This NY Times piece on the pre-announcement editing of Sarah Palin's Wikipedia entry sheds light on the way Wikipedia functions in the larger media ecology, in large part based on its open structure and currency. That updates in the wee hours prior to a candidacy announcement might be the efforts of an insider comes as little surprise. But the way that such updates morph the site into a kind of engine for dissemination and creation of news shows that the combination of at-large editing and instant updating amplifies information sharing power enough that people need to adjust their expectations about where to find (and how to make) the news. As the Times reports, the Washington Post called it "another example of Wikipedia’s mysterious ability to predict about-to-break news, if we only knew to look there."

Just mapping out some thoughts about how writing shifts over time. Right now the heart goes where it goes and the mind follows. Who knows where the map will lead. As said in the song vibrating the inner ear hammers even now, "I'm stuck moving."

From the Washington Post comes this piece about corporations playing fast and loose with images found online. The article is of interest to writing teachers working with new media for its illumination of fair use principles. If one of the four lenses through which we might view fair use is the potentially commercial nature of the use, it's tempting to look at the "photonapping" of images by corporations and argue for more flexibility when applying the profit criteria to use decisions. This, however, might not be true to the phenomenon reported in the piece. It's not that the uses by the corporations are fair. The article quotes Lawrence Lessig, who points out, "There's really no excuse for [these companies] except that they think it's not important to protect the rights of the amateur." For educators, these legal dimensions might be discussed as part of a broader conversation about how to make decisions about using materials in projects. I put a screen shot of the Post article above to serve as the link to the article, which I've attributed and which I'm discussing in terms of educational uses of media. Is it fair? These questions are sometimes complex.

Lessig's quote and the rest of the article, more interestingly, get at what is behind much of the trend of companies wanting to appropriate amateur materials from the Web:

"Authenticity is the new consumer sensibility," says Joe Pine, a business consultant and co-author of "Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want." It is the criterion "by which people decide what to buy and who to buy it from."

It's a byproduct of the user-generated world: the trustworthiness of YouTube, the realness of Facebook. Above all else, we believe ourselves. "People don't want to buy the fake from the phony anymore," Pine says. "They want to buy the real from the genuine."

If nothing else the trend asks us to continue thinking about the power of citizen media as reflected in the desires of corporations to be like Mike, or Allison, or Tracey.

I've been long cured of the illusion that starting a blog or other networked accretion will translate into productivity for a writing project. Still, I'm always eager to break out of isolated author mode and take things public. With that in mind, I'm posting a link to NowWriting.

I envision this wiki as an article in terms of chunking it for work prioritization, academic weight and such. I think of it as nothing like an article in terms of its composition process. I hope to write on it in a number of ways: cobble on it over the next couple of months in blog-like fashion; spend some time refining and extending pieces; go fungal with links to partial ideas that might be dumped or expanded; see if anyone jumps in to add or change ideas or foci. I honestly only know for sure that I want to toy with the idea of enacting rather than describing an emerging and converging kind of writing.

I've enjoyed fidgeting with the wiki software. I'm struck by the way that composing wiki text feels closer to the raw HTML coding of the early 90s. It's very liberating to link when the urge hits. Going back and changing, though, is tougher, I think. The naming of files when the link is created runs counter to the provisionality and fluid form that should be part of this kind of project. In any case I'll be pushing this around for a while and welcome joiners.

I've posted a video reflection of a recent annotation assignment. The Flash video is about 35mb, so click the image or use the link below only if you have a decent Internet connection. For the assignment, we used a CommentPress text set up by the Institute for the Future of the Book.

Lot's of good things happened. I pretty much stepped out of the way (my favorite teaching style) while students worked with one another to pick apart the text. We wove in video clips from the film version of the story, so we got to think about media and narrative and a hybrid interpretation of the story. Great interaction among commentators. You can check out the online edition of An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge we created or watch my video reflection on Student-Centered Literary Studies on the Web.