the tweney review

I love the high, faux-literary tone of this spam message I received today. Its content is essentially the same as many Nigerian wire fraud scams … but the language is awfully high-flown. Where do they come up with this stuff?

From: Lady Catherine Levett,
4 Old Church Street, Chelsea, SW3, England.

Here writes Lady Catherine Levett , suffering from cancerous ailment.
Iam married to Engineer Neil Levett an Englishman who is dead.
My husband was into private practice all his life before his death. Our life
together as man and wife lasted for three decades without child. My
husband died after a protracted illness.

My husband and I made a vow to uplift the down-trodden and the
less-privileged individuals as he had passion for persons who can not
help themselves due to physical disability or financial predicament. I can
adduce this to the fact that he needed a Child from this relationship,
which never came. When my late husband was alive he deposited the sum of 950,000. GBP
(Nine Hundred and Fifty thousand Great Britain Pounds Sterling) which were derived
from his vast estates and investment in capital market with his bank in Malaysia.
Presently, this money is still with the Bank. Recently, my
Doctor told me that I have limited days to live due to the cancerous
problems I am suffering from.

Though what bothers me most is the stroke that I have in addition to
the cancer. With this hard reality that has befallen my
family, and me I have decided to donate this fund to you and want you
to use this gift which comes from my husbands effort to fund the
upkeep of widows, widowers, orphans, destitute, the down-trodden, physically
challenged children, barren-women and persons who prove to be
genuinely handicapped financially.

As soon as I receive your reply I shall give you the contact of my
lawyer and the bank in Malaysia. I will also issue you a Letter of Authority
that will empower you as the original beneficiary of this fund. My
happiness is that I lived a life worthy of emulation. Please always be
prayerful all through your life. Please assure me that you will act
just as I have stated herein. Hope to hear from you soon and God bless you and
members of your family. you can contact me through my private email
address: levett_ladycatherine@yahoo.co.uk

Lady Catherine Levett

At Wired, we’ve been experimenting with what we loosely call “open source journalism” in a variety of ways. What we’re learning is that there’s a fairly natural flow from quick blog posts to more fully-cooked news stories, and it works something like this.

A reporter finds out about a breaking news story, and puts a quick blog post up about it. If it’s important enough, we’ll feature that blog post on the home page of Wired.com right away. In the meantime, the reporter will continue working on the story: Calling sources, checking facts, looking for additional details, and thinking through the implications. As she discovers new information, she’ll post it to the blog, either as followup posts or as updates to the original item.

Eventually, for the bigger stories, we accumulate a series of blog posts with a fair amount of original reporting in them. This can happen over the course of a morning, a day, or even a couple of weeks. At the same time, we start getting comments on the posts, and occasionally those comments have additional information that leads us in new directions. (We do read, and sometimes respond to, all our comments.)

At this point, we can write a full-blown news story, incorporating much of the reporting and even the copy from the blog posts, while adding context, analysis, and a more standard news story structure.

The result is that readers can read any of Wired’s 10 active news blogs to get up-to-the-minute, relatively unfiltered news reporting, almost as fast as we do it. Or you can follow Wired’s home page (or our Top Stories RSS feed) to get a slower, more filtered, more “cooked” news feed.

This process has worked well for us in covering some big stories, such as the Digg user revolt of May 2007, the Virginia Tech shootings in April 2007, the iPhone launch, and coverage of a variety of industry conferences. We also use it almost daily, on a host of smaller stories.

But it’s not fast enough. For some people, even the blogs are too slow. That’s why a number of us in the Wired newsroom are starting to use Twitter, Facebook, and other social software to post about news stories we’re working on, even before we’ve blogged about them.

I’m making my Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn pages public, and other reporters are, too. I’ve also created a Facebook group for the tech business news beat that I oversee — it’s called The Epicenter, and it’s open to anyone who is interested in news about the tech business.

It’s all very experimental, and I’m not sure yet which media are going to work best for long-term communication and collaboration on the news. But my goal is to make something explicit about my work that has actually been true for my entire career: I’m not just a source of information, I’m also a hub for information, a conduit for facilitating the flow of news and perspective.

I’ll see you online.

UPDATE: Scott Karp has an interesting article on this topic called “Can Blogs Do Journalism?” The answer, of course, is yes, and not surprisingly, blog publishers are discovering that daily news and print journalists make pretty good bloggers.

My daughter and I will be on TV this week, 8pm local time Wednesday night (Nov. 14) on most PBS stations. That’s when our “GeekDad” segment will air, sometime during that night’s Wired Science program.

Wired Science is a collaboration between Wired (my employer) and KCET (a PBS station in LA). I’m not really involved, except that one day a video crew came to our house and filmed stuff as Clara helped me build a UFO-shaped hovercraft out of plywood, a piece of tarp, a leaf blower, and of course lots of duct tape. I also did two other episodes, except with some local high school students instead of Clara. I hear those episodes may be appearing on the Wired Science website, but not on TV.

Here’s a link to the Geekdad: UFO segment (just a preview now, but may have the full segment after Wednesday).

So my daughter’s a star! If you like her performance, send fanmail to wiredscience@kcet.org and ask them to bring her back next season!

UPDATE: Here’s the GeekDad: UFO page on the PBS website, with the video and comments from viewers.

Jay Rosen: ‘No one owns the practice of reporting or assigns the right to do it. It’s a democratic thing to tell others what’s going on and “show your work.”‘ The journalism that bloggers actually do

This looks really cool: Google Earth now lets you explore the sky, too. Google LatLong: Sky: The final frontier

In short: keyboard is great; speed and battery life suck: Freedom to Tinker » Blog Archive » One Laptop Per Child, Reviewed by 12-Year-Old

Thanks to repeated viewings of Jimmy Neutron, Clifford the Big Red Dog, and Scooby Doo, Clara is now obsessed with the idea of building a super-duper clubhouse that contains, among other things, trap doors, secret pools, a waterfall, and levers that make things happen (like pop people into the air). But most of all, she wants it to have a flying saucer — that really flies.

KJ and I really want to encourage this obsession but it’s getting hard to figure out what to do with it that will be a) practical and b) satisfying to Clara, and maybe even c) educational and inspirational for her. With KJ’s help she’s made spec lists and has started drawing plans.

I posed my problem to Chris Anderson, who edits the Geekdad blog (oh yeah, and Wired mag too). He was nice enough to pose my question to his readers — many of which have some great suggestions here:

Ask Geekdad: My daughter wants a UFO

Our biggest trick — and it’s not really a big stroke of genius or anything — is simply to make a huge and dramatic presentation and then not let anyone actually see the phone. The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: You can’t reverse-engineer my presentation skills, sorry

I’ve been playing with an iPhone all weekend, and I haven’t had this much fun with a gadget in a long time. Is it useful? You bet. No phone does web browsing or email quite as well as this one. Plus it’s a great music player, video player, and photo browser, and it’s got tons of other features. But it’s not exactly a productivity tool: If you’re expecting to edit web pages, write long emails, or work on office documents, you’re looking at the wrong phone. It’s more of a lifestyle phone: Like iLife for your pocket. All you Mac fans will know what I’m talking about.

Check out my full reviews (and the rest of Wired News’ iPhone reviews) on Gadget Lab.

Really, what could be more perfect than an elegant titanium spork? Spork of the gods