So Gary was fun, but I was looking forward to Christensen. There’s a not-too-thin logical chain where I have a job in this industry because of his research getting into the hands of certain early online news adopters.

When Gary spoke, I think I promised Sean Blanda I would give Christensen the #sholinonrap treatment.

@seanblanda oh Sean I’m really not feeling #sholinonrap today. Maybe tomorrow when Clayton Christensen is here.

— Ryan Sholin (@ryansholin) May 21, 2013

I had my dates mixed up, but you get the picture.

For the uninitiated, “#sholinonrap” is how Sean responds on Twitter or Facebook or wherever, whenever I make some sort of hip-hop reference. Last time Sean was here at the office for some sort of panel, I gave him the treatment, tweeting about the panel in the form of rap lyrics.

And not only was it fun, but it was also a disciplined approach to note-taking that forced me to do three things:

1. Pay attention.
2. Boil down complex topics into simple, 140-character-or-less approximations of lines of verse, complete with rhymes and flow where possible. (I am not an expert at this, kids.)
3. Show my work by tweeting it.

In other words, an efficient and entertaining (for me, anyway) bit of exercise for my brain.

So yesterday during Christensen’s talk, I found a nondescript spot in the audience between a VP of News and a Social Media Editor and did my thing. It went okay.

Many, many thanks to Chris Amico for whipping up a Storify of #christensenonrap before I even had a chance to get back to my desk to prep for my next meeting. Here it is:

###

I had a couple interesting conversations later in the day about why Christensen might not have been too excited about answering direct questions about how this applies to the news business.

One reason might be that the American Press Institute (hi y’all!) spent a few years of research on how Christensen’s theories about disruptive innovation fit into the news business. Newspaper Next. You might have heard of it. Maybe not. Here are a few useful links. (Some of these are remarkably useful.)

• The Newspaper Next research itself, from API. This should probably be required reading for anyone seeing this, but really, you should have read it a few years ago. Some of it may seem patently obvious now.
• Steve Buttry in September 2011 on his personal experience as part of the Newspaper Next project.
• An October 2011 Nieman Lab post by Justin Ellis revisiting the Newspaper Next research and its impact (or lack thereof).
• From Nieman Lab again, an October 2012 post that includes a podcast interview with Christensen and links to…
• …the Fall 2012 Nieman Reports cover story on Christensen and how his disruption theory applies to the news industry.

Plenty to peruse there over your holiday weekend, eh? Anyway, hope you enjoyed this episode of #sholinonrap. Beast!

Actually, I do use it, maybe once a year or so, to communicate the fact that I don’t write many blog posts these days, and you should just follow me on Twitter or somewhere else if you’re interested.

But that’s barely true. I don’t “talk” about “media” stuff much on Twitter, although I sort of do, depending on how you feel about reading between the lines, but sometimes a GIF is just a GIF.

That’s the end of the preamble.

This is a linkdump.

I’ve been using Pinboard (again) for a couple months now to “save” links to “read” later. (Is there an Emoji for air quotes? Wait, I’m going to tweet that, brb.)

Is there an emoji for air quotes?

— Ryan Sholin (@ryansholin) April 10, 2013

The air quotes are because I haven’t really used these tools for anything other than reducing the amount of guilt I have over not reading the entire Internet.

Really, who reads everything they save to “read later?” Nobody. It just sits there, festering. I used to share first, read later, but in modern times, it often feels silly to re-share something everyone has already shared, so I’ll just “like” or “favorite” and let that be a passive form of sharing, rather than crafting a shiny new headline and point of view around some interesting article, where “interesting” equals “this caught my eye and it seems important.”

So, instead, I present this unscheduled, imperiodic link dump of a bunch of stuff I’ve saved. Maybe I’ve read it, maybe not. Maybe it’s useful, maybe not.

You be the judge. An ordered list in no particular order follows, although it might end up in chronological order, we’ll see.

1. Matt Waite for Source on the hey-wasn’t-this-hotly-debated ethics of a mugshot news app.
2. 10 years of NFL play-by-play data, in CSV form.
3. A List Apart article on small-screen (iPhone, for example) navigation patterns.
4. Software to help humans figure out if that pic was ‘shopped, marketed to insurance companies.
5. “Don’t learn how to code; learn to make things.”
6. A painfully basic lesson for product managers and entrepreneurs: Solve Existing Problems
7. If you’re going to have meetings, Always Be Capturing, so you don’t have to have more meetings to review what you decided in the previous meeting.
8. On the perils of including edge case legacy functionality in your application to satisfy power users: Checkboxes That Kill Your Product
9. Hey guys, remember when Netflix was a useful social network?
10. Solid notes on *how* to measure audience engagement in news apps, although I would argue that *what* to measure is critical.
11. For the completely uninitiated, a perfect explanation of the (current) state of open graph tags and making content shareable.
12. Lorem Ipsum for avatars.
13. The accidental limerick detector.
14. The year-old Zeldman-approved recommended replacement for the ol’ -9999px trick.
15. “Could you make a list of cute animals that gets 5 million views?”

Great ideas here for community managers and related parties: How to Use the “Network Density” Formula to Measure the Health of a Community

• Men In Blazers, a soccer podcast by Brits of some vintage, in New York City, mostly, for ESPN’s Grantland. Funny.
• Roadrunner, by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers.
• Hay Day, an iPhone farm game. Or as we call it in my household (all members of the household, cats excluded) “the farm game” or even just “the farm.”
• Trying to get sort of OK at, well, Rubik’s Cube.
• Reddit.
• Alt Latino, from NPR, because, seriously, where else are you going to hear interesting new (and old) Latin music?

Not everything applies, and there are a lot of assumptions in this about Agile and the size of the organization involved, but it’s a good overview.

On Sunday, after bearing the brunt of an excited explanation of Italy’s glorious victory over England via penalties, including a stunning Panenka from Pirlo, my own wife turned around and asked me why I was rooting for the Azzurri.

This was weird, because it’s her fault.

(Hey, this is a blog post about soccer. If you’re not interested, feel free to stop reading here.)

She’s half Italian, and although her grandfather on the other side of her family is a pretty staunch supporter of the Spanish national team, she and her brothers seem to have taken up the flag of the Italian team. I have a feeling this has a lot to do with what she refers to as “Italia ’90,” which must have been a big deal in her house, and importantly, in her grandmother’s house, where there’s always a satellite cable thingie of some sort tuned to a variety of RAI channels.

I have watched more RAI in Italy, Venezuela, and New Mexico than most non-Italians have watched in their lives, Vinny Vedecci (which is stunningly accurate) not withstanding.

So maybe that’s where it started for her.

For me, it was the 2002 World Cup. We lived in New Mexico at the time, and I was waking up well before the crack of dawn to watch the U.S. Men’s National Team play, for no discernible reason other than I was remarkably unemployed at the time, and could do so. Then, it was Italy’s turn — probably the fateful round of 16 match against South Korea, and we drove over to a friend’s house to watch the game together. I think I might have been more worked up in anticipation than her and her brother, as illustrated by long forgotten history of that early morning which I won’t relive here. Anyway, I don’t remember much, except my future wife jumping up and down in joy and agony, and cursing out Totti for the dive (watching it 10 years later, it does look more like a foul than a dive) that got him thrown out of the match.

That must have been where it started for me.

Four years later, married and traveling with her family in Italy, I found myself quietly rooting for Brian “Wow That’s A Ton of Blood” McBride and the American team against Italy in their group stage tie, while sitting in a quiet restaurant in a sort of sleepy pilgrimage town in southern Italy. The day of their round of 16 win against Australia, I was driving our family around Catania in Sicily, somewhat lost on the way out of town, listening to the game on the radio (in Italian, naturally), when Totti hit his penalty in injury time. I remember seeing a kid standing on the balcony of his second floor apartment in the sun, waving an Italian flag at least as tall as he was. (Memory may have somewhat augmented this visual.) By the time the semifinals rolled around, we were back home in Santa Cruz, and saw the incredible 2-0 win over Germany from inside a crowded bar downtown, then watched the final with a room full of trendy Americans rooting for France (as I might have been categorized back in 1998), in the back of the Irish-ish pub where I had bartended for a couple years.

I may have been a little vocal when Zidane was sent off. Something I seem to recall about yelling “AU REVOIR!” while holding up my imaginary red card… Anyway, some of these details are better lost to memory.

2010? I don’t seem to remember an Italian team playing in the World Cup in… Oh, right. There was that. Even I, an American rooting for what amounts to my soccer-team-in-law, felt shame when the Azzurri were unceremoniously dumped out of the tournament early. They showed no sign of life, or creativity, and while it’s easy to blame the coach, player selection, morale, etc., they just didn’t look like they wanted to be there. It was hard to watch.

So not counting the recent friendly where I rooted for my first team, the red, white, and blue, against an underpowered Azzurri that was short Cassano, Balotelli, Osvaldo, or any other substantial offensive threat, that brings us to the current tournament, where I’ve cheered a 1-1 tie with Spain, the goalless 120 minutes vs. England ending in penalties, and now I’m looking forward to a semifinal against Germany, who are sure to be favored, but don’t count out the ridiculously tenacious Italians. They’re stubbornly playing for pride, with a great old goalie, at least two certifiable madmen up top, and Pirlo the artist in the middle of the field. And they like being the underdog.

And so do I.

All unhappy airport terminals are alike, so the sense of deja vu carries over from the hotel to the cab to the fluorescent carpeted discomfort of Logan, and the foreboding sense of dread that comes with a United flight. (Prove me wrong, airline. Prove me wrong.)

On to the obligatory, but hopefully not exclusively duplicative and obvious notes:

• Homicide Watch is excellent, and repeatable. Whether or not you use the code powering the DC site, the model of reporting on every homicide in a city — and not just reporting it, but reporting on it, while maintaining pages for every victim and suspect — this is something that doesn’t depend exclusively on technology, although the platform is perfectly tailored to the job. But it does depend on being obsessed with telling the stories that we often hide behind numbers, or a map. (Previously.) Also, it helps to be as driven and passionate about it as Laura, and to care about people.

• Sometimes, there’s just no story in the data. Jonathan Stray hoisted this banner of editorial force, and Daniel X. O’Neill waved it high, the sort of basic news value that journalism school drills into us if we listen: Check the facts, check the data, then double-check it and account for the fragile chain of human actions that produced the data. Because a spreadsheet packed with invalid data and intervening variables is not a story. It’s a mess, and a risk, and it might be the start of the reporting process, not the end of it. (Session video here, worth watching.)

• The Media Lab projects didn’t blow my mind like they did back in 2008 and 2009, but Dan Schultz has a severely high ideas-per-minute score, and the good sense to quickly prototype them without hesitation or permission.

• The contraction of the Knight News Challenge grant cycle into themed 90-day periods is a right and good thing, as is the new prototype fund. You should apply to one or both, right now. This minute.

Not pictured in this list: An improved opinion of the food and beverage options in Cambridge, Mass.

Crowdsourcing as a term was new, and by definition “bigger” than just “sourcing” because it could happen at scale, where scale could be thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people with the right call to action and programming framework.

WNYC’s “beer, lettuce, milk” price data gathering project was a favorite, although it appears to have been powered by a comment thread, mostly.

That was always one that stuck out in my mind, due to the quantitative nature of it. This wasn’t about asking the news audience for opinions; it was a method of gathering facts about the city and its bodegas, data that wasn’t compiled anywhere, and that made sense to bring together in one place, given the chaotic system (system?) of New York City bodegas.

###

Matt McAlister has gathered a Big Important List of crowdsourced reporting projects, and he’s notably compiling a list that extends beyond traditional journalism and news organizations, as we all should.

It’s a fascinating list of projects, and a reminder that it’s not always “content” news organizations are looking to “generate” from “users,” but information, or perhaps better yet, analysis of documents or images or cities or rivers or the world surrounding them.

Again, my own interest, albeit usually from afar, in tools like DocumentCloud, is the chance to bring the audience into the reporting process by giving them an assignment. “Read a piece of this giant 1100 page budget, or campaign finance bill, or FEC disclosure, or Friday night data dump (see the classic Talking Points Memo instance here), and annotate it so we can find the important stuff quickly.”

###

The fun part, naturally, isn’t in examining the past of crowdsourced reporting, but imagining the future. What does a platform to quickly spin up an instance of a crowdsourcing machine when news breaks look like? More than a map, surely, as amazing and powerful as location can be. It has to be flexible and fast and able to parse submissions into something useful, digestible, sortable so the most important information surfaces as if it were weightless.

Or are we already looking at the platform, the system, in Twitter or Facebook or Google Search or the Web itself? I don’t think I believe that. There must be more, or there must be a federated system to harvest and groom information from all these sources — not for the purpose of curation into a story or list or gallery, but for analysis, understanding, quantification at scale.

Continuing to dream of that ideal crowdsourcing platform…