Kristine Lowe

A blogging-journalist hero for Ada Lovelace Day

Danish IT-journalist Dorte Toft used her blog to help reveal one of the country’s biggest business scandals in modern time. It won her both acclaim and criticism.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and, answering UK software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson’s call, over 1,500 blogger worldwide have pledged to write about a woman in tech they admire. As I believe we sorely need new journalistic heroes and new myths that better illustrate the opportunities offered by our rapidly changing media landscape, I thought I would take this opportunity to put forward one such hero: programmer turned blogger-journalist Dorte Toft. Full story over at Journalism.co.uk

I find it unbelievable that editors felt the need to emphasis that blogging doesn't replace journalism and warn of using blogs as a journalistic tool (in Danish) after Toft helped flush out the skeletons in the closet at IT Factory. Toft's work is a great example of both beat blogging and using a blog to do investigative research. It also reveals some of the major flaws in journalism today, and I have a feeling I shall return with some more thoughts on this story, an ALD09 post for Ada Lovelace Day, later. However, I really wanted to use my own blog to force myself to write an ALD09 post about a late mentor of mine.

Free our data (chapter xxx)

Bente Kalsnes has an interesting post on the problems with "free" public data in Norway, which is often very far from free.

She describes an environmental web project she was involved with for local newspaper group Edda Media: it stranded on a combination of lack of a coherent format for the data in question (ex. xml), the public institutions' lack of experience/willingness to cooperate with external partners and the worsened financial outlook.

It's a pity the project stranded, or was postponed until further notice rather, because it sounds like one that would have added great value to the local news sites and communities in question.

It's yet another example of how difficult it can be for newspapers to make structured use of public data in Norway, another aspect being how "it is a problem, especially for local newspapers, that public institutions often charge big fees for this information which has been gathered on behalf of the public, using the taxpayers money,” as Espen Andersen pointed out in this interview.

Tim O'Reilly on Andrew Keen at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin

Here's a great video clip from a conference I wish I'd found the time and opportunity to attend this week, the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin:

However, I expect to find lots of people have blogged brilliant stuff from the event when I get a moment or two to catch up with all the posts I've been running out of time to look at in my newsreader. In the meantime, I've skimmed through Adam's excellent blog coverage from the conference here and here - which the clip above is taken from.

I couldn't resist sharing this clip as I've spent, perhaps wasted, quite some time debuking Keen's arguments, notably in The Road to Hell is paved with amateur contributios, Keen, Leigh and the Appeal to Authority and Keen's misguided cult of the professional (the latter is, by the way, very relevant to some of the things I'll be talking about this weekend).

On the mind shattering importance of the worldwide web

I know I write a lot about the wonders of the web, but it does of course have its pitfalls as well, and here's one of the best parodies of web evangelism I've come across in a while.

Now, even though I read the Cluetrain earlyish (2002 I think, thanks to Adriana), I didn't come across Gluetrain 'til yesterday, here's a few excerpts, but better afford yourself the whole treat if you, as me, miraculously hadn't heard of it until now:

A powerful inter-galactic conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to waste time at work, download naughty pictures, and build pipe bombs. As a direct result, things are getting really weird -- and getting weird faster than the parking lot at a Grateful Dead concert...

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media. How many discussion groups on nude pictures of Pamela Anderson Lee could you find twenty years ago?

12. There are no secrets. The networked market knows more than companies do about their own products. So just let 'em build the damn stuff themselves, and retire on your stock options, OK?

I found this gem via Doc Searls, who, both through his contribution to Cluetrain and his blog, has provided me with, and inspired me to elaborate on, many of the best metaphors I know for describing things great and small, both in the virtual and the real world. I was fortunate enough to be able to thank him for this in person in London in February. Here's a shot I snapped when the company I was with had just escaped Google HQ (a visit we all had to swear on a legally binding paper we'd repeat nought of).

Your grandchild: "Did people just sit there?"

I have to confess that I've shamelessly ripped the headline of this post, as well as the first quote, from a post on NRKbeta, but it all serves a larger purpose.

You see, NRKbeta brought my attention to this thought-provoking quote from an article by Douglas Adams, which, when I read it, was a bit like a missing piece of a jigsaw puzzle falling into place, as I've been thinking quite a bit about how people use social media, and how the way they use it defines their understanding of it recently. I'll return to those thoughts later, but, first, here's Adams:

During [the twentieth] century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport—the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show “normal” mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

“Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.”

“What was the Restoration again, please, miss?”

“The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity back.”

Which brings me to a quote from The Cluetrain Manifesto (2000), to my mind, the book that best describes how the (social) web has changed business as usual.

In fact, if we are to imagine how the world may look like a decade or two into the future, I think this might be the book professors in intellectual history will use to introduce their students to how the interactive web, or social media, changed people's mentality, the way they communicated, what they came to expect of the world etc. (that is, if the age of mass media isn't treated as just an insignificant aberration as Adams suggests):

In many ways, the Internet more resembles an ancient bazaar than it fits the business models companies try to impose on it. Millions have flocked to the net in an incredibly short time, not because it was user-friendly – it wasn't – but because it seemed to offer some intangible quality long missing in action from modern life.

In sharp contrast to the alienation wrought by homogenised broadcast media, sterilised mass 'culture', and the enforced anonymity of bureaucratic organisations, the Internet connected people to each other and provided a space in which the human voice would be rapidly rediscovered.

Though corporations insists on seeing it as one, the new marketplace is not necessarily a market at all. To its inhabitants, it is primarily a place in which all participants are audience to each other. The entertainment is not packaged; it is intrinsic.

Unlike the lockstep conformity imposed by television, advertising and corporate propaganda, the Net has given new legitimacy – and free rein – to play. Many of those drawn into this world find themselves exploring a freedom never before imagined: to indulge their curiosity, to debate, to disagree, to laugh at themselves, to compare visions, to learn, to create new art, new knowledge...

...or simply to communicate, as Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman's 'The history of digital community, in less than 7 minutes' (via Sambrook) so aptly shows we've been doing 'literally from the moment people started connecting computers to one another':

Fined for flirting with Gates

Without doubt my favourite headline last week, but the story behind it was probably not a big hit in the headquarters of Fast Search and Transfer who was served a hefty fine of roughly £100,000 (NOK 1.110.220 kroner) for not informing Oslo Stock Exchange (OSE) about Microsoft's bid for the company.

According to OSE, Fast should have disclosed that it was being courted by the IT-Giant by 7 November 2007 at the latest, when the sales negotiations were formalised with a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

However, that Microsoft was in the process of acquiring Fast, clearly price sensitive information according to OSE, was not made public until 8 January 2008. Hence the fine, and the headline – which strictly speaking I guess should have been "Fined for flirting with Ballmer." After the acquisition of Fast was completed on Friday, Microsoft's CEO paid a secret visit to Oslo on Saturday to reassure Fast's employees about their future roles in the company. He was greeted by Digi.no and Anders Brenna, who recorded the visit for posterity here.

Detail from picture by Anders Brenna.

Of course, the headline isn't all that great from a SEO-point of view, but that's another matter...

I give up

My internet connection is sending me headlong into a major depression here. And, you know, I find it very hard to blog when I'm in a bad mood: I'm definintly a good mood blogger.

My internet connection is so painfully slow and erratic that I have to phone my bank to check my balance (yeay, £60, let's go wild), and on such occasions my Yahoo-account behaves like a hungry little brat, screaming: 'Lost connection, LOST CONNECTION, HTML ERROR, error, heellloo? FEED ME' constantly, thereby interrupting my writing again and again (I hate it when it does that).

Yes, I decided to sign up with a new internet provider, only seven days until I can get that up and running, only seven more days in hell. But for now I give up working from home: better head to the office, and stop by the gym for a dose of endorphines on the way so I don't arrive the office looking like a storm cloud (not that it matters that much: we have separate offices. Can you imagine? A news site/magazine where all the journalists have separate offices? Yeah, I know it's 2008, but we're on the Northern frontier here you see, the future is often slow to reach this faraway corner of the world). Okay, enough complaining: gym. Perhaps the blogging mood will catch up with me later in the day...

Incidentally, this storm cloud is from Brighton,
where they have great storms:-) (lived there 96-97)

Scandinavian living: my online provider is a liability, any of the 2 other providers worth signing up with?

Okay, enough is enough. I really need to get a new online provider before my current provider gives me a nervous breakdown, any ideas for a better solution? (My currrent connection is unstable and slow as hell, pardon my language)

As far as I gather there are only three solutions to choose from in Norway: Netcom (my current provider), Telenor (the part state-owned former state monopolist), all other providers in Norway run on the networks of one of these with the exception of Ice (which is the process of building its own network).

Something like BT Open Zone would work well for me if the national coverage was good, but as far as I know no such option is available here.

Since mobility is key to me, a landline-based broadband tied to my address with a 12month or more fixed contract is pretty useless. I need something that works on the road: ideally all over Norway and beyond (and in my experience the UMTs network in this country only really works well in the main cities and along the main highways).

As for Netcom: I'm aware that my mobile broadband card is not the best, and I've heard from friends that Netcom has another mobile service which works well, at least in Oslo, but I can't forgive them for the customer disservices I suffered from their side since signing up with them.

This was only the beginning ...the fact that I've twice spent close to an hour on the phone with them trying to fix my non-existent online connection - with Netcom going on about me having to reinstall everything from the Netcom software to my operating system, only to be told at the end of the conversation that, actually, Netcom's network is down, that's what's been causing my problem - is enough to never go near them again. My time is valuable for one, but they also charge money for these customer disservices.

Now, Telenor tells me they will be the better option because they've been in the game for so long (like in: hey kid, you know we used to be a state monopolist, so our starting point is .. well...kinda superior you know – wink, wink), but evidence and my, perhaps ill-informed, instincts tell me that this starting point doesn't bode well for their customer service, which leaves ICE: do you think it's worth the gamble?

Funnily enough, they say Norway is one of the most connected countries in the world, but right now the chore of finding a decent online provider reminds me of my first visit to a Californian supermarket in 1996: the sheer multitude of different brands for every products was perplexing to say the least, just for Mayo there was something like 20(!) different brands to choose from! Back home we only had one... Now, these days we have at least two, but what if both are equally shit?

Having said all this, I could have missed something in my crazy deadline race, in which case I'm more than happy to be enlightened...

Influence on the Web is all about connectivity

It's been months since I revisited the value of linking out, so it was great to stumble across this post by Publishing 2.0 (via Martin Stabe), which contained too many eloquent lines on the power of the hyperlink to include them all on del.icio.us. My favourite parts:

The reason Google’s search results often contain more blogs than traditional media content is that blogs were the first to harness the power of the link. Blogs linked to other blogs, while traditional media brands remained disconnected silos. Savvy web users — many college age or early 20s — pooled their links on Digg and developed the power to drive server-crashing volumes of traffic, forcing traditional media sites, who still lack such influence, to plaster themselves with Digg This buttons...

...Journalists and PR professionals, the influence brokers of traditional media, have lost a huge degree of influence on the web in large part because they don’t link to anything. While traditional media brands are still powerful channels on the web, they are losing influence everyday to the link-driven web network — journalists and PR professionals can no longer depend on controlling these former monopoly channels to exert influence online.

Whenever I give talks to traditional publishers who have been afraid to link to other sites because it will “send people away” instead of keeping them trapped in the publisher’s own content, my now standard response is to say that there’s a site that does nothing but link to other sites — all it does is send people away. And yet remarkably, people keep coming back. So much so, that this strategy has translated into $10 billion+ in advertising revenue. (Yes, Google of course).........

Somebody is using my email address to send spam, how?

Just received a spam email seemingly sent with my Yahoo email address, so if you get one from my Yahoo address called 'January 74% off', it's not me, don't open, but my question is how do they do that? The email address is identical. How can they possibly pull that off? I've got a number of other emails, and it's about time I ditched Yahoo since it's so painstakingly slow and erratic, regardless of which Yahoo version or which computer I use, but can I prevent this from happening to other email addresses? I'd be grateful for any advice...

Computer woes

It's my worst nightmare come true, well actually it could be a lot worse, but still: my laptop is ill, so I think I need to head for the gym to steady my nerves.

Yesterday I thought I'd have a major nervous breakdown when I was unable to turn on my laptop (it's an extension of my mind, not to mention instrumental to how I earn my living).

Luckily I'd already filed my first story that day, but unfortunately I had to go straight into an editorial meeting and postpone both the nervous breakdown and trying to fix the laptop. Turns out it was just the battery, it worked well when I first removed it and then put it back in, but the machine went black on me again just now as I was writing. Again it's the battery, but it acts funny in other ways too: often freezes if I have the wireless on when I turn on the laptop, or the icons on my screen won't show up, or programmes 'run down' the screen or only close partially when I turn them off. So I think I'd better take it to Toshiba hospital next week, which is a pain in the ass if you don't have a car, because it's located in nowhere land and only open during office hours (when I'm supposed to be at work)... My last visit did nothing to endear me to the place...

But first I'll get that workout to calm myself enough to finish all the other things I was going to write today.....

Must read of the day: All this online sharing has to stop

This piece is absolutely hillarious, so I couldn't help but share it with you. Here's an excerpt, but go read the whole thing. The author first deals with the woes of the music industry:

"You think you were the first to suffer from your content getting ripped off and spread to the four corners of the earth? Get to the back of the line, bud. There's a few people ahead of you"

Then the woes of the newspaper industry:

People "copy-and-paste entire articles from online newspapers to blog sites or to their own computer and they don't pay a thing. Then they read them or 'share' them with other people who they might not even have met."

Before he gives us this little gem:

"Next, pornography. You know, there used to be tons of top-shelf magazines, all earning a comfortable living. Then you know what? The damn internet came along and at a stroke destroyed their business model, in which shifty-gazed commuters had to go into insalubrious shops to get "content". Now there are loads of internet sites (Google reliably tells me) where you can get free amateur porn - exactly the same sort of stuff that people used to pay for! It's shocking (and what's more, there are no unsightly staples in the middle of the pictures)."

Before he tails it all off with a great two lines that puts the whole article in a new perspective....

What's up with The Independent's website?

Did The Independent online have technical problems this morning? Some ten minutes ago I only got error messages like site not found, site unavailable or too many incoming HTTP requests if I tried to access articles from my newsreader or via bookmarks on my work PC, same thing earlier this morning when I was unable to access even the main site via my laptop. Too busy chasing other deadlines to investigate, but strange... The Indy is probably the site I most frequently get error messages from when I try accessing articles from my newsreader, usually site unavailable or site not found, but nothing on this scale....

Update 23/01: what a (not so) perfect time to finally blow off some steam about this, turns out we got a brand new Independent online as of today, at least a new layout with what looks like improved RSS-navigation. Don't like the brown banner much, but I'll stop being grumpy, even about the 75 old Indy media articles that showed up in my newsreader today, and try to find some time to test it over the wknd (long day, need some sleep, might be over the moon if I find a much improved site when I'm more rested).

Another news site moves to open software

Journalisten.se, the news site of Swedish trade publication Journalisten, published by Sweden's journalist union, unveiled its brand new website just after Christmas. The site is built in textpattern, an almost bloglike open software solution. Apart from the much improved layout, the new site is a joy for all RSS-lovers, offering separate feeds for the various sections of the site such as opinion pieces, job ads, news articles etc. Journalisten's editor told me they'd chosen textpattern due to the much simpler content management system, delivered by Netrelations, and the opportunity to display all the websites' various sections better.

Other news sites using open software in Scandinavia include Reiser og Ferie (Joomla) and ABC Nyheter (Drupal) in Norway and Information.dk (Drupal) in Denmark.

What would we do without internet?

It was Christmas day in a tiny village in a remote corner of the world. My mum wanted to go to church, yet the local paper didn't list at what the times the Christmas sermons were on.

Abdicating local coverage?
Now, we could talk of abdicating coverage and all of that, but I have a hunch the common practice is that churches have to pay for ads to get the times mentioned, and, in either case, there's always the internet: of course the Norwegian state church has its own homepage that lists sermons in various towns and cities...

The Government gets RSS-feeds (or, RSS is now at the political realm's disposal, let's hope it 'gets it' as well)
....via Andreas I even learned today that the Norwegian Government finally has managed to add RSS-feeds for each and every government department to its website, with separate feeds for the parliament's two chambers, for press releases, white papers, green papers etc. Now if the politicians and lobby groups could only learn to subscribe to the documents they need via newsreaders, we might save a small forest each month - and maybe this country could edge a bit closer to deserving all those political claims to being a world champion in environmentalism, though when it comes to digital democracy the Estonians are still way ahead of the game....

'Digital natives' is a dangerous term

It's vouge these days to talk about how the younger generation will turn the media world upside down, digital natives as they are. And yet, this statement is paradoxical, as too many journalism students, digital natives or not, seem to "aspire to work in some newsroom ca 1973". Jill Walker Rettberg highlights a deeper problem, which chimes with my own experiences:

"...despite today’s students having grown up with technology, and despite their using the net extensively, they still lack very basic skills for using the net in learning at a university level - and the ways teens use the internet differently from older users (e.g. games, IM, social networking) can almost hide the fact that many of them lack skills seen as basic in what we oldies call digital literacy - such as being able to find relevant information, evaluate it, synthesize it and present it. Of course it’s also possible that they’ll simply redefine 'digital literacy' so it means something else once they’re adults, but I somehow doubt it. I think actually the idea of 'digital natives' is dangerous - it lets us as teachers and parents off the hook."

For the record I should say that I'm by no means a techie – I know some advanced stuff, am ignorant of some basic stuff and basically just learn as I go along – but then, neither do I belong to the generation of digital natives, missed that one by a year:-)

Key Internet Insights

One of those days: so many stories to blog about, but no spare time so far. In the meantime, here's the two most compelling quotes about the Web I've come across in a while:

Adriana Lukas: The futility of control freakery
... It was the internet that has driven the futility of control freakery home for me too. Once you start blogging, interacting and communicating, there is no point in trying to make people pay attention to you, let alone force or manipulate them to do what you consider right or appropriate. And anyone, whether an individual or business will struggle with the web until they realise that they should control what they can, not what they wish they could.

Tim Bray (via Adriana): The Net's killer application
Here’s the thing: the Net’s killer app has always been other people. There are side benefits, like access to all the world’s information. But the links that matter aren’t between pages but people, and they’re strong and rich and subtle. Multiply the infinite flavors in human relationships by a thickening bundle of means-to-connect; that product is what’s new and what’s good and what’s exciting. People who are looking for the Next Big Thing are mostly looking in the wrong places. And anyway, you don’t need to look, it’ll find you. The Next Big Thing? Two fearless predictions: it’ll be about a new way to connect to people, and it won’t show up first on either Techmeme or TechCrunch...

Internet thieves beware

This really beggars belief: guess we have to add wi-fi broadband theft to the list of new world crimes unheard of before the age of Internet. I thought Scandinavia was bad for legislating all things great and small - I could go on for hours about the dog poo squad and other bizarre rules and regulations politicians come up with here - but in London a man has actually been arrested for 'stealing the waves' as Adriana so aptly puts it.

From a news report:

Police officers has arrested a man on suspicion of stealing a wireless broadband connection after spotting him using his laptop in the street... Dishonestly obtaining free internet access is an offence under the Communications Act 2003 and a potential breach of the Computer Misuse Act.

I had no idea. Now I know why some hotels can get away with such ludicrously expensive and impractical internet set-ups.

Spam season and the (il)logic of spam

I guess I'm lucky, or have been, to receive very little spam on this blog, just the odd trackback, but this month spam's been a daily nuisance - mostly in the form of trackbacks, but also comments. What's struck me though, is that most of it links to real products, like Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses or book reports. So, is this a new, absurd product advertisment strategy, or just pranksters with a bizarre kind of humour? Where's the business model in spam?

Now, blog spam, at least the kind I get, comes in three differents forms: 1) when someone writes gibberish and links to a product website: seems like an obvious prank, I mean, who would click on a link like that? 2) says "I've found the ultimate solution to xx" and links to a product website, why would I care? 3) says something intelligent that relates to the topic of my blog and links to a product website. If it's intelligent enough I might let that pass as it could be the beginning of an interesting conversation.

But the whole business of spam really is beyond me: you spam 10,000 blogs, get 5,000 or less hits - how big a percentage is actually stupid enough to buy your product? Try to advertise sunglasses via a trackback on my media blog, huh? That is almost as widely off the mark as the spam emails I get about available Russian chicks and European casinos. Talk about untargeted marketing...

Here's an interesting blog post (in Swedish, via Henrik Torstensson) about sites spamming Swedish blogs with links to 'link farm like' catalogues. Again, the business model escapes me....

Ghost let loose in my Bloglines account?

Something really weird is happening with my Bloglines account. All of a sudden I found two new feeds I certainly didn't add myself, in fact, had never even heard of before: one Didier Stevens and one Panzera Security blog. Very strange. Then, the next time I checked my newsreader, Didier Stevens was gone but to my surprise I saw that one of the feeds I do subscribe to, David Black, had 10 new posts. Upon closer examination I found that this Didier Stevens feed had inserted itself into David Black's feed, and the former was clearly advertising for various software solutions. A new sophisticated form of spam? I'm even supposed to have saved one post from the Panzera Security blog which I have never opened. Spooky. My mind needs some rest after a long days' work now, but would be grateful for any suggestions of what's up here ...