Het hier al eerder besproken idee van minister Plasterk om 8 miljoen euro uit te geven aan het maken van een plan om verlieslijdende traditionele nieuwsbedrijven te helpen nadenken over hun toekomst krijgt, helaas, steeds concretere vormen. In de auto vanochtend luisterde ik naar een interview op BNR met Rimmer Mulder, hoofredacteur van de Leeuwarder Courant en lid van de ‘Tijdelijke Commissie Innovatie en Toekomst Pers‘ (waar ook bloggers Paul Molenaar en Bart Brouwers zitting in hebben). Volgens hem staat de journalistiek onder druk, en goede journalistiek is goed voor de democratie. Dat laatste klopt, dat eerste niet. De interviewer, een journalist want hij wordt betaald voor z’n werk, wilde toch even verifieren of de journalistiek wel echt onder druk stond, want het nieuwsaanbod is toch zo groot? Het antwoord van Rimmer had ongeveer deze strekking:

“Met alle respect voor de bloggers (op een vieze manier uitgesproken), maar dat zijn amateurs. Ik heb het over professionele journalistiek. Journalisten die feiten checken, de tijd nemen voor onderzoek. Niet over burgerjournalistiek (wederom vies uitgesproken).”

Als dat het (zeer beperkte) wereldbeeld is van deze persoon, waarom moeten we dan als samenleving 8  miljoen euro uitgeven om dit soort mensen aan het werk te houden? Het is niet de journalistiek (zie amateurdefinitie hier) die onder druk staat, het zijn de traditionele journalistieke bedrijven die niet kunnen omgaan met een snel veranderende wereld. En als zij willen weten hoe ze moeten overleven, waarom moeten wij daar dan de rekening voor betalen?

Een tip voor de commssie zodat ze die 8 miljoen uberhaupt niet hoeven uit te geven: ga bijvoorbeeld deze discussie eens lezen, naar aanleiding van David Carr’s suggestie gisteren in de The New York Times om een ‘iTunes voor het nieuws’ op te zetten.

The Thinking Machine
After a pause, he corrects himself. “You know a few basic things, like how to poop.” His point, though, is that your brain starts out with no actual understanding or even representation of the world or its objects. “You don’t know anything about t

Advertising is a type of Micropayment
Advertising is effectively a micropayment for content, whether it is valued as a CPM, CPC or CPA. It is a generic promise by the audience overall to pay enough to keep the show on the road (or Web).

OpenMoko Open-Source Mobile, coming soon
Can the power of open source be harnessed into the form factor of a cellular phone? That’s the question Taiwan-based OpenMoko hopes to answer positively, when it starts to roll out its OpenMoko platform and phones later this year.

The best user manuals EVER
Never underestimate the value of providing fabulous training materials in getting–and keeping–users motivated to get better. And the better they are, the more likely they are to appreciate (and buy) your higher-end versions, evangelize, buy and create a

Fun with Asterisk at the Etel Faire
Two phone calls enter; one phone call leaves. Each of the players call a number, they compete in one of ten very short (5 seconds) games. The winner stays on the line and takes on the next caller. Games involve hitting the keypad first, being loudest, and

Why I’m not alarmed that school children use Wikipedia
With all its faults — and I consistently link to articles and blog posts that point those out — I think school children are better off because Wikipedia exists, for the exact reason Tancer says we should be alarmed. On most Wikipedia entries school ch

Spotplex, “The Better Digg”, Falls to Crunch Effect
At any rate, without actually seeing it its hard to really evaluate it. But in as it uses the analysis of blogs for news and buzz, it seems to be following the pattern of Techmeme, Tailrank, Megite and their ilk rather than Digg.

For startups, failure can be a good thing
Along the way the site has become a case study in how to fail well – by launching features quickly, seeing what works, and fixing things on the fly. “When we roll out a new feature, we know we’re probably not going to get it right the first time,”

When old media use terms like ‘digital initiative’ they reveal how really old they are
It is now 12 years later and where are we? Several “digital” companies that didn’t exist when Negroponte wrote his essay have market capitalizations far beyond that of any “atom” media company. And we’re supposed to be impressed with the launc

Peer to Peer Information During Disasters
User self service and collective intelligence shouldn’t just be limited to consumer applications! This stuff has real utility for government disaster response. Unfortunately, governments tend to be late adopters of new technologies.

Falling off the end of the Long Tail
There are countless niches like this, each one an opportunity for someone to build a micro-business or just a resource to satisfy a demand, bringing powerful social media tools such as wikis and blogging to specialist communities that already exist in les

When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing
Something is going on here—something with broad implications for tagging, classification and “Web 2.0″ commerce. There are a couple of lessons, but the most important is this: Tagging works well when people tag “their” stuff, but it fails when they’re a

Life-Long Computer Skills
Teaching life-long computer skills in our schools offers further benefit in that it gives students insights that they’re unlikely to pick up on their own. In contrast, as software gets steadily easier to use, anyone will be able to figure out how to draw

What is an Open Creative Community?
Equality of opportunity is an important social norm of an open creative community, but one’s place within community has to do with one’s skills, abilities and willingness to engage with others and participate. Status exists, but it is freely given in

The future of privacy
Use pseudonyms online. There’s absolutely no reason to use your real information anywhere short of buying something with a credit card. Establish a couple of good identities know and build your reputation. Someday reputation will be the prime currency in

The Thing That Is Ning
Those *&&%$$ blogger revolutionaries! They’re worse than the 90s dot-com boomers! They’re more disruptive. They’re violently disruptive. They are not just kiting stocks, they are really tearing into the fabric of reality.

Who needs a CIO?
And they block the ports used by the most popular services, from Skype to Second Life, which always reminds me of the old joke about the English shopkeeper who, when asked what happened to a certain product, answered “We don’t stock it anymore. It kept se

Hollywood Disrupted
What Gabler and I both seem to be focusing on is the very real possibility that what is truly disrupting Hollywood is not technology per se, but what the technology is enabling the audience to do and how it’s affecting the public’s “consciousness”

The Great Media Industry Schism
Individuals can now make a good living as content creators, without ever creating or becoming part of a scale content business. What’s more disruptive, however, is that in the market for original content, the attention economy is draining dollars out of

Us Being Human
Here’s my question – is it even possible to provide players with meaningful activities and tools with which they can develop these kinds of fundamental social structures in a way that is integrated with game play? If possible, why are these things sti

The transformation of IDG
The brutal reality that we’re facing today is the costly process of dismantling and replacing legacy operations and cultures and business models with ones with new and yet to be fully proven business models. However, we face greater risks if we don’t

It’s a Wrap. You’re Hired!
Once the rest of the YouTube generation enters the workplace, “video résumés are going to be as ubiquitous as PDAs or iPods,” says Mark Oldman, a co-president of Vault.com. Just leave out the gangsta rap. For your sake and ours.

Google KML Search: What Does it Mean for Geospatial Professionals?
When I present a slide with the web browser on one side and Google Earth and Maps on the other, and say “everything you can do on the web of pages you will be able to do on the web of places (via a browser such as Google Maps or Google Earth)”, the launch

WhyMax?
So if the business case for WiMax looks fragile, what explains its popularity? Two things: the desire of equipment-makers who have not done well out of 3G to make up for it with the move towards 4G technology; and the computer industry’s aspiration to bre

Worlds in Collison
The desktop may not not be dead, but it’s dying. And there’s one thing we know for sure about its network-borne successor: it will be vastly more powerful.

Screencasting tips
Given all the network connectivity that we have nowadays, it’s perhaps surprising — but nevertheless true — that we have few opportunities to directly observe how other people, who are proficient users of software tools, do what they do. Screencasts

Perhaps It’s Not The Entertainment Industry’s Business Model That’s Outdated
So the problem isn’t that the industry’s basic business model is obsolete — it’s just that everyone thinks they’re actually selling music or movies, and that leads them to do stupid things like put DRM on the music to take away many of those benefits, or

Content Labels Format
So the idea is that lets say you have a website that talks a lot about football, has no adult content, is child safe and is in French. You can then create a Content Label describing all of these features, then you submit it to be certified. A third party

Hack This Product, Please!
The idea that the people who use products should have input into their design and production is not really new, as scholars such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Eric von Hippel have shown. His research has proved the import of the role

Why People Are Such Jerks Online
Some of the latest research on this actually looked at how brains process messages during a conversation, and noted that in a normal conversation the person is tracking a variety of different cues in terms of how the other person is responding, and those

Satellite Synergy
The reason these two companies have 13 million subscribers willing to cough up $12.95 a month for something we all grew up thinking should be free is that commercial radio has self-destructed. All these folks (including me) are paying for satellite becaus

The Mobile Web
A very interesting fact that is obvious when you read it, but very interesting at the same time, is that there are up to 4 times more mobile devices in use around the world that have web access, than there are computer and laptops with web access. These n

Netvibes Promises Cross-Platform Widget Compatibility
Today at the Future of Web Apps conference in London, Netvibes founder Tariq Krim announced that their upcoming “Coriander” release will do just that. The new product will be called the Universal Widget API and will be available at eco.netvibes.com/uw

Streamburst Offers Innovative Non-DRM

Darpa Chief Speaks
No. I mean, I think that’s the legend. But I have not found that to necessarily be the case. The best science is done when you get the best people together. That doesn’t have to be in the open. What you do have to do is gather a large enough population of

Television on The Internet – How much Bandwidth is Needed? Where?
But let’s fast forward to Internet TV. Now any of us can watch whatever we want to watch whenever we want to watch it. Now how much entertainment bandwidth do we need coming into town? How many different shows are being watched in the whole community

The Wright Stuff
Will Wright plays with evolution—and Intelligent Design—in his new magnum opus, Spore. In this extended interview, see what one of the gaming industry’s luminaries has to say about the Wii, Second Life, and much more.

Read Any Good Ads Lately?
With TiVo skipping commercials and pop-up blockers neutralizing online ads, traditional advertising is under assault everywhere. “Seamless brand integration” means that books, cartoons, video games and even television shows are now the hottest vehicles fo

Norwegian Newspaper Shows The World How Embracing The Internet Is Good For Business
This goes back to the simple fact that newspapers got too focused on thinking they were in the newspaper business, rather than in the business of delivering useful news and information to a community of people in a way that was useful to them, and which b

Look Out MyBlogLog – Here Comes Explode
The idea of adding a cross-network friendship and commenting community isn’t a shocking innovation, but if Explode can implement it well then it could find strong support among users. The creators of Explode report that they will soon implement widget

Selling Homeowners a Solar Dream
Founded by a solar power veteran and a former tech company executive just 18 months ago, and still officially in a pre-launch phase, Citizenrē says it has $650 million in bank funding behind it. Enviro-actorvist Ed Begley Jr. has cut an eight-minute vide

The Online Evolution
World of Warcraft has done well, so has City of Heroes, so now suddenly it’s growing into this business which is multifaceted business with lots of different genres. And it has truly reached in Asia a level where one out of every 5 people have a Lineage a

Why AOL Created 63 Million New OpenIDs
This is an interesting gambit from AOL, which has generally been shifting from a subscription model (as it was in the 90’s) to a rich media content/ad based business model. One of the ways they’re doing this is by leveraging their access to the Time Warne

Many Web 2.0 Sites Fail to Link to Related Content
Some of the big Web 2.0 properties do a nice job here. YouTube and Google Video in particular are standouts. Each provides numerous links to related videos. However, these links are based on content metadata and not on the viewing habits of people who wat

Traffic And Flow
This world of traffic will change things like blogging: instead of commenting at someone’s post — a static, page-centric system — I might simply create a commentary with a link to the original (which I may have discovered in my inbound traffic, not nece

Why the iPhone will change the (PC) world
Jobs’ iPhone demo was so powerful that he actually made people believe that Apple invented a whole new user interface. In fact, Apple did something more important than that. The company took some of the best — hitherto obscure — UI research and put it i

Watching the watchers watching us
So they did something about it, using technology, of course. They installed a $1200 three-camera rig hooked up to a radar gun, so that they could get the speed of passerbys, take a picture of their plates and then email them to authorities. Leaving the ne

Mobile phone lifeline for world’s poor
Of the one million people who become new mobile phone subscribers everyday, about 85% live in emerging markets, according to the mobile phone industry body, the GSMA.

Seven steps to remarkable customer service
Here are seven things we learned about providing remarkable customer service. I’m using the word remarkable literally—the goal is to provide customer service so good that people remark.

Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll
As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.

The Elusive Electronic Health Record
Over the last dozen years, I’ve seen many entrepreneuers and many business plans that proport to create a universal electronic medical record. I still don’t have one and I know there isn’t a ubiquitous approach for this. You’d think that with al

Why AOL Created 63 Million New OpenIDs
This is an interesting gambit from AOL, which has generally been shifting from a subscription model (as it was in the 90’s) to a rich media content/ad based business model. One of the ways they’re doing this is by leveraging their access to the Time Warne

Many Web 2.0 Sites Fail to Link to Related Content
Some of the big Web 2.0 properties do a nice job here. YouTube and Google Video in particular are standouts. Each provides numerous links to related videos. However, these links are based on content metadata and not on the viewing habits of people who wat

Traffic And Flow
This world of traffic will change things like blogging: instead of commenting at someone’s post — a static, page-centric system — I might simply create a commentary with a link to the original (which I may have discovered in my inbound traffic, not nece

Why the iPhone will change the (PC) world
Jobs’ iPhone demo was so powerful that he actually made people believe that Apple invented a whole new user interface. In fact, Apple did something more important than that. The company took some of the best — hitherto obscure — UI research and put it i