this is a reply to
The Need to Transit in blink.lk which was a reply to a comment i had made in blink.lk titled "Journalism 2.0"

i disagree with opinion blink.lk is endorsing:

Journalism 2.0 is all about journalists like me using these applications in an innovative manner to process stories. We are not the techies we are the practitioners and we have to make the transition fast or the techs will get in first and take over our profession and change the craft into something unrecognizable.

this is a very stereotypical and superficial opinion.

if journalism 2.0 is journalism with web 2.0 then can introduce carpentry 2.0 as standard carpentry with web 2.0? would techs take over carpentry to something that is unrecognizable?

are techs disallowed to express their opinion? as in, only journalists should be allowed to be in media?

Mark Briggs again in Journalism 2.0: How to Survive and Thrive “As journalists, we need to change our practices to adapt, but not our values. We’re like sailors in the English proverb I chose for the title to this introduction: No amount of wishing for a return to smooth seas will calm the water around us. To carry the sailing metaphor even further: It’s time to tack. It’s time to turn the bow of our ship and make the wind in this new sea work for us, not against us.

how to can survive and thrive as journalists - be ethical, humane, unbiased, etc. stick to the values you swore by when you became a professional journalists. have no hidden agendas. and most of all, be humble!

also, what storm?

if you feel that technology is a challenge then hire a techy. pay him/her. i don't know how to build a chair so i would hire a carpenter or buy a chair. why would i waste time and money when i know that i cannot make a chair?

let me add common sense to the list of items journalists can use to survive and thrive! keep it simple stupid (KISS)!

1. no clear definitions

   there is no clear definition of web 2.0. wikipedia says:

   ""Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that facilitates communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashup and folksonomies."

   is blink.lk web 2.0 compliant? how about cnn.com? if i have a standard website and i add an rss feed link to it would it make my web site web 2.0 compliant?

   is it that important that we label it as web 2.0 compliant? labeling is important from a marketing perspective - hype works. but from a functional point, getting web 2.0 compliance is like a 40 year old asking a doctor to certify that he/she is a ver 2.0 20-year old!

2. o'reilly also went on to say...

   source: Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again - O'Reilly Radar:

   1. Don't treat software as an artifact, but as a process of engagement with your users. ("The perpetual beta")
   2. Open your data and services for re-use by others, and re-use the data and services of others whenever possible. ("Small pieces loosely joined")
   3. Don't think of applications that reside on either client or server, but build applications that reside in the space between devices. ("Software above the level of a single device")
   4. Remember that in a network environment, open APIs and standard protocols win, but this doesn't mean that the idea of competitive advantage goes away. (Clayton Christensen: "The law of conservation of attractive profits")
   5. Chief among the future sources of lock in and competitive advantage will be data, whether through increasing returns from user-generated data (eBay, Amazon reviews, audioscrobbler info in last.fm, email/IM/phone traffic data as soon as someone who owns a lot of that data figures out that's how to use it to enable social networking apps, GPS and other location data), through owning a namespace (Gracenote/CDDB, Network Solutions), or through proprietary file formats (Microsoft Office, iTunes). ("Data is the Intel Inside")

   hence my opinion of "web 2.0 is the method of using web applications (mostly xml based) in a functional manner".

3. versioning can be misleading

   both web 1.0 and web 2.0 and subsequent versions of the web are all functional aspects of the web.

   as o'reilly says "the perpetual beta" is another attribute of web 2.0-ness. (if you want to call it that). notice that gmail has been "beta" since they started it.

   versioning the web in this manner, i feel is inappropriate. but if it helps generate business and hype - then why not?

   we tend to assume that ver 1.0 is obsolete when ver 2.0 is released. for example, consider taxonomy and folksonomy. these are two methods of classification of content which can be used simultaneously. in blink categorizing content is done by author and date - which would fall under taxonomy. blink.lk allow authors to tag their articles / blog posts. this would fall under folksonomy. the "tag cloud" would be the union of taxonomy and folksonomy items.

   kanabona.com follows standard taxonomy along with name-spaced titles. the title would start with "opinion" or "sri lanka". the reader would be able to asses what the article / blog post is about based on this. tagging is allowed but i have personally refrained from using it as i would like to keep things simple (going with the whole kiss thing). but other authors (3) are free to use it if they wish.

   versioning the web is like calling the CDs Optical Media 1.0 and DVDs Optical Media 2.0. we still use CDs and we probably will use it for another 20 years as the technology is not obsolete. CDs are fairly reliable and can store over an hour of high quality audio. Why should CDs obsolete? however, floppy disks became obsolete because of they were unreliable and painfully slow.

4. web values

   the supposed web 2.0 reintroduced some important values of web 1.0 - "harnessing the power of user contribution, collective intelligence, and network effects".

   if you restrict user contribution, moderate collective intelligence and deny network effects then that goes against web-values.

   so i strongly feel that media web sites such as cnn and bbc goes against these values. they allow content syndication to a certain extent but their copyrights and terms of use restrict syndication to just adding a link. they also subject user comments to censorship and moderation. several friends of mine tried posting comments on cnn and found that their comments were not published. there was no profanity or hate speech. however they did eloquently criticize cnn for being biased.

i feel journalism 2.0 should be more than a superficial attempt of using web 2.0 applications such as blogs and wikis and look at adopting some of the web-values (ver 1.0 and ver 2.0). i also feel that before upgrading from ver 1.0 to ver 2.0, journalists should revisit their code of conduct, ethics, values etc.

PS: html etc is not rocket science. i train my clients to use drupal and use basic html to update and maintain websites.

References

• blink.lk: The Need to Transit
• blink.lk: Journalism 2.0
• O'Reilly Radar: Web 2.0 Compact Definition: Trying Again
• Wikipedia: Web 2.0