Local Music Q&A on Questionland Seattle

Ask members of the local music community questions about everything you need to know about the music industry–from booking a show to signing a record contract. Panelists include Eli Anderson of the Crocodile, Michelle Smith of the Comet, Nick Heliotis of Hardly Art Records, Ben London of the Recording Academy, Vincent Gates of Commontone Studio and Eric Grandy, Megan Seling, Dave Segal of The Stranger, and more.

Ask at http://www.questionland.com

Earthquake! Is Seattle Next?

This week on Questionland, Robin Friedman, Paul Bodin and Bruce Schoonmaker will answer your questions about Earthquakes. You can get the perspective of the Director of Emergency Management and Preparedness for the City of Seattle, a Seismology prof. at UW and someone who can tell you how to stop your house from falling down.

If you want to know the latest and you want to be ready… go ask them a question, or read their answers. It’s a rare opportunity to get information that is specific to you – for example: should you buy earthquake insurance?

Gardening Q&A on Questionland!

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz, I wonder where the chicken is?

An expert panel of gardeners and one on chicken-raising! will be online at Questionland answering your questions.

It’s gardening time, so if you have questions about native plants, pruning, planting or anything green go and ask.

Release Notes: Featuring, Archiving, Favorites

We released some minor improvements last night:

1. Featuring Changes

People who are featured in a category no longer appear on the front page. You can make them appear on the front page by intentionally featuring them there. This give greater control over who appears on the front page.

2. Archived Categories

We have found that categories are an excellent way of running panel Q&As. To avoid category crowding we’ve added the ability to archive (previous release) and in this release we have made it so all contributions are automatically closed down when a category is archived.

3. Favorite Answer

The favorite answer has always been represented by an icon of your choosing. The default is a boring star, but everyone uses different things: mushroom, chair, etc. We realized that people new to the site might not be clear on what this is since it only gave a description if you hovered over it with your mouse. Now “Favorite Answer” text has been added to make it more obvious.

420: The Straight Dope About Pot

Seattle is one of the most pot-friendly cities in America. In honor of National Pot Smoking Day (4/20), Questionland will be hosting experts – from marijuana enthusiasts to prosecutors – to answer your questions about Seattle’s favorite plant. How should someone grow it? How should they avoid getting busted? Here’s your chance to find out… It’s an online Q&A starting on Monday April 19^th until the 23^rd.  Go ask your questions.

The Experts: Norm Stamper, Former Chief of the Seattle Police Department. Peter Holmes, City Attorney, Seattle City Attorney’s Office. Alison Holcomb, Drug Policy Director ACLU of Washington. Philip Dawdy, Campaign Director, Initiative Co-Author Sensible Washington. Ben Livingston, Cannabis Defense Coalition/Seattle Cannabis Resource Center. Kevin Bjornson, Hydrotech Hydroponics.

For those of you who don’t know the origins of 420, it started with a bunch of high school kids who used to meet after school at 4:20 to smoke pot. They called themselves the Waldos because they met by the wall (Wikipedia).

These creative leaps are perhaps not the best advertisement for ingenuity while under the “influence”, but 420 has nevertheless become a national event and while it was once a celebration of the counterculture, pot smoking is now mainstream, or would be, were it not for it’s inclusion in the insane drug war. If you want to know more, hyperlink over to www.questionland.com – dude.

Shirky’s Dinosaur

Clay Shirky wrote a post about the Complex Business Models which is meant to be a harbinger of the seemingly inevitable collapse of the giant media companies and models. It’s not that long a post, but it could have been said in a sentence: “It’s easier to build new things than it is to change old ones”. Granted, it looses a little intellectual oomph in translation, but that’s the gist.

This idea finds it routes in evolutionary theory, where you can’t change things that already exist, so a cycle of selection, destruction and renewal is required. But is that equally true of societies and organizations? No. It’s not. An organism cannot adapt to it’s environment Larmarckian-style. Giraffes did not start off with short necks and stretch them to reach tasty leaves at the top of the trees. But humans are different from most animals because they use tools to adapt. They cannot grow a longer neck but they can build a ladder. Organizations of humans are even more versatile than an individual. They can change remarkably quickly. We dealt with a hole in the ozone layer of our atmosphere not long ago – pretty impressive. But just because we CAN does not mean we WILL.

Our culture, American-style capitalism, is based on throwing stuff away so we can sell/buy new stuff. This is as true of toasters as it is of organizations. We attach little value to the old things and want the new ones. We want the new ones because we’re”taught” – by advertisers mostly – to like the new ones.

Destruction is not endemic to us, our organizations or our society. It is a cultural trait which can be changed with the right kind of leadership.

Waiting for Hearst: A Tragicomedy

The media is has reached an almost unbelievable state of navel-gazing (which I am perpetuating right now). Much of it appears warranted as we go through what appears to be an unprecedented transition in the world of news, newspapers and new media. Of course it’s not at all unprecedented, it’s just been a while since we went a transition of this magnitude. TV was quite a big one, but most of us have no memory of that. A hundred years ago Pultizer and Hearst turned the newspaper business on it’s head in their epic battle for supremacy. In the process they changed journalism entirely and were roundly criticized for it. They were blamed for coarsening journalism. I’ve heard that bloggers have been similarly criticized.

Real Time is A Hundred Years Old

They ushered in the age of the pundit, of the investigative journalist. They changed the design of newspapers and introduced new technologies to sell their papers such as color photography (see that around much today?). They even introduced the first blushes of interactivity and real time news: they used the telegraph and telephone to have reporters give real time updates and they illustrated them on simple displays outside their office headquarters. This was a hundred years ago!

McKinley in The Grips Of Money Interests – Homer Davenport

Personality Sells

Hearst had the good fortune of coming from wealth, but that isn’t what enabled him to succeed. Plenty of wealthy people failed where he succeeded. In fact The New York Journal had already been run by a couple of rich guys who had failed when he bought it (interesting historical side note: the founder of Hearst’s famous newspaper was Albert Pultizer, brother of the more famous Joseph). Hearst succeeded for lots of reasons, but mostly because he aggressively recruited the best and brightest and gave them credit. At a time when papers spoke with “one voice” and denied virtually anyone a byline, Hearst not only gave his people bylines, he put their pictures on the front page. And he let them speak in their own voice and voice their own opinion. His was one of the first papers to voice multiple perspectives. His tolerance of quirky, almost crazy personalities was incredible. He occasionally had to go in search of a drunk reporter in all his local haunts to see where he had passed out.

Technology is Not New

Hearst loved technology. He once went up in a hot air balloon and took pictures of San Francisco giving people their first aerial view of their own city (his first paper was the San Francisco Examiner).

Innovation in Design Was Key – Yes, Even Then.

Hearst once gave the entire front page to an “cartoonist”, an area once reserved for magazines. He was not constrained by columns. To be fair, much of what he did was an extension of the innovations of Pulitzer, but where Pulitzer spent most of his time creating infighting amongst his people while managing them from his yacht, Hearst would dance a jig in the newsroom with the paper on the floor as he read through it.

Waiting…

Waiting for Godot is an enigmatic play at best and defies summary for the most part. But here’s what Wikipedia has to say:

Waiting for Godot follows two days in the lives of a pair of men who divert themselves while they wait expectantly and unsuccessfully for someone named Godot to arrive. They claim him as an acquaintance but in fact hardly know him, admitting that they would not recognize him were they to see him. To occupy themselves, they eat, sleep, converse, argue, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats, and contemplate suicide — anything “to hold the terrible silence at bay”

Sound familiar?

Matt Cutts on the Value of Answering Questions

I’ll just cut to the chase and let you play the video. The whole thing is about link building and worth listening to in its entirety (it’s short). If you want to hear the bit about answering questions skip ahead to 1m37s.

As a side note: If you read Matt Cutts’s Blog, he has a post on how to skip straight to the part of a youtube video you want to play. Unfortunately, WordPress has it’s own unique way of embedding YouTube videos which makes that neat feature impossible. Either that or I’m an idiot. As much as I’m annoyed by option #1, I’m not keen on accepting option #2. So, if you think it’s option #2, please provide proof in the comments, that way I can at least benefit from the potential shame and humiliation.

Questions, Questions, Questions

Questions tell you a lot. What’s asked, what’s answered, how they’re answered. Here’s two sites that take an interesting approach:

Fifty People One Question

Ask a lot of people the same question and you learn something generally about who we are.

5Q4 – 5 Questions For

Business week collects questions from the community for top newsmakers and then asks them those questions on video.

Do you have any others to add? Tell me in the comments.

Interactive Journalism. What is it?

The go-to phrase for anyone talking about news sites is “interactive”. But what the heck does that mean when it comes to journalism?

First, let me define what I mean by journalism because not enough people do. My definition is “borrowed” from David Nordfors: he defines journalism broadly as content created to meet the needs/demands of the public. This is in stark contrast to PR or activism which is created to meet the needs of the company, author or cause. As Pultizer said:

“Our repuplic and its press will rise or fall together… day after day, the existence of the newspaper is dependent on the approval of the public”.

News Doesn’t Pay

Mathew Ingram wrote a post today about the need for newspapers to “engage”. He includes a very interesting study by Hal Varian who points out that people spend on average only 70 seconds on online news a day. As Ingram is quick to point out, Varian is Google’s Chief Economist so the study is big on the economics and light on anything resembling a solution – and he may have an inherent bias given his employer. What is clear is that news companies have never made money on news, they’ve made money on the things that were adjacent to the news: classifieds, travel, car sales, etc. Those are gone and not surprisingly the news business is in a well publicized death spiral – well, traditional news as in newspapers and their digital equivalents. The solution: engagement. Get them to people to spend more than 70 seconds on the site.

Will We Ever Get Beyond Comments?

Those are pretty words and the panacea for all things Internet. But does it have any relevance to journalism? As usual there is the must-have reference to “comments”. People read commented stuff more and they come back more. OK. That can pass for interaction… in 1999. Google itself has gone back and forth on allowing comments on their news section, so it’s funny coming from them. Ingram points out that more important than just comments is whether the journalist participates in the comments thread. When that happens, things improve significantly – no statistics on this are provided, but I certainly have witnessed it and experienced it. Bottom line: comments help, author participation makes all the difference, but comments really aren’t going to cut it.

The News Raises More Questions Than It Answers

Although the news is meant to inform, it typically raises more questions than it answers. Even a simple story about a car accident can raise questions: is that a dangerous intersection? how many accidents have there been at that spot? is anything being done to make it less dangerous? Most of this kind of data is readily available and has the potential to turn a tedious snippet into something interesting. Imagine if the story was about health care or a supreme court decision rather than a car accident?

Journalist Know A Lot More Then They Are Telling

Most journalists write a story that includes about a zillionth of what they actually know about the topic. When a journalist does a story on health care, or reports the latest congressional silliness, he/she actually knows a great deal more about the subject then is included in the piece being written. Many journalists could, and do, write books about the subjects they cover. In the news story they have some small number of words in which to cover “the news”.

Why Don’t We Capitalize On That Knowledge?

Since the news raises a lot of questions and the journalist knows a lot, why not let the readers ask the journalist some questions? Why doesn’t every news story end with something like: “If you have questions about this story then ask the journalist”. The community could then get answers to the questions raised by the news. When the Supreme Court rules on campaign finance I expect the journalist will cover the obvious implications. But I’d have a lot of questions as I imagine most people would.

Questions Are At The Heart Of Real Interaction

Ever sit around a dinner table or a conference table and have people tell you what they did that day or give you the departmental summary? If you have then you have also wished you were somewhere else. The thing that makes things interesting is when someone asks a question. The great thing about a question is that it implies interest on the part of the person asking and it gives the person answering a chance to express an opinion while being helpful. The questions asked invariably teach you something about the community and the answers, well they do too.

Journalists Know People

Let’s up the ante one step further. In the course of writing an article or covering a story, the journalist interviews sources. These people are either experts on the subject or people whose opinions are relevant because of their position (e.g. they are a politician). Why not let them answer questions too! Invite them to participate. Highlight their presence, invite the community to ask them questions, highlight their answers. The journalist already has their contact information and most people think they are not well represented by the media, so why not let them have a shot at it themselves and see how easy it is(n’t).

Should Everyone Be Allowed To Answer?

I could make a radical suggestion and even contemplate letting the community answer each others questions. I wouldn’t go overboard with this, not everyone in the community is an expert. But many of them are. So the solution is pretty simple. Yes. Let the community ask questions as well as answer them, but make sure the journalists answers come first.

Can You Make Money Doing This?

Well, first let’s agree that it’s likely to actually engage people and keep them on your site longer. In fact they will have a sense of membership on your site, especially if you give them a basic profile and aggregate their contributions on the profile – they’re now a contributor to your site! They have their own column/byline in the shape of a profile. They are community, they are engaged, they are then likely to come back. Good start.

Time is Money – Ask Facebook

Once you have an engaged community there are many more ways to make money. Look, if Facebook can make (a rumored) 1-2 billion dollars a year on their site then you have to believe that time is money. Facebook focused on getting them there and keeping them there and then… well they might make billions. So get ’em there, keep ’em there.

oh… and feel free to comment or better still ask me a question.