Elephant Diaries: The Conversation
Ned Resnikoff with a message many of us in old media are good about hearing:
The journalist can no longer afford to keep his audience at a comfortable distance, or ignore the work of others covering the same topic.
Social Media Signposts
A couple of notable signposts I recently passed on the social media highway. The first, a twitter post from a new tweetFriend yesterday:
Question for everyone: How do you go about “catching up” on Twitter when you’ve been away for a couple of hours?
The second, a link from another tweetFriend to twitTangle:
We allow you to rate and tag your friends and then filter your timeline to help you easily find the tweets that are most important to you!
Official Inkstain Daughter Nora, who is a social media professional (Really! I am not making that up!) has long offered a particularly thoughtful argument about the trajectory of social media. You jump on it with a bunch of friends because it’s fun. It gets clogged up with a network of connections that becomes too dense to manage, for a variety of reasons. You jump off and head to a new social media goober.
Thus my own social media networks are rooted in the old email lists and IRC from my free software days. When Orkut arrived, we all jumped on and hung out for a bit. And left. The early days of climate blogging offered a similarly small and uncluttered community that was fun. I don’t spend much time there any more.
RSS offers another self-assembled way to manage this situation, with weaker links and fewer social obligations. Facebook and LinkedIn haven’t much worked for me. And now Twitter (and Identica), which I love but fear are quickly acquiring the same sort of baggage.
This has something to do (which I haven’t thought through very carefully yet) with network effects and tipping points. There seem to be a pair of thresholds. Once you get above the first, with enough nodes on the graph for the network to become useful, it’s fun. But at some point it rises above a second, where there are too many nodes to manage. With some technologies, paring nodes is socially hard (this is Nora’s argument) so you just jump to a new social networking platform. But part of the problem for me is that there are simply too many interesting people, which makes it personally painful to me to do the necessary paring to make the social network manageable.
One of the interesting corollaries of this is that I’ve got a handful of nodes that have migrated with me (I’ve migrated with them?) through a variety of these media. Nora’s experience is similar.
Meatspace enforces this problem using basic physics. There are only so many people who can fit in the room with you. Perhaps that ultimately is the best solution. Off to work, to an office full of people.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Solar Power Edition
New Mexico State regulators approve expansion of rooftop solar incentives:
New Mexico regulators Tuesday approved a major expansion of the state’s solar energy program, including provisions for solar installations on Albuquerque businesses.
“We’re going to see a flowering of solar in this state,” said Jason Marks, a member of the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission. Under the program, residents and businesses are encouraged to put solar panels on theirroofs, generating electricity that they can use or put back onto the electric grid for use by others.
See also Doug Mattson’s take in the Santa Fe New Mexican (yay diverse local press!).
Elephant Diaries: On Endorsements and Bias
An intriguing analysis by RIccardo Puglisi and James Snyder, published this month in NBER (gated), finds statistical evidence for a correlation between newspapers’ endorsement patterns (R vs. D) and the papers’ news coverage of scandals involving Republican and Democratic politicians:
[T]hose with a higher propensity to endorse Democratic candidates in elec tions give significantly more coverage to scandals involving Republican politicians than scandals involving Democratic politicians, while Republican-leaning newspapers behave in the opposite way. This bias in the coverage of scandals is not connected to the editorial page, but also aff ects the news section. While the fraction of stories devoted to political scandals is on average very small, the magnitude of the coverage bias e ffect is very large in relative terms: the di fferential coverage of Republican versus Democratic scandals by a newspaper with a propensity to endorse Democratic candidates which is one standard deviation higher would be larger by around 26 percent.
Green Video
Troy Simpson, the Journal video guy, has been doing a series with our energy conservation guru, Al Zelicoff. He just put together a nice “channel” collecting them all:
Triptychs
Many people have made triptychs. Dave is one of them:
A long time ago I took photos of my Spinal Tap Action Figures. I feel no explanation is needed as to why I would take photos of my Spinal Tap Action Figures… they are Spinal Tap Action Figures. Nonetheless, I uploaded a triptych of the “portraits” and so far two people have posted their favorite Spinal Tap lyrics as comments to the photos.
Spinal Tap action figure triptych
This has spawned a new dream for me in which many people post their favorite Spinal Tap lyrics to that particular Flickr page.
Infrastructure Speed Bumps
Dan McKay has an excellent story in this morning’s ABQJournal on some of the practical aspects of trying to spend all that federal cash in a hurry (ad gated):
[C]ritics are starting to wonder whether the massive projects are remotely realistic — even if Congress doles out the money.
For one thing, under federal law, accepting federal money usually means getting environmental clearances, which can take up to two years.
But President-elect Barack Obama wants projects that are “shovel ready,” perhaps with construction starting within six months.
The Obama transition team is reviewing the environmental-impact-study process and how to improve it, the Journal has learned. A transition spokeswoman wouldn’t comment on the issue.
Ed Adams, Albuquerque’s chief administrative officer, put it this way: “If they expect to have the cities and the counties move these projects forward, they’ve got to streamline the environmental process. They can’t run these projects the way they’ve done in the past.”
Energy Cost Comparisons
In my quest for intuitive ways of understanding the relative costs of various forms of energy, kudos to the Financial Times for this graphic (and also a good article to go with it):
Financial Times energy cost graphic
Hat tip Gernot at Env-Econ.
Elephant Diaries: An Alternate Business Model
It is frequently suggested that there are important parallels between the changing business models of the news and music industries, and that there is much we can learn from one another.
I am currently brainstorming ways to get someone to pay me to perform journalism in bars.
CBGB's by LE_M@SC - New York City (2005)