Archive for March, 2009

I just finished watching Nathan Eagle speak at O’Reilly ETech 2009 about his start up, txteagle.

Dr. Eagle’s interest in mobile phones and their broader roles in society brought him to East Africa where really fascinating innovations are taking place. While there, he saw a number of problems:

1. With unemployment in Kenya hovering a little below 50%, many relatively educated people have lots of idle time. With the exploding popularity of mobile phones, a cell phone is often present during downtime.
2. Cellular operators are searching for ways to increase average revenue per user (ARPU) and to distribute the traffic volumes more evenly (less at peak times).
3. Corporations have millions of tasks that humans can do better than computers and cheap communication networks allow those to be distributed via crowdsourcing.

Dr. Eagle’s elegant solution pays Africans (in airtime or mobile money) to complete simple tasks like surveys, translations and transcriptions. As he says, think of it as “mobile Mechanical Turk.” And as he explains in the second half of his speech, there are a number of exciting secondary effects of this empowerment.

As you probably know, I care a lot about openness in education. I have a new post up at Techdirt proposing that academics can help create a vibrant digital news ecosystem via open access and academic blogging.

Instead, academia should be thinking larger. We do not need professors to write for newspapers — the medium itself is not necessary. Academia can do two things to support a vibrant, reliable information ecosystem: support open access and support faculty blogging. Open access publishing increases the availability and reach of scholarship; the original articles are more accessible, allowing more general purpose writing to piggy-back off them. And as for academic blogging, the future of news need not contain newspapers as we know them. Plenty of brilliant professors have compelling and informative blogs, but for the most part, these are not considered positively in the tenure process, creating a disincentive to young scholars. If Zimmerman and others who care about high quality information want to promote it, they should encourage tenure committees to support academic blogging.

Check out the rest of it.

This may be a week of Costa Rican sun and 24 hours of travel speaking, but amidst the search for viable business models for journalism, should we actually want monopoly?

As Ethan Zuckerman has pointed out, monopoly rents were a large reason newspapers were able to sustain expensive, important journalistic endeavors like investigative or foreign reporting. As the geographic monopoly source of information, newspapers could charge extraordinary rates for advertisements. In turn, these profits subsidized the type of reporting that Paul Starr rightly notes is essential to democracy. More efficient competition, like targeted online advertising, has undermined this status quo.

So, does (limited?) monopoly information control, have a desirable benefit? Could Google’s continued rise and importance to online advertisers signal a new opportunity to capture monopoly prices and subsidize “hard journalism”?

It goes without saying that this vast, unprecedented level of global monopoly would have terrible effects, so, more prudently, perhaps the title of this post should be “should we wish for false-monopoly?”

It’s late; help me figure this out.