Björn Jeffery

I’ve been meeting with a lot of journalists lately, discussing the new role of journalism and media. My presentation at Hej!2007 and Reboot9 takes up the issue, but I thought I’d lift out one statement which really says it all:

Journalists need to go from being gatekeepers to being curators.

Old Media have been holding people and their stories out for ages. When I worked at Sydsvenskan, we had a person that only worked with keeping in contact with the readers. Sounds like a good idea. But often enough, the job was to keep people away from the journalists in question. Sometimes getting leads, but then following them themselves. A classic gatekeeper.

Let’s look at the opposite. Imagine an art curator running a gallery for instance. You don’t go to the gallery because you necessarily know the artist exhibiting, but you trust the curator enough to go anyway. You respect his/her taste and choices enough to check it out.

Today, what old media has is a brand which is (hopefully) filled with trust and credibility. This compared to your average blog at least. I think they need to leverage that trust and start becoming the hub about what’s going on in the world, rather than having to report about it themselves. If the newspaper says that a certain blog has a good post on the issue, people will click to read it. They could find themselves, but only with great difficulty and without guarantees of finding anything worth while.

A new type of journalism is evolving. Picking out the best stories, pictures, videos and anything else being produced – and then editing it together into a new piece. Adding context, background and analysis. If they start having that approach, I think old media is going to thrive in this information filled society.

tags technorati : media newspapers gatekeeper curator

tags bloggar.se: media, tidningar, gatekeeper, kurator

At Reboot9. Loving it. Don’t want to blog too much in order to focus on the presentations. Olof is doing a good job of it though, head over there instead.

I had my presentation yesterday. The Box Room was extremely hot and noisy, but it went okay I think. The topic was Old Media vs New Media: news narcissism and the end of having anything in common. If you missed it the slides are here below:

tags technorati : reboot9 conferences presentation media

tags bloggar.se: reboot9, konferenser, presentation, media

After a great day in Stockholm yesterday I’m off to Copenhagen and Reboot. I suggested a presentation but instantly got some negative feedback regarding choice of topic (the same one I had at Hej!2007). I guess if there’s any conference where it would be okay to be called out as “so last season” I guess it would this one 😉 Either way it looks like I’m holding it anyway, so please feel free to drop by and join the conversation.

The whole Good Old gang are going actually – all nine of us. Could be really good! Last year’s meet up was one of the highlights of the year.

tags technorati : reboot9 conferences copenhagen

tags bloggar.se: reboot9, konferenser, köpenhamn

I had a presentation at Lunds University about the whole web 2.0-movement this morning. I promised to upload it here, but the formatting through Slideshare will make it 235 slides long… Not exactly ideal for the web. But if you want it – just drop me a line and I’ll send over a PDF-version straight away. That goes for anyone that might be interested of course!

Okay, I’m back on track again. Jetlagged still, but I think it’ll be okay. I’ll try to write down a few thoughts when I’ve landed properly. Just a short note to say that I will be having a presentation at Lunds University at 9 am tomorrow, if anyone happens to be around. The official invite is right here (PDF).

Oh yeah, our more corporate blog Good Old Office is up and running for real this time.

Douglas Engelbart is a legend, and one that laid the foundation for his genius in the most impressive way I’ve heard in a long time. Perhaps ever, actually. At the age of 25, he took a few months to try to straighten out what he should be doing the rest of his life. What he realised was that if people don’t get better at collectively using their resources in order to get forward – the world would ultimately crash. So he put together his lifetime goal from this insight, and phrased it like this:

As much as possible, to boost mankinds collective capability for coping with complex, urgent, problems.

This then became the driving force behind his work, and life, for 55 years and counting. _Wow.

Engelbart spoke calmly and with a very humble approach. Today, many of the ideas presented are obvious and integrated in society and systems. Therefore a simple analysis would have been “heard it all before“. But this is where it started. From the beginning. I found it a bit difficult to keep that perspective in mind.

He stated that solving any truly large-scale problem requires collective capability. And in order to do this, one must develop an adequate comprehensive understanding of the following:

The problem situation
The possible solutions
The resources required
The resources available

Engelbart called the way of approaching this the Collective IQ. He also added that the augmentation model was valid over a very large scale, following this logic:

Individual human – Operative IQ
Community of Practise – Collective IQ
A Complete Company – Collective IQ
The World – Collective IQ

At times, the presentation was very abstract and hard to follow. Or at least to summarise in an easy way. Someone more skilled would definitely done it better. Check Technorati to see what others are writing.

tags technorati : injo4 innovationjournalism douglasengelbart

tags bloggar.se: injo4, innovation journalism, douglas engelbart

Okay, I set up a Onelinr backchannel for INJO4. Let’s see if I can get people to use it.

tags technorati : injo4 innovationjournalism backchannel onelinr

tags bloggar.se: injo4, innovation journalism, onelinr, backchannel

I’ll be a bit slower on the blogging today, the focus of the programme is slightly different. I might cover one or two things later on.

Until then, this chartlet is interesting:

Posts that contain Jaiku per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

tags technorati : injo4 innovationjournalism jaiku

tags bloggar.se: injo4, innovation journalism, jaiku

Here’s my presentation in Slideshare format:

Update: Thanks to Nate Anthony for getting a few terms more correct in the presentation. And also, check out Seth Familians presentation on the same topic linked as a PDF here.

tags technorati : injo4 innovationjournalism presentation goodold bjornjeffery

tags bloggar.se: injo4, innovationjournalism, presentation, goodold, björn jeffery

Technorati: An introduction for Journalists and Publishers

Dave Sifry started out asking the audience how many were working journalists or publishers, and also how many that already used the service. Only 20% were using it, some what surprising I thought.

Sifry emphasised that the media landscape is changing, and also the increasingly difficult differentiation between advertising and non-advertising in content. Not only was the media changing, but also the places where one can get the media from. Examples like YouTube, MySpace were mentioned. This part was hardly news for anyone reading this blog, but fair enough – a good introduction for the crowd.

He described what he hoped to become a shift in journalist attitude that was “this is what happened today” to “this is a very small part of what we could manage to find in this enormous news flow that happened today”. Something to that effect at least.

Sifry encouraged journalists to get involved in the conversation through tracking what is being spoken about right now. Technorati can today show content that was posted just under 60 seconds ago, making it ideal to pick up instant reactions regarding current events.

Under the topic “Using Technorati in journalism”, Sifry outlined three major points:

Search: Get the real-time conversation
A way to discover not only what people are talking about, but also as a way to find sources to more information. Finding the people behind the blogs so that you can contact them for further research.

Discovery features: Gauge the Zeitgeist
Technorati look at what 75 million people are talking about and track the most active conversations. This can be used to find new ideas for stories.

Authority: Understand your sources
“Every single person has a reputation”, Sifry said. Technorati can be used as a good way of checking what is being said about people. And it’s also a good way to find out more about people doing rants and raves – being able to understand their context and background.

Sifry continued with a Sun Microsystems case study. Sun regularly listens to the conversation about their products, and they provide a link to a Technorati search from each product page (see an example here).

Sifry finished with an interesting answer to a question about how Technorati themselves innovate. He said “don’t build the right system first” meaning that most projects fail anyway, and that one should focus on getting systems out there fast and then listen to the responses and change them accordingly. They try to work with new feature development within two week cycles. Two out three projects on average fails, but according to Sifry this was a good thing. Provided that you revalue what is a success, and what isn’t.

tags technorati : injo4 technorati davesifry innovation

tags bloggar.se: injo4, technorati, dave sifry, innovation