Re: MF Media Tools project

Thanks for thinking of me, what an awesome sounding project!

So I like immediate feedback, so I'm going to send you some, if I seem to
be stating something obvious, or I missed the subtlety of an idea, no
insult intended.

My first thought is this might start to answer the question, "So now
what?".  The web and activism is still in its infancy in many ways (I had
a bunch of squatter convincingly explain to me that it takes 10 years for
a good strategy to mature), and IMC is a product of that infancy.  Its
still just getting going, but already the limits of its usefulness are
beginning to come clear.  So I'm thrilled.

Thinking about what would be needed to make this project work, a perhaps
non-obvious piece is the support for the human editors.  This sounds like
an editor heavy project, and so ideally you want good tools,
documentation, and a community for the editors to operate in.  Not
necessarily new tools to develop, perhaps integration would be
sufficient, but I think its a critical part of the project.(And building
decent communities worked well for Dmoz, and DAMN [for a while])

Memes seem like a very interesting, but difficult building block.  Topics
are hard enough to prevent "semantic drift" on, and those are usually
simpler concepts.  Difficult but neat.  Seems like you'll want to have a
hierarchy of these in order to simplify classification, and allow editors
to browse for currently recognized memes.  As a bit of social engineering,
I think one should emphasize all over the site how memes, are flexible,
evolving concepts, and so people won't be surprised when a meme moves out
from under them.

Not sure how Talking Points are directly related to the project.  Useful
though.  I'm really sick of the "Inarticulate Protester" cliche.(Or is
that a meme?)

What is a pull quote?  Whatever it is, I would say mark it inline, but
store a copy outside, cut down on processing.

This duplication of data shouldn't be a problem because presumably the
archived documents are static, and the data won't need to be kept in sync.
Do we want to deal with the chase were the documents aren't static? (CNN
has a really interesting and effective technique of writing stories
gradually as a story unfolds, editing it every 30-45 minutes, might be
interesting to catch that evolution)

Do we need to get a normalized list of media organizations?  (Seems like
one should exist somewhere) URIs could be sufficient, as long as we stick
to web accessible resources.  Definitely want to normalize the list so one
can add neat info like a graph of media ownership to the analysis.(e.g.
isn't it interesting that Fox News, and the SkyNews seem to always agree?)

What are the laws concerning archiving and making available this material?
Especially if we're arching in digital format material which one is
general required to pay for? (WSJ, on NYTimes archives)

Webware seems cool, glad to see that python is starting to develop a
coherent web development story.  I have to admit to being really puzzled
by the appeal of AOLserver, Postgres, or OpenACS.  Using Postgres has
definitely cut into the number of people excited to work on active.(not as
much as the quality of the active code base has, but its contributed)
Seems like AOLserver will have the same effect.  And OpenACS was still in
TCL last time I checked.

Exciting

kellan

--
"we reject kings, presidents and voting. we believe in
rough consensus and running code." [david clark (MIT)]

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