Rebooting the News #82

Today on Rebooting the News #82 we discussed:

Jay quit Quora over the weekend. One more corporate blogging silo (a phrase that’s getting traction) was a bridge too far.

Dave at Scripting.com: “We’ll do much better if there are a million personal blogging silos instead of one or two huge corporate blogging silos. The corporate ones are too easy for governments to control without the people knowing they’re being controlled. In the case of Twitter, the freedom-loving founders will eventually leave, and the new management will likely care more about return on investment than All The News That’s Fit To Tweet. And Facebook has never been about freedom. They desperately want to get into China, as does Google (again) and that’s going to involve compromise, at least on behalf of the Chinese populace. What they learn about control can and probably already is being applied around the world, including the US.”

Dave’s post: Find me stuff I’m interested in. Where the personalization of news hasn’t gone yet.

“It’s important that people learn to manage their own infrastructure. It’s going to happen, we can do it. We can make servers much easier to set up and maintain, and do more stuff that’s meaningful to people like the people in Egypt fighting for freedom. By spreading out we’re harder to stop.”

Jay’s post, The “Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators” Article: a genre analysis. “What’s the appeal? … here’s a guess: almost everyone who cares about such a discussion is excited about the Internet. Almost everyone is a little wary of being fooled by The Amazing and getting carried away. When we nod along with Twitter Can’t Topple Dictators we’re assuring ourselves that our excitement is contained, that we’re being realistic, mature, grown-up about it.”

“Some day an historian is going to write a fine book on how American journalism came to see calling out lies as taking sides.” Link.

Here’s the show; hope you like it.

http://mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com/reboot11Feb14.mp3