Writing

There are 45 posts filed in Writing (this is page 1 of 5).

Creating the future of journalism (post and podcast)

I just finished listening to the two podcasts by Dave Winer on what we need from Biden, and his conversation with Jeff Jarvis on how to work around the brokenness of the mainstream media in the 2024 election. This was an excellent conversation. I  have several comments on the Jeff Jarvis podcast, and will cover them in this post, and there is a separate podcast at the end of this post.

Jeff Jarvis brought up two points based on prior writing/conversations with Dave Winer. One was “the power of the link”, and the other was that people should uses their own personal spaces to respond to someone else’s post or story. I agree that if you are going to talk about someone, or something that they wrote, you should link to it. However, recently Dave Winer wrote a post critical about the people and work of the Podcasting 2.0 effort (how they reimplemented rssCloud), but he did not link to the thing he was complaining about (I had to track it down). How does this square with what was discussed in this podcast? I think it is inconsistent at a minimum, and perhaps bordering on hypocrisy.

Another topic was people commenting on social media posts, and how a lot of these comments were “spam”, in that people were not responding to what was posted, but were posting to try to take advantage of the “flow” of the original poster (in this case, I am assuming it was Dave Winer – it could also happen to Jeff Jarvis,  but it was Dave Winer who brought it up). This is a tricky topic. Both Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis said they want to encourage conversation (well, maybe it was Jeff more than Dave). However, if you want to have conversation, you have to give people the chance to say something. If the response to comments is deleting comments, or blocking people because they disagree or are critical, this discourages people from commenting. If I write a post commenting on another post (either compliments or criticism), how should I inform the person or site I am are writing about? Both Dave Winer and Jeff Jarvis said people should be “respectful”. That sounds good, until the conversation gets blocked. I do not have any solutions to offer here, but if someone wants to have a conversation, it has to be two-way/bidirectional. In the case of social media apps, part of the design of the apps, in my opinion, is to encourage conversation. Blocking people and deleting comments in a thread do not give the impression that someone wants to have a conversation.

The next topic I would like to address is providing an alternative to the mainstream media. Dave Winer talked at some point about individuals creating stories (covering  events (like reporters, I suppose)) and creating/editing a flow of stories (again I assume this is mainstream media stories, which is a lot of what get commented about on blogs). I  will address the “flow of stories” idea first. During the 2020 George Floyd protests, I started a site to curate the mainstream media and social media coverage of the protests in Portland,  Oregon. The site was called Portland Protest News, and I updated it daily for a month and a half before I had to stop due to an illness. I set up news flows from mainstream media (primarily using RSS feeds), reviewed those feeds on a daily basis, selected stories to post, created a post with links to those stories, and also created a newsletter with the same content. At best, I was able to do this in an hour. Most of the time, it was 1.5 hours, and sometimes two hours. It was difficult to do this and work a regular 8 hour day. To me, the curated flow that Dave Winer talked about in the podcast with Jeff Jarvis would take at least this much time. Someone would have to put in that time to create a dynamic site with daily posts.

Next, I would like to discuss the topic of people covering events. I thought the idea of protesting the New York Times was interesting,  and the idea of others news organizations covering that protest might occur. However,  in a recent post of mine commenting on an essay by Anne Applebaum on protests in Poland, Applebaum stated that protests, if not carefully targeted, achieve little. I do not think there would be a clear enough goal to make protesting the New York Times effective. I think that the idea of independent writers/bloggers attending events and publishing accounts of this events is worthwhile, but I think there are several issues as well. Finding out about events takes work, attending events takes time, and writing about the events takes time and effort. Who will do these things? Who will coordinate this work? How will the posts/stories be distributed so that others can find out about them? The story “The Little Red Hen” comes to my mind, where one animal does all the work to produce a loaf of bread. Where are the “little red hens” to do this work?

There are some independent news organizations covering state legislatures (States Newsroom) and voting issues (Votebeat). There are small news startups trying to cover local news (Salem Reporter in Salem, Oregon as an example). There is even a online newspaper in Washington state (the Sammamish Independent) that is produced by volunteers. These are all current examples of independent coverage. Some of them have some funding, but many are dependent on subscriptions or donations. Doc Searls, in his work at the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University, has written a series of stories about “The News Commons“, and experiments in the Bloomington Indiana area. So, I point to these examples of “little red hens”, each with a focus, but providing inspiration and food for thought to others.

I welcomed this podcast, as it shared many ideas and food for thought. I hope my analysis has done the same, and I welcome any and all feedback. No one will be blocked or deleted,  I assure you!

I recently posted a quote from Hannah Arendt: “We are free to change the world and start something new in it” . I would like to point to a recent post by Ken Smith about how to solve the problem of Donald Trump. He organized his post as a series of problems to be addressed. I think the structure of this post could be implemented as a website in a fairly straightforward manner. I will try to create something in the next week that could serve as a model. Maybe I can even get Ken Smith or someone to collaborate with me on this project. Any assistance would be welcomed!

The topic of text boxes

Recently, in another post on the subject of textcasting, Dave Winer made a comment about text boxes:

Every time you see a tiny little textbox that’s a sure clue they’re trying to own you, and hoping you don’t notice.

http://scripting.com/2024/02/01.html#a154043

I think this is a reach. In my opinion, the simplest reason to use a text box for text entry is that users are used to it and it is easy to implement (using Occam’s Razor here). Another explanation is that it is use of prior art, as Dave Winer has written about before (see here, here, and here). No sinister plan to “own” anyone here. Could text editors be better/have more features? Sure they could! Could writing apps cooperate with each other and have APIs? Sure they could! Should people be demanding these things? Sure…maybe….or maybe they could make those things happen…or maybe they could submit a feature request….

If the software is open source (Mastodon et al), someone could make their own changes. If the software is a service provided by a company that does not charge for the service (hmmm…Twitter, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky come to mind), it seems more difficult for users to request features and drive changes. If a group of users REALLLY wanted something and no other app seemed interested, maybe they could create their own product (thinking Kickstarter here). To me, it comes down to this: how bad do you want this?

Finally, another take on this sentence comes from Ken Smith:

Ken Smith comment on Dave Winer’s “text box” statement.

Based on Ken’s comment, I take this as “any antisocial behavior” in the blank – racism, anti-Semitism, discrimination, manipulation…the list can go on and on as Ken points out. This Quora thread has some good points about someone trying to “own” someone.

James Gallagher: The what, why, how formula of technical writing – “These three questions allow me to evaluate the extent to which my writing and the writing of others follows through on its stated goals.”. The post gives examples of each question – nice!

Colin Walker points to Misu talking about writing consistently, and I love this quote from Colin: “if you don’t do the things you want to get better at then you never will and there’s no point moaning about it.”. I also needed to hear that!

James’ Coffee Blog: Advent of Technical Writing – a series of posts on the topic of technical writing, published in December 2023, lots of good nuts-and-bolts writing advice.