-Q-U-S, then that gets replicated over on Friend Feed, which is nice that it gets replicated at all, but it’s not the ideal solution.
Because then when somebody comments on it over there, now they have a whole other synchronization problem. Do they bring the comments that are on my comments over back over? Well, they don’t have that yet. And how many times around this loop are we going to go before it hits us? That there really ought to only be one copy of this thing, and we ought to be passing around pointers, so that all these tools that people are developing can work cooper atively. So we don’t have to talk about this version of a tweet or that version. When people say that all the time, like, I’ve noticed this in threads that are developed off of my tweets over in Friend Feed space, they go, “Well, I don’t think Dave actually ever comes over here. " Well, I do, but there are other services where my stuff gets echoed where I never show up, and so I really don’t know when people have commented on my stuff over in those places. And, okay, this is fine for 2009, but what about later? What about 2010, 2011? We can’t go much further than this, and the problem is it multiplies, and as it affects more and more people, only leads us towards more siloing, because, you know , it starts becoming an ache and a pain when you realize how many different places do your things get replicated, so people shut it off. And they say, “I don’t want it replicated because I want everybody to come here and talk in this place, because that way I don’t have to go to 18,000 different places to see what’s new. " Okay? So, there’s a way to solve this, and there’s a way to do this elegantly, and that ’s what I was talking about yesterday in a very shorty-end way, which is that if apps, like, for example, Discuss could hang your comments off of a tree that existed only in one place, then all of a sudden you wouldn’t have to do any synchronization at all.
And it’s a force that goes against all this synchron ization, and it says, “Let’s try to coalesce things, but let’s not give up any of the ability to build these other apps on top of this stuff. " So the way that that will happen, and I’m convinced it will eventually happen, and it could happen as soon as, like, next month, right, is for one of these services that have access to investment capital, like Twitter or Facebook. Of course, Google has extremely deep pockets here, and they could do it, you know, just very, very easily, is to allow applications to attach arbitrary data to a user’s profile, and also to access data that’s been attached to a user’s profile, obviously, with the user’s permission.
Because none of this is going to happen because that’s, of course, how well this OAuth stuff works anyway, is that unless the user says, “Hey, you know, this app is allowed to access my profile and the data that’s hanging off it,” and, of course, now get this.
Oh, we’re going to go to another song.
This is called “Estimated Prof it,” and this one’s not live, and it’s off the Terrapin Station album. And the next one , after that, this one’s five minutes, and if I keep going, then we’re going to get to another one, which is “Dancing in the Street ,” so it’s a beautiful, beautiful song. This is Dave, the hippie surfer here, coming to you from Berkeley, California. Don’t forget, Pinko, liberal hippie surfer. Anyway, yes, where was I? Not only do you want the profile data to be in this space, you also want the tweets to be there, too, because I want to be able to hang data off the tweets. And, okay, so Kevin says, “Well, why wouldn’t you, let’s hang the mp 3 off of it, but use a URL to the mp3. " No problem. I’m okay with that.
You can hang the mp3 itself or the URL to it, and if Twitter doesn’t want to store my big blob of data, I don’t have a problem with that. Just let me put the URL up there and link it in there.
I’d be okay with that. But, you know, on the other hand, maybe somebody wants to do this. They do it for AVI files, which are, you know, QuickTime movies and stuff, which are much, much, much, much larger than an mp3, but it’s not the blob that’s important.
It’s not the bits itself that are important. What’s important is the integration, the one place to put the data that does not require synchronization. So that’s the idea that I was expressing. And oddly enough, I think it’s related to this whole idea of orchest rating coverage of political events by bloggers so that we are not all over the map and so that we have this organization to our work. Same idea, really, but in different spaces. So, everybody, ladies and gentlemen , boys and girls, we’re now 27 minutes into it, and I think we’re about done for today. So, if I don’t talk to you before that, I look forward to seeing you again next Sunday with the Rebooting the News podcast with Jay Rosen and have a wonderful Tuesday, wonderful rest of the weekend. If you’re in California, try to stay cool because we’re having this awesome, awesome heat wave.
This is your hippie surfer dude from Berkeley, Dave Winer. See you soon, okay? Bye.
I’ve been doing these podcasts every Sunday with Jay Rose and they’ve been getting some interesting places and people I think are starting to pay attention and they’re starting to write about them.
We’re only on the sixth one or the seventh one now, I’m not sure, they’re losing count, but I think that we’re figuring things out and now the podcast actually has a name, it’s called Rebooting the News and I ’m sure there will be a website at some point in place to comment.
I still want to keep the feed at scripting. com/rss. xml because that means that not only do you get that podcast, but you get all these other podcasts that I think of doing every once in a while and sort of add a sidebar to each of the discussions that we have and try out new ideas, like for example I have some music playing in the background and I have no idea whether you can hear it or not and whether it’s too loud or too soft, I don’t know, but it’s Fire on the Mountain, The Grateful Dead from the Shaked own Street album and this goes out to one of the reviewers, you see I’m so bad with names, let’s see if I can find this, hold on, give me a sec, this is funny, see of course I didn’t prepare and that’s one of the things that this review er called me on, let’s see, I think I used the word appreciated, there it is, Tim Windsor at the Neiman Lab, reviewed our last podcast and let’s see what he said about me, he used the word obstreperous, which I looked it up, I had to look it up, it’s not entirely bad, it’s not how I would describe myself, he says Dave Winer the occasionally obstreperous, you’d have to go with that because everybody is occasionally everything, often brilliant, well thank you, developer and provocateur, which I go for, with the surfer y hippy voice and that I totally resemble, I love that, that people hear my voice as surfer hippy, that’s why I play in the grateful fit in the background today as a tribute to Tim Windsor and to help people get in the groove of, you know, it’s like maybe I’ll play, I think the Beach Boys would be a little bit too, excuse me, well too, I almost played the Beach Boys, I used to, whenever I’d get back to California from a trip I would always play California Girls, which I thought was a way of saying, hey, you know, it’s good to be back, you know, because the East Coast girls are whatever and they really keep you warm at night, but there’s nothing I can’t wait to get back to the stage to the cutest girls in the world, California Girls. Anyway, so what I wanted to talk about very briefly, I think this might be a very short podcast, is something that came up at the very end of Sunday’s podcast where we were talking about, you know, applying the principles of blog gers/amateur journalism, that’s why I much prefer amateur journalists to citizen journalists, because citizen, I don’t know what it is, citizen journalist sounds like naive, pie in the sky, you know , true believer type stuff, where , I mean, when you come down to it, everybody’s a citizen, so what are you really saying about somebody to say that they ’re citizen journalists, it’s really not saying anything else , and I think there’s a subtext there that, you know, somehow you can dismiss this as just being an act of civic, you know , it’s like the people who go to city council meetings, and they’re kind of wacko, you know, whatever, I don’t know, it’s apologies people who go to city council meetings. I think that it’s going to be a lot bigger than that than just people who are doing their civic duty, I think that this impulse to tell your story, and to have other people hear it, I think that journalism’s been tapping into that, that’s how they get us all to work for free for them, I mean, how many hours do you spend on the phone with a reporter to get one measly little quote, you know, well, the payoff is that you want your ideas out there, but of course the journalism system so thoroughly disappoint s on that, because they never get your ideas out there, they get your name out there perhaps, but they don’t get your ideas out there. So this news system I think is going to be a lot better, because you’re going to get closer to the sources with less interpretation, and we’ll get to decide for ourselves who we like and we don’t like, and until then we’re just getting the sort of one perspective news, and it’s all for the perspective of a soon to be unemployed professional journalist, and so it’s increasingly becoming more and more about their plight, and it’s more visible, whereas I don’t think it’s really any more present than it has been before, it’s a lot more in your face, it’s harder to avoid, but I think that the story has always been about the journalist and not about the story, and that of course isn’t really good. If other professions did that, then you’d see some really terrible results, and other professions of course do it. We ’re dealing with this whole financial catastrophe right now , because the financial industry looked at our homes as being just another sort of instrument to manipulate, and where were their consciences? Would these people have anything like a conscience ? Because these are people’s homes, their lives they’re trading on, and the same way that the journalist is thinking about themselves more and more, and less about the service that they’re supposed to provide.
The medical industry, well they want ACS’s drug consumers, and they reward physicians appropriately. Accordingly, lawyers, don’t get me started on lawyers, but lawyers exist to perpetuate lawyers for the most part, well I won’t say for the most part, but I’ve had my nose rubbed in this recently , where I paid a huge amount of money to lawyers because they could really fuck me up, and that was the way it was explained to me. You could be right Dave, but if you pay, you get to keep some of your savings account. If you don’t pay, you could be proven right in court and end up penn iless. Well, so you all know what I did, right? I went and fought for the bigger principle ? No. I said I think I’ll keep my savings account, and I ’ll live to find another day.
But I think that our system is finally completely coughing up the air balls on all of this . I will just look the other way while everybody fucks the system, and just take my little piece of it, and somehow worry about how it all shakes out later. Well, the bills come due folks. Shaking out now.
Everybody said, they like to say, well we’re going to pass this mess on to our grandchildren.
Yeah, sure. If we’re lucky, and that’s what I always said, and it seems to me like that’s been disproven. We’re not passing it under our grandchildren. We’re doing it to ourselves, or we are the grandchildren.
How about them apples? Anyway, so back to the positive stuff.
Not that this isn’t all fun, and it’s kind of interesting, I think, no matter what the outcome is. Jay said something, and I hate to say that I had come to exactly the same conclusion, and just didn’t want to put that much in at the end of a podcast, that the way to do the coverage of the Boston Marrow race, this is like flipping all the way back, is to have a simple sort of assignment desk, the equivalent of an assignment desk, in today ’s newsroom, or in yesterday’s newsroom, and instead of alloc ating professional reporters' resources to covering a story, it allocates the amateur reporters’ resources. So what you do is you get a bunch of bloggers to sign up and say, I ’m interested in covering the Boston Marrow race, okay? And you get your name on the list, and in return for volunteering to do this, you will get some assignments, and your byline and your story will get some flow. And the more people that are signed up to do this, the more events we can cover, and I think the more flow you ’re going to get. And it’s the obvious next step. It’s one of the ways of getting the structure. And we’re already well-schooled at how to do this kind of stuff. We’ve been practicing this whole art called “Unconferences,” you know? They’re all about volunteers. And I think that once you have a mission to the structure, you’ll get a lot more people participating. I think because people are anxious to make a contribution. You saw that in the last year’s election, that once there was a candidate who at least had the veneer of being a cause, or having ethics , or standing for something, that people stood up and said, okay, I’m going to give my time , I’m going to give my money, I’m going to endorse this guy, I’m going to write about him on the blog, I’m going to do whatever I can to get this guy elected. I think that spirit is, it’s never going away, and it never has gone away. It ’s just been waiting for something for it to hang on to.
And so, anyway, the point was, the reason why I got so excited about this is that it’s the hyper-camp idea that I started talking about a number of years ago of this permanent newsroom as an open resource for the blogging community, and it ties bloggers to a geography .
And it says, okay, if you want to work today on news, get on the BART and go to downtown San Francisco, get off at the Powell Street station, and head over to some office, okay, and I’m making this up, of course, there is no such place.
But there will be such a place, in my humble opinion. And get off at the 14th floor, and in that room, you don’t know who you’re going to find. There will be some people that are pitching stories, and there’ll be other bloggers, and there’ll be great networking, and there’ll be coffee and donuts, maybe, and a big conference room table in the middle, and some tables off on the side, and then at either end of the room, podiums, and everything’s being webcast so that people can tune into this room. So you want to know what’s happening in San Francisco today. You can either get on the BART and go there, or you can tune in to the webcast, there’ll be two streams, and the cool thing about it is that a lot of people in the room are going to also be tuned in to the web streams, because rather than go sit at the other end of the room, listen to the press conference that’s going on there, you can sit at the table, at the main table, and be able to talk with your colleagues, and that’s the most important thing. The eye contact, the ability to look them in the eye, and to talk directly to them without any latency, or any glitches, or whatever, go off on the side. By the way, there probably would also be little sound rooms there for doing podcasts, quiet rooms, where you can sit down one-on- one with somebody and do an interview, or have a little discussion. Like, for example, yesterday, Steve Gilmore and Kevin Marks both questioned me on a blog post that I put up, and I understand I re-read my blog post, and it was pretty sketchy. The main reason why it was so sketchy was because I’d written about this before. I think I’d even done a podcast about it before, and I get kind of lazy. If I’ve already done something, then I ’ll do it one more time.
I’ll do it over and over again.
Anyway, I’m noticing that the audio is about to switch to another Grateful Dead song called “Stagger Lee. " It’s another live version, and it’s going to switch right now.
There you go. It’s a great song . I think the Grateful Dead make superb background for this stuff. Then, of course, at this room, there’s the great whiteboard that says, “These are the stories we’re covering right now. " Volunteers, if you’ve got some time today, there’s a rally down at Market Street at the Ferry Building, or the Olympic Torch is coming through San Francisco, or go over. You’ve got some free tickets for the Giants game over at Packbell, at AT&T Park, or whatever they call it these days. If you’re an American Leaf fan, the A’s are playing over across the bay, and go cover it for us. Take some pictures, upload it, and there will be processes set up for everything, and it will run very much like a wiki-pedia, or like an unconference. Only better, because we’re learning.
We’re going to learn. Sure, the reporters are going to say, “Well, what’s to stop one of the people who is creating news from coming and covering him or herself?” Nothing other than the believability that comes from having such a huge conflict of interest. Sure, it all has to be disclosed. When that person covers their own event, you know that you’re reading the story written in the first person by somebody who is making the news, or believes they’re making the news. Find an interesting, don’t read it, and then you know what? The readership statistics will indicate whether or not there’s value in it or not. People will or won’t read what they believe or don’t believe. A lot of times, people will read things that they know that they don’t believe, just so they can hear the words come out of somebody ’s mouth, the same way a reporter does it. It’s funny how the assumption is that in order to have a sense of a good bullshit detector, you have to work for one of the big media companies. In fact, I think that kind of numbs out your bullshit detector, we’re all born with it. To some extent, we certainly get it whipped into us that you just can’t take anything at face value that you read in the news or you hear in the news. I don’t think it’s a unique skill. I think we can all apply our filters. This is something I’ve said rather than ringing my hands. I think it’s going to be a lot better in the future because you’re cutting out the middlemen and the middlemen have not been serving our interests. I’m excited. I’m also excited that it’s one of the things in mathematics that I loved about mathematics is that if something’s true, no matter how you approach it, you’ll get to the same place. If there is a physical law in the universe, you could come at it from, I can’t think of a good example, but it happens over and over and over again. If by just following the thread of the dev olution of the professional news world, you end up at hyper camp , but if I end up at hyper camp, the way I ended up at it was I happened to be at a blogging event or an event where there were a lot of blog gers.
This just happened spontaneously. We were sitting in a room, me, John Udell, and Doc Searles and probably a handful of other people. This was a long time ago. This was like 1999, like 10 years ago. I think it was ‘99. I just noticed it was this sort of magic element where instead of talking on the phone or sending emails back and forth or reading each other ’s blog posts, when you’re physically present in the same place, there’s this really powerful thing that happens. I come at it from that standpoint. Jay comes at it from the standpoint of how do you reassemble what the news process is using am ateurs? We both agree that this is the way to do it. No matter how you get there, it’s going to be the same damn thing.
Now, with Steve Gilmore and Kevin Marks, we’re talking about oddly, it’s the same thing there, too. The fundamental question is, I’m just using two examples here because it could be a lot of different entities could do this. But right now, the two most obvious candidates are Facebook and Twitter. Google easily could be the proponent of this idea or the implementer of it. So could Amazon. Amazon’s a natural, although it would conflict with their current business model, I think. The idea is this, okay, where are we storing our data? So you take something like TwitPick, for example. It’s storing the data, picture data over on its own servers and then posting pointers to Twitter.
That’s a real low tech. I do that myself. I actually did it before TwitPick existed, a thing called Twittergram that I did that does pretty much exactly the same thing, only I think mine’s a little bit better in some ways. Of course. I’m a pride of auth orship.
And I don’t think for pictures, it much matters whether you shoot a pointer up there to the cloud or whether you shoot the bits of the picture.
And so that’s never been what I ’ve been arguing for, okay? I don’t really care. And I could see where they might have thought that’s what I was saying, because I said it was a YouTube-like opportunity. But that’s not really what I was thinking, although I certainly wouldn’t object if Twitter or Facebook. And of course, Facebook does let you upload pictures now. As does Friend Feed, which I just learned about recently. Maybe they just added it recently. It’s possible that it worked that way. But so no, what’s important is that the apps that build on these platforms all work on the same data.
So that when you’re editing an aspect of a user’s profile, it ’s not their profile in my space , it’s their profile in Twitter’s space. So that when another app allows the user to change their profile, they start with the data that my app put up there and they work from there. And it’s this sort of cooperative working on the same data approach that is much more powerful than everybody has oh, we’re going to switch songs again. This is now going to be in 3, 2, 1. This is all new Minglewood Blues, another live one. And this is going to last about four minutes. And I should wrap this up by then because see how far into this we are.
Yeah, we’re at 20 minutes. So for a short podcast, it would be really nice to wrap this up in four minutes.
So you go back to like my first experience with this was Unix.
In the Unix, you have all these command line tools. And yeah, they all operate on the same data files, which could be C source code, or they could be e-mail messages, or they could be just , you know, RTF, I think those are called.
It was the Roth, sorry, N-Roth, all the print formatting stuff that they did in Unix, that they all operate on the same set of files. Of course, you don’t want each one, each one of these little utilities to have its own file format. And you have to, in order to be able to convert all the sentences to their proper case, upper lower case, whatever, assuming there was a tool to do that, that you ’d have to like copy the file into some other place, do it, and then copy it back out. See, that’s the world we’re living in right now, and it kind of sucks.
So if I post a comment on my blog using the Discuss app, D-I -S-Q-U-S, then that gets replicated over on Friend Feed, which is nice that it gets replicated at all, but it’s not the ideal solution.
Because then when somebody comments on it over there, now they have a whole other synchronization problem. Do they bring the comments that are on my comments over back over? Well, they don’t have that yet. And how many times around this loop are we going to go before it hits us? That there really ought to only be one copy of this thing, and we ought to be passing around pointers, so that all these tools that people are developing can work cooper atively. So we don’t have to talk about this version of a tweet or that version. When people say that all the time, like, I’ve noticed this in threads that are developed off of my tweets over in Friend Feed space, they go, “Well, I don’t think Dave actually ever comes over here. " Well, I do, but there are other services where my stuff gets echoed where I never show up, and so I really don’t know when people have commented on my stuff over in those places. And, okay, this is fine for 2009, but what about later? What about 2010, 2011? We can’t go much further than this, and the problem is it multiplies, and as it affects more and more people, only leads us towards more siloing, because, you know , it starts becoming an ache and a pain when you realize how many different places do your things get replicated, so people shut it off. And they say, “I don’t want it replicated because I want everybody to come here and talk in this place, because that way I don’t have to go to 18,000 different places to see what’s new. " Okay? So, there’s a way to solve this, and there’s a way to do this elegantly, and that ’s what I was talking about yesterday in a very shorty-end way, which is that if apps, like, for example, Discuss could hang your comments off of a tree that existed only in one place, then all of a sudden you wouldn’t have to do any synchronization at all.
And it’s a force that goes against all this synchron ization, and it says, “Let’s try to coalesce things, but let’s not give up any of the ability to build these other apps on top of this stuff. " So the way that that will happen, and I’m convinced it will eventually happen, and it could happen as soon as, like, next month, right, is for one of these services that have access to investment capital, like Twitter or Facebook. Of course, Google has extremely deep pockets here, and they could do it, you know, just very, very easily, is to allow applications to attach arbitrary data to a user’s profile, and also to access data that’s been attached to a user’s profile, obviously, with the user’s permission.
Because none of this is going to happen because that’s, of course, how well this OAuth stuff works anyway, is that unless the user says, “Hey, you know, this app is allowed to access my profile and the data that’s hanging off it,” and, of course, now get this.
Oh, we’re going to go to another song.
This is called “Estimated Prof it,” and this one’s not live, and it’s off the Terrapin Station album. And the next one , after that, this one’s five minutes, and if I keep going, then we’re going to get to another one, which is “Dancing in the Street ,” so it’s a beautiful, beautiful song. This is Dave, the hippie surfer here, coming to you from Berkeley, California. Don’t forget, Pinko, liberal hippie surfer. Anyway, yes, where was I? Not only do you want the profile data to be in this space, you also want the tweets to be there, too, because I want to be able to hang data off the tweets. And, okay, so Kevin says, “Well, why wouldn’t you, let’s hang the mp 3 off of it, but use a URL to the mp3. " No problem. I’m okay with that.
You can hang the mp3 itself or the URL to it, and if Twitter doesn’t want to store my big blob of data, I don’t have a problem with that. Just let me put the URL up there and link it in there.
I’d be okay with that. But, you know, on the other hand, maybe somebody wants to do this. They do it for AVI files, which are, you know, QuickTime movies and stuff, which are much, much, much, much larger than an mp3, but it’s not the blob that’s important.
It’s not the bits itself that are important. What’s important is the integration, the one place to put the data that does not require synchronization. So that’s the idea that I was expressing. And oddly enough, I think it’s related to this whole idea of orchest rating coverage of political events by bloggers so that we are not all over the map and so that we have this organization to our work. Same idea, really, but in different spaces. So, everybody, ladies and gentlemen , boys and girls, we’re now 27 minutes into it, and I think we’re about done for today. So, if I don’t talk to you before that, I look forward to seeing you again next Sunday with the Rebooting the News podcast with Jay Rosen and have a wonderful Tuesday, wonderful rest of the weekend. If you’re in California, try to stay cool because we’re having this awesome, awesome heat wave.
This is your hippie surfer dude from Berkeley, Dave Winer. See you soon, okay? Bye.