Media Clouds
It’s time. In my last post I mentioned Danny’s discovery of Wordle, and after playing around with it for a few minutes I started wondering what would happen if you fed a whole news site at it. Would it be possible to quantify how much attention a story gets? Better yet, would it be possible to quantify the language used by different media sites if they all ran similar stories and you could compare the coverage? What type of stories does a news site prefer over its competitor?
Wordle may not be able to answer these questions, but perhaps it will provide a starting point. Wordle’s function is to absorb whatever text you throw at it, determine what words appear the most, and then create something that is at once pleasing to the eye, and full of useful information. Words that get repeated are made proportionally bigger, and since we’re visual creatures, the results may speak louder than a simple word count.
Of course, the news doesn’t stand still, so it trying to find answers from only a single day of stories would be inaccurate. Using five days worth of material would be better, and though it would probably be better still to take a whole year worth of samples (slightly difficult with the constant 24-hour news cycle), five days seemed like a sane way to start before committing to a schedule of daily copy-and-pastes. The following are tag clouds generated from five days worth of news site front pages, July 13th, 14th, 16th, 21st, and 23rd. Read on to kill your dial-up modem…
Litmus Test
The other night Danny and I were talking about tag clouds and a possible experiment that could be done using something called Wordle (see this post for more info about Wordle). The experiments requires that the news cycle be on “autopilot,” i.e., a general representation of what’s going on in the world over a long stretch of time. The recent swath of high-profile celebrity deaths has thrown a kink into the works (to put it lightly), so hopefully I’ll be able to put up some results in a week or two.
In completely other news, I’ve located another excellent source of OpenGL ES tutorials, this time from Simon Maurice. Jeff Lamarche, whose tutorials I posted a few weeks ago, has also added some new content and updated his project template to work with the new iPhone OS. Good stuff.
Renovations
Found out that apparently wp-config.php is stored in a publicly-accessible directory for most users. This is important because wp-config.php contains, by default, the name of the SQL database that WordPress uses, and the associated username and password (but, to be fair, not your admin username and password). Now, more experienced webheads who implicitly understand these things would have the option of installing the entire WordPress directory somewhere safer (for example, anywhere other than ~/public_html/) before configuring it, but I’m not too keen on moving around a billion files this late in the game. What to do?
Google as usual produces a good answer. The entire WordPress directory doesn’t have to be moved, since it’s really only the wp-config.php file that is of major concern. All that’s needed is to strip out the database/login information and paste it into a new php file outside of ~/public_html/, and then finish by dropping an include(); into wp-config.php to link them up. This way, wp-config.php is still able to view the information it needs while keeping said information out of public view. Hacker-proof? Probably not, but it’s at least a deterrent against bots and scripted attacks.
If you’re paranoid, it goes without saying that you should probably rename your SQL database and the associated login information after moving things around, or else Google’s cache (or someone else’s) might be able to dig up the information anyway.
Anyhow, I wouldn’t be surprised if the page is acting pear-shaped for a few days. Drop me a line if so.
Here to Stay: Our Brave New World (Part 1)
Gigi has found a fascinating book (as is her habit), The Cult of the Amateur, a book whose arguments boil down to the following: the internet is destroying our culture. Despite that I’m one of the first to shake my head and exclaim, “Oh, internet!” every time something ridiculous happens online, I strongly disagree with Andrew Keen and his silly book. Yes, I’m passing judgement, but to be fair, he started it. I’m not starting where I should, so let’s turn the clock back to Composition 101 at York.
Westcott, the musicianship professor (and excellent ragtime pianist) was following his regular lesson when all of a sudden we realized he was on a tangent: music was dangerously in need of being democratized, he said. The superstar had existed for hundreds of years now thanks to modern roads, the printing press, airmail, and all other methods by which we shrunk our world. If you were Mozart, you were no longer simply famous in only your home town; now you were famous throughout the whole country, then several, and finally worldwide. Michael Jackson is another household name, and even anyone who hasn’t heard his music will recognize the name. The goal for musicians became to compete on the world stage and success was measured against the same. What about local talent? Completely overshadowed. Westcott was now very animated, and the message was clear: take back music from the few elite, put it back into the hands of everyone. Form a community orchestra, join a band, join a choir, perform locally and rise above the siren song of fame. Unfortunately, marketing yourself becomes problematic without the millions of dollars promised by The Industry. Enter the internet.
Arguably, Westcott’s goals have already been accomplished. Music, film, news, open source software and opinion now belong to anyone with an internet connection. To Keen, this is a terrifying notion, and it forms the basis of his book. For example, his claim that today’s generation can’t tell the difference between credible news by objective journalists and what they read on an uninformed blog lacking citations — like this one. In this respect I partially agree with Keen, but I find his implications off-base. Without critical thinking skills, it is difficult to tell the difference between objective journalists, ill-informed opinion, and outright lies. I find it a dangerous idea that we should trust only our “traditional” news media. Traditional media is susceptible to bias, misinformation, and propaganda, to different degrees than independent bloggers. Yes, traditional media has a dedicated staff who draw their salary from doing the job right, but that doesn’t make them bullet proof. Case in point: Keen presenting himself as an objective journalist.
Another target of Keen is Wikipedia. Believe it or not, we’re only on page four of the introduction. We, the reader, are told that none of Wikipedia’s nearly three million entries have ever been edited or vetted for accuracy, which is tantamount slander. Jimmy Wales actually tells us that Wikipedia has been compared favourably to Encarta by traditional magazines (but don’t believe him, I bet no one vetted that claim). Wales even goes on to point out Time Magazine misquoting him, so don’t tell me that Wikipedia is the only one ruining public understanding. Let’s move on though, because we’ve still got a lot to cover.
Ah, YouTube. Among the videos Keen cites is one which he describes as a young woman watching another YouTube user who is watching yet another user, all leading to a woman making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in front of the television. Read that back a second time. Is that art? Don’t agree? Welcome to all of recorded human history. The concept of art vs. mediocrity isn’t new. Going back to Westcott’s complaint against the superstar, mass media was an enabler to an elite few to become world famous, but world fame did not equate to art, talent, or creativity; just fame (though certainly talent and creativity help). Some people think John Cage is a hack. I think Top 40s radio is a cesspool. Now that we have the internet, there are much deeper depths to plumb, and even if you think most of it is coal, you have to start somewhere to find diamonds. It’s now possible to find alternatives to world-famous superstars, and those who never used to have a chance have now been given an audience.
We’re not done yet though, for Keen is about to play the “think of the children” card. Cited is the brutal war going on between Israel and Hezbollah, juxtaposed against digg’s tendency to publish more banal stories. Keen is now placing the responsibility of publishing the information he wants on sites that publish, well, other things. If you want to read about the latest Ext4 file system, you head to Ars Technica. If you want to watch Stephen Colbert act wilfully ignorant, you hit Comedy Central. If you want world news, you read one of the many respected online publications, many of which have risen from traditional dead tree methods of circulation. Digg is a news aggregator, not a news substitute. Keen’s point does not escape me though, which is that Digg indicates what is most popular among internet users, and his concern likely rises from the fact that banal stories are more popular than important ones. Actually, it’s my non-expert opinion that this was true before the internet, so let’s move on and wrap up.
One of Keen’s final assertions is that new media such as YouTube and MySpace are starving traditional media of their advertising revenue. This is one of the biggest told-you-sos of the internet: everyone knew there was money to be made on the internet, everyone. Instead of embracing change, the dinosaur that is old media resisted it. Newsprint knew that they were losing customers to internet media: their competitors could produce content inexpensively since there was no physical circulation. Sounds like cheating, doesn’t it? If you think old media should have borrowed this idea instead of fighting it, you just won the internet. Why could old media not play that game too? They did eventually, but too late if you ask me. The music industry is another one that shot itself in the foot for years. Music piracy skyrocketed on the pirates’ assertion that downloading was convenient until someone figured out that people would still pay for the music as long as you made it convenient, and it’s been hugely profitable ever since. Replace “downloading was convenient” with “stealing was convenient” and you see the shutter-vision that prevented this from happening sooner. The movie industry is just the same: internet rental services and internet to TV streaming is more convenient than ever, and the main detractors are not the studios but the consumers who worry that electronic distribution gives too much power to the studios. So have traditional media been robbed of their revenue by the new? Arguably some have, and it’s the price for not keeping pace.
