Andrew's blog

Our friend Thomas Lowenhaupt of Connecting.nyc Inc. writes:

With the arrival of the .nyc TLD (like .com and .org but just for New York City), we'll will soon have the capacity to create neighborhood media centers such as astoria.nyc, brooklyn-heights.nyc, clinton.nyc, greenwich-village, harlem.nyc, etc.

Three journalists, publicly, have been proposing new models for newspapers' financial survival in the face of Google's aggregating all web-based articles:

The Media Equation (David Carr)
Dinosaur at the Gate (Maureen Dowd)

The newspaper business---not that people around here look to hasten its demise---has folks that want to rip apart the model and reassemble it. "Don’t Mourn the Passing of Business Models" is a brief post from a Cato blog that says, bluntly, "The news business as we know it today is just a historical contingency and in no way essential to democracy or an informed society." (I love libertarian writers. In a jungle, they'd be the ones poking tigers.)

We have more media options than ever, except that less and less do they include print newspapers. So what to do with those media options?

What opportunities does a newspaperless future afford?

For those who take seriously the idea of creative destruction---that innovators destroy business structures in order to create something better---how do you envision reassembling the essential parts of a dismantled newspaper business? What would you do with the writers and editors? The foreign offices? The databases and sources?

Each of those is a valuable resource, to someone, in some way. So how would you re-use them---and ultimately increase their value---once their home newspapers cease printing?

Half dozen major government libraries, including the New York Public Library, the Dutch Nationaal Archief, and the State Library of New South Wales, all have something in common: they each have uploaded thousands of their archives' photographs and associated metadata to the photo-sharing website Flickr for (nearly) unrestricted sharing, commenting, and collective tagging.

But the groundwork for these enterprises was laid by colleagues of Michelle Springer, Project Manager for Digital Initiatives at the U.S. Library of Congress.

Since January 2008, Springer has been shepherding a pilot program, uploading chosen collections to the Library of Congress' Flickr site, including "The 1930s-40s in Color" and "News in the 1910s". As her report on the pilot describes (www.loc.gov/rr/print/flickr_report_final.pdf), the results were impressive:

• As of October 23, 2008, there have been 10.4 million views of the Library of Congress' photos on Flickr.
• The Library made 15,000 Flickr contacts.
• 2,518 Flickr users added 67,176 tags to photos.
• More than 500 of the Library's records were enhanced with new information provided by Flickr users.
• And visits to the Library's Prints and Photographs Online Catalog increased 20% from January to May 2008 compared to the same period the year before.

But through a civic media lens, what does Springer expect the long-term effects of Flickr to be for major public libraries and the people they serve? I interviewed her by email in mid-December to get a better idea....

This morning I attended a Social Media Breakfast here in Cambridge--the theme this time being "Social Media for Social Change".

My first impression: wow, they got a lot of people to network and listen to talks at 8 o'clock in the morning.

I keep coming across remarkable collections of Obama photography, except in this case...