The Interested Observer

Like a million other amateur photographers, I have a flickr page. I’m no Ansel Adams, but I can point and shoot pretty well and I think I have a certain point of view. So imagine my surprise and my delight when I got an e-mail from Schmap, makers of a freeware program of worldwide cityguides. For a guide to Newport, Rhode Island, they simply wandered through the Flickr “library” looking for pictures of Newport (a really good reason to tag those pix!) and e-mailed people with a share-alike commons license and asking them if they could use the photos in the guide with proper attribution. They asked me if they could use two photos I happened to be especially fond of. Of course, you don’t get paid, but this is how the Commons is supposed to work. And it’s nice to see it does and it’s especially nice to see my photos loved and adored by someone besides me.  I wonder how many other companies are making use of the huge flickr library of fabulous images?

Personally, I think politics always goes down better with a little music chaser.

This Tony Blair mash-up to the Clash song “Should I Stay or Should I Go” has been in wide distribution all over the Internets and I see no reason why it shouldn’t stop here as well. One can only wonder where the mash-up crowd will go once Google and it’s lawyers take the copyright disinfectant to YouTube. Sigh. But for now, enjoy.

The Tony Blair – Clash mash-up.

The Tony Blair – Bowie mash-up.

I really know more about Ryan Singel than I should.

I know he works for Wired News. I’ve seen pictures of him. Read his blog and I’ve even rifled through his reporter’s notebook — something you can get your fingers sliced off for in an actual newsroom. I know reporters who teach themselves foreign languages or stenographer’s shorthand to keep other journalists from stealing their stuff.

In Old School journalism there are no Share-Alike licenses. There aren’t even any “you show me yours, I’ll show you mine” licenses. Even among friends.

To paraphrase Bono, “Every artist is a cowboy, every journalist a thief.”

But Ryan, and quite a few others like him are a little more magnanamous. A good journalist knows there’s always one more call he could have made, one more news nugget he could have found. One more something left out there somewhere that he has a nagging feeling he should have looked into.

So with Wired’s permission (and probably a sigh of relief from the overworked copydesk) Ryan has posted his unedited story, along with his notes on the Wired Wiki for anyone and everyone to add, subtract, resort, rearrange, copedit, correct and generally help Ryan and the Wired staff whip this Wiki article into shape.

Think you can write better headlines than the boys at the New York Post? Well have a go with Ryan’s story via Wired’s headline contest. My current favorite is “What a Wiki World,” but you know that could change. It seems everybody wants to get into the act. But this noble experiment is almost over. Wired says unless this experiment in collaborative journalism is “a total distaster” you can see how Ryan’s story turns out — with a little help from his online friends — on September 7.

Dead tree newsrooms used to pride themselves on their collaborative enviornments. If you’ve ever been in a newsroom or even if you’ve just rented “All the President’s Men,” you’ll notice there are no offices (except for editors, who don’t actively write anything), just wide open spaces and a profound lack of privacy. This is supposed to foster a collaborative spirit among journalists, which on occasion it does. On the good days, you can get somebody to polish your lede, come up with a synomym for a word you’ve already used six times in one paragraph, or give you the phone number of that guy they know whose girlfriend works at a place that might be good info for your story.

However, most of the time, what you get in a real world newsroom is the special privilege of listening to the business reporter across from you planning her wedding, monitor the progress of the special projects editor’s fantasy baseball team or watch the assistant food editor adding new items to her eBay store.

In short, not the most collaborative of environments. But then here comes Ryan, some guy from Wired News who wants to do a story on Wikis. He shows you his first draft, hands you his notes and a copy of the Wired Style Manual and asks you very nicely if you could help him out. He trusts you. He beleives that you are as interested in this wiki thing as he is and you will check his facts, his syntax, his spelling and his hyperlinks and help him write a really good story. Sure, there might be a few wingnuts out there who might want to mess with Ryan’s story, but on the flip side there are people who will come right behind them and fix everything that was undone.

Right now, today, Wired Wiki looks like exactly what it is — a science project. Can a reporter really rely on strangers, even –gasp– ordinary people to collaborate with him on a story? Could this possibly be scalable to the point where collaborative journalism becomes part of the media culture right up there with “who, what, when, where and why?”

Personally, I don’t think so. At least not right now. Although a Maureen Dowd Wiki would be an awful lot of fun(let’s all try to think of a new nickname for Rummy, shall we?), not all journalism needs to be or should be collaborative. But for every Maureen Dowd there are hundreds of beat reporters, citizen jounalists even guys at big outfits like Ryan Singel, ready to rely on the kindness of strangers to help him put his fingers square on the pulse of his subject.

I am sure there is a place for collaborative journalism in the future of the medium. I’ll be very interested to see other projects like this one and its eventual incorporation into mainstream and not-so-mainstream media.

The results of Ryan’s science project will be in Wired News on Sept. 7.

In the wake of the Wikimania Festival at Harvard Law School in early August, everyone became obcessed with all things Wiki. Then after a few too many diet cokes, and cheesecake brownies all compliments of Wikimania, we started to get silly. Cold pizza stashed in the kitchen fridge had several tags and a note that its Creative Commons license permitted toasting as a derivative work.

We started thinking about all the collaborative culture and open source works that have been around long before the Internet and Wikipedia. We came up with a short list

• quilting bees
• barn raisings
• Family recipies
• Audience participation at the Rocky Horror Picture Show
• The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” (“take a sad song and make it better.”)

But right now, this very minute, the most interesting experiment in collaborative culture is all about Free Beer.

Free Beer is a Danish brewery that offers free beer to any and all comers. Not free as in you don’t have to pay for it, but free as in freedom. Freedom to take their recipe and make it your own.
The project, originally conceived by Copenhagen-based artist collective Superflex and students at the Copenhagen IT University, applies modern free software / open source methods to a traditional real-world product (beer).Here’s the fun part: The recipe and branding elements of Free Beer is published under a Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5) license, which means that anyone can use the recipe to brew their own Free Beer or create their own version of the recipe. Brewers of the new beer can make money from selling their beer, too. All they have to do is publish the recipe under the same Commons License and give credit where it’s due — to the original Free Beer folk. Not creative enough to come up with a label design or brand element for your beverage? No problem. Modify Free Beer’s logos and remember to honor that Commons license.
Can’t wait to get started? The recipe is right here.

And don’t forget to upload your new brew to the Flickr pool of international Free Beer makers.

Now compare this to Atlanta-based Coca-Cola, which has had its formula locked up in a vault somewhere since it was first concocted by John Pemberton in 1886. In her article “Have a Cloak and a Smile” Barbara Mikkelson maintains that the urban legend surrounding the top secret formula is just that — a shrewd marketing idea to add a little mystique and allure to the brand. As the article points out, even if you wanted to make your own coke, you couldn’t market it as coke, and you probably couldn’t import many of the ingredience Coke uses.

What would happen if Coke loosened its grip on its forumla. What if it allowed fans and chemists alike to concoct a derivitive version of the soda pop, credit Coke and keep the train moving by using a Commons License to pass the recipe on and on and on. Certainly it couldn’t be any worse than Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke or any of Cokes in-house deriviative works. We think not. And both Free Beer and Coke have arrived at the same ends — a certain brand cache and mystique that makes consumers want to consume and in the case of Free Beer tinker with it, if they so choose.

But the “large red cola concern” (as it’s sometimes referred to in Atlatna) literally has its soda down to a science and unlike Free Beer, the ordinary consumer doesn’t have the money, the products or the machinery to manufacture Coca-Cola.

Enter Open Cola. Well, actually, it entered about five years ago, as a way to explain free culture and open source software. A noble experiment that wound up selling 150,000 cans and making the Toronto based OpenCola more famous than the software it was designed to promote. Like Free Beer, the recipe and the instructions for making OpenCola are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, license their recipe under a GNU General Public License.

OpenCola said its success was due to a “widespread mistrust of big corporations and the proprietary nature of almost everything.”

If you have the time and th inclination, you, too can make your own cola. Kate and Kayle took a shot at it in England,(see their step by step process on The Guardian Web site.) And remember, this isn’t really a new idea. After all, John Pemberton was making his own cola in 1886.