Image via Wikipedia

When you get right down to it, Privacy is a poor hack.

Right now, the privacy controls are out of our hands. Though we may think that editing our Facebook feed and hiding behind fake e-mails protect us, the truth is anything but. A few years ago, I was able to find my grandmother’s social security number online; she has never owned an Internet-enabled computer. On a bet, using only his first name and a cursory knowledge of his life, I was able to find a random stranger’s home address, his phone number, the phone number of his parents, and all their past residences–in 30 minutes. Our unique identifiers are spread all over the web, we can’t help it.

There is a metaphor many security experts use when dealing with the concept of privacy in the digital age. The Panopticon is a prison designed to allow a single observer to see all the prisoners, without the prisoners knowing that they are being watched.

Many professionals live in fear of the digital Panopticon, a situation in which our own information imprisons us in an Orwellian trap of monstrous proportions. With our every move tracked, we loose that sacred American right to privacy. These experts invent security codes, hashed passwords, privacy keys, and the little delete buttons next to Facebook mini-feed items. They are all subject to a shared delusion. That they are staving off the end of privacy as we know it.

The Panopticon is here. We are trapped in its prison cells. We can’t protect our information. The unending attempts to do so are distracting us from the real question, an old one.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The Latin question has even more relevance now then it did for the Romans who read Juvenal’s poems. It translates to “Who will guard the guardians?” and it is one of the most important queries of the digital age. It is second only to the question: Who are the guardians?

Right now, we have deluded ourselves into thinking we are safe. But we couldn’t be more wrong. Our lives are open books to our world’s elite.

A $100 background check will reveal plenty about me, from my tendency to visit Taco Bell at two a.m. to any time I’ve been called in court. The monetary elite, both personal and corporate, can pay far more for invasive background checks that will track me to my favorite deodorant and last sent e-mail.

Our national agencies, the bureaucratic elite, have access to the machines that process my movements through the information world. The government can track my phone calls, library renewals and, with only a little bit of effort, find out more about my communications than I could possibly remember. Before I start sounding like a conspiracy theorist, here’s a number to consider: 399 billion dollars. That’s how much of your taxes went to the US Department of Defense in 2007. Almost 34 billion of that amount went to various groups marked on their budget as “Other.” In 2008, the president requested 45 billion dollars for classified intelligence operations and agencies. If our government needs to know something about you or me, it will.

Finally, the intellectual elite can also easily find the information behind identities. I’m not talking about the ivory tower, I mean black-hat hackers. Bruce Sterling, in his documentation of the hacker movement from the 60s to the 90s, The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, documents numerous digital intruders, including one citizen who found Bill Clinton’s credit card. Unfortunately, anything digital can be broken into with effort, time, and a big enough computer. All these years later, an ever increasing number of identity theft crimes mean that against a smart criminal, there is no real protection.

It’s time for a paradigm shift. Our information’s security is irrelevant, we need to ask how to be secure in our digital selves. We need to be able to stand in the center of our personal Panopticon and see every aspect of our many identities in complete exposure and detail. It is time to take the tools away from the elite, opt-in, and watch our watchers.

Right now we are in a weird between state, where we are forced through complicated security practices because we want to protect ourselves from the non-elite who seek to steal our identities. But this provides a false sense of security, the waitress can still steal your credit card number and your workplace can discover court settlements.

Enter the society of consensual monitoring, where the masses of information are under our control and we see what we output. Imagine a life-feed. A website where you can go to see every transaction made with your credit card as a news item, your credit rating is a widget in the corner of your screen, the government’s servers send you an alert every time your social security card is checked in the system, and you can track when people search for you in the same way that you can see a report on who is visiting a website.

What we need is permission, the same corporate and government groups that can track your identity with ease are the ones who have control over whether or not you can access it. You need to pay them to be able to see what is happening with your own identity. We have lost the ability to see our own identities.

Practically, It wouldn’t take that much to accomplish. Once we had permission, to opt-in to your identity you wouldn’t need new technology, everything we need is out there, RSS, XML, and more.

As an example, there is an increasing number of free websites that allow you to track your own identity and name as it travels through the Internet. Many of these allow you to plug in to social networks such as Facebook, which tracks friends as they go to events and take pictures, Last.fm, which tallies up what music you listen to, or Digg, which lets you mark the news stories that you read. The Spock service combines the ability to see when your name pops up on the web with feeds from other services. Friendfeed lets you track activity in your own identities while seeing what your friends are doing.

On the more professional side there are services likeLinkedIn, which allow you to put up all your professional information for potential employers and see exactly who has been looking at your profile. Annualcreditreport.com lets you get your credit report once every 12 months–for free–from the top agencies and CreditKarma.com gives you yourTransUnion credit score for free, through advertiser sponsorship. In an extremely useful move, an increasing number of banks allow access to account information via mobile phone.

The ability to opt-in to your identity could be here tomorrow, but we need to go to our government representatives and our corporate bosses and argue for it to happen. This is an all or nothing proposal, either we can all join in consensual monitoring of our identities and be truly safe or we can live in a constant scramble to try and protect the unprotectable.

Related posts:

1. Requiem for a Geek: The Social Network is good news for Zuckerberg

Image via Wikipedia

On the web everything is in the present, but that doesn’t mean it is presently relevant or even accurate. Timestamps are an essential component of any online content you create.

Timestamps are enormously important to participants with online content. While the content you are authoring may not always have relevance, it will always be on the web, sometimes even after you think you’ve removed it from the web. Numerous sites run archives, others simply scrape content and some folks may even print things out.

Your work may live on after you are gone. However, it will become a useless mess if you fail to provide the proper context. That context is the exact date. 

You may think this is a non-issue, but think back for a moment. If you work and play on the internet you’ve probably re-shared, commented on or been surprised by something you thought was new content but was, in fact, years old. Think about how you felt when it happened. Even if you never re-shared stuff from this date last year by accident, just reading it and briefly thinking it was something new probably made you feel a little silly.

Why alienate possible participants like that?

Any content management system worth its salt has to timestamp its content internally. It isn’t difficult to make that meta-information show up on your site. Some organizations get it, like the Guardian, who removed words like today and tomorrow from web reports. There are many others that don’t however.

I have frequently stumbled upon sites that don’t list the date at all or, just as useless, only list the month and day. Just as bad are the sites which publish multiple posts a day and don’t timestamp them with the date and time of publication. I can’t trust content that comes from these sites, and neither can you, because it is impossible to tell if it is current or relevant.

If you run your own blog, work with a news organization or are just occasionally posting content online do everyone a favor and put the month, day and year right there under the title and author. You’ll be helping to build a better internet.

Related posts:

1. Site upgrade

This month’s Carnival of Journalism asks: how do you hack your life? What tools and techniques allow you to work smarter and more effectively?

There are four big things I want to focus on in this post.

• How my Kindle makes me a better worker and a more reliable journalist.
• Why After the Deadline makes me a better writer.
• The wonderful powers of Boolean logic and other special search operators.
• A list of the other major tools I recommend to student journalists daily.

The Kindle 3G is a miracle tool

I purchased a Kindle 3G a bit more than half a year ago. Since then it has become my professional safety net.  The Kindle has a long battery life and the 3G version gets internet pretty much everywhere for free. This makes the device my ultimate fall back. Amazon says the browser on the Kindle is experimental but it works just fine. There are a lot of things you can do with it.

• Get directions on Google Maps
• Send text messages with Google Voice
• Store all your reference materials, code cheat sheets and textbooks.
• Take notes using my special P2 theme
• Read Google Reader’s mobile edition
• Check email
• Look up words in the dictionary
• Google things
• Check Wikipedia
• Oh… and read books of course.

I also wrote a post a little while back on why I consider the Kindle my digital swiss army knife, with more reasons why the device is the most reliable tool in my arsenal.

Image via CrunchBase

After the Deadline plus WordPress will make you a better writer

After the Deadline is a WordPress plugin and now a Chrome extension that takes your spell check to the next level.  In addition to the standard check for misspellings, After the Deadline also looks for style issues and checks your grammar. It’s much better than Word.

Install the plugin, start blogging with it and you’ll see right away just how good it is at catching errors. I pay attention to the plugin and correct where it indicates. As a result, I’ve seen a significant increase in my writing’s quality over time.

Search operators save me a lot of time and help make sure I can find exactly what I’m looking for

If you are not already familiar with Boolean Logic as a way to window searches, you are missing out on one of the most useful techniques of the information age.

However, Boolean operators are just the beginning. Google, Twitter, GMail and others all have specific search operators to help you find what you are looking for.

Here’s my post on Boolean, Google and Twitter search operators. Then, to really power through GMail, you need to check out this list of special search operators for Google Mail users.

From Research to Release: using the free web to create better journalism

I also maintain a list of free tools that journalists can use to create better content. Check out the list and add your own suggestions.

Bonus round: time management

You should also check out Toggl and Rescue Time, two great tools I use all the time. They both help me keep track of what I’m doing and how efficiently I’m doing it.

Related posts:

1. Boolean Logic: How to Search the Web [Re-post]
2. Why the Kindle is my Swiss Army knife
3. Announcing P2 for Kindle! A WordPress theme for notes and collaboration

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

Washington Post’s recently released aggregator site Trove brings little to the table, both in terms of content and function.

So I’ve now had three days of Trove and I’m not sure why it has got such glowing reviews. The site’s home page illustrates an old-media approach to new-media content and brings along the various troubles of WaPo’s home page to this different platform. Ignoring font choices, the front page on my screen is an ugly and fairly useless mess.

I guess I should explain what I want from a service like Trove.

I want a site that finds me content that I haven’t or couldn’t find without it.

Trove’s front page is a showcase of the mediocre when it comes to selection of content. I don’t need a site to select headlines from the New York Times, The Atlantic, BBC or Variety. That’s half the reason I use Twitter. The people I follow and the internet in general curates mainstream content like that for me. That’s the point. I don’t need another site to do what everyone else already does.

Instead, Trove presents me with lists of articles, 90% of which contain information I already know, don’t care about or have already read. Not only that, but the articles listed on my front page range lack any sort of real timeliness. In the channels, some articles are over a week old. In three days of use, I’ve only discovered three articles on the service’s front page worth clicking through. Channels usually only have one useful article themselves.

I guess Trove wants to be a one-stop-shop for people to get all their news, but I don’t think such a thing can or should exist anymore.

If you do curate content that I could find everywhere else, you better add something to it or provide social proof.

If you are curating content and using real people to do it, I’d really like to see some sort of value-add from the curator. The only thing that is apparently being curated by a human are the Editor’s picks, which apparently have no connection with the actual topics I’m interested in. Not only that, but the single thing of value the editor adds is a summary of the article.

Now if you are going to feed me NYT and BBC articles, the least you could do is show me some sort of social proof that tells me that either people haven’t read this yet (and is therefore valuable for me to share) or that so many people have that I need to read it myself. Yet there is no notice of tweets, comments, Facebook shares, or any other sort of social proof, even from within the Trove system itself. Nor are there the keys I’d need to share what I’m interested in socially with other users or other services. If you are going to show me things that I (and anyone else with two eyes and a broadband connection) have already read, then you had better let me share it from your site, otherwise what’s the point?

I need a point of view.

Hard news and even most soft news topics seem to completely lack links to articles that take a stance or, at the very least, provide news commentary beyond the boring just-the-facts reporting that’s killing journalism. The curated articles that appear on my front page are nearly useless for learning anything about a topic. It’s a little better on the individual channels.

I want to learn something.

While timeliness is important, it is not the be all and end all of this type of platform. There is another side of things, finding the type of articles that illuminate and expand a topic. The point of all the reading I do online isn’t just to keep up on the latest news, it’s to expand my knowledge and learn. The tuned channels, editors’ picks and front page present me with nothing that expands my knowledge of a topic.

My aggregator service should know me.

Despite Trove’s much trumpeted Facebook integration, all that its search of my topics of interest and recent posts proved is that it has no ability to distinguish Facebook interactions from things I’m interested in news about. Trove automatically included four different channels having to do with The Beatles. Presumably because I list them as one of my favorite bands? Except there could not possibly be any news about The Beatles that I’m interested in. Especially not enough to fill four channels.

Its channel finder, which encourages me to pick one out of two choices for a channel topic recommended presumably from Facebook, rarely presents me with any topics of interest.

Trove succeeds in one way in this regard. The site’s functionality assures me that no marketer will ever get any truly useful or accurate information from my Facebook page.

You can (maybe?) focus Trove by using the Save this Article or Ignore buttons, but they are minuscule.

My niche interests have the highest value in any aggregator.

The greatest value I gain from any aggregation or curation system is in its ability to bring me important information, breaking news and important thoughts and commentary on the niche topics I’m interested in. This is the one place where timeliness matters least. Of course, channels dealing with niche topics, inevitably ’tuned by me,’ lack interesting content or, sometimes, any content.  Just off my last week’s Twitter feed alone, I could easily fill a page on narrative design or transmedia. The first has three articles, the second is mostly boring, or stuff I’ve read already.

Weirdly, Trove’s page on George Mason Patriots (the name for every one of my University’s sports teams) is pretty decent and tuned by Trove’s editors. So I’ll put that one in the win column for them.

Then the Video Games channel, though tuned, is horribly useless, including a Portal 2 review from the Colorado Daily above the fold. What?

Personalization across all of my services.

Not just Facebook.

When I hit the front page of my aggregator, everything I want to know about what I care about should be there.

It just isn’t. Instead there is a set of articles that are fluff. It is either stuff that doesn’t interest me, doesn’t tell me anything new, or just distracts me with useless content.

The design.

I’m all for pretty fonts, but a website is more than that. Let me just go down the list.

• Huge useless Channel Finder taking up a lot of above the fold space. (Found out you could close it using a tiny non-intuitively placed close link.)
• Tiny curation buttons (the previously mentioned Save and Ignore).
• Minuscule sub-titles. These are hard to click and almost so small to make longer ones difficult to read.
• Time information is light gray text on a white background. I guess they don’t think we care about this so they make it hard to read? This is especially bad with the small titles.
• Zero video. What the hell? Is this the 90s? Is this the Drudge Report? I don’t know how you could build a site like this and completely forget to include video.
• Broken elements. I know, it’s the first week. Still, how do you release a site where the footer scroll function (Your channels) doesn’t work?
• Stand-alone article titles. It looks ugly. They have bullet points that just look odd. Oh and the titles lack context standing on their own. At least give me the first sentence here. 160 characters. Is that really too much to ask?

Channels pages are better, but lack visuals, images, videos, etc…

I don’t know what the conversations page is, but it doesn’t have anything on there or explain the feature.

Don’t spam me.

The daily email is just pointless. The last thing I need is an aggregator sending me emails like Trove’s stuffing up my inbox. The minimal content in the newsletters is just completely useless. Also they’re an opt-out feature which is almost enough to make me condone the site on principle.

Conclusion: Trove offers little to make it a competitor.

I just can’t figure out what Trove brings to the table in this already crowded field. There is nothing on display that makes it competitive with far more excellent applications like Feedly, My6Sense, NewsTrust, NewsMix or FlipBook. The content provided is far outstripped by other apps and sites or even email newsletters like SmartBrief.

Let’s face facts, as much as we’d like WaPo to succeed with something like this, Newser does mostly the same thing in a much more effective and visually appealing manner.

I could agree with the argument that Trove isn’t a terrible site. However, it doesn’t really offer anything that would make it useful to me or any other web-native.

Related articles

• Trove, WaPo Labs’s Personalized News Site, Plays Hot-Or-Not With Articles (fastcompany.com)
• Washington Post Launches Trove, Aggregation Site (huffingtonpost.com)
• Personal news site Trove launches, News.me up next (lostremote.com)
• Washington Post Today Launches News Aggregation Website ‘Trove’ (mediaite.com)
• Washington Post launches Trove as custom news site (seattlepi.com)
• Personalised news service Trove launched by Washington Post (blogs.journalism.co.uk)
• The Washington Post Launches Trove, A Personalized Social News Site (techcrunch.com)
• Is There a Cost to Free Custom News Aggregation? (loispaul.com)

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Hello all,

No big blog post today. I’ve spent most of the day traveling to NYC for the College Media Advisors spring 2011 conference. I’ll be presenting for a few workshops and it will be cool. I’ll have more up here about what I’m doing later. If you will be at CMANYC11, I look forward to seeing you. If not you can track it on Twitter via the hashtag #cmanyc11. You can also find them on Facebook.

If you’re in NYC and want to say hello, I’m in the area until the 20th of this month.

-Aram

Related posts:

1. Work and play in DC, NYC [Update]

Image by ShashiBellamkonda via Flickr

Someone realized that TBD was doing the worst thing in the world for Allbritton, telling the competition that they could compete.

The cut-backs issued to Allbritton Communication’s grand experiment TBD were surprising. First the outlet cut community profit-sharing, than Allbritton paired the organization down to just a website and put it under the purview of a TV guy, finally, the site received enormous staff cuts. It’s clear that the site is now pretty much dead and the ambitious community hub and hyperlocal media convergence that Jim Brady planned for will never see the light of day again.

The reason Allbritton shuttered TBD has been a point of speculation. While the assumption is advertising, it doesn’t seem like Allbritton really gave them a chance to try. There have been other speculations as well. TBD garnered world-wide attention for its novel approach and Allbritton has succeed with new media projects before. There was a lot that TBD did right. So what did they do wrong?

TBD made the ultimate mistake, empowering potential competition.

The Allbritton experiment offered ad placement on local blogs, together with a revenue sharing scheme. In reality, the split was not very good. TBD got the lion’s share of revenue. However, it did succeed in substantially changing some bloggers’ mentality . For many, the idea that their website, that thing they did out of passion, could be worth anything was a surprise. In addition, the fact that TBD highlighted their content, meant that someone was actually reading.

Aggregation of news is a great idea, but there is a significant tripping point when your own horse is in the race, you are creating a site in which your own content competes for eyeballs with content made by outsiders. TBD put the content created by bloggers in on the same level as media made by various Allbritton outlets.

It seems clear that TBD was empowering the local bloggers that made up their community. While this might be a great idea in theory, trying to do so from within an established network of media outlets presents a whole host of conflicts of interest for the parent company.

I found out about TBD’s dropping of community advertising as soon as it happened, but not from a usual source. I monitor the local blogger meetups as part of my job and a member of the group sent out an e-mail to the list talking about the decision TBD had made to drop the service. Within minutes, the next few e-mails sent to the list were all about new ways to monetize blogs and where to find sponsors.

Was TBD’s ‘failure’ due to being unable to monetize in a short time, conflicts between staff silos, or brand failure? Perhaps these all contributed to the great experiment’s downfall. But I think someone at the top realized that all of TBD’s community aggregation and promotion was creating competition with Allbritton’s established media.

By empowering bloggers, TBD was going to make it harder for Allbritton to make money, simply by creating a larger number of venues for advertising.

I think that this potential competition for already difficult to sell online advertising played a serious role in Allbritton’s  decision to shut down TBD’s main operations.  Taking this perspective, their actions make sense; the move to decrease community focus, the shut down of community advertising before everything else and the eventual elimination of almost all of the community managers. There wasn’t enough time to evaluate if TBD could sell ads, but there was enough to see the positive reaction of the community and make assumptions on where it could lead.

TBD was doing something great, it was elevating the online community it covered and building bloggers up into responsible community journalists. Through process of selection, TBD influenced the community blogs creating something like beat reporters and it helped them understand that their work was worth more than a few Google ads. It would be hard to think of something more impressive, or more threatening to an established multi-outlet media company. Though TBD’s layoffs were a sad day for the state of journalism, from Allbritton’s perspective, I can see how it would be the right choice.

In retrospect, I think that part of the reason that AOL picked up Huffington Post was because it realizes that it faces the same frightening conundrum as Patch spreads. By soliciting community contributions and paying community members for freelance content, Patch is essentially training the next generation of citizen journalists. Rather than give them the opportunity to start-up their own little outlets, diluting advertising potential, I suspect that we’ll soon see a platform for local Huffington Post-style sites through Patch. By providing citizens with a platform and publicity AOL will face less of a threat that contributors might striking out on their own.  Not to mention, the content will be on AOL’s platform, so they pretty much own it.

Is there a lesson that future start-ups can take away when seeing TBD’s loss from this perspective? The obvious answer is: don’t try being an aggregator when your parent company owns multiple media outlets in the area. There is also a less obvious path for the future.  Own the platform.

Multi-site content management systems are so easy to set up these days. I can think of at least three off the top of my head. Setting up a business model around this isn’t hard, establish yourself, give community members easy entrance and exit with their existing content to the platform, provide them with better tools than they could get at Blogger or WordPress.com, promote the hell out of them, advertise against their content. There is no reason why HuffPo’s model couldn’t be adapted to local.

It’s clear that TBD’s biggest problem was the threat it created by showing people that they need not be part of the church of journalism to create content valuable to the community and earn money with it. They didn’t need to go to journalism school, have a pedigree, or write in AP style. They just need to be dedicated, honest and to create quality content. Considering how many mainstream media journalists seem to lack those very principles these days, it’s clear that empowering citizen journalism was really TBD’s biggest threat.

Your opinions?

Related posts:

1. Huffington Post and AOL: 5 things to take away
2. Old vs New Media – Creative Commons, Wikipeidia and Post Scraping – What is Grand Theft Content?
3. Putting the I in Journalism

Sometimes it is important to maintain a character or narrative over multiple stories. The tool for that is story arcs. Story arcs are most common in TV and graphic novels, however, with the easy linking of stories, there is an opportunity to expand the use of arcs.

A quick review: A story arc allows you to move one narrative thread through another narrative thread, or is simply an evolving narrative, and is most often used for character development. It is especially common in episodic storytelling, where character story arcs spread over multiple episodes of a story. Sometimes plot-lines outside of characters are also spread out over more than one episode.

Particularly plot-focused episodic narratives may use overlapping arcs, allowing an episode to both complete and start a new primary arc.

Image via Kalkion.

I’m curious if the same techniques behind story arcs in episodic content can be applied to other media.

Journalism

The first possibility is in journalism. Journalists often write each article without thinking if it will need a follow-up. As a result stories tend to stand alone, making it difficult for news websites to engage the participant beyond the landing story. In order to get more impressions, they instead spread the story out over multiple pages. This is one of the reasons that news websites have such high bounce rates.

But news organizations, especially local organizations which often follow a story topic over significant periods of time, have a real opportunity to establish arcs over multiple stories, allowing readers to get a better sense of the whole of the story and the people involved. This can drill down further than topics and get people more engaged. If there is something to really connect readers to other content, than it can build traffic and keep users on the site.

The New York Times sometimes plays with interactive features that build on the concept of an arc through a progressing story. I believe that The Washington Post used to  have a related topics frequency graph of some sort that fed on keywords, but they don’t anymore.

Can you think of any ways that news organizations can innovate to make story arcs a part of building coverage?

Transmedia

I was thinking about the value of leaving hints and bits of story in each transmedia element. This is sort of an ARG concept. Transmedia concepts often reveal depth to a story through content, but I’m thinking more along the lines of hiding points on a story arc throughout different media.

The issue is that it could be revealed in different order each time. Perhaps it could build on a narrative where order is not as important. It might work well with time travel.

Design

The most obvious way is to include elements of previous UI stages in other user interface stages, providing a connection. This isn’t particularly uncommon, but I’m thinking about how the technique can be in narrative terms. Really we are establishing a simple type of story about progression from one level of use to the next.

Is it possible to expand beyond that? Hyperlinks are, I suppose, another way to do it.

What about implementing overlapping arcs in each UI level? Include part of the last UI in the current stage. I’ve seen this done before and it is usually pretty cool. I think that could be especially useful with browser-based interactive fiction.

Music

Establishing a story arc over the course of a commercial album is not entirely unheard of but it is pretty rare. When it is done, it can be fairly successful. I’d like to see it more often. Beyond that, what would be really interesting is to treat each song as an episode, with its own story and arcs connecting them together.

Can you think of any other interesting ways to use story arcs?

Related posts:

1. Thinking about how we could use musical cues with online content
2. Story vs Narrative vs Plot

Image via Wikipedia

AOL has announced that it will acquire the Huffington Post and place Arianna Huffington as AOL’s editor in chief. What does this mean for the media, the future of content creation and the internet at large?

1. The portal is dead.

Ten or more years ago, AOL and Yahoo, among others, staked their profits on the idea that a single curated site would be the way we would interact with content on the internet. It’s clear now that they couldn’t have been more wrong.

Your interactions online now come automated at the courtesy of your social graph. We find content through our friends and sites or apps that build on their actions.

All you have to do is take a look at the front page of HuffPo to know that Arianna Huffington is all about the verticals. The single-page single-site model is officially dead. But that doesn’t mean that one company can’t become your only stop for news.

2. AOL wants to own your consumption at all levels.

It’s ironic that only after leaving Times-Warner has AOL started looking to control your entire media input. With the rapidly expanding Patch covering hyper-local news and Huffington Post covering general national news, AOL is building a serious content ecosystem.

Endgadget, TechCruch and PopEater all show AOL’s attempts to target the niche market of content as well.

It’s clear that AOL is angling to have content for everything you could have an interest in, from the very local to the broadest national news. From here on out, you may not use a portal to find AOL content, but you will still be reading it.

3. The content farm is on its way out, long live citizen journalists.

It’s doubtful that Arianna Huffington will preside over a Demand Media-style content farm. What’s far more likely is that she will turn her signature citizen reporting strategy loose on AOL’s various web properties.

Despite AOL’s recent moves in the content farm direction, their acquisition of HuffPo means that they will be home to serious amounts of freely contributed content. Since Huffington has continually been one of the biggest proponents of citizen journalism, it’s almost certain that she will bring it to AOL in a big way.

This is great news for citizen reports and bloggers whose only wish is to have their content writ large across the web. It’s also really bad news for the growing number of unemployed professional journalists, who have, in desperation, tried to eek out a meager salary from content farming. On the plus side, Patch is hiring.

4. Journalists can have public opinions. In fact, they should.

Arianna Huffington’s success comes from a number of things, but the overriding signature of her work is her passion. Huffington is frequently on record supporting the things she cares about and the way she believes the media should work. Her passion is what made Huffington Post a success and I doubt she will stop doing the things that made her and her site newsworthy.

In fact, it was both her loud voice in politics and in media policy that attracted others to her site and motivated them to build content. Huffington’s zeal continues to do more to power Huffington Post than the site’s CMS, software or server.

It’s more clear now then it has ever been that the future of journalism lies far more in emotion than in clinical reporting.

5. AOL isn’t a joke anymore.

For a while AOL had become a bit of a dot-com punch line. They didn’t have good content, they didn’t have an understanding of web 2.0. They didn’t have a strategy. They didn’t know how to make money.

Well, that’s over now. AOL is on its way to becoming an online media giant to rival any of the traditional companies out there. When it comes to figuring out strategy and monetization they are now the ones to watch.

Related posts:

1. Why Allbritton was right to short-circuit TBD.
2. Old vs New Media – Creative Commons, Wikipeidia and Post Scraping – What is Grand Theft Content?
3. Boolean Logic: How to Search the Web [Re-post]

Image via CrunchBase

Social media has many great communication tools and is an excellent way to increase expertise, but what if you want to learn something new? It’s hard to get started on a new topic when the good stuff is hidden in huge feeds.

I’ve really only regretted the death of two online services. Furl, which got swallowed up into Diigo‘s relatively ugly interface, and Social|Median, which turned into an underwhelming XING application. In the second case, it was a real shame because Social|Median was one of the better learning tools I’ve ever found online.

When I briefly met Robert Scoble, he was on his way to speak about the internet as a learning tool at a conference at George Mason University. He asked a group of us, social media folk, about the tools we used to learn:

• Google Reader was of course the big mention, in part because it’s ability to follow people, which makes it immensely useful at helping you read what the experts are reading.
• Feedly also came up, because it takes huge Reader feed lists like mine and makes them manageable and better readable.
• Of course Twitter was on the list, along with various methods to interact with it and monitor hashtags.

But I had to mention Social|Median.

Here’s why, Social|Median allowed you to take people and RSS feeds, big or small, put in keywords, and get a list (and useful RSS feed) of articles from all of the feeds that related to your key words or phrases. You could then invite or leave an open invitation for content experts who could recommend links into the newsfeed as well.  It let you control the level of loose relation and really dig into the mega feeds for the articles relevant to you.

This whole process was immensely useful when trying to learn something new.

Around the time I first became a user of Social|Median, I was asked to write for a youth blog on UPI. When asked to pick from three topics, I chose the Obama and the economy. The problem was that I knew absolutely nothing about economics. It was an opinion blog and I felt that to have a real opinion, I needed to know what I was talking about.  I talked to some friends who knew more than I did and they recommended some feeds, but the highly topical blogs weren’t always the right choice, they aimed at expert readers.

By mixing the highly focused feeds with mega-feeds from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Huffington Post and other general news outlets, as well as conservative and liberal political blogs, I was able to get a stream of content that provided the broadly general information, context, and gave me the ability to delve into the specifics.

When it comes to social media, excepting programming, web development and social media itself, there are really only two types of content promoted: the stupid and the expert. If you wanted to sit down and, over the course of a few months, learn something about a specific topic, it’s pretty difficult to pull off.

The problem is mostly the social media echo chamber. There are topic experts and what they say is frequently reposted and linked to. Breaking into that cycle with your own content is difficult, especially if that content is below the level of the experts and the people who want to become experts. While tools like Quora may offer you the ability to ask specific questions, there’s no way social media now could… say… take the place of a class textbook.

This is a shame because, as I discovered, the information is out there. It is floating in various RSS feeds and online in the heads of some other middle-of-expertise folks. At this point, Social|Median is really the only tool I’ve encountered that made accessing it easy. I’ve yet to see anything like it again.

All the existing tools build on content shared by your network, increasing the echo chamber effect. It does little to help you really learn something new. It doesn’t pick out the signal from the noise because so much is lost when everyone is retweeting modifications on the same theme. The only thing that has come close is LazyFeed, and it is more dumb search then learning tool. While I like the site, LazyFeed isn’t really useful unless you monitor it all the time.

We badly need a learning tool like  Social|Median. Where is the site that intelligently sorts through the mass and hunts down the content I need to educate myself? Once we get outside of general news and web-related content, can social media really do it? Am I just following the wrong people? What’s been your experience?

Related articles

• What I’m Doing To Bridge The Gap: Exploring Social Media (socialmediaexplorer.com)
• Are science blogs stuck in an echo chamber? Chamber? Chamber? | Not Exactly Rocket Science (blogs.discovermagazine.com)

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