What I’m Reading

The Reason So Many People Are Unemployed

According to Aaron, the answer is a lack of money.

Tagged: economics, financial crisis, essays, unemployment

Liveblogging SXSW: The Future of Context in Journalism

One of the continuing conversations about how to improve journalism is how to cover ongoing stories. Specifically, how do journalists provide the context that shows people the big picture, not just the latest developments?

Looks like it was a great panel led by Matt Thompson, Jay Rosen, Staci Kramer, and Tristan Harris.

Tagged: sxsw, liveblogs, Jay Rosen, Matt Thompson, Staci Kramer, Tristan Harris, Journalism, contextual journalism

The Right Way to Collaborate (If You Must)

Collaborate where it makes sense and provides additional value, not for the sake of collaboration itself.

Tagged: collaboration, advice, Business, productivity, podcasts, interviews, Morten Hansen

Join the team, before it's too late

Facing a staffing shortage, the NC Technician makes a plea to the campus.

Tagged: student newspapers, Journalism, NC Technician

AOL's Big SXSW Bet On Seed and "Bionic Journalism"

AOL has built a three legged stool to create content: part professional, part freelance, and part aggregated . . . but its model is far more hand-crafted than the other new players in the mass content creation space. “The essence of journalism has always been separating signal from noise,” says Hansell. “It’s all judgment. It’s all selecting the best bits.” What AOL hopes to create with Seed is an editorial machine which automates the assignment process as much as possible, but keeps the final selection part in human hands.

Bionic Journalism is leveraging the best of what machines can do against the best of what humans can do.

Tagged: Journalism, AOL, seed, Technology, startups

Learning By Accident

I totally dig the phrase "just-in-time learning." There's a growing market for that.

Tagged: Education, hacking education

The case for context: my opening statement for SXSW

Systemic knowledge makes the episodic much more valuable.

Tagged: Journalism, hacking journalism, contextual journalism, sxsw, Jay Rosen, Tristan Harris

Demand Media's content assembly line

Sean Blanda brings clarity to other reports with his first-hand experience.

Tagged: Demand Media, algorithmic journalism, Journalism, content farms, business models

Facebook Will Allow Users to Share Location

To be formally announced in late April at f8, the developer conference.

Tagged: facebook, Technology, scoops, social networks

WordPress Guns for Web Content Management Duties

Edit Flow gets a bit of high-profile attention.

Tagged: WordPress, Edit Flow Project, Publishing, content management systems

Large monitor in the office that provides a real-time stream of information about and relevant to the company is awesome. If each person had access to one of these, it might even make remote working more effective.

Tagged: ideas, productivity, Technology

TEDxNYed: This is bullshit

Why shouldn’t every university – every school – copy Google’s 20% rule, encouraging and enabling creation and experimentation, every student expected to make a book or an opera or an algorithm or a company. Rather than showing our diplomas, shouldn’t we show our portfolios of work as a far better expression of our thinking and capability? The school becomes not a factory but an incubator.

What's broken about education and approaches Jarvis would take to fix it.

Tagged: hacking education, TEDxNYed, Jeff Jarvis, New York City, Education