I think that is incorrect, because in science, the cool thing is that fail = win.  What I mean is that science is all about testing something, getting results, and developing a conclusion based on those results.  If your model sucks and your experiment fails as a result, you’ve learned something.  You rebuild, you try something else, and you chalk your first try up on the list of things that don’t work.  Launch and iterate, my friends.  It’s the Google way, and we’ve done alright so far.

Stories are just as much about what’s written as what is not written.  Pictures are just as much about what is captured as what is not captured.  Science is just as much about what works as it is about what does not work.  There is another debate in the research community about whether it is worth publishing failed experiments in academic journals.  Of course it’s worth it!  People learn most from failure!  Of course maybe more space should be reserved for the epic wins, but there is just as much to be gleaned from the details of an epic fail.

That is why I am so stoked about the Energy Department’s announcement that they are going to fund a bunch of cutting-edge research experiments, some of which currently exist only in conceptual form.  Says the leader of the new initative, Dr. Arum Majumdar:

“We don’t know which ones are going to work, but we’ll try them,” he said, “and if many of them fail but one works, that’s great, we’ve solved the problem.”

Exactly.  And for the projects that are funded but ultimately do not prove feasible or scalable, we’ll still have a win on our hands.  We will have explored and ruled out approaches based on data instead of instinct, and we will also have encouraged researchers and entrepreneurs to take risks and to think outside to box.  That’s America, baby.

Image used and modified under a Creative Commons license courtesy of willandbeyond.

• The Science of Political Science
• Mea Culpa: Facebook Chat Is, In Fact, Useless
• Turning The Wrecking Ball of News Into A Bola
• Here’s What I’m Thinking About
• Do You See What I See?

• Making Twitter Work for the Masses
• Untwisting Twitter
• When I Heard The Learn’d Software Engineer
• Will The Personalized Web Filter Out Diversity?
• Stop Creating for a Moment and Enjoy? We’re Fine, Thanks

Google Reader is a tool for pulling interesting content to a central inbox via “feeds.”  Almost every website on the web that publishes regular updates also sends out a feed that can be subscribed to via various tools.  As a result, instead of clicking through a long list of bookmarked sites to see if there’s something new to read, you can just subscribe to that site’s feed and all the new content will build up in your inbox.  (If you want to subscribe to Tropophilia’s feed, click here.)

Though it got off to a rocky start, Reader has been incrementally socializing and personalizing itself over the past two years.  First it let you share items publicly; later, those shared items became directly available to your contacts who also use Reader.  Recently, the team introduced the ability to “like” an item in addition to sharing it, and it also created a section of “recommended” feeds based on your reading, sharing, and liking history (although it was a little hard to find).  It has also given users new ways to share with the “send to” feature that lets you post to Twitter and other third party sites.

At first, it was confusing as to why there was both a “like” and a “share” feature, with many people not understanding when they would do one without doing the other.  This week, the Reader team cleared that up by delivering the punch line:

• You can now sort any feed (including the comprehensive feed) by “magic.”  The sorting is based on what Reader has determined you’re interested in, as reflected by your reading/liking/sharing history.
• The “recommended feeds” feature now has prime real estate in the main sidebar in a new “Explore” section.
• There is a new “popular items” feed (also sortable by your personalized “magic”) that shows you what items have been popular across the web recently.

It’s now clear why there is a distinct “like” button.  If you enjoyed an article but don’t necessarily want to share it with your contacts, you can “like” it and Reader will feed that signal into its personalizing algorithm.  The more you “like” things, the more recommendations Reader can make (and the more Reader can provide everyone with a sense of what’s popular on the web at any given moment).

With these few moves, Google Reader will likely rejoin Twitter as one of the first places I go when I have time to spare and want to see what’s going on in the world.  I have my trusted feeds that I have added myself, but now I also have the ability to sort those feeds according to what I’ll likely find most important or interesting.  In addition, I am now constantly offered new sources of information to consider adding to my diet of feeds.  I can quickly click a feed, browse its items, see how often its authors post, and decide whether to subscribe or pass.  If I pass, it is removed and replaced by a new feed suggestion.  This adds a new layer of tailored serendipity, letting me discover new voices and points of view within the topics that interest me.

Finally, the popular items feeds adds an additional layer of true serendipity that lets me take the pulse of what’s buzzing on the web.  Add those improvements to the fact that Reader aggregates the reading recommendations made by my friends, and it truly is one of the most customized and personalized sources of information aggregation on the market.

One of the observations being made about my generation’s expectations for news is that we no longer believe we should have to go find out what’s happening or being said in the world — instead, we expect that information will find us.  By rolling out these new features, the Reader team is delivering a product that meets (and in some ways, exceeds) those expectations.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user optionthis.

• The Google Reader Debate: What is a “friend”? What is “public”? What is “privacy”?
• Old Media Attempts New Media: NY Times Reader and MSNBC Spectra
• Welcome to Tropophilia
• Tropophilia Speaks, Google Listens
• Three Weeks To Go: Get Informed, America!

As a future lawyer (side note: I sent 12 of 15 law school applications last weekend!), it reassures me that at least the ABA’s leadership has recognized that lawyers, firms, and their clients need to adapt in order to survive.  But I found it even more encouraging that Schofield highlighted the need for the entire justice system — especially the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which were last updated in 1938 — to be refreshed for the present times.  I’d like to highlight a couple of her points and add my own thoughts as well.

The first area that Schofield specifically targets is the billable hour.  The billable hour system rewards firms and attorneys for the time spent working on a project.  While the rate can vary depending on the type of work performed, the rates typically do not reflect the value added by the work performed.  And it doesn’t even really make logical sense, as Evan Chesler noted in Forbes back in January: “If you are successful and win a case early on, you put yourself out of work. If you get bogged down in a land war in Asia, you make more money. That is frankly nuts.”  He went on to propose a system more similar to how a construction contractor operates:

For reasonable periods of time during the life of a lawsuit, say three months at a time, I should do what [a contractor] does: identify the client’s objectives, measure, calculate, build in a contingency and come back with a price. Once the price has been agreed upon, the billable hour should be irrelevant. The client will no longer be surprised by a whopper bill and met by the standard (albeit true) explanation that “litigation is unpredictable.”

Whether this is the approach that wins the day is up for question but, as Schofield concludes, “sooner or later, something has to give.”

Moving on from the billable hour, Schofield notes that the new generation of lawyers is organizing its workload and its information in new and different ways from the previous generations.  Using an anecdote, she notes that younger attorneys are no longer organizing evidence or information as a “story”, and instead are keeping key documents in their originally produced, bates-stamped order.  The takeaway is that as the tools for organizing and making sense of information become more sophisticated, we no longer have to rely on physical arrangement or sorting in order to retain a sense of sense or order.

This should not be lamented in my opinion, but celebrated and built upon.  The further into the information age we progress, the more information and data there will be to collect, understand, and present for consideration.  More and more, we will rely on tools to do that type of processing for us; what will be important from a human skills perspective is the ability to instruct those tools how to find and present what we need.

I spoke on the phone recently with Professor Fred Lederer at the William & Mary Law School.  In 1993, he helped start a program called the Center for Legal and Court Technology that “seeks to improve the administration of justice through the use of appropriate technology.  They recognized over fifteen years ago that the world’s judicial systems would need to keep pace with the rapid innovation that would arrive with the 21st century.  From the question of resolving disputes across multiple jurisdictions via videoconference, to figuring out the best means of conducting electronic discovery from data-saturated companies, the CLCT plays an important role in training new and veteran lawyers alike how to be better advocates in the information age.

Schofield concludes her essay by calling for a rebooting of some of our laws and the entirety of the justice system.  She highlights intellectual property law as a particular area of concern, noting that affairs have progressed to such a poor and confused state that content companies, in a vain attempt to protect themselves, feel forced to sue the very customers and partners they need to survive.  While this is also in large part a failure of imagination and innovation on the part of the content industries, the laws could be improved as well.

Of particular concern to Schofield is the ever-decreasing synchronization between the realities of the present and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, the court protocol for civil suits.  Schofield notes that 1938, the years the Rules were last refreshed, was the same year that the ball point pen was patented and that transatlantic air transportation was just a vision.  Now we live in a world where information is anywhere and everywhere at once, where employees work for companies headquartered on the other side of the planet, and where more or less everyone carries a small, constantly-connected computer in their pockets.  The Rules “speak of a 100-mile radius for service of subpoenas and the admissibility of hearsay statements by unavailable witnesses whose presence cannot be procured.”  Choice of venue and law are based on “anachronistic ideas of territorial jurisdiction and sovereignty.”  We are applying the procedures of pre-World War II to post-9/11.

The first of Google’s “Ten Things We Know To Be True” philosophy is “Focus on the user and all else will follow.”  The legal industry and the justice system would do well to follow this, whether they consider their “user” to be their client that should pay for the value received, or a citizen or company that deserves the fairest application of justice that is available.  Technology is meant to improve our lives, and that should include improving the protection and enforcement of rights as well.

• “…and nothing but the truth, so help me Google” [Guest Post]
• Passing On Your Cloud
• Everybody’s Working for the…Health Insurance
• Just a Little Light Gym Reading
• “Green is Green:” Good Enough?

In hopes of making this post more than a typical “I swear I’ll blog more often….starting NOW!” vow (I’d love to see statistics on how many blog posts start with some variation on this theme), I thought I’d share a mix that I created tonight for my friend Sam.  Sam hasn’t received his mix in the mail just yet (is it possible to ever find a blank CD lying around when you need one?  I think not), but it’s ok because there are a a few surprises left out of the online mix.

Enjoy the tunes.  I might blog more often, and I might not.  You’re busy people.  You understand.

I recommend listening to this playlist in a car at night or under headphones, just because those are my two favorite ways to listen to music.

• New to Me in ‘08: Music
• Questioning Things: Vol. V
• Lala: Send Your Music To The Cloud
• Are Ads and Subscriptions the Future of Music?
• Annonymity and Secrets Online: Postsecret on Facebook

One of my first posts on Tropophilia profiled the founder of reCAPTCHA, Luis von Ahn, and his efforts to harness otherwise-wasted human effort.  Given today’s announcement, I thought it made sense to repost it in order to put into context this acquisition and the “spare cycles” philosophy that it engenders.

Disclosure: I am an employee of Google.  I was not an employee at the time this post was originally published.  All views expressed in this post are mine alone, and do not necessarily reflect those of Google.

———————————

“Spare Cycles: Distributing Computing Among Machines and Minds” - published January 19, 2008.

A few weeks ago I read an article in The Economist about distributed computing, defined by Wikipedia as “a method of computer processing in which different parts of a program are run simultaneously on two or more computers that are communicating with each other over a network.” Basically what you do is download a program that, when you’re not around, uses your computer’s processor (which would otherwise be mostly idle) to crunch data sent to it from a central server. Your computer joins thousands of others crunching data at any one time, forming a giant networked supercomputer with each unit working on a different piece of the puzzle.

What’s the puzzle? It can be anything, or at least anything that requires a whole lot of computer power to figure out. Some puzzles are humanitarian in nature; for example, the World Community Grid (sponsored by IBM) currently has projects tackling cancer, AIDS, and Dengue fever research, as well as African climate change. Others are more geeky (or, should we say, scientific), like the SETI@home project which is searching for extraterrestrial intelligence by analyzing radio telescope data.

So the bottom line is this: while one way to save the planet and contribute to science is through the donation of time and money, another way is through the donation of your computer’s processing power. Why let your computer idly sit while you’re at work or school all day — occasionally using a small processor burst to throw the next picture from your hard drive onto your screensaver, which no one but your dog is watching — when you can have it use its full capacity to solve some of the world’s toughest problems?

The buzz word for this phenomenon is “donating spare cycles.” Basically, a cycle is the process your computer goes through to retrieve a command from its memory and execute that command. It’s how your computer works and, in a way, it’s how our minds work too. A human cycle, then, would be the process our brain goes through to retrieve and process information from our memory. But do humans have spare cycles to donate? You bet.

Meet Luis von Ahn. I first read about him in this article in Wired magazine. You know those pictures of twisted letters and numbers that you have to enter to sign up for an e-mail or other online account? Those are called “CAPTCHAs”, and von Ahn invented them. CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” While optical character recognition has advanced far enough to allow computers to “read” standard text, the technology is not (yet) capable of deciphering the contorted figures presented in CAPTCHAs. By entering the letters you see, you prove to the system that you are a human.

So we’ve established that CAPTCHAs are essentially good, because they protect the integrity of such services as Facebook, Gmail, and so on. But aren’t they annoying? Do you feel like you’ve just wasted 10 seconds of your life when you fill one out? Well, what if I told you that those 10 “wasted” seconds could, when correctly harnessed, actually be used to do some good?

Enter the reCAPTCHA, also invented by von Ahn. What is it? The website for reCAPTCHAs informs us that while it takes about 10 seconds for one person to fill out a CAPTCHA, “in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day.” 150,000 hours of “wasted” time every single day. Imagine if those man-hours were put to use!

reCAPTCHAs do just that by asking you to enter slightly distorted characters from two word images in a CAPTCHA. One image’s solution is known by the computer, and the other is not. This second, unreadable image has been pulled from the book scanning project being undertaken by the Internet Archive, similar to the Google Books project. If you get the first word right, then the system assumes that the answer you provide for the second word is also correct. The system verifies the answer through several users before sending it back into the database. In those otherwise “wasted” 10 seconds, you have more or less helped in the effort to render the world’s libraries digital. How ’bout that?

Von Ahn has several projects that are studying and implementing this idea of distributed human computation. The ESP Game randomly matches up two players who are presented with a single image. They are tasked with “tagging” that image with words that describe it. When the two players agree on a word, they get points based on the time it took them to enter the common word and then move on to the next image. After an image is used in several games, commonly tagged words are considered “taboo” and cannot be used as the agreement word between the two players. This forces players to be creative and find more descriptive or more contextual terms to describe the picture.

So what’s the deal? Most image search engines have only two things to go on when scouring the web in response to your query: the title of the image, and the words surrounding the image on a webpage. By using the information gathered from The ESP Game, however, search engines now have human-generated and -verified terms that describe the subject of the image, the colors of the image, even the quality of the image. By playing a (fun and addictive) game, players help make the web more searchable.

Another example of distributed human computing is the Mechanical Turk, a project hosted by Amazon.com. The philosophy is similar: the site recruits users to complete tasks that computers simply cannot — a “human intelligence task”, or HIT. Last summer, the Mechanical Turk was famously used to distribute discrete sections of satellite imagery of the Nevada desert to thousands of humans, who in turn clicked “yes” or “no” as to whether there was any sign of Steve Fossett’s downed aircraft. Fossett was not found and the search was ended, but as many as six previously unknown crash sites were discovered in the process.  [9/16/09 update:  The remains of Fossett and his aircraft have since been located.]  Because this project is not in game-form, users are enticed to stay through monetary compensation — mostly pennies per task, but that can add up in the end.

In a presentation to Google (video here), Luis von Ahn talks about The ESP Game and some of his other initiatives in human computation. If this stuff sparks your curiosity, it’s worth the 50-minute watch. But here’s the money quote, as paraphrased by Bob Wyman:

Ahn estimates that during 2003, 9 billion human-hours were consumed [...] just by people playing Solitaire on their computers. [...] To provide some scale to that number, Ahn shows that the Empire State Building in NYC took only 7 million human-hours to build (6.8 hours of Solitaire play) and the larger Panama Canal took only 20 million human-hours to build (less than a day of Solitaire.)

Idle human time is valuable. If there’s a way to harness it to do good in the world, then I’m all for it.

[9/16/09 update: Removed information about a Tropophilia-sponsored team on the World Community Grid.  This effort is no longer active.]

Images courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University, and Flickr users saschaaa and tmartin.

• Spare Cycles: Distributing Computing Among Machines and Minds
• Do You See What I See?
• Philanthropy Online: FreeRice.com
• Debugging Earmarks
• Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

I am a pretty rabid fan of a little music ensemble called Dave Matthews Band.  You might have heard of them.  I just returned from a trip with my brother to the ostensible Mecca of DMB fandom: the band’s annual three-night stand at The Gorge Amphitheatre in central Washington.  Counting this weekend, I have been to 16 of their concerts.  I have all of their studio albums, most of their official live releases (they number in the double digits), and countless (legal) amateur recordings of other shows.  The total track count in my iTunes library for the band and their side projects numbers over 800.

But if you think those numbers are sickening, try these on for size.  I am such an unabashed fanboy of the band that when they released their latest studio album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, I ended up buying it in two different formats:

• the iTunes Pass version ($20), because along with the album tracks it also came with (so far) 16 extra pieces of exclusive video, studio audio, and live audio content delivered piecemeal over time;
• the (physical) Deluxe Box Set ($60) which included the same extra studio audio as above, did not include video or live audio, but added in extra artwork and photos.

Let’s pass over the rather obvious and self-admitted fact that I have obsession issues.  The interesting thing about the information above is that I had to pay $80 – eight times the album price – to get what might be called the total media experience available in physical or digital form.  Isn’t there a way to merge these two, and make it less expensive (and therefore more attractive) to feel like you truly own not only the music, but the album experience itself?  This is the question Apple has asked as sales of entire albums in the iTunes Store have dwindled, with consumers instead opting to buy tracks piecemeal.  Their first answer was a service called iTunes Pass.

iTunes Pass was Apple’s first attempt at solving the riddle of how to replicate the experience of buying a box set or, to go even further back in time, a vinyl.  You pay twice the normal album price, but in addition to the entire album itself, you get extra “special” content: early track releases ahead of the full album sale date, demo tracks, live tracks, the entire cover leaflet, videos, and more.  What makes it more interesting is that this extra content is not delivered all at once, but it is sent to you over time.  So every week or two, you have a nice little mini-Christmas when you find a new video or exclusive track to enjoy.  This rolling delivery method also enables access to content that might not otherwise be available on the album release date — like, say, live versions of tracks from the band’s tour.

I am not aware of how successful iTunes Pass has been, but it apparently was not satisfactory.  Yesterday, Apple supplemented that service with the long-rumored iTunes LP.  Both Apple and the record labels were interested in going beyond iTunes Pass to renew the “retro” experience of going to a store and buying a big, beautiful LP, and combining that with the feeling of exclusivity that comes with owning an exclusive content-filled box set.

Essentially, iTunes LP takes the iTunes Pass experience and dresses it up in an immersive, interactive format.  It will vary on an artist-by-artist and album-by-album basis, but often the experience will be crafted by the groups and their creatives staffs themselves, rather than by Apple.  In addition to putting the iTunes Pass audio and video content in a cool visual form, iTunes LP also has the capability to deliver the photos, artwork, lyrics, liner notes, and other information that before was really only desirable in physical form, in an engaging and attractive digital package.  It is unclear whether the LP content will be delivered piecemeal, as is/was the Pass content, or if it will be obtained all at once.

I have to say, when I first read about iTunes LP yesterday, I was skeptical.  It seemed to me that Apple was merely dressing up the iTunes Pass in a gimmicky, flashy interface.  However, my Big Whiskey iTunes Pass converted free-of-charge into an iTunes LP last night (after I upgraded to iTunes 9.0, which is required to view any iTunes LP), and I am actually pretty impressed.  iTunes LP actually is a pretty beautiful and engaging experience.  If this format had been available when I decided to buy the box set plus the iTunes Pass, I might just have bought the iTunes LP instead.  I get most of the same photos, all of the same videos, all of the same audio minus a few bonus studio tracks, and most of the same “aesthetic” experience provided by the box set.

Would I buy an iTunes LP for every album I bought?  No.  But for long-awaited albums from bands I really admire, sure.  My biggest issue is that, as far as I can tell, the iTunes LP is not a portable format.  Maybe the music and video content is, since I assume it is stored just like any other rich content is in iTunes; but the photos and the flashy aesthetic experience are most likely locked into Apple’s walled garden.  This won’t be a deterrent for most people though, and it offers a big reason for them to choose the iTunes Store as their point of purchase over competitors like Amazon (or Tropophilia’s darling, Lala).

Will the iTunes LP renew interest among consumers in full album purchases?  Will Lala and other competitors find a way to replicate this experience in the browser, and perhaps even in a portable, open format?  Will this save the music industry?  Stay tuned.

• Lala: Send Your Music To The Cloud
• What is the Future of Music?
• Mashups and Conversational Media
• “There’s Something In The Air”: How Apple Brings You Into The Flock, And Keeps You There
• New to Me in ‘08: Music

Click that image and view in full size, or better yet, click the link above and view this in Google Earth yourself.  In short, we have an astonishing number of satellites orbiting our world.  Thousands upon thousands.  Those are not stars in that picture.  Every single one of those little bitty particles surrounding our planet is a human produced mechanism.  Those that are not inactive are beaming radio waves between each other and to the surface.  Some are equipped with cameras, some with telescopes.  How are they not colliding?  How is the International Space Station not being torn to shreds?  I know the answers to these questions, but still… it is nothing short of incredible that we have managed to distribute this many machines into orbit around our planet, when just over 100 years ago we had not even figured out how to sustain powered flight on Earth.

You can click on any satellite and have its trajectory mapped (hence the several colored lines swirling around the planet).  What’s more, the positions of all the satellites are updated every 30 seconds.  I want to keep this open on my side monitor all.  day.  long.

I have no philosophical or other insightful point to make here.  I’m only trying to say one thing, and it is the following.

Damn.

• This one time, at Space Camp…
• Tropophy Winner of the Week: Virgin Galactic
• Google In The Sky (with Diamonds?)
• Satellite Challenge #1
• A Note To Our Readers

This is too important and fascinating a debate, though, for me to be content sitting completely on the sidelines.  So I thought I would take some time to write not an argumentative post, but a prescriptive (or at least predictive) one that offers what I think might be a successful model for the future of written journalism.

A little over a week ago, Mike Arrington posed a fairly radical hypothetical: what if the best 5-10% of the New York Times‘ reporters walked out and started their own company?  A lean staff count and modest production expenses for this web-based enterprise would allow plenty of budget for investigative journalism and other expensive reporting.  ”How many private equity funds would kill to put $100 million behind the ["New" New York Times] to make sure the company had plenty of money until it reached profitability?” ponders Arrington.  ”My guess is plenty. [...] And I know a couple of hedge funds that would be right there, too. I know this because they’ve pitched me on a vision not much different than this one.”

Arrington’s proposal was inspired by a recent fascination with Politico, whose leadership he met prior to their interview with Charlie Rose.  Profiled by Michael Wolff in this month’s Vanity Fair, Politico is the web-based Bible of political junkies that rose to prominence during the 2008 election season and has sustained more modest, but nonetheless impressive growth.  Both the article and Rose’s conversation with some of the staff are worth checking out.

Arrington fails (or declines?) to draw the connection between Politico and his own web publication, TechCrunch, and as a result does not recognize the disconnect between their shared model and his “New New York Times” proposal.  It is indeed an innovative idea to take the cream of the journalistic crop, free them from the burden of a bureaucratic and expensive print-based publication, and set them on a new (and hopefully profitable) course of news reporting.  But the Arrington hypothetical only addresses one of two major problems with written journalism today.

The first problem, which Arrington’s proposal largely solves, is the financial one.  The process of written journalism today is alive and well, but it is burdened by the cost and logistics of distributing the product of that process.  Free the process from the inefficiencies, and you’re part of the way to profitable newsmaking.  The second issue is not about dollars and cents, it’s about organization and consumption.  A dramatic shift is developing between the reader and the way she seeks, receives, and experiences the news.  It will not do simply to take the New York Times and make it leaner.  The entire model has to be changed.

Much of the successes that Politico (and TechCrunch, for that matter) has experienced are due to the specialized nature of its reporting.  Politico covers American politics (and during its fledgling months, primarily the American presidential election).  TechCrunch covers technology companies and products.  In the interview with Charlie Rose, one of the Politico guys likens this to following the ESPN model: focus completely on a topic that is narrow enough to give you a singular authority on a certain type of content, but broad enough to allow for a variety of voices and topics.

As Jeff Jarvis pointed out back in 2007,

[Newspapers] try to cover everything because they used to have to be all things to all people in their markets. So they had their own reporters replicate the work of other reporters elsewhere so they could say that they did it under their own bylines as a matter of pride and propriety. It’s the way things were done. They also took wire-service copy and reedited it so they could give their audiences the world. But in the age of the link, this is clearly inefficient and unnecessary. You can link to the stories that someone else did and to the rest of the world. And if you do that, it allows you to reallocate your dwindling resources to what matters, which in most cases should be local coverage.

It’s a subtle but important distinction between yesterday’s model and tomorrow’s model.  The more independence and character you give to the “section”, the more likely those specialized components are to attract and retain an audience.  As Jarvis notes, there’s no need for 100 newspapers to produce 100 different versions of the same story when a single, well sourced and researched version is available to everyone.

So here’s my own hypothetical.  Imagine TechCrunch and Politico federate together to form the NewsCrunch network.  Politico becomes PolitiCrunch.  Over time, they create or add SportsCrunch, ArtsCrunch, BreakingNewsCrunch, MusicCrunch, ComiCrunch, TravelCrunch, StockCrunch, etc.  Each maintains their own editorial voice, agenda, and budget.  They may look and sound completely different, but they are part of a larger initiative to provide the best specialized news possible.  Instead of a giant wrecking ball of a news outfit, they are instead a multi-headed bola.  Slowly but surely, the cream of the journalistic crop leave the New York Times, ESPN, and others to join this new news medusa.  Readers can go to NewsCrunch to see an aggregation of all the stories, or they can pick and choose among the networked sites.  I believe this is the future of news.

And don’t get me wrong, local news is part of this vision.  It’s just that instead of the whole news network being based on the local identity, the local coverage just becomes a piece of the larger puzzle.  The Birmingham News shouldn’t waste time covering national politics and shifting stock prices, unless those topics fit into its coverage of local events.  The Birmingham News should focus all of its energy on happenings in the Birmingham metro area.

Of course, the dealbreaker argument is that there are constituencies that simply need a printed, all-in-one product to get their news, be they poor or elderly or otherwise not in a position to follow the news online.  This is the hardest dilemma to solve, in my opinion, and I have few solutions to offer.  All I can say is that it is increasingly worthless to have a single organization provide reporting on news of all kinds, and also manage the printing and distribution of the print product.  If there must be a print product, let there be a company that pulls the relevant content from these networks through licensing deals, and specializes primarily in the efficient compiling, printing, and distribution of those stories.

If journalism is to excel in the future, it must be freed from the frictions that are holding it behind.  Those frictions are cost, and the antiquated idea of having to be all things to all people.  Both of these can be achieved by moving to the web, which offers cheap distribution and the possibility of specialization.  Division of labor let loose an explosion of industrial growth in the last century.  It can do the same for journalism in this century, if only we are brave enough to break the mold.  It will not be easy, it will not be cheap, and it will not be without pain or heartbreak.  But revolutions never are.

Image in the public domain from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum (via WikiCommons).

• Breaking The News
• Newspaper Is Not The “One Medium To Rule Them All”
• A Sign of the Times: “Extra” Lets You Really Read All About It
• The Human Side of Newspapers
• In Science, FAIL = WIN

One of the big buzzwords around Washington and the rest of the country since November 4th, 2008 has been “transparency”.  President Obama was widely prophesied as the harbinger of a political culture of openness and honesty.  He has also been expected to be the first to leverage the Internet as a chief means of communication and collaboration with the American people.

So far the President and his administration have made promising steps on both fronts (see data.gov, for example).  But what is important to remember about the web is that it’s designed to let the novice user contribute just as much as the elite power players.

WashingtonWatch.com, a website maintained in his spare time by Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, has started an initiative to let the average Joe and Jane identify pork spending buried within federal legislation.  Wired.com’s Epicenter blog notes that the site, in partnership with the Sunlight Foundation, will be rewarding the top citizen watchdogs with Amazon Kindles, iPods, and other prizes.

This is a perfect example of what the New York Times recently referred to as “focused crowdsourcing.” If you want to put the mob to work, you need to do a few things.  First, identify a market where there is a thirst for action.  Then provide a specific and realistic objective, ideally one that is measurable and that can be registered in discrete steps (so as to lure both the curious and the committed).  Offer users the tools and rules of the game, and provide worthy incentives.  Next thing you know, you’re harnessing the wisdom and effort of the crowds to (hopefully) do some good in the world.

Harper has followed this model to perfection.  The contest ends either when all earmarks have been entered, or when the fiscal year ends in October.  Here’s hoping for robust participation from a digital citizenry hungry to see and make some change.

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