The Buzz Machine is posting live from a conference on blogging at Harvard. I've left the typos in and excerpted a few lines. One eye ca...
The Buzz
Machine is posting live from a conference on blogging at Harvard. I've left
the typos in and excerpted a few lines. One eye catching exchange goes as
follows:
: Jimbo Wales, founder of Wikipedia, says that a few years ago, nobody
could have predicted that a bunch of unpaid citizens could replace the
Encyclopedia Brittanica with its budget of $350 million but it happened. He
said that the business model of The New York Times is not sustainable.
Abramson shudders, of course. Kaplan said Wales doesn't know what he's talking
about; he has not been in a place like Baghdad and does not know the
dififculty of getting information there and does not know how the existing
system can be replaced.
:Hinderaker goes back to Bill Mitchell's question from his presentation, in
which he asked what tool we need to help build trust. Hinderaker says it would
help to show us the material behind the story. The attitude bloggers have is
-- via the link: "See for yourself. Don't take our word for it."
Then somewhat later.
: Jill Abramson, an editor at the NY Times, and Dave Winer, get
kerfluffling together and I can't summarize it well. But I entered in when she
went on about the expense of keeping journalists in Iraq -- which is true and
for which we are grateful. But I started telling the story of Zeyad taking
his camera to cover an antiterrorism demonstration last December that The
Times didn't cover. As soon as I mention it, Abramson starts shaking her
head and looking away.
: Abramson said that it is "completely contrary" to the
histyry and standards of The Times to run content that they do not vet.
I would have given anything to have asked whether Abramson of the Times
preferred an unidentified AP stringer taking pictures of Iraqi election workers
being executed on Haifa
Street over Zeyad, and why. But that would have been churlish, and I must
admit, intellectually shallow. The really interesting question was posed by
Jimbo Wales. The engine that enabled Wikipedia
to overtake Brittanica at the encyclopedia game was self-evidently a powerful
one; a phenomenon, which I am tempted to surmise may structurally resemble
asymmetrical warfare. Abramson shuddered and well she should. But at what? What
was out there in the dark about which these conference participants are talking?
It is a something that has already swallowed Brittanica. No one is quite sure
what it is, but everyone should be quite certain that it will strike again.
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