Bamblog

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Before writing about sightseeing, football and partying in Jaffa/Tel Aviv, I want to share some more thoughts and impressions from the “Boundaries of free speech”-conference. While the first day focussed mainly on traditional media and journalism, the second day brought additional perspectives by including various people with an Internet/blogosphere background. It started off, however, with an interesting discussion with Ari Rath [Wikipedia german/english], the former chief editor of the Jerusalem Post. He talked about the responsibilities journalists have to different groups - readers, publishers, editorial staff, political authorites - and presented a lot of anecdotes from his long professional career as a journalist.

After Ari, it was my turn to present some ideas on “Mainstream Media and Weblogs - Competing or complementary publics?” [english slides pdf]. The main points I wanted to make were that Mainstream Media (MSM) and the Blogosphere both contribute to publics, but
apply different criteria for filtering, publishing and linking information [in a nutshell: MSM provide general and (most often) objective
information to a wide audience, blogs provide specific, i.e. personalized information to (most often) small audiences which I call “personal publics”]. It is important to note that Blogs not only increase opportunities for information management, but also allow for identity management and relationship management - that’s their main appeal to most of the bloggers who have no intent on replacing or even contributing to journalism. Using some empirical data I showed that both areas of communication are interconnected (there are processes of mutual agenda setting), thus they are complementing (rather than replacing) each other.

After my presentation, we brought in Mushon Zer-Aviv from New York via a Skype video call. Mushon, a new media artist/activist, talked about different projects he is working on. Most notably he presented ShiftSpace, an (still somewhat experimental) tool that allows to add further layers of text and information on other websites. Quoting from this interview:

ShiftSpace is an open source platform for the social extensions of websites. It is if you will, a transparent layer above any website where users can leave notes, discuss, protest, create art, and deeply explore the interactive potential of the web.

By installing the plug-in’s current public beta version 0.07 (which we launched for the first day of 2007) users can use the ‘Notes’ space (application for ShiftSpace) to leave post-it notes on websites, use the ‘ImageSwap’ space to switch any image on the web with any other image, and use the latest addition ‘SourceShift’ to modify the html source of any page. We call these modifications shifts. When a user browse to a shifted page, she gets notified by a little icon, she can then click the + keys to launch the ShiftSpace console and browse the shifts.

The main aim is to make the privatized spaces on the web - sites that are controlled by companies, governments, etc. - public once more, allowing creative and critical annotations and modifications of the content. It was fascinating to see the demos in his presentation; I will definitely check the tool over the next days.

From lef: Ari Rath, Mushon Zer-Aviv, Ronen Eidelman

In the afternoon, we had three presentations by bloggers - Don Alphonso (one of the most prominent bloggers in Germany), Dan Sieradski of jewschool.com, and Amitai Sandy who is an comics artist and intitiated the Isreali anti-semitic cartoon contest. Although they have different professional backgrounds, they all share (and conveyed, I think) the idea that the blogosphere is changing the way information is flowing between people and media. This was also abvious in the concluding panel discussion [1], where we touched a lot of interesting questions, from lowered barriers of access to publishing means (the barriers to get an audience have not been lowered the same, though) over citizen journalism to aspects of reduced variety of perspectives when you’re able to select from a wide range of information sources. I pointed out that control over published content is not only exercised by governments (think China, Iran, Egypt, …) and community standards (think the ban on nudity in the US), but also by software code: The way search engines rank search results, for example, is for most users some sort of “black box”, but it has an tremendous influence on the visibility and exposure of information.

Oh, and when discussing serendipity (the moments of finding something you didn’t know you were looking for), I shared my secret for learning new things every day: The homepage of my browser is set to “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random” - every time I open Firefox, I get to see a random page of Wikipedia, which is really interesting. I think it was Dan who said this was the most dorkiest yet most awesome thing he’s ever heard..

In line with Don’s impressions [german], I think this has been a great conference, with a lot of interesting and stimulating presentations and discussions. I’m glad I had the chance to participate, and want to thank Charlotte Misselwitz, Ulrike Goldenballt and Ronen Eidelman, the main organizers, for the work they put into making this conference happen.

[1] Moderated by Hisham Abdullah, the panelists were Don Alphonso, Dan Sieradski, Dov Shinar and Jan Schmidt - seems you had to have a three-letter name to get chosen as a panelist..