*Livestock statistics not included

Seriously, this interactive singles map is fun. I just wish there was a poly version!

Thanks to Allan Jenkins for the pointer.

The catch is that hashtags are often cryptic — usually because they work best when they’re as brief as possible. So you might stumble across an interesting-sounding tweet containing a hashtag like #wci, #plurk, or #tpb and wonder about its context. Although you can follow a hashtag easily with tools like Twitter Search, Hashtags.org, Tweetdeck, or Twitterfall (which Paul Bradshaw recommended yesterday in Tidbits), those tools don’t easily tell you what a given hashtag means.

Here some promising new tools that can help you quickly put a hashtag in context — or let people easily look up the meaning of the hashtags you launch or use…

• WTHashtag is a brand new wiki-based hashtag glossary from Microblink. Since it’s brand new, a lot of popular hashtags aren’t listed there yet. If one of your favorite hashtags isn’t listed there, just create a free account and then add a page for the hashtag. Anyone can edit these pages, so if you feel some sense of ownership or concern about a hashtag, you can check off “watch this page” to get alerts of updates. I just created a reference page for #JTMpoynter, the hashtag for this week’s Journalism That Matters conference at Poynter.
• Tagref is a searchable glossary of hashtags that gets built directly via Twitter. To add a hashtag to this glossary, send a tweet to @tagref Twitter account in this format: @tagref #hashtag is definition. (I just did that for #JTMpoynter.)
• Tagal.us lets you set a hashtag definition via Twitter. This process is a bit more involved than how Tagref works, but every hashtag you define via Tagref also gets cross-posted to Tagal.us. One advantage: Other Tagal.us users can vote on definitions and decide which best describes a particular hashtag.

…All of these services are pretty new, so a lot of popular or new hashtags aren’t listed there yet. If some of your pet hashtags aren’t there yet, take a minute to add them. And whenever you launch a hashtag, be sure to list them in these glossaries. It doesn’t take long, and the findability benefits could be significant if any or all of these tools gets popular.

NOTE: I originally published this article on Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.

This morning I listened to an excellent Radio Open Source interview. Host Christopher Lydon was talking to Global Voices Online founder Ethan Zuckerman and GVO managing editor Solana Larsen. I’m a huge fan of GVO and read it regularly — mainly since I enjoy hearing from people in parts of the world I generally don’t hear much about (or from) otherwise.

One of the most interesting parts of the discussion concerned how homophily shapes our individual and collective view of the world. Homophily is a fancy word for the human equivalent of “birds of a feather flock together.” That is, our tendency to associate and bond with people we have stuff in common with — language, culture, race, class, work, interests, life circumstances, etc.

Zuckerman made a profound point: Homophily makes you stupid. Which is another way of saying something my dad told me a long, long time ago:

“You’ll never learn anything if you only talk to people who already think just like you.”

Here’s what Zuckerman actually told Lydon about how homophily makes it hard for people from around the world to relate constructively…

“We know so little about one another, and what we do know is generally so wrong, that our first instinct is to try to shut each other off. …We have to work a whole lot harder. We can’t just assume that being connected [via the net] solves these problems. If you let us work it out on our own, we tend to reinforce our own prejudices and stereotypes.

“If you look at sites like Digg and Reddit, these are sites that promised the future of journalism, where we would all get together and decide what’s important. …But that begs the question: Who’s ‘we?’ If you’re getting your news from these sites, you’re getting a fairly focused, tech-heavy view of the world. You start to fall victim to homophily. It’s a basic human trait, but it’s probably worth fighting.

“Cass Sunstein, an amazing legal scholar, says that one of the dangers of the internet is that we’re only hearing like voices, and that makes us more polarized. Homophily can make you really, really dumb. What’s incredible about the net is we have this opportunity to hear more voices than ever. But the tools we tend to build to it have us listening to the same voices again and again.

“Search in the future needs to lead us to people, to places, to voices. My hope is that in the future we get over homophily and we start looking for really productive serendipity — the sort of serendipity when you go to that shelf in the library and you think you know the book that you’re looking for, but you actually find the book you’re really looking for within 2-3 shelves of it. You think you’re looking for info on the US elections, but you end up finding info on how the Jamaicans are viewing the US elections. You think you’re looking for info on network security and you en d up finding information on why Pakistan is so afraid of YouTube.”

I figured if Zuckerman had so much to say in an interview, he must have written more about the dangers of homophily. And indeed he has. Read his Dec. 17 post, Social software, serendipity and salad bars. A couple of quotes from that post:

“Newspapers like the New York Times have a terrific mechanism to encourage serendipity. In many major newspapers, the lower right-hand side of the front page is reserved for a story that readers would otherwise likely miss. …These stories aren’t selected by algorithms — they’re chosen by editors who want to feature content in the paper that might otherwise be ignored, which frequently includes stories on topics other than Iraq, US elections or terror. Dan Gillmor describes this feature as ‘institutionalized serendipity‘.

“It’s less clear where the institutionalized serendipity lives on the New York Times site. The NYTimes.com homepage features several times as many stories than the front page of the paper edition, but it’s much less clear which ones you’re encouraged to read. There’s more choice and less guidance… which isn’t a bad description for the information universe opened by the Internet. And the guidance that’s offered may be a homophilic form of guidance — in the bottom right of the homepage is a box that offers a list of the 10 most popular stories, as measured by e-mail traffic, blog links and searches. In other words, these are the stories that fellow websurfers found most interesting, not the stories the editors felt you should read, even if you didn’t know you were interested in them.

“The serendipity box in the paper New York Times is a form of persuasive technology — it convinces us to pay attention to information we’d otherwise ignore.

And the finale, in which Zuckerman nails it all:

“Encountering new ideas isn’t a supply problem in today’s internet — it’s a demand problem. There’s a near infinity of people unlike you creating content and putting it online for you to encounter. But it’s entirely possible that you’ll never encounter it if you don’t actively look for it… or unless the systems you use to find ideas start forcing you outside your usual orbits into new territories. Don’t fear the serendipity.”

Zuckerman also linked to some great further reading:

• Republic.com 2.0, a book by Cass Sunstein
• Salon.com interview with Cass Sunstein about Republic.com 2.0
• Zuckerman’s review of Susstein’s latest book, Infotopia.
• Homophily in Social Software, Oct. 2006 O’Reilly Radar article by Nat Torkington
• Echo chambers and homophily, by Danah Boyd

Plus, here are a few more resources I found by following those breadcrumbs:

• Why Everyone You Know Thinks the Same as You, Washington Post, Oct. 16, 2006
• Social Cataloguing for Book Lovers, an IT Conversations interview with Tim Spalding, creator of LibraryThing, a service that offers an intriguing unsuggest feature that directly counters homophily.

On the other hand:

Some people think homophily is a wonderful thing. And they’re not wrong.

For instance, in a homophily theory backgrounder, ChangHyun Jin (Univ. TX, Austin) wrote: “Homophily and effective communication breed one another. …Individuals who …attempt to communicate with others who are different from them often face the frustration of ineffective communication. Differences in technical competence, social status, beliefs, and language, lead to mistakes in meaning, thereby causing messages to be distorted or to go unheeded.”

I’m sure that’s true. It is definitely easier to communicate clearly and with fewer interpretive errors when the sender and recipient have much in common. Which is one possible definition of “effective communication.”

Socially constructive communication is another matter, of course.

What’s the point of fighting homophily?

Seems to me the reason to fight our tendency toward homophily is not to do dismiss the value of commonalities, but rather to broaden our basis for common understanding by being willing to learn more about each other, directly from each other. It’s improving our pattern recognition skills and our ability to reality-check each other. It’s a way to recognize broader and subtler commonalities — even if only by gaining respect for divergent views and experiences.

While this may sound uncomfortable and difficult, I tend to think of it as perpetually working to expand my comfort zone — rather than simply stepping outside it. The bigger and more diverse my comfort zone becomes, the less tunnel vision I will have, and the more interesting my life and work will become. And if a lot of people start thinking that way, then… we’ll all have that much in common.

Which is probably a good place to start.

Thanks, Ethan.

Picking up on my post yesterday, Univ. of Florida journalism professor Mindy McAdams challenged me (and her other readers) to translate my quick list of what j-schools should be teaching into a something more testable and measurable that could be translated into a curriculum.

Here’s my first shot at that:

• Content management systems (including blogging tools): First, I’d have the students run a group blog on a topic of their choosing for a year to get comfortable with the content and commenting apects of blogging. (A group blog is likely to get more activity and discussion than individual blogs.) This blog should be based on an expandable, customizable tool like Wordpress. Then the students should be taught the basics of information architecture, and from that figure out how to expand or customize their blogs to deliver or integrate new kinds of content or services. This could be as simple as finding and installing Wordpress plugins to add features, or integrating content from other places (such as Flickr or del.icio.us). The goal would be to get them to not just understand, but demonstrate that on their own they can envision, research, evaluate, and act upon options to do more with their content online. There’s a lot you can do without getting too geeky. They need to gain the confidence that many options are within their personal grasp — they don’t always need to get permission or beg someone else to do things for them.

There’s a lot more on my list, of course…

• Mobile tools and mobile media strategies. These students all have cell phones anyway. Require them to subscribe to mobile news and information services, and critique the quality of the service and user experience. Also, require them to create whatever kind of content their phones support (photos, video, audio, GPS data, even just SMS to Twitter, etc.) and post or stream it from their cell phones. Include participatory exercises based on SMS or MMS to include students who don’t have data plans on their phones. Free services like NowPublic, Flickr, Qik and CNN’s iReport could be especially helpful and even fun for your exercises.

• Social media. The point here is to help students learn a key tool for engaging communities, while also gaining experience with how influence works and information travels through social media. I suggest starting with whatever social media services most of the students are already using (like Facebook, MySpace, Ning, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Twitter) and explore both the one-to-one and group interaction options through exercises. For groups, it’s probably better to get them involved with existing, active groups on these services — rather than try to start a new group from scratch. Where possible, use both web-based and mobile options for these services. They should learn to use these tools for community outreach, story/issue research, and promotion of their work.

• Economics and business theory/models. Journalism students should be taking courses in the media business that offer the fundamentals of historical, current, and emerging media business models. They should learn what budgets and balance sheets look like, how grant funding and investment works, and how to evaluate the economic environment they’re operating in — including how it’s changing. Get them used to seeing the big picture and looking ahead. Practical skills could include analyzing the economic environment of the local community, spotting emerging trends that could offer journalistic or other media opportunities, and writing a basic business plan to capitalize on those opportunities.

• Business skills. This could involve evaluating and estimating revenue options from grants to investors to advertising to subscriptions to partnerships and more, as well as knowing what steps to take to pursue that funding. Example exercise: Develop a strategy and action plan for increasing online revenues for the campus or local daily paper — including calculation of expenses and revenues, and a timeline for implementation. In addition, they should be aware of what it takes to start and run a business — requirements for taxes, healthcare, getting SMS shortcodes, working with advertisers, etc. No part of the business that supports their journalism should be alien to them.

• Management skills. I’m envisioning this both from an entrepreneurial and organizational perspective. In all exercises, put the students in a decisionmaking role and guide them through learning how to manage time, resources, and people — whether employees, collaborators, or community members. For instance, if a class project is increasing online revenues for the campus paper, divide that mission into sub-tasks, assign someone to manage each part of that project, and require them to make decisions and delegate. Teach them how to use tools like Basecamp to coordinate team efforts. In fact, it might be a good idea to coordinate projects with other j-schools around the country or world, since increasingly in the media business project teams are widely distributed. The point is to encourage them to take charge of the process, not just to pigeonhole themselves as content creators.

• Marketing, advertising, and SEO. In addition to taking a marketing basics class oriented toward media products and services, j-students should learn the basics of search engine optimization — since findability generally translates into traffic, engagement, and revenue for most media ventures. Exercises can include learning to use Wordtracker to optimize headlines, stories, and metadata to increase both traffic and relevance; using Google Analytics to analyze traffic patterns to a news/info site (such as for the campus paper) and suggest strategies to boost traffic and engagement; developing and running Adwords campaigns (with a modest budget) to promote a class project; researching niche ad networks that might help support various types of coverage or beats, etc.

• Community engagement and management. This is perhaps one of the most marketable skills any journalist can have for the next several years or decades. The point is to get them used to creating news as part of a conversation, rather than simply as a one-way product for publication. It’s about promoting constructive public discourse through active engagement. Exercises could include participating in an active community forum; working as a volunteer moderator for an active forum where contentious topics arise; taking and active role in editing and discussing a Wikipedia page of interest; helping to coordinate (not just cover) local events like town hall meetings, conferences, or festivals; participating in or running local meetup groups, etc. These experiences tech how to handle conflict, foster consensus and diversity, produce events, and demonstrate respect and understanding for communities in order to build credibility. In this respect, working through local government, advocacy groups, social service agencies, neighborhood associations, and ethnic or religious groups could be as valuable (maybe more valuable) than working through journalistic or media organizations.

…I realize that my list sounds like a hell of a lot of stuff, but I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface in terms of what today’s journalists really need in order to take advantage of current opportunities, spot emerging opportunities, and take charge of their own destinies (rather than relying on a paternalistic news org to shelter them while they write, write, write).

I realize also that there may be resistance in journalism schools to much of what I propose, for reasons ranging from “we’re not a vocational school,” to IT staff resisting implementing the kinds of tools I’ve mentioned, to the need to integrate curricula more closely with business schools, to the tenured faculty who must teach at least some of these topics not knowing or caring much about them.

I’m not saying this would be easy. But I do think what I’ve outlined, in addition to teaching core journalism skills and values, is what today’s j-students really need to prepare for the kinds of careers they are most likely to have — and the kinds of media they can play a key role in inventing or developing.

Thoughts?

(And thanks, Mindy, for making me think this through more.)

Courtesy National Center for Atmospheric Research

Notice the difference in scale (vertical axis) from the chart I published last night. Oh yes, the wind is kicking up today! Hang on!

In response to my post yesterday, I want one place for all my content, knowledge management guru and very cool guy Jack Vinson (who I finally got to meet at BlogHer) posted an elaborate list of almost-options that address various aspects of this puzzle.

See: The elusive me collector. Excerpt:

“The basics of the problem are pretty familiar: content I generate is scattered across many websites of varying degrees of openness. Blogs, wikis, forums, social networks, paid publications, mailing lists, photos, videos, podcasts, … But there isn’t a place where all of that stuff comes together. At the high level the needs are: automatic; item-level controls; permanence; tags; re-mixability.

“I don’t think anything I’ve run across, beyond your standard feed aggregator, has the ability to do something with the resulting aggregated content. Amy suggested that she would like to be able to categorize / tag the content, selectively share it, re-mix it, analyze it, feed it out to something else…. Essentially, ‘it’s my stuff, let me play with it.’”

Yeah. What he said.

Oh, yes, of course I checked — and I now own the domain mecollector.net. I’ll give it away to anyone who can prove they can put together a tool that does what I asked for. Go for it, geeks!

As I mentioned yesterday, tomorrow I’m giving a session about online political coverage called "Tools of Engagement: It’s a Conversation, Stupid!"

I’ve been collecting a lot of "string" for this talk, and I won’t pretend I have it thoroughly organized. That’s fine — I tend to mostly improvise my sessions based on what the attendees need and want most at that moment.

Here, then, are a bunch of links to site I’ll probably want to mention tomorrow…

READ THE REST OF THIS PIECE, and comment if you like, over at my other blog The Right Conversation…

Check out the Nokia 93i, which was featured at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. I heard about it this morning on Slashdot Review, and it had me drooling…

…READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE at my other blog on citizen journalism, I, Reporter. You can leave a comment there too, if you like.

For more than a decade, e-mail discussion lists have been a mainstay of conversational media — and I think they’re likely to continue to remain popular. E-mail is approachable even to total online newbies.

However, since everyone is on e-mail overload, discussion lists end up presenting a problem: clutter. Sure, you can cut down on list clutter via daily digest postings — but if it’s a busy list, scrolling through a digest posting gets to be tedious.

Since I am constantly overwhelmed by e-mail, I find that feeds or web-based reading can be better ways to participate. Of course, these options aren’t available from every list service.

If you value the online discussions you’ve joined but can’t handle the e-mail, here’s some advice…

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE over at my other blog, The Right Conversation. You can leave a comment there too, if you like…