PressThink’s Top Ten Ideas for 2004

Jay Rosen’s blog on the press and media has a nice entry on PressThink’s Top Ten Ideas for 2004. The top ten ideas are:

1. The Legacy Media.
2. He said, she said, we said.
3. What the printing press did to the Catholic Church the blogging press does to the media church.
4. Open Source Journalism, or: "My readers know more than I do."
5. News turns from a lecture to a conversation.
6. "Content will be more important than its container."
7. "What once was good–or good enough–no longer is."
8. "The victory of affinity over geography."
9. The Pajamahadeen.
10. The Reality-Based Community.

There are explanations or links to blog entries that explain these. It is a great way to summarize a year of ideas. More generally Rosen’s blog does a good job of linking to highlights of ideas and short essays. His blog seems a good example of a blog made up of short essays rather than just links.

Podcasting: audio for your iPod

The Globe and Mail has a good story from the Associated Press on ‘Podcasting’ lets masses do radio shows (Matthew Fordahl, Monday, Feb. 7, 2005). The story gives some history and describes some of the uses of postcasting. For more see iPodder.org.

Less than a year old, podcasting enables anyone with a PC to become a broadcaster. It has the potential to do to the radio business what Web logs have done to print journalism. By bringing the cost of broadcasting to nearly nothing, it’s enabling more voices and messages to be heard than ever before.

Continue reading Podcasting: audio for your iPod

Google Local

Google Local is a new Google service in beta where you search for What and Where. It will remember your “Where” as in “Hamilton, Ontario”. It then presents the results in a list with a map to the right which tries to locate a particular result.
So, for example, if I search for my name I get a result “A” for McMaster (actually for the McMaster Floral Design in the Hospital) that appears on the map where McMaster is in Hamilton. A mixed result that is sort of right, but not right enough.

Paul Graham: Hackers and Painters

Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham is a readable essay about hacking and how it is not computer science, but is akin to painting or writing. He concludes with:

Over and over we see the same pattern. A new medium appears, and people are so excited about it that they explore most of its possibilities in the first couple generations. Hacking seems to be in this phase now.
Painting was not, in Leonardo’s time, as cool as his work helped make it. How cool hacking turns out to be will depend on what we can do with this new medium.

Embedded in the essay is an idea about fame and open source hacking that needs some thought. My sense is that hacking is in the age of genius, while the arts Graham gives as examples were developed during an age where individual genius was not recognized as it is now. Hackers essentially want the recognition they think artists get for open source work even though our idea of genius is a product of a history of Western art culture. What if we reversed the theory and imagined computing culture, that downplays individual genius relative to other arts, as providing a paradigm back to the arts where the genius artist is no longer the norm?
This link came from Matt Patey.

d’art Design Group: Interface by group94

Drew Paulin drew my attention to an interesting interface for the D’ART DESIGN GRUPPE which was deisnged by group94 / webdesign from belgium who have their own neat interface.
I was talking with a web designer over the weekend about why he doesn’t have a web site. His take was that you don’t get jobs from your web site – at most it acts like a online portfolio, and one that takes lots of work to keep up to date. That said, it seems some of the most creative web works are those by design groups to show off their creativity.