Correction. Nothing Happened. Thank you.

I’m on the local police department’s email announcement list.

Earlier today, a ‘suspicious activity’ alert went out possible attempted burglary.

Just now, I received the clarifying email:

“…we have determined that the attempted burglary was, in fact, an individual who went to the wrong address.”

This message says so many good things about the police department, the neighborhood, and the accuracy of GPSs.

On the Trust-iness of the Media

In last night’s talk with MN ISPI on wikis, blogs, etc – the issue of citing Wikipedia as a source came up.

Like citing the 1911 version of Brittanica is the same as citing the current version.

A strawman argument.

One based on false assumptions. Assumptions that established organizations don’t have biases, aren’t infallible, and that knowledge doesn’t change.

As you know, all three are false.

Should a publishing organization be a trusted source simply because they’ve published for a century? The National Enquirer is almost there.

I’ve written before about my issues with newspaper organizations before, and it comes down to trust.

I don’t trust newspaper organizations to regularly publish information relevant to me, while there are great number of websites I do trust.

Part of this comes down to frequency of publication. There are blogs1 that publish when there’s nothing (or nothing more) to say and I have the same issue with them.

The other part is find-ability, share-ability. Both of which are tough in online or hardcopy versions of papers (also in a number of blogs as well).

All of this factors into trusti-ness of a source, not just age.

Perhaps this is me growing weary of ‘journalism‘ framed as Something Special People Do rather than something we all do (or at least can do).

Frankly, in a world of instant publishing, I trust a mass of crazy people working for free much more than organization with a well designed masthead.

Elsewhere:

“I can now get through the paper in about 5 minutes–that is how little usable content there is in it.” – Sheldon Mains

Sheldon’s entire list is spot on.

1. Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, TechDirt immediately come to mind.

Maps of Parallel Americas: Republik van Nieuw Nederland

If you’ve ever wondered what New York would be like if it remained a Dutch colony until the late 1700s?

I’m thankful we finally have an answer.

“New Netherland achieved independence in 1798, after the ‘old’ Netherlands were overrun by the French. Philip Schuyler, the last Director-General of the colony, became the first Prime Minister of the independent Republic. Influential successors were PMs Maarten van Buren (1820-1856)…”

via strangemaps

Cullect.com for Curation

As I’ve mentioned before, our lives are multi-faceted. Each facet has its own community of trusted experts. Some are friends, other are colleagues, or simply authoritative in their field.

If you’ve been following my development of Cullect, then you know early on, I switched from the label ‘Editors’ to ‘Curators’ to describe the people behind a reading list.

Curation better describes the what I see as a core function of Cullect – making an easily shareable list of relevant items on a very specific theme. Culling the bad. Collecting the good.

Earlier this week, I talked with a consultancy about how Cullect’s theme-specific (practice area, industry, etc) reading lists could augment their internal knowledge sharing and client relationships. Curated knowledge from your trusted experts.

Last night, via Twitter, Mike Keliher points me to this:

“[Curators are] identifiable subject matter experts who dive through mountains of digital information and distill it down to its most relevant, essential parts.” – Steve Rubel, Micropersuasion.com

Twitter Updates for 2008-02-04

  • @CraigPratchett – my review of Born Rich from June ’06 http://tinyurl.com/2r3ugt #
  • just got pulled into http://www.naymz.com/ – yah, even w/ it’s downtime, Twitter is my favorite and my best #
  • is @ Kopplins for my first day back doing client work….well for the next 39 minutes of battery life. #
  • @geniodiabolico, just wanted to share the frustration with making Mail.app usable. Like iTunes, I want a far more flexible alternative. #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-02-01

  • potty training stats: hours to pants ratio; 3:5 #
  • "treat your users as owners"…another principle behind @cullect – cullect/1: http://culld.us/687441 #
  • "The slicker you make your show, the more it looks like a Pepsi commercial. It also gets less interesting to me " http://culld.us/687256#
  • IL2: MPR’s rebroadcast of last night’s debates. Definitely not agreeing w/ HC’s economics (healthcare & mortgage). #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-01-31

  • Guiliani’s presidential campaign was a manifestation of New York City arrogance. #
  • is looking for people w/ blogs that they can add javascript widgets onto to test a new feature of @cullect. DM me. kthxbye. #
  • proving the future is already here: "policy changes begin to affect the economy as soon as they are anticipated" cullect/53: http://cull#
  • @timelliott -re: @Scobleizer I was thinking the same thing. If being deleted from FB is your biggest problem… #
  • is spending the morning working on the benefits of @cullect for _feed publishers_. Stunned that so few aggregators consider the publisher. #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-01-30

  • after forgetting about it for ~2 years, one of the very 1st features for ‘feedseeder’ came back to me this morning. It now awaits deployment #
  • @geniodiabolico – as both listener and a publisher I’ve found it overly complex and fragile. #
  • http://tinyurl.com/34tcx3 confirms my feelings that the economy is only bad because it’s an election year. #
  • @geniodiabolico, to follow up, the forthcoming version of @cullect is nicknamed ‘Fear of an Evil Genius’. It’ll be in the user-agent string. #
  • @tweet140 I don’t think you should expect all tweets to be 140. :p #

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Twitter Updates for 2008-01-28

  • @geniodiabolico inspired by one of your tweets, I heavily refactored @cullect all weekend. So heavily, I need a new MC. Who’s your favorite? #
  • @gapingvoid, "hey, they’re Parisian literary purists – they’re going to bitch and moan anyway." Brilliant! cullect/1: http://culld.us/641081 #
  • @geniodiabolico – Chuck D is works. I’m versioning w/ ‘MC’ or ‘Mc’ or ‘Mac’ s. tweet is http://twitter.com/geniodiabolico/statuses/611605172 #
  • has reached inbox 0. #
  • @croncast – I played w/ Joost prolly 6mn ago. New ways to get Big Media don’t excite me, so I uninstalled shortly there after. #
  • asks: anyone know of something like FlickrFan, but for Twitter? #
  • @stefanhartwig – something I can put on my mac mini + tv. #
  • @stefanhartwig – Apple’s RSS Headline screensaver is close. Thanks. #

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