Category: Four pillars

I wasn’t in a position to keep up with the news last night; I was too busy looking up at a canopy of stars, talking to friends and colleagues, experiencing what it feels like to be homeless for one night. Great experience, especially when you can choose where and when, especially when it’s only once a year.

As luck would have it, yesterday turned out to be one of the coldest nights of the year, around 40 degrees Fahrenheit; this, on the banks of the Thames, with a gentle wind reducing the effective temperature even further. As I looked around, I watched people try and fashion makeshift windbreaks out of umbrellas and polythene sheets; struggling to cocoon themselves in sleeping bags with hands that had become stumps and eyes that wouldn’t stop watering; walking around trying to convince themselves that it would make them feel warmer. [An aside: the stump-like hands and frozen fingers meant that there weren’t many BlackBerries or iPhones in evidence.]

Sounds hard. Not really.

It was all too easy. After all, we had spent all day in warm offices with warm colleagues and warm bank balances. We were in reverse Cinderella time, the clock would strike and everything would go back to normal. We’d all had a decent meal for dinner, and we were all in anticipation of a decent breakfast.

The morning came and I could go home. Go home to a warm family and a warm shower and a warm bed. [I have never enjoyed a shower as much as I did this morning, allowing stinging needles of super-hot water to drive away every memory of the previous night’s cold.]

Byte Night is not about one night, it’s about the lives of children and youth that need help. Children and youth who don’t have the warm choices we have. Children and youth forced to leave home without warning, forced to sleep in doorways and abandoned cars and nooks and crannies.

Byte Night turned 10 yesterday, a decade during which around £2m has been raised. Amazing stuff, great testimony to the vision and hard work done of people like Ken Deeks and James Bennet, and a great reward for the incredible work done by the people in Action for Children. We raised a lot of money over the last few days. But we can raise more, so I’m going to keep the site open for a few more days. Link here. If you’re feeling warm when you read this, think about the people who aren’t. Enough said.

You’ve been extremely generous, and we’ve passed £1000 in quick time. Amazing what the web makes possible.

We sleep rough on Friday. The weather forecast for Friday is not that brilliant, so this year we’re really going to be earning our Saturday morning tea and butties. Can I implore you to keep it up, and keep giving? It’s for a worthy cause.

Love it or hate it, we work in a profession that has been kind to its participants over the years. Kind in terms of challenges and learning, kind in the context of personal development and career progression, kind when it comes to earnings and security. Of course, there have been peaks and troughs, redundancies and job losses, shutdowns and even meltdowns. But in the main we have much to be thankful for.

Which is why I am keen to participate in giving back whenever I get the chance.

Which brings me to Byte Night. An annual convocation of the profession, but with a difference. The convocation is late at night, in the open air, and on hard ground. Byte Night is where a couple of hundred of us sleep rough in order to raise funds for Action For Children.

Please support the event and the charity, and give.  Give generously. Please. There’s a link in the sidebar and over here.

We are not far from a time when we will order maps like we order pizza. Confused? Bear with me, humour me for a bit.

Ordnance Survey maps have always been rich in information:

What is shown above is a very UK-centric view, with the Ordnance Survey example. I’m sure there are equally good examples all over the world. However, most such maps seem to provide information that is primarily directed at the hiker, the trekker, the cyclist, the wanderer.

I’ve never driven a car. Which means I’ve used a lot of public transport over the years. We have three wonderful children. We like visiting places, both urban and rural. And there have been times, many times, when I’ve wanted better information on a map. Information like “Which are the tube stations where carrying pushchairs is easy?” ” Where is the nearest clean toilet with baby-changing facilities?” “Where is the nearest place we can get some water and some fruit?” Information that pertained to the carless childfull urban public-transport-using parent.

My children are well past their pushchair times. But my pushchair times are not up yet, nor are my urban-warrior-with-child times: in less than a decade I expect to be a grandfather. Which is why I was delighted to see this:

One of the key advantages of today’s technologies is that custom delivery of information is possible cheaply and efficiently. So soon I can imagine I will be ordering maps like pizza:

• Manhattan base
• Deep pan
• Include toilets and ice cream parlors
• Exclude one way systems
• Add extra parks and playgrounds
• To go.

You get my drift. Thanks to Euan for the tweet:

www.diaroogle.com — the place you want to go to when you want to go — ’nuff said.

Following on from comments on my last post, and at least in some part influenced by what I’d had bouncing around my head when I wrote this in 2006 (to do with Gresham’s Law and information), I’d like to spend a little time thinking about news as a commons, its damage and its repair.

If we consider news to be a commons, then, taking a leaf out of Clay Shirky’s book, we could think of news publishing tools and techniques slightly differently. We could think of them as ways to damage the news commons, and to repair the news commons.

What damages the news commons? Lies, inaccuracies, errors, omissions. How can we make sure that the news commons suffers the least damage? By ensuring, in turn, that the cost of repairing the news commons is at least as low as the cost of damaging the news commons.

Shirky made this point in the context of wikis originally, but I think it has merit in the context of news and the dissemination of news. Which leads me to thinking this way: if the tools and techniques used to disseminate news are such that the cost of repair is as low as the cost of damage, then the quality of the news disseminated will improve.

In other words, the cost of stopping a lie from spreading must be as low as the cost of spreading the lie in the first place; the cost of publishing a corrected text must be as low as the cost of publishing the error-strewn text in the first place.

Dave Winer, some years ago, regularly used the phrase “River of News”, usually in the context of RSS, if memory serves me right. Tools like Twitter, when used with techniques like snurl, already provide rivers of news, but usually in the context of the news publisher rather than the news topics. Search tools like Summize then convert that into topic-based tributaries. But by definition these are streams of information without the notion of damage or correction.

So what would happen if we had wiki-based newspapers? I’ve seen cursory attempts; I think there’s a lot more to come. Am I right in thinking that MSM tools and techniques are fundamentally asymmetrical in this respect, the cost of repair is far higher than the cost of damage, so damage increases over time.

Why would I say this? Two reasons. One, errata, error and omission correction, retractions. These things tend to be tucked in somewhere in the bowels of a paper, while the actual errors and omissions make the premium slots. Two, if you take something like the manuals and policy handbooks in most organisations, the reason they never get used is they’re usually out of date. And why are they out of date? Because the ‘cost of repair” is too high.

The manuals and guides and policy handbooks migrated into wiki space. In a wiki, there’s no place to hide the error or the correction.

So is it time for wikinews? Where does it exist already? Where does it work well, where does it fall down?

Views?