MiniMediaGuy

Iconoclast originally described those who smashed religious statues to combat idolatry but essayist Christine Rosen put a secular spin on the term in a lengthy lament entitled “The Image Culture.” In it she observes that television and new media have saturated us with images — the World Trade Center collapse, the New Orleans floods — that so dominate the public agenda that “articulate person(s are) being rendered mute, forced to communicate via gesture and expression rather than language.”

Well, fortunately that is not quite true, at least in the case of Rosen who weaves this woeful thread through an engaging 20-page piece with many a fine turn of phrase and not one rude gesture. I’ll gently dissent from her world-gone-to-hell-in-a-handbasket-view momentarily, but first let quote her own fears of a public discourse reduced to poster children, sound bytes and bumper stickers. Looking ahead to this coarsened future she concludes in part thus:

” … we will have lost something profound: the ability to marshal words to describe the ambiguities of life and the sources of our ideas; the possibility of conveying to others, with the subtlety, precision, and poetry of the written word, why particular events or people affect us as they do; and the capacity, through language, to distill the deeper meaning of common experience. We will become a society of a million pictures without much memory … “

Lovely words even if I find them overly defeatist. Like my country friend says, “That dog can hunt!” Of course dogs hunt in packs and after finishing her essay I inquired about The New Atlantis, the journal for which she wrote. It is published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, “a neoconservative Washington think tank” according to an article on NewsFactor Online magazine announcing the journal’s launch in 2003. That article noted — for those of us previously ignorant — that “The New Atlantis” harkened back to a like-titled essay — written by Sir Francis Bacon and published in 1627 shortly after his death — that describes his utopian vision. The managing editor of the modern day New Atlantis told NewsFactor the journal intended to provoke “thoughtful and candid discussion about the implications of advancing technology.”

As a newspaper reporter who has covered Northern California high-tech industries for more than a decade, that strikes me as a noble goal and explains why I’ve glanced at the cover of New Atlantis ever since it began appearing in my mailbox — and why I read Rosen’s piece all the way through. I also feel like we live in a media-saturated society and I am particularly vexed at the repetition of imagery. For instance, I walked away from the television on September 11 when the second tower began to fall down and since then I have deliberately avoided seeing those images again. I know it happened. I’m not in denial. But I’ll be goddamned before I will aid and abet the murders who performed those acts by feasting on that horror and in so doing instilling fear an anger into my own heart.

So while I am to some degree simpatico with Rosen, ultimately I think she misses two essential points. First, ideas have come alive in the blogosphere. Yes, there is lots of noise, but there are now emerging networks of like-minded people who are doing astonishing works around the globe. This gives me enormous hope. Second, we have as yet no idea of the ways in which video may be used more thoughtfully and artfully than it has been up till now. I generally subscribe to the view that the written word encourages disciplined thought and imagery inspires emotional response. But image creation and manipulation are centuries newer than written language. I do think that I succumb to technohype when I postulate that maybe as video tools proliferate into millions of hands, a new grammar of video communication will arise that will be more expressive than the grunts and gestures Rosen fears.

Anyway, gotta run to work. Have a great Christmas holiday and if I’m flaky next week and post little or not at all, have a sane and happy New Year.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Bloggers should have some familiarity with copyright law and some of the new currents that run in opposition to traditional copyrights. This is no legal treatise but a quick exposure to help keep you out of trouble, particularly if you’re blogging interests are commercial.

Whatiscopyright.org sets forth this definition:

“Copyright laws grant the creator the exclusive right to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform and display the work publicly. Exclusive means only the creator of such work, not anybody who has access to it and decides to grab it.”

Most of the news coverage and angst over copyright in the media has been over music downloads, and I’ll skirt that today to focus on the copyright considerations of greatest importance to word-based bloggers. The legal injunction — do not steal copyrighted works in their entirety — contains a small loophole. This is the recognized right, called “fair use,” to quote and attribution portions of a copyrighted work, as in fact I did above.

The Stanford Libraries have a useful Copyright & Fair Use compendium that says in part:

“Fair use is a copyright principle based on the belief that the public is entitled to freely use portions of copyrighted materials for purposes of commentary and criticism. For example, if you wish to criticize a novelist, you should have the freedom to quote a portion of the novelist’s work without asking permission … Unfortunately, if the copyright owner disagrees with your fair use interpretation, the dispute will have to be resolved by courts or arbitration.”

If you are new to public writing game you might want to scan the Stanford site but most of this is pretty common sense stuff if you simply don’t take too much of anyone else’s work and you give them credit. By the way, lifting a section from another written work without attribution is plagiarism and while it may or may not be a copyright violation, it is bad form.

Many computer programmers and Web page creators have spawned a counter-movement that rejects copyrights, arguing that digital information is not simply easy to copy — it is best improved when it is freely available for others to make their own embellishments. Given the financial stakes involved in selling copyrighted works, this is a huge debate that will not be settled in this blog entry. I do want you to know about what is called the copyleft movement so you can think on this at your leisure.

As bloggers, you will be able to make a choice as to how or whether to protect your own works, and nowadays there is an alternative to traditional copyright. A set of licenses popularized by a group called Creative Commons allows you to reserve some rights while making your works available to other to read, quote, perhaps even modify or improve. I use a Creative Commons license on this blog because I want it to be shared. I think that’s the way of the Web.

More recently the Web has been buzzing about a concept called the mashup. Wikipedia defines “a mashup (as) a website or web application that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.” An article in Business Week illustrates some of the examples and captures some of the excitement over mashups. Sometimes I wonder if the excitement isn’t a little overblown, but nevertheless in searching around this morning I found a Website created by the Web 2.0 Workgroup that lists a growing array of mashups. This is cutting edge stuff, much of which is over my head I’m afraid, but if it’s where the Web is going it at least makes sense to be aware of it.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Continuing my preparation for a one-day seminar on how-to-blog, I’d like to pull together some milestone dates in the progress of blogging.

A blog hosting company called Blockstar has created a lovely timeline that goes back to 1992 when Tim Berners-Lee was collecting the bits and pieces that would become the web. The timeline acknowledges that “weblog” was coined in 1997 by Jorn Barger. It also notes that the Blogger software was launched in 1999 by a company then called Pyra Labs. (Google acquired Pyra in 2003 and now runs Blogger).

An otherwise forgettable Forbes Magazine article entitled “Attack of the Blogs” contained some interesting dates in a graphic subtitled: A Brief History of Blogs. The graphic notes that in December 2002 “political bloggers drive Trent Lott from Senate Majority leader post over allegedly racist comments,” and that in August 2004, bloggers were first credentialed to cover U.S. political questions.

Political blogging won huge amounts of public attention and gave blogging, at least temporarily, rock star status. In January, a research report from the Pew Internet & American Life project said “8 million American adults say they have created blogs … still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.”

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

Blogging enables you to speak your mind to a worldwide audience but with that power comes some legal responsibilities. You may not destroy reputations with false statements. Nor do you have an absolute right to publish even truthful material about private individuals. An attack on reputation is defamation, and it can come in two forms, slander (spoken) and libel (written). The separate concept called invasion of privacy allows individuals to sue publishers who put them in the spotlight without good cause. Awareness will help you avoid these legal pitfalls.

A Wikipedia article lays out the basics on slander and libel which are both grounded in the ancient concept of defamation, defined by Dictionary.com as “communication to third parties of false statements about a person that injure the reputation of or deter others from associating with that person.”

Note the two key words–false and injurious. True statements may be injurious but not defamatory — though it may cost you time and money to defend yourself against a civil lawsuit by someone or some firm that feels aggrieved. So think twice before you take a shot at anyone, and be certain of the truthfulness and provability of whatever you publish.

A Boston law firm has created an u pdated overview of slander and listed some of the cases in which this ancient concept was adjudicated in recent years. (They seem to have to do with who is not at fault in the case of a slander, i.e. the ISP or Web host who transmits the defamation but has no other role in itss utterance.)

Libel is a written slander (though in a multimedia age, I suppose a slander could be podcasted or vodcasted). The Media Law Resource Center, a non-profit comprised mainly of traditional publishers, publishes an FAQ on libel that includes the obvious, “Help! I’ve been sued for libel,” which suggests you consult a First Amendment lawyer.

Let us hope this is never your misfortune for it could cost you dearly to defend even a truthful statement if you should be sued. As Australian university professor Brian Martin says more forcefully :

“The law of defamation is supposed to protect people’s reputations from unfair attack. In practice its main effect is to hinder free speech and protect powerful people from scrutiny.”

Martin has created a “suppression of dissent” website for people fighting unfair suits. He has also written extensively on defamation in the Internet age and how technology and common sense rather than law are best suited to protect reputation.

The concept of invasion of privacy is newer and trickier in one key regard, as noted by attorney Ivan Hoffman in an online essay on the topic:

“Unlike defamation, there can be an actionable claim for invasion of privacy even if the matters disclosed are true. This is a separate cause of action from libel or slander in this regard.”

In other words, truth is no defense. If you publicize even a true detail about a private party they may be able to sue. In an age of video cell phones and instant publishing I think this is the sleeper issue. Say you’re at a at a club and you snap a picture of two people who might not ought to be together, and then you throw it up for everyone in your world to share. Is that an invasion of privacy? I suspect the law will be asked to reset the balance between what each of us can expect to remain private and the ability of anyone, anytime to publish anything.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

No pressure. But you’ve only got a second to grab an online reader’s attention. So put a snappy headline, sans underlining, on the left side of the page. That’s a sample of the findings in a phenomenal new study, posted on the Poynter Institute website, that uses eye-tracking to discern how viewers scan a Web page.

Although I do not yet have the technical savvy to create a web page, I understand design principles from my days in print-based graphics. So this morning I’m putting off my preplanning for the blogging class that I will coordinate in January to explore the nuances of online design.

The study “observed 46 people ( … in San Francisco … ) for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content.” Among the findings of what the authors described as a preliminary analysis:

1. Think upper left. Eyes most often started in the upper left-hand quadrant then followed a winding path around and off the page.

2. Small is beautiful. Small type seemed to get more focused viewing behavior, as if the act of discernment compelled attention, while viewers tended to scan and presumably skim bigger headlines.

3. Underline sparingly. It may inhibit reading of short blurbs.

4. Write terse, grabby headlines . Study authors Steve Outing and Laura Ruel write: “We found that when people look at blurbs under headlines on news homepages, they often only look at the left one-third of the blurb … On average, a headline has less than a second of a site visitor’s attention.”

5. Text rules. “Our test subjects typically looked at text elements before their eyes landed on an accompanying photo,” the authors wrote. Single-column text, displayed in short paragraphs, was preferred.

6. Place ads to be read. Ads placed top and left worked best. Right and bottom ads got less attention. “We noticed that when an ad was separated from editorial matter by either white space or a rule, the ad received fewer (eye) fixations than when there was no such barrier,” the authors wrote. “Article ads that got seen the most were ones inset into article text,” as was done at roughly half of the 25 sites used as a comparison group.

The entire report is available via a 340-page PDF. Thanks to all those involved in making public such a tremendous resource. I was pointed to the study by Unmediated.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

I started out this morning to outline some top blogging personalities, to present at a how-to course coming up in January, but I got happily detoured because I found a repository of basic tips and resources compiled by blogger and author Sheila Ann Manuel Coggins and hosted by About.com, a Website now owned by the New York Times.

The About.com site was instructive in many ways starting with how it was organized. Each entry is brief requiring probably five minutes reading time if you don’t follow links or click on ads. Each entry in the blogging series includes a menu with related topic on the same theme. Consider this an object lesson in information design — chop up big topics into small bits and link them with a menu. From a considerable array of offerings I’ve selected a subset that seem most useful to novices or beginners. Obviously you can explore on your own once you see the menu.

All of the following are titles from Sheila’s compilation, with a brief comment by me and the necessary link to About.com.

One
7 Tips and Ideas for Your First Weblog Entry : Duh! What better way to begin than at the beginning.

Two
Profile Page Template : How to tell people about yourself, and how much to tell them depending on whether your blog will be personal and professional.

Three
6 Tips for Beginners : A primer on where the blog resides (electronically), thoughts about how and why to choose a theme, and how to create a community around your blog.

Four
How to Be a Good Blogger : Sheila offers 12 tips but perhaps the most important is to update your blog regularly. If there’s nothing new, why would anyone visit?

Five
6 Time Management Tips for Bloggers : Unless you were completely unoccupied before you took up blogging you’ll have to build time into a busy schedule, especially if you want to blog regularly.

Six
Top 10 Tips on Promoting Your Blog: Once you’ve got it why not — if not flaunt it, at least try to increase your visibility among the audience or audiences to which you would like to appeal.

Finally, a professional acquaintance, knowledge management specialist Darlene Fichter, recently pointed me to an astonishingly concise and yet insightful list, created by a thinker named David Pollard, that I urge you to read and print out and clip by your workspace. The list is entitled What the Blogosphere Needs More of (Update).

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

The blogging world is full of personalities, and I’ll run down some of their names tomorrow. But once you begin blogging you become a central personality in that world. A blog is a platform for personal expression. This self-expression could take an overt form if you write about yourself, your family, your business or your art. Or you could take the subtle approach of selecting items from the news flow and calling attention to them. Either way you reveal something about yourself. Never lose sight of your own importance. You have joined a “conversation.”

That’s a concept worth explaining to new bloggers. Think about it. Writing has historically been a one-way communication. So has broadcast. Feedback loops have been built in over time through letters to the editor or call-in shows on radio. But the Web is fundamentally different. The reader who is stirred by some blog entry can usually e-mail the writer, or post a comment on the blog, or refer to the prior post in their own blog. This built-in feedback potential makes writing on the Web, in theory at least, more like a conversation than a monologue. One of the best and certainly most visible expressions of this new “conversation” metaphor is the Cluetrain Manifesto, a collection of statements and anecdotes that may seem obvious now but were quite prescient in 1999 when the authors proclaimed that:

“A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed.”

At some point you might want to scan the entire Manifesto or learn about its main points, its authors and something of its importance in the Wikipedia (collaboratively-created online encyclopedia). It captures and expresses many of the customs and conventional wisdoms of the Web, albeit from a marketing point of view. If your goal is to get other people excited about your ideas, or to promote some other cause or concept (often called a “meme” in Web-speak) you’ll have to do is translate the Manifesto’s corporate marketing lingo into a political or cultural message more comfortable to you.

Just bear in mind that the defining novelty of the Web, and of blogging, is the potential for two-way communication. Or to repeat the reigning metaphor, it’s a conversation. One of the technologies that facilitates this conversation-like buzz is the hyperlink ( need background ?). If blogging becomes your first exposure to the use of hyperlinks then you are in for a treat. As a writing tool they enable you to embed lengthy explanations (as I did above with hyperlinks) into your prose without having to slow down the story line. You can link to proofs — maybe there’s a data table or a photograph that relates to your point. Because of the ease embedding links, I think of blogging as an evolved form of writing. In fact I’ve blogged about hyperlinks in writing once or twice in the past.

For purposes of this discussion, hyperlinks enable bloggers to refer to one other, to articles in the media, and to any resource on the Web. This is one of the ways bloggers link their thoughts to the wider discussion and “join the conversation.” And here one last point on personality is in order. When you start blogging your voice may be low and timid, especially alongside the big personalities around you. But don’t be intimidated to the point where you quit. Because you’ll find, if you persist, that some people will visit your blog. It may help to envision the Web as a collection of little ponds, with fish swimming inside each pond. A realistic goal would be to become one of the bigger fish in one of those many little ponds.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
‘Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media