Wednesday, January 3, 2007

What's in a name #2: Placeblogs? Now we have a name for local sites like KnoxViews and KnoxBlab: They are "placeblogs," and my blogging acquaintance Lisa Williams up in Massachusetts has created Placeblogger.com to help people find out about them. Lisa started her own placeblog a couple of years ago, H2Otown.info, in Watertown, Mass.,  for neighbors to share local news, events and discussions. (She tells, and I keep repeating, a great start-up story about hearing an explosion near her house and not being able to find anything about it in the local media. ) She also makes the point that not all people blogging about their communities are doing "citizen journalism," but that their blogs are sometimes home to what JD Lasica and others have called "random acts of journalism." I was happy to see a couple of our Knoxville sites already on the placeblog list. Maybe I'll find someone in my neighborhood with time to turn Maplehurst.org into a placeblog so that it will qualify too. For now, it's barely a webplace. 3:28:33 PM    comment [] What's in a name? Avoid redflag phrases like 'self-described' Dave Winer, the leading evangelist for Really Simple Syndication, has let reporters know that they should stop calling him "the inventor" or even "the co-inventor" of RSS... (That's the technology that lets you subscribe to the contents of this weblog, or podcasts, or headline feeds from publications like The New York Times.) By the way, that's Dave's coffee cup I'm borrowing. Click on it to get to his blog. (Besides 'RSS' were my Dad's initials, and he'd get a chuckle out of that mug.) "If you want to understand what made RSS happen," Dave says, "it's the innovation, evangelism and commitment that was behind it, not the invention... But we lack a good word for the other stuff, so sheez, what's the big deal if they substitute 'invention' for all that? I've looked the other way. But to say I was the 'self-proclaimed' inventor is just wrong, I just nod my head when others say it, because I'm tired of arguing." Some reporters may have taken that nod to mean, "ok, call me 'co-inventor' then," which recently resulted in a story referring to Dave as "a self-described co-inventor," something he interpreted as a put-down. And that little twist of language is why I posted this message in the first place -- as a word of caution to my news writing students.  "Scare quotes" or a phrase like "so-called" or "self-described" can cast a cloud over the descriptions they refer to.  The hint of skepticism or disbelief is a sneaky kind of editorializing that has no place in news reporting. Save it for the editorial page. If you have a question about the accuracy of someone's title or claim to fame, look it up. Check sources you trust. (In fact, after this whole discussion, Dave added quotes from a few of those "usually reliable sources" to the top of his weblog. Even before that, if I were a reporter writing about RSS and didn't know Dave at all,   a few easy Web searches would have uncovered enough documentaiton of the rise of RSS to call Dave RSS's leading evangelist without any hesitation... and without getting into all the tech-insider squabbling about the early development of RSS. (That's not to say he's just an evangelist. Dave's inventions and innovations are numerous, as he notes in a comment below. He not only wrote and revised several versions of the RSS file definition, he wrote some of the first programs to use it. In fact, he created the blog-and-RSS writer-and-reader program that I've been using for five years.) RSS was one of the early uses of the XML markup language and is probably its most visible application. Inventions can sit on a shelf without someone to convince people to use them. Among many other things, Dave and his company, Userland, got the Times involved in RSS, which had a lot to do with the telltale little orange dominoes falling onto media web pages around the world. That also made it possible for academics like me to bookmark the RSS feed address for a Times story and know that my students can still use the bookmark years later without having to go through Lexis/Nexis or the Times pay-per-page archives. (Try this bookmark link, which I used a while ago.)  Dave also brought RSS to Harvard and left its specification there for good keeping. As for "innovation," Dave also added the RSS "enclosure" feature that made podcasting possible... and later created what I consider the first podcast worth listening to, a feed for interviews that NPR veteran Chris Lydon did when he and Dave were blogging at Harvard. (Coincidentally, Chris once worked for The New York Times. His current radio show, blog and podcast is called RadioOpenSource.org) Digging the Times another way Meanwhile back at the Times, the media company formerly known as a "newspaper' has added another Web-based technique of sharing its contents -- by publishing links that let readers post Times stories to social-networking sites like Digg, Facebook and Newsvine. Here's the announcement. (I haven't done much with those three sites, but my Del.icio.us links keep growing. So much technology; so little time.) (Phrases in italics were added for clarification after a first draft of this item went out on my own RSS feed -- and before Dave added his comment below concerning his contributions to the development of RSS.) 3:16:06 PM    comment []

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