At Wikisym 2010, I delivered the closing keynote to a great set of academics and researchers from around the world.

It was also the first public venue where I described a new project I’m starting called WikiFactCheck, which attempts to bring the culture of reliable sources, verifiability and citations set by Wikipedia to the task of fact checking news outlets and sources. This will start with focusing on the US “Sunday Morning talk show” circuit, a cause taken up prominently by Jay Rosen and projects such as PolitiFact and Meet The Facts. But the effort can be extended to other domains, such as political debates, speeches and briefings, and I look forward to seeing the brainstorming around this.

See the following for the complete presentation, and feel free to visit the wiki above and contribute your ideas. I will be giving a brief talk at AEJMC in Denver, Colorado about the WikiFactCheck project.

This week I’m at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at Univ. of Texas-Austin, an event that’s been a great source of professional and academic dialogue regarding digital journalism.

One of the neat demos was from NPR’s Kinsey Wilson, who showed their iPad-specific web site. If you visit npr.org with the iPad Safari browser, you’ll get redirected to their beta site created with “HTML5″ – npr.org/tablet (though Dave Stanton of U of Florida points it it’s really XHTML 1.0 Transitional. You don’t need an iPad to see it: use Safari for Mac/Windows or Firefox 3.5+ to visit that URL directly)

Without plugins, they’ve added an audio clip playlist manager that’s pegged to the bottom of the screen. On a landscape laptop screen, it looks a bit big and intrusive.

On a portrait-screen iPad with high pixel density, it’s very nicely sized and placed.

Wilson said the NPR team took about three weeks to finish the project. When the iPhone first launched, Steve Jobs famously said you don’t need apps, since rich web content is all you need. We know now Jobs changed his mind, but NPR is showing how you can make a web page feel very “app-ian” with some simple HTML additions.

With the rumors of Facebook getting into China this year, VentureBeat has put out an excellent roundup of the big four social networking sites in China:

• RenRen
• Kaixin001
• Qzone
• 51.com

What’s interesting is that each one comes from a different angle: students, music/games, instant messaging and rural users (respectively). That makes for an interesting scrum, as no single service rules the landscape quite like Facebook does in the US.

I’ll be on KCBS radio tomorrow to talk about Facebook’s prospects.

In general, RenRen (nee XiaoNei) is the most like Facebook, as it launched as pretty much a pixel-for-pixel clone. It has a valuation of approximately $1.2 bln with Softbank recently buying a 35% stake.

I’m not hopeful Facebook will make any successful splash in the China market, though the way it’s been reported via sina.com, there’s every indication this is just an unsubstantiated rumor.

After two days of showing the iPad to the community at USC, I got an interesting questions from a student in class: “It isn’t really a computer, it really isn’t a mobile device, so what is it?”

The best explanation I came up with: a spork.

It’s a digital spork.

Now I mean that in the most affectionate way. Rather than doing neither thing well, it does two things quite competently in one tight package.

It’s a browsing device with a large bright screen, powerful processing for multimedia and enough storage/connectivity to mimic a laptop. On the mobile side, its 10-12 hour battery means you constantly use it without rationing your time (this could be a bad thing), you can toss it in your bag without thinking twice, and you can lean back in bed or lounge at the beach to use it.

Now, the “lean back” aspect makes things interesting.

This is what makes the device so exciting for publishers and TV folks.

See, this whole laptop-based “lean forward” crouching over your keyboard phenomenon is foreign to them. It’s too participatory. You’re at your keyboard, ready to comment, to chat, to pan, to praise. You’re multitasking,  your attention is scattered, and you’re almost always one tiny step away from being bored and doing something else.

Traditional media companies aren’t used to that, and haven’t understood what to do with it.

Instead, the iPad brings back the passive, single-tasking, lean-back experience. Lean back is what they understand — couch potatoes, lounge chair magazine leafers and bathroom readers. You’re doing one, and one thing only.

So the iPad gives them hope the pendulum can swing back away from the wild chaotic bazaar of the mouse-based desktop, and back towards what they understand. And to help monetize this, they now have the elusive micropayment system they’ve been missing for a while — the iTunes Store. Years of Apple iPod and iPhone consumers buying songs at $0.99 and apps at $0.99 have conditioned the populace to pay these micro-amounts, driven by an ephemeral impulse buy for content.

Or so the industry hopes.

It’s a very real possibility it will be successful, even if I don’t particularly care for the trend.

Paid apps already available from Time and ESPN replicate the web content on those sites, but with more interactivity and a rich multimedia display. Folks who think this is folly, that the same content can be had for free on the web, and will kill the iPad paid-content market, need to consider consumer behavior more carefully.

By that logic, bottled water companies should not exist because of course we have free water everywhere, from taps and bubblers.

We know otherwise. That Evian, Perrier, SmartWater (and even Aquafina selling what is practically the same as tap water back to us) make money, and lots of it, is no secret. There is upselling of what is commodity. And if there’s ever a perfect partner for making that work (reselling what is common at high markups) it’s Apple.

And that’s what we’ll see — a bustling marketplace for captive content. That’s not my concern per se. What does give pause is a whole new generation of content that is not linkable, commentable or recordable. The iPad is a closed box, and for that reason, the rich discourse (and ugly trolling) goes away. But along with that goes the chaotic mashed-up marketplace that has spawned a creative content community.

For that reason, I hope the iPad will be good like a spork is good on a camping trip –something that will do the trick in adverse conditions, but not something you’d want for your main dining experience. Because that lean-back experience takes away the culture of the read-write web, and that would be a step backwards.

Update: my friend Cory Doctorow has an even stronger warning when it comes to the iPad: “Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)“.

Saturday was the day that thousands of users obsessively checking UPS.com for their package status  finally got their gleaming white box of iPad goodness.

Specs

With an entry price of $499, Wifi networking, a fast custom A4 processor made by Apple, and 16 Gbytes of storage, the iPad promises to be a compelling media consumption device. I say consumption, because it doesn’t come with a camera at this time nor does it come with any removable storage for expansion.

So does the iPad meet the hype? In the first 12 hours of use, I’d say yes it does. And it has great implications for traditional print publishers.

First the very basic physical aspects: it’s a 9.7″ 1024×768 pixel screen, or about the same screen size as a respectable laptop of a few years ago. The difference is, this is thin, portable and held vertically. It’s a classic lean-back instead of lean-forward experience. With no physical keyboard, you naturally hold it in portrait mode, about a foot from your face. That gives the pixels much higher impact on the eyes as it fills your visual senses.

When it comes to operation, one cannot underestimate the value of the intuitive direct manipulation interface — scroll by swiping, zoom by pinching, enable by tapping. There really is no manual for this thing, because you can learn everything you need to know in about a minute of experimentation.

Apple boasts the device can go 10 hours on a full charge. Most  testers have found Apple was modest, and have exceeded that in real world tasks. One caveat: because the battery is so capacious, one really does need to use the included 10 watt adapter to charge the iPad in a reasonable amount of time. Plugging the tablet device into a computer’s USB port will charge it much less slowly, taking up to four times as long and not being able to charge overnight.

The screen is plenty bright in daylight, as that’s something Apple perfected some years ago. However, since we’re used to screens that stand almost vertical, putting this down on a table, even at an angle, will bring up lots of glare, especially outdoors. The keyboard is usable, but not for touch typing. For brief bursts it’s fine, and more pleasant than using the miniscule iPhone or iPod touch virtual keyboards.

Content

In some ways the iPad is a retro concept. With a fixed well-known screen size for content developers, and apps that need to be installed before one can experience rich content, the iPad model is reminiscent of the golden era of CD-ROMs. That was a time where every pixel on the screen could be manipulated, and any mode of interaction was possible with rapid-fire crisp response because everything was local to the computer. This resulted in great tools and content, including Voyager CD-ROM books, Apple’s Hypercard and multimedia encyclopedic content from Encarta and Britannica. Strangely enough, iPad may bring us back to recapture that cutting-edge 1995-era multimedia technology, which kind of got lost in the shuffle of “the net.”

Contrast that with web pages viewed on a general purpose computer, which has been the focus of “interactive content” since 1995. While basing the dot-com revolution around Web browsers and Internet-hosted content certainly allowed for great advances in connected applications and collaboration, it was lacking for rich media experiences. Macromedia (now a part of Adobe) pushed the envelope by giving us Flash, but even then most sites amble along awkwardly with a mishmash of dynamic HTML, and give us a but a small window of interactive Flash.

The situation changes quite a bit with iPad.

Right now, the two choices for content creators is to go the “app-ian way” or to innovate with web content. Remember: the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch don’t support Adobe Flash.

Apple doesn’t mind closed solutions but only if *it* is the purveryor of the proprietary product. Therefore, Apple didn’t want to give entire swaths of its prized iPad real estate to another company. The other solution that has developed is the HTML5 spec, which has been trumpeted as the way to replicate Flash’s video and advanced multimedia capabilities in a standard way, and is supported by the Apple’s Safari browser.

The apps released so far for iPad have been impressive, which has invigorated the art of visual news design, now that designers (unshackled from HTML and CSS) have the entire screen the play with. The content from NPR, Match (France), Yahoo! Entertainment and even the usually bland Associated Press all show promise that go far beyond what you see from their respective web sites.

In the coming months, look for news outlets to experiment heavily with both approaches.

So far the range of iPad apps exhibits a curious mix of charging for the app, charging for the content, or making money from advertising.

Consider what we have right now on launch day, you can find an array of models from various news organizations including:

• Pay for app, pay for issues (Time)
• Pay for app, free content (CNN, ESPN ScoreCenter XL)
• Free app, pay for content (Wall Street Journal)
• Free app, selected free content, ads (NY Times, subscription forthcoming)
• Free app, free content, ad support (IMDB, Yahoo Entertainment)
• Free app, free content (NPR, BBC)

Tablet style computers have been around for years now. So what makes Apple’s move interesting? The allure for publishers is that Apple has tackled the problem no one in media has been able to solve — micropayments. Apple’s iTunes Store system has suddenly made even $0.99 transactions possible and profitable, since people are already signed up, credit card in hand, and comfortable with pulling the trigger to pay for ephemeral content. That’s a major cultural shift traditional media organizations are eager to join.

Today’s Wall Street Journal Speakeasy blog has a piece about Ron Livingston’s lawyers filing a lawsuit against an anonymous Internet user, in an attempt to identify who’s been editing his Wikipedia article to add rumors that he’s gay. The best legal description I’ve found is at the Copyrights & Campaigns blog:

The complaint includes claims for libel, false light, and violations of Livingston’s statutory and common-law right of publicity, and seeks actual and punitive damages. Presumably Livingston will seek discovery (IP and email addresses and other identifying information) from Wikipedia and Facebook, which they hope will identify the poster. Livingston can then name the individual in the complaint, and proceed against him. Section 230 won’t protect the individual; it only shields the service (i.e., Wikipedia or Facebook) that hosted the material.

The suit is here, as Coupleguys, Inc. vs. John Doe.

In being interviewed by the reporter of the piece, I explained the Streisand effect to him. He mentioned this phenomenon of Livingston trying to combat edits that he’s gay but perhaps bringing more attention to this rumor in the process. The sticky situation about Livingston’s lawsuit (at least according to LGBT groups) is whether calling someone gay is actually “maliciously altering” his article.

My comments about the case pertained instead to the sticky issue of people notable enough to be in Wikiepdia, but not enough to have legions of watchdogs.

According to Andrew Lih, author of “The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia” (Hyperion), inaccuracy or vandalism problems are difficult to stop for people who are “notable but not extremely famous,” a category Livingston, best known for his roles in “Office Space”and “Sex and the City,” falls into. Lih, a registered Wikipedia editor and one of 1,000 administrators who oversee the site [his wife is also a reporter for the Journal], said Madonna’s Wikipedia page may have dozens of people watching out for abuse, whereas someone like Livingston rarely receives that kind of attention.

This is roughly the same dynamic that led to the Seigenthaler case, where a fairly notable journalist didn’t have throngs of passionate folks looking out for his article.

And perhaps that’s my worry about a smaller user community than was here in 2007. As the number of articles increase, are there enough watchdogs to keep article quality high, or are other technical measures (flagged revisions, semi-protection, et al.) needed for maintaining quality?

Erik Zachte and Erik Moeller of the WMF blogged recently that contrary to other studies, the core “active editors” has remained stable of late.

On the English Wikipedia, the peak number of active editors (5 edits per month) was 54,510 in March 2007. After a more significant decline by about 25%, it has been stable over the last year at a level of approximately 40,000

Is it enough for that community to have the same numbers, year on year, when that same period saw a growth of over 500,000 articles?

I cannot say that I know, but it is something that gives me pause.

This week on NBC LA TechRaw I review the Panasonic LUMIX DMC-ZS3 which has the trifecta of what I’m looking for a compact point and shoot:

• Wide angle and long zoom lens (25mm to 300mm in film terms)
• 720p high definition video, optical zooming works while recording (!)
• Beautiful optical quality (Leica lens)

It finally is a decent all-in-one package for journalists in terms of visual quality. The only missing element is an external microphone jack for great audio interviews. It lists for $349, and can easily find it for less than $300 at online retailers.

View more news videos at: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/video.

On August 1, my wife Mei and I boarded a plane in Beijing. We shook the dust off our shoes (literally), took the last bites of some of the best cuisine in the world, and made the big move back to the United States.

Our new home: Venice, California, and a nice modern bungalow near the beach where the sun shines bright and the sea air welcomes you each morning with a cool relaxing breeze. I’ll be taking up a new post as associate professor and director of new media the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Journalism.

I’ve always said I like to go where “interesting problems” are. For the last six years in Asia, I got to observe the growth and impact of the Internet in the region, especially while living in China. I also had the chance to write a book, the book, about Wikipedia while traveling the world to meet enthusiastic volunteers contributing their slice of human knowledge for free. It’s been a great ride.

As a journalist and educator, right now, there is no more compelling place to be than the US where the news industry is facing an incredibly tough challenge as it looks for ways to survive an era of digital economics with Craigslist, hyperlocal content, and rapidly changing subscriber and revenue models. It will require smart analysis, enthusiastic practitioners and a unique new role for the academy to help determine how the news industry remains solvent and relevant in the 21st century. I’m thrilled to be with USC to help figure out that future. It’s a city I never imagined I’d live in, but have been impressed and excited at every turn.

It’s July 1, and in China the ominous deadline to implement the Green Dam/Youth Escort internet filtering software has been postponed, to much rejoicing by Internet users in the country.

To outsiders, this must seem quite puzzling. Why would China’s “totalitarian” system need to back down on this?

This should be seen as a case study on how the complexities of China’s decision system is much more nuanced than what a “Communist” regime would suggest, and the role of citizen deliberation in a new, upwardly mobile, aspirational, IT-savvy China.

While the outside world sees the PRC government in absolute control, in reality the heavy handed, top down authoritarian system rides on a delicate balance of, bottom up public consent that supports the state’s legitimacy.

Here’s why Green Dam illustrates this quite well.

China’s Internet filtering is by far the most advanced in the world in terms of precision and scale. But until now, it happened in the “cloud,” in far off intangible spaces through two main vehicles:

• One is through massive domestic Web site content regulation through revokable Internet Content Provider licenses (ICP). Operators have to self-censor through technical or human means to please the authorities regarding general guidelines on taboo topics. Keywords are banned and discussion topics are forbidden. In some cases, explicit timely edicts are required, such as for significant June anniversaries, sensitive political meetings (People’s Congress) or poor construction standards in Sichuan earthquake zones. Even with these, China’s netizens have come up with clever tricks and puns to get around many of these automated filtering systems.

• The other is the Great Firewall, the blocking of what foreign Web sites China users can surf. The implementation is clever, in that restrictions show up as technical errors (connection reset, site not found/unreachable) and curb behavior through uncertainty and doubt about a site’s reach-ability, rather than fear. You don’t know whether it’s the Internet acting flaky, or whether a site is actually being filtered. Tech-savvy users can trivially circumvent this.

But you don’t need perfect censorship to have effective censorship. Both these systems do quite well for the PRC government in keeping the 3T1F topics outside the mainstream, and ensuring that the government is not embarrassed by reporting on its incompetence.

The key, here is that both the domestic and international filtering activities happened in the cloud, the ether, the machines that comprise the Internet. It wasn’t in your home and it didn’t intrude beyond the cable to your desk.

Green Dam suddenly put the specter of restriction, surveillance and control in your home.

With that one stroke, which probably seemed like the next logical innocuous extension of the censorship regime for PRC bureaucrats, the government took the big miscalculation of crossing into the the private space, and the personal property of China’s citizens. And that’s where the outrage came.

This was the camel’s nose into the private tent of Internet users. A poll on China’s major sites (Sina, Netease, et al) all showed over 3/4 of respondents said Green Dam was not necessary or a bad idea.

(NB: China is not the first or the only government wanting to censor Internet traffic for content. Australia’s Clean Feed proposal to covertly filter out sites at the ISP level has been under fire from their netizens, and was unceremoniously put on hiatus as well. Most public schools and libraries in the United States implement content filtering at some level. This is not a uniquely China issue.)

What the authorities in China didn’t realize was how serious that breach of boundary would be.

I knew it was going to be a tough road for Green Dam when it appeared the MIIT initiative was not a unified effort. Before leaving for my travels, I did commentaries with the Associated Press, Deutsche Welle, Al Jazeera and others, making the point that even China’s official news outlets were openly questioning Green Dam’s legitimacy. The new Global Times newspaper, which has been rather frank about other issues, led off with serious questions about the software’s safety.

Then came the big one.

China Daily, the official mouthpiece of the government, was publishing criticisms of Green Dam shortly after it was announced, even publishing Photoshop’ed illustrations of netizens mocking the system. (”Outrage over bid to tame Web“, China Daily, June 18, 2009)

One picture it included with the article was a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” multiple choice question describing Green Dam as “spyware” with “systemic flaws” that could be “exploited by hackers.” Another cartoon shows a gray hand of censorship coming from the computer screen and stiff-arming a computer user in the face.

It was clear at this point, the Green Dam initiative was from a smaller portion of the PRC bureaucracy, and not from the highest levels. China Daily would have never published something so critical if it was of the highest-level of agenda pushing.

China’s netizens were speaking, and the media and government were taking notice (and with higher ups looking the other way). So while this was not democracy in action, it certainly was something in action.

At TEDxShanghai last month, I described the phenomenon of Wikipedia and Twitter forming the basis of a new online commons where global netizens come to share and reinforce memes across geographic and social boundaries (SlideShare presentation). For years, enthusiastic faith-based technology enthusiasts hoped the Internet would bring democracy to any place it touched. This has been spectacularly elusive. On the flipside, some viewed the new Web 2.0 social revolution as “socialist”, “collectivist” and at worst, Maoist. That’s been inaccurate as well.

Instead, I describe the new borderless, socially agile, activist associations that crop up on the Internet as a new system of ‘deliberative adhocracy’. Alvin Toffler, and later Cory Doctorow, used adhocracy to describe a new form of rule based ephemeral associations that “capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results.” (Waterman)

Whether it’s as massive as #IranElection to bring global awareness to its politics, or as small as #MotrinMoms to discuss outrage at an insulting advertisement, we now have an online information commons (Twitter) and knowledge commons (Wikipedia) that supports a space for the new distributed Zeitgeist. In China, obviously there are other analogs (Twitter clone Fanfou, Baidu Baike, BBS forums, et al.) but the effect is the same. To see deliberative adhocracy in action look no further than the Human Flesh Search Engine that metes out social justice in the absence of a strong rule of law in China.

Readers familiar with my book will know I described how a Wikipedia Revolution changed forever how we deal with free access to knowledge and its production. I will however, be quite Burke-ian in my pronouncement about the Internet’s effect on China.

Revolutions are sudden overthrows and disruptive repudiations of the status quo. China has a terrible modern history with revolutions, with more of them going bad than good. The rule law is sometimes described as when “reason trumps politics.” To China’s authorities, the Internet is being used in a deliberative process that fulfills that role. It is not perfect, nor prevalent enough to ensure social justice on a large scale. However, it is a huge step forward for a country that is convinced that after a century of turmoil, that any step must take safety and efficiency into account.

The hiatus for Green Dam, is the standard face-saving way for the government to back down. There is a good possibility it may come back in another form, watered down or otherwise. But for now, China’s netizens are having their day.

“Scientists have more faith in Wikipedia than national print media”

That’s one of the takeaways from a recent poll of nearly 1000 toxicologists when they were asked  how various media outlets cover their specialty: the representation to the public of chemical risks. (The poll was conducted by STATS, The Center for Health and Risk Communication at George Mason University, and the Society of Toxicology)

Given the common lament that Wikipedia shuns “experts,” and information is produced by people “off the street,” the results are intriguing when you look at the numbers for other professional and “mainstream” media outlets. From the report synopsis:

WebMD and Wikipedia were seen as significantly more accurate in the way they presented chemical risk than any other media source.

·         56% say WebMD accurately portrays chemical risks

·         45% say Wikipedia accurately portrays chemical risks

·         By contrast, no more than 15% say that leading national newspapers, news magazines, and television networks accurately portray chemical risks.

·         Over 80% say that leading national newspapers, news magazines, and television networks overstate chemical risks

[...]

…only 15 percent described similar coverage in the national print media (i.e., the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal) as accurate. This figure dropped to 6 percent for USA Today and 5 percent for broadcast network news.

At a press conference at the National Press Club to release the preliminary results of the study, Dr. S. Robert Lichter, who conducted the survey described the Wikipedia finding as an indictment of the mainstream media – ” it’s disturbing that someone off the street seemingly can do a better job than the media.”

I’d take issue with the fact that Wikipedia is simply the product of random person “off the street,” but it is a real shift in what we consider authority and how reliable information can be produced.

Even the best performer, WebMD, gained the approval of only about half the toxicologists who were surveyed which should be a bit surprising in itself. My (full disclosure: unpaid, uncompensated) commentary as it appeared in the report:

“This reminds me of the Nature study [link] that was done in December 2005 where it found that on average, Britannica had 3 errors per article, and Wikipedia had 4 errors,” Lih says by email. “It was surprising because Wikipedia did much better than expected, given its foreign work process and Britannica did much worse. People had presumed a certain level of accuracy from Britannica’s reputation, and it was knocked down from that pedestal. To me the WebMD and Wikipedia results here are similar – they’re much closer than what one would expect. Wikipedia doing better, WebMD doing worse.”

But perhaps the most interesting part was not WebMD, but that the daily professional print media came up so short in the eyes of these experts. It seems to reinforce the old adage: “Journalists do a pretty good job of covering things, except for subjects in which you’re knowledgeable.”

The commentary for Columbia Journalism Review contributor Alissa Quart was insightful about why the MSM approach (reporting science as a storyteller for the masses) is perhaps systemically flawed:

“Journalists fall into storylines, because that’s how we write. There are three narratives, that we use, which can make us great but also get us into trouble – one narrative to please our editors, one to please our readers, and one which leans toward our sources, because we identify with them. WebMD and Wikipedia contributors are disconnected from most of those narratives – maybe they are trying to please certain readers, but they aren’t ‘the reader.’ Their model of knowledge doesn’t ask for stories, or sentiment or people.

This is a really good observation that meshed well with my views about the role of public relations and the dangerous media narrative driving scientific reporting. Quart and I arrived at the same conclusion.

In short, argument trumps aesthetics. Lih, an engineer by education, concurs. The clash of narratives “also says something about motivation, in that the mainstream press will be driven by reports, PR bring shoved at them, and also the market and the desire by editors (in a top-down manner) to demand reporters find a story in the latest research, even if in the greater context of the field, it doesn’t warrant so much attention. In that sense, Wikipedia’s motivations are different, in that the ‘crowd’ helps moderate and even dampen the type of ‘recentism’ that is so pervasive in news coverage.”

The overall summary can be found at the Stats.org site, or you can view the full PDF.