Maybe I was just wary of thin networks, shallow relationships that have become “friends,” the shameless self-promotion of celebrities, opportunistic brands suddenly going social, and a collective culture that celebrates the trivial above the meaningful through the madness of crowds. I was having second thoughts about collective awareness and the promise of unifying knowledge through We Media. Then this happened: #Haiti at 90999.
Among the many extraordinary efforts to provide aid and relief for the people of Haiti comes this one from The Extraordinaries, winner of last year’s We Media Pitch It! competition: the Haiti Earthquake Support Center utilizes crowdsourcing and facial-recognition to help locate the missing. Anyone can post photos of a missing person or loved one, […]
It seems that every story begins as a Tweet or a post. The amateurs use them to source and update stories in newspapers and on news broadcasts. They link to our Twitter feeds, blogs, photos and video. They’ve created their own Twitter accounts and started blogs. They publish streams and comments. They link to our […]
We couldn’t get to Hyderabad for this year’s group hug of the world’s newspaper publishers, but it sounds like the old boys are getting feisty in their dotage. Forced once to postpone because of bad economics and waning interest, the reconvened World Newspaper Congress, organized by the merged World Association of Newspapers and IFRA, launched […]
Dear Mr. Murdoch: We’re so fortunate that we can entrust you with the future of the news business in the U.S. Such a shrewd business leader, too. Can you help a confused citizen understand your plan to save the news? 1. You’re going to charge people to read a story online that they won’t read, […]
Dear Arianna, About 2000 years ago the philosopher Seneca said that “the best ideas are common property,” which is an old thought rediscovered as the fresh ethos of the Internet. To be fair, the current state of being on the Web allows me to bring to the same sentence a Roman stoic with the Greek […]
“Today is a good day to do big things,” Amanda said when she was eight. It was so profound that I wrote it down and saved it. That was more than 20 years ago. She’s lived up to her words, but I seem to have let them slip over the years. Today I was given […]