TEDxMarin - Robert Tercek - Reclaiming The Power of Personal Narrative (by TEDxTalks)
TEDxMarin - Robert Tercek - Reclaiming The Power of Personal Narrative (by TEDxTalks)
This is from a live event on the Poynter Institute’s site in the US.
“Entrepreneurs should always ask themselves “why will I succeed where others failed?” If the answer is simply “I’m doing it right” or “I’m smarter,” you are probably underestimating your antecedents, which were probably run by competent or even great entrepreneurs who did everything possible to succeed. Instead your answer should include an explanation about why the timing is right – about some fundamental changes in the world that enable the idea you are pursuing to finally succeed.”
Jonathan Stray wrote in 2009 that he wanted a tool to find the original sources for reporting:
Since he wrote the post, he highlighted the Memetracker project that does something like he wants.I want to be able to see the source tree for every article or fact of interest to me, and I want filtered views on my news aggregators that show only the primary reports. It’s not important (or remotely realistic) that every reader scrutinize the sources for every article, but it is important that it is possible to do so easily.
“Facebook’s news application will be worse for media companies than Google News. Google News generally requires users to visit a website and optionally personalize it. A Facebook news application will deliver personalized news where users already spend significant time, their news feed and to their smartphone via Facebook Mobile. Personalization will happen transparently.”
In a report in MIT’s Technology Review, Erica Naone writes about a research project by IBM called Social Lens. It is a content filter for intranets that allows people to filter information that might be relevant to them. One interesting element of the software:
Because Social Lens ranks the relevance of the information it surfaces, Daly says, it includes a slider that users can manipulate to adjust the quantity of information they receive. People can set it to give them only the most important information in an area, or, when they have more time, they can expand the view to see a larger number of posts. Daly hopes the slider will help users who are reluctant to tune a filter for fear of messing it up–this way, they can still limit their view without changing the lens fundamentally.
Online Journalism review has an interview with Burt Herman, a former Associated Press reporter and bureau chief, about the launch of Storify. He explains the thinking behind the concept.
We’re flooded withTweets, YouTube videos, Flickr photos and everything else. Everyone can be a “reporter” when an event happens. But not everyone is a “journalist” – making sense of an issue and giving the context. So we built a system to help people do this, take the best of social media and make it into a story – to “storify” it.
From Online Journalism: Storify’s Burt Herman on the evolution from reporter to entrepreneur.
Clive Thompson in Wired discusses how important pictures are in helping us understand complex topics.
My crayon experiment was inspired by Dan Roam, a visual-thinking guru and author of The Back of the Napkin. Roam argues that our culture relies too heavily on words: Our school systems—and political systems—are designed to promote people who are verbal and eloquent. And text tends to encourage us to describe our problems as narratives or linear lists of facts.
But dynamic, complicated problems—like global warming and economic reform—often can’t be boiled down to simple narratives. They’re systems; they have many little parts affecting one another. In those situations, drawing a picture can clarify what’s going on. “Words,” Roam says, “won’t save us.”
“Where we struggle is with comments that we believe contribute nothing useful to the conversation. I’m not talking about obscenities and spam — we have software that aims to block the publication of those — but something more subjective. Most of our readers are business professionals who value their time highly. We believe they want comments that are as rewarding to read as they are to write. The challenge is how we deliver that experience in a way that doesn’t delay the publication of good comments nor use up resources that might be better deployed on other parts of the site.”
“A natural human tendency is to give more weight to information that supports our favorite hypothesis than to information that weakens it. This is unfortunate, as we should do just the opposite.”