The Demand for "Explainers" and The Giant Pool of Money

Jay Rosen has written article that I could quote 1000 times.  It's called National Explainer: A Job for Journalists on the Demand Side of News.  It focuses on the huge success of an episode of "This American Life" called The Giant Pool of Money, which serves to explain the US mortgage crisis.

This episode has been downloaded 50,000 times more than any other episide.  Why?  Because the producers (Ira Glass and Alex Blumberg) focused on explanation instead of information.

The Original Whiteboard Explainer: Tim Russert

 

The whiteboard he used on election night 2000 (not the one above) is now a part of the Smithsonian. 

Facebook, Addiction and the New News

Over the past 3 weeks or so, I've fallen for Facebook. It has continually impressed me with it's innovation, social design and growing dominance of its space. Facebook does a lot of things well, but the one thing that impresses me most is how it exposes the actions of my friends on the site. I can see it when Kris Krug joins a group or Duncan Rawlinson updates Twitter . It brings the online and public world of my friends closer to me.

Tagging Katrina

Last week I participated in a Seattle Blogwalk (which I haven't yet written about- but soon!) one of the questions we asked was who had blogged about Hurricane Katrina. I raised my hand and talked about using my personal blog to let people know that our friend David Stitcher made it out of the city. I wondered at the time if there was any chance that someone who knows Dave, besides a regular reader, would be able to find that post.

Sir Tim - You must feel SOME responsibility!

I really enjoyed reading the BBC interview with Tim Berners-Lee. But, I was in awe at how Mark Lawson kept trying to get him to say that he felt responsible for the bad elements of the web...

But do you feel responsible? You say humanity will do whatever it does with it, do you feel responsible for what happens?

You must reflect though on the law of unintended consequences because it wasn't remotely ever your intention when you started on this that so much of the web would be given over to sexual exhibitionists masturbating in their bedrooms with webcams. Do you ever have bad moments about that?

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Rubel Says Fortune 500s Need to Listen to Common Craft

I write that title with tongue firmly in-cheek. I do work with a couple of Fortune 500s, but Steve is reacting to the survey results that show that Google Results = Bad PR and referring to a case study I wrote a while back about using blogs to get better search results. He says:

IE 7 At GnomeDex

I guess it's OK to talk about it without Chris kicking our ass now. Dave Winer has posted some that Microsoft is going to show off IE 7 at GnomeDex on Friday. I've also heard that there may be tablet-based demos too, but I'm not 100% on that.

Seattle Most Un-Wired US City

At first I took offense- like un-wired was a bad thing. Then I figured out that it meant wire-less. Woo hoo. Read the short article.

The Seattle-Bellevue-Everett-Tacoma city narrowly surpassed former unwired leaders San Francisco and Portland, Ore., which finished second and fourth, respectively, in this year's ranking of the top 100 U.S. markets for wireless Internet accessibility.

According to Intel's third annual "Most Unwired Cities" survey, conducted by Bert Sperling of Sperling's Best Places, this year's top 10 "Most Unwired" regions in the USA are:

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Free Public Wifi in Seattle

Free Wifi Close Up

Originally uploaded by Lee LeFever.

I stumbled upon this in a local neighborhood and was taken aback. It's part of a test being conducted in a couple of places around the city. It is supposed to bring computer users to local businesses like restaurants and laundromats. Very cool to see it happening in my backyard.

43 Things Wins a Webby

This is a great big shout out to the Robot Co-op for their Webby in the Social Networking category. The great guys/robots with big brains who created 43 Things deserve it and and I say more power to 'em. It blows my mind to think that just 4.5 months ago there were 139 people doing 411 things. Now, it's 21,500 doing nearly 83,000 things. Go Robots Go!