Author: Ryan Sholin
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“Cleaning up the comment cesspool”
Cleaning up the comment cesspool: Ventura County Star editor Joe Howry has penned what is either the most eloquent column a newspaper has ever published on the problem of comment threads and trolls — or the most cliché-laden — or possibly, both. If you can get past that, it’s an interesting approach they’re taking: They…
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Beyond Comment Threads
Beyond Comment Threads: A Mozilla journalism challenge on building better community conversations around the news. So far, nothing terrifyingly new. Paragraph-level commenting, Slashdot-style threading, collapsing, and moderation. And if I could figure out how to register for the site, with or without OpenID, I might be able to comment on the entries. (via PBS IdeaLab)
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The Myth of the Three Laws of Robotics – Why We Can’t Control Intelligence
The Myth of the Three Laws of Robotics – Why We Can’t Control Intelligence: “Let’s get something out of the way. I’m not worried about a robot apocalypse.”
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Reuters covers ExtrAct
Reuters covers ExtrAct: MIT Web Tools Help Small Landowners Navigate Gas Leasing Frenzy. ExtrAct remains my favorite MIT Center for Future Civic Media project. Last time I saw the demo, there was (still) an amazing interactive map of natural gas wells, plus what amounted to a social rating system for “landmen,” the dudes who show up…
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Hardly Strictly takeaways
By now, you’ve surely forgotten the barrage of tweets and check-ins from 30 or so of us — the “Hardly, Strictly Young” David Cohn invited to the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute a couple weeks back for a round table Carnival of Journalism mission to gather alternative ideas about how to implement the Knight…
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Prime numbers, semi-transparent PNGs, and organic randomness in tiled backgrounds
Prime numbers, semi-transparent PNGs, and organic randomness in tiled backgrounds: The Cicada Principle and Why It Matters to Web Designers. Wish I had an excuse to use this.
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Content asteroid belts
Cameron Koczon on how publishers and readers manage satellites like Instapaper, Readability, and other unbundled flying objects: A List Apart: Orbital Content. “Many publishers will ask—and it is a fair and familiar question—why should users have the right to carbon copy my content and share it in other contexts? It is a question that belies…
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On the deaths of two photojournalists in Libya
“Chris and Tim are at sea now, heading toward Benghazi, which means, in the indirect but solemn ways that the fallen travel from battlefields, that they are heading home.” via THE GUN by C.J. Chivers. ### As for me, I don’t have a lot of grief in me for this, just anger. Undirected, unfocused anger.…