The Long Tail - Wired Blogs Jon Lund, the head of the Danish Internet Advertising Bureau, and I had dinner in Norway last week and he told me the chilling story of the crazy free newspaper war in Denmark that almost killed everyone involved. I thought it was an important cautionary tale of Free gone wrong, and I encouraged him to write it up on his blog. He did, and it is indeed grim reading. I’ve excerpted (and lightly edited) the basic story below, but it’s worth going straight to the source to get Jon’s analysis, along with a lot of links to other reports on this disaster. Short form: the attempt by a half-dozen newspaper publishers to “out-free” a free Icelandic paper that entered the market (backed by Morten Lund, who made a fortune as an early investor in Skype) ended up costing the collective newspaper industry in Denmark more than $150 million dollars and the bankruptcy of three newspapers. Morten Lund has also been chronicling this disaster, confessional style, on his blog (see here and here).
Ideal Government The New York Times - Times Reader 2.0 Programming a direct-democracy Reinventing Gonzo Journalism in a digital age Part 1 - Rock the Drawing by the great Thomas Hawke Hunter S Thompson is a hero of many. The writer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the most honest book about the Hell’s Angels appeals to thousands of young journalists. He invented Gonzo Journalism. Gonzo Journalism took things a little further. So Thompson died in 2005. What’s there to write about? To get an idea how we can reinvent Gonzo Journalism we should come up with some ideas for stories first. Want to experiment with Gonzo Journalism (coined by Hunter S Thompson) and thinking about spectacular subject. Some stories that need Gonzo style reporting Olaf Koens, a Dutch correspondent in Moscow suggested to send a reporter to war-zone, since that’s one of the subjects where Hunter S Thompson had flaws. Antonie Fountain from the band Little Things That Kill suggested to investigate trafficking and forced prostitution on the Red Light District. Twitter user Gumbah said we’ve to investigate coffeeshop suppliers by posting outside their doors.
Open-source governance Open-source governance is a political philosophy which advocates the application of the philosophies of the open source and open content movements to democratic principles in order to enable any interested citizen to add to the creation of policy, as with a wiki document. Legislation is democratically opened to the general citizenry, employing their collective wisdom to benefit the decision-making process and improve democracy.[1] Theories on how to constrain, limit or enable this participation vary however as much as any other political philosophy or ideology. Accordingly there is no one dominant theory of how to go about authoring legislation with this approach. There are a wide array of projects and movements which are working on building open-source governance systems.[2] Applications of the principles[edit] In practice, several applications have evolved and been used by actual democratic institutions in the developed world:[3] Common and simultaneous policy[edit] History[edit]
OffiSync integrates Google Docs with Microsoft Office VentureBe A tiny Seattle startup has done what two giant companies haven’t done: get Google Docs to work well with Microsoft’s Office software. OffiSync, a self-funded startup run by entrepreneur Oudi Antebi, has created an Office add-on that integrates Google Docs, Google Apps and Google search into Microsoft office. When you open up Microsoft Word, for instance, you can see the Google functions on the menu, as if they were a Google toolbar. The software will be available as a beta download today. Microsoft is slowly moving in this direction. It has promised to integrate software and services into the Office suite by 2010 to give the desktop software more features that make it seem like a cloud-based solution. “We are Googleizing Microsoft Office,” he said in an interview. OffiSync works with Microsoft Office 2003 or Office 2007, and it will be available for the Mac in the future.
Libre Culture: Meditations on Free Culture : David M. Berry and Giles Moss The Internet is Killing America's Free Press and Why It Mat By popular demand, here is the complete version of my little weekend magnum opus on the future of the American press with all four of the related posts in one place.  If you read it in parts, I made a few minor revisions and corrected some misspelled words.  Thanks for reading and caring. There is a wonderful scene in State of Play, Kevin McDonald's flawed, but thought-provoking, political thriller, when Cal McAffrey, the grizzled, oddly uncynical investigative reporter played skillfully by Russell Crowe, explains to the young gossip blogger from his newspaper's online group why he spends so much time checking and re-checking leads, working his sources, and making sure he has all the verifiable and double-sourced facts available before he lets go of a story: "I still think they (readers) know the difference between real news and bullshit," he says. For the sake of our democracy, I pray that he is right. But, content is not necessarily news. Why Journalism Matters
SILK: Social Innovation Lab Kent SILK is a small team based within Kent County Council that was set up in 2007 to ‘do policy differently’. Over the past 4 years we have been doing projects which have demonstrated the benefits of working in a different way and have developed a Methodology and Toolkit which provide a structure for the way we work. We believe that the best solutions come from the people who are closest to the issue; this could be service users, residents or frontline staff. We go much further than community consultation and we believe that people should be actively involved in the design of services that they are going to use or deliver. The SILK Methodology provides creative and innovative ways to engage with people and approach projects, and enables a collective ownership and responsibility for project design, delivery and outcomes. We're really pleased that SILK has been featured in Parsons Innovation Constellation. If you have any questions about our Methodology or Toolkit please get in touch.
NightTline: Twitter and ABC Launch a Tweetable News Show Twitter has rapidly become an invaluable tool for news outlets: news anchors are using Twitter constantly to ask questions and gather feedback from their audience, while CNN's Breaking News account is the #2 most followed user on Twitter. But what ABC and Twitter are about to do tops our list for the boldest use of Twitter within traditional media. So what's ABC conjouring up? Well, its popular Nightline news program and anchors are going to host a weekly online news program that uses Twitter for debate and questions. According to ABC, the show will take on Nightline's Face-Off model, which pits two opposing sides on an issue that an ABCNEWS anchor provides and moderates. Twitter will be integral to the entire show. The show will air digitally on the Nightline website as well as ABC News Now, ABC's digital distribution network.
Government of, by, and for all the people