• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

I’ve been following the recent attacks in Mumbai. I first heard the news on CNN, but the best way to keep up has been online. What always amazes me is the dedicated cadre of Wikipedians who constantly update Wikipedia with the latest news (aside from Wikinews’s excellent coverage). Fifty minutes after the attacks started Wikipedia had a page on the attacks up and four hours after a page on the previously unknown Deccan Mujahideen.

As well, CNN throughout the day has shown MMS videos, witnesses via Skype videochat, and discussion of the Mumbai bloggers keeping connected during the Mumbai curfew over the net and via services such as Twitter.

I like this trend. I love our continually-developing participatory culture. I think that ultimately it is for better, as consumers’ competition with traditional content producers can only result in increased product quality. The MSM (mainstream media) is beginning to embrace citizen journalism. For example, readers on CNN.com can now submit stories through iReport (with a disclaimer about the news being unvetted).

Any discussion of citizen journalism requires a discusion of its legal implications. In the United States, journalists are protected from disclosing their sources in thirty states. There is no legal precedent yet for whether bloggers, who increasingly break major news before the MSM, can be classified is journalists and thus be under those same protections. Only time will tell, but I am hopeful.

EDIT: Additional info from CNN on the ongoing Twitter use during the Mumbai crisis. I agree with CNN’s assessment that the wisdom-of-the-crowds nature Twitter is both its greatest asset and handicap. From the article:

As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see and (sic) ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.

“During the hour or so I followed on Twitter there were wildly differing estimates of the numbers killed and injured – ranging up to 1,000.”

What is clear that although Twitter remains a useful tool for mobilizing efforts and gaining eyewitness accounts during a disaster, the sourcing of most of the news cannot be trusted.

A quick trawl through the enormous numbers of tweets showed that most were sourced from mainstream media.

Someone tweets a news headline, their friends see it and retweet, prompting an endless circle of recycled information.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

“The Semantic Web is a web that is able to describe things in a way that computers can understand.” (1). Currently, most all content on the web is written for human consumption and understanding. It is currently very, very difficult for software such as search engines to extract from context clues what exactly the page or data it is looking at means, or what the data is related to. Various efforts have been underway to deal with this problem so that computers can better organize and information on the web. These efforts include RDF, which is a essentially a markup language designed for the purposes of building out the semantic web. The purpose of RDF is to allow for a “formal description of concepts, terms, and relationships within a given knowledge domain.” (2).

The reason that the development of the semantic web is so useful and cool is that it will allow for much, much, much easier use of the myriad amounts of data published on the web. As I mentioned above, the issue that computers have when looking for information on the web is that they cannot tell what context the data is. A computer may see tabular data in an HTML page, but it has no idea if the data is baseball stats or a listing of physical constants on a physic teacher’s website. Yes, context can be determined by keywords, but an even better way to define what the data represents is doing so formally using a technology such as RDF. Then, if a company such as Google reads a webpage, it can know exactly what the data presented is, and then provide better search results related to that page. As well, now someone can easily re-use the data for their own purposes, using something akin to Yahoo! Pipes, without depending on the author of the webpage having created an API or RSS feed to share the data. Screen-scraping becomes easy.

Further Reading:

• Microformats
• Comments and links on Slashdot

References

1. http://www.w3schools.com/semweb/default.asp
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

HTML and CSS are the presentation languages of the web. A programmer may build an application in Python or Java, or make their website more beautiful or fun using Javascript, but ultimately all that these languages do is allow for abstracted, automated editing of a page’s HTML and CSS.

HTML

HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, started as the sole language for making a website using Tim Berners-Lee’s WWW system, the system that became the web as we know it today; when you made a page on the net, you wrote HTML to define the content, layout, and design of the page. Note that HTML is not a programming language, but a markup language–you use it to describe how something should look, and the computer interprets it and renders a page onto your screen. Wikipedia says it best: HTML “provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as links, headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on…”

Making a well-designed layout for a webpage was difficult because the only way to position elements such as images and text was to place them into tables with hidden borders. As well, much of the HTML code was redundant. There was no way to write one line that made every single link bold and green; you had to specify attributes of page elements individually for each element. To make a single link bold and green, you would write it as <strong><a href="http://woot.com" color="green">Woot</a></strong>. Please note that the use of the color attribute is deprecated; style should be used instead, but I’m using the old-fashioned example on purpose.

Edit: To clarify, the more important reason not to use tables for layout is that if you do, you are essentially marking all of your content as tabular data when it is not, thus making life harder on search engines. (Thank you: http://www.digital-web.com/articles/everything_you_know_about_CSS_Is_wrong/)

CSS

In 1996 CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, was unleashed upon the web (although full support in the major browsers took another 3-4 years). CSS allows for the separation of form and content in web design. That is, you can write the content of your webpage then structure it using HTML, and then define the actual layout and colors and font and what links do when your mouse passes over them using CSS. Wikipedia always says it best: CSS is “used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language” such as HTML.

Now if you wanted all links to be green and bold, it only took one CSS statement ( a{color: green; font-weight: bold;} ) (note how I don’t even need to wrap all of my HTML links in the <strong> tag, I just use CSS). Web design became much easier because instead of structuring the page using tables, CSS could be used to position page elements either relative to the edges of the window or other elements, or absolutely using coordinates on the page. More complex designs became possible, and webpage maintenance easier.

Standards

Today, as always, the W3C, the World Wide Wide Consortium, manages these two languages, as well as the varied ecosystem of dialects that have sprung out of HTML such as XML and all other technical standards related to the web. XML is Extensible Markup Language, and it allows people to make their own languages with their own tags. Major use example: RSS and podcasting.

Tags

As you may already know, HTML is written as a collection of tags. For example, all HTML pages start with the <html> tag and end with </html>. All tags that “open” a statement are written as <tag> and all that close it are written as </tag>. With the exception of a few self-closing tags such as </ br> (which makes horizontal rules), always close your tags!

When you write posts using WordPress, you can always switch between the visual editor and HTML editor. All that the visual editor does is translate your clicks and words into HTML. If you do try the HTML editor, it works the same way, but you can see the code changes your actions make. The tags you will find most useful are the <a> tag, which is for links (a standing for anchor), the <p> tag, which denotes a paragraph, the <h1>–<h6> tags, which allow for headers to be inserted into a page, and the <ul> and <ol> tags, which allow for bulleted and ordered lists (and don’t forget your <li> tag too!).

The W3C has an excellent HTML primer that will do far better than I ever could at teaching HTML.

The Future

To me, the best feature coming out of the W3C’s work is the <canvas> tag. This tag allows for animations like those made in Adobe’s proprietary Flash software and played in Adobe’s proprietary Flash player to be done using open standards and tools.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.

• This post is part of a series I am writing for a class on New Media. Some technical explanations may seem unneeded or lengthy, but I am writing for the benefit of a very intelligent but less technical audience.

No person can harbor any doubt that piracy is rampant on the Internet. Powerful tools such as BitTorrent allow the rapid sharing of files with ease. Sites such as the Pirate Bay allow BitTorrent users to find the files they seek. Limewire is still in widespread use. Media organizations looking to protect their rights are working as hard as ever. Ars technica, a technology news website, has an excellent article on the statistics provided by organizations such as the RIAA and MPAA on piracy. The article takes an in-depth look at the reported losses due to piracy and finds that the numbers are grossly inflated.

In my opinion, the media industry is being absolutely ridiculous in its attacks on piracy. While I agree that copyright holders have some right to enforce their ownership of works, the industry needs to embrace the Internet. The history of media has shown that while new mediums can have adverse affects on the incumbent media, like that of television on radio, the incumbent media can easily adjust their business models in response and then profit further, like radio’s embrace of the music industry after TV became the dominant entertainment medium. Media consumers are the media companies’ customers. Attacking these customers with accusations only further alienates them, no matter how true these accusations are. A better tactic would be to invest the necessary capital to move the anachronistic music industry into the age of YouTube, Garageband, and Facebook and thus attract customers back to the licit portions of the industry.

While some in the media industries have slowly embraced the power of the Internet, the laws have not been updated in such a way as to allow consumers to take advantage of the Internet using their media. For example, while digital music sales have taken off, there is no way for consumers to create content that utilizes that media and post it on the Internet. Copyright law, as it always has, favors the copyright holder. I do not wish to dispute that balance of power. Rather, in the age of the Web, I say that laws need to be updated so that consumers can pay some reasonable fee and utilize a song in a way that does not fall under fair use in a YouTube video or on their Facebook. Fair use evaluation today is too arbitrary, and the process too protracted, to allow for the embrace of the Internet. I exhort the media industries to wake up from their slumber and realize that they are in an age that could either be golden in the quality of its media production or gloomy in the lack of the ability of consumers to create new works using the user-empowering technologies of our age.

From Adam Feldman's blog, blog.pamiproductions.com.