So, this is some serious Web 2.0 action: Instructables user zachninme (and ex-intern) wanted to have a rating system for comments on the site (so far, we only allow users to rate the instructables themselves.) He built a Greasemonkey script that any Firefox user can install; this injects a rating interface into all the comments whenever that user visits Instructables. Then, he wrote a backend using the new Google App Engine that collects all of the ratings, aggregates them, and pushes the show/hide logic back to the user’s Firefox client.

Voila: instant community/social feature, completely disintermediated from our site. The web being what it is, nowadays, he doesn’t have to run a server or get permission from us. Innovation accelerates…

Here’s a link to his announcement.

I just got an email about this new citizen journalism site. It looks pretty slick and already has some interesting content from around the world. Getting alternative viewpoints out of China, Iran, or even (at times) the United States is no easy feat, and these guys seem to recognize this.

Check out, for example, their tutorials on how to install Tor on your browser so that you can upload to or browse Demotix without leaving a trail.

Here’s the info from the release:

As many of you already know, my partner Jonathan Tepper and I have launched Demotix, a website for user generated news. Think of it like Flickr or YouTube, but only for original photo/video news taken by freelancers or the man on the street. They/You tell us what is going on, we tell the WWW and the world’s mainstream media. As of today, our site is now live. You can visit us at: www.demotix.com

Why are we doing it?

• Only four US newspapers have foreign news desks (the NY Times, LA Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal), and there are only 141 US foreign correspondents currently working today (in print and broadcast media)
• In the UK, a 2006 study of the broadsheets showed that more than 50% of the news was directly attributable to press releases
• The world’s media (over 90%) relies on the wire services – the Associated Press and Reuters – for their news. But some 80 countries, or 40% of the world’s nations, have no bureau from either agency.

The news is shrinking daily. We hope Demotix can plug that gap, and more. We hope Demotix will bring Web 2.0 to journalism. We hope to be giving a megaphone to the man and woman in the street with a story to tell.

Eventually we hope that Demotix will be THE place where anyone in the world can go, in safety, to upload news – major, minor, local, cultural, political, whatever. Even before launch, we have agreements with the Daily Telegraph, Newsweek, La Repubblica, and others – and will now supply them with a daily wire and picture feed of ‘citizen’ news. We have also built partnerships with Reporters Sans Frontieres, Witness, Global Voices, Committee to Protect Journalists, Committee to Protect Bloggers, Index on Censorship, OpenDemocracy and others. I have just come back from Cuba and Iran where the feedback we received was fantastic.

Please visit our site and let your friends and colleagues know that we exist (even better, pass this email on to everyone in your address book). Ideally, ask your friends who have interesting photographs and videos of great stories to upload them. And bear us in mind for whatever you witness. We need all the help we can get, so if you know anyone we should speak to or anyone who might be of help to us as we launch the start-up, please put us in touch.

Thank you for your help and please visit our site: www.demotix.com

My plan will be unchanged, it seems. I’m not sure what will come of the merger, but at the moment I’m just waiting for my contract to run out so I can get an iPhone. The Helio Ocean is not quite what it’s cracked up to be. Press release after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

A fake media history from the future: http://idorosen.com/mirrors/robinsloan.com/epic/

It runs about five minutes. The invented histories and news presentation technologies in the 2008-2014 time span are interesting and plausible.

Here’s a Nokia ad that hit all the right buttons, for me. It’s in keeping with the emerging cultural storyline that we now have, that the broadcast media of the twentieth century were a cultural blip in human development, and that technology’s ongoing development will now return us to the weird, deeply human world that we inhabited before.

We’ll see.

I’m hanging out at the web2.0 conference, this week, checking out occasional sessions and schmoozing. Instructables is doing free laser etching on the conference floor for your laptop/phone/genitalia.

I’m also doing a web2Open (the un-conference running parallel to the main one) session tomorrow afternoon at 12:50PM called “Coding Lazy.” It will be all about how Instructables uses tags to model Javascript dependencies in the client, and how that allows us to code at full speed while procrastinating on proper factoring and optimization for as long as possible. Stop by if you’re interested!

Here’s the Web2Open schedule. And here’s how to get a free pass.

A great article in the NYT. Long, but worth it. Excerpt:

The premise of the work is simple — get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them. But when those customers live, say, in a mud hut in Zambia or in a tin-roofed hutong dwelling in China, when you are trying — as Nokia and just about every one of its competitors is — to design a cellphone that will sell to essentially the only people left on earth who don’t yet have one, which is to say people who are illiterate, making $4 per day or less and have no easy access to electricity, the challenges are considerable.

Thanks, Stephen.

A blast from the (misguided) past:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

(From Kasima)

The old record of 29.4% was set in 1984. The new one is 31.25%.

[From Tim]

Tata unveils its new, sub-$1000 car for the domestic market. It gets 50mpg, due to its tiny 33hp motor, but there will be a projected 10 million cars similar to this sold over the next five years in India, as incomes rise.

Most people on this planet are getting richer, which is great. At least for those people, and for now. We’ll see how it goes in the long run…

Photo from a BusinessWeek article about the Nano.