Tonight’s presidential “mash-up” debate, sponsored by The Huffington Post, Slate and Yahoo! is neither a debate nor a mash-up, complains National Review’s Jim Geraghty at his Campaign Spot blog.
Geraghty links to a Wired story by Sarah Lai Stirland that explains the problem:
Mashups typically involve the combination of two disparate elements — for example, metropolitan crime data and Google maps, or rapper Jay Z’s The Black Album and the Beatles’ The White Album — to make new creations such as chicagocrime.org or Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album.To that end, Yahoo said as recently as Friday that it would upload the raw footage from the online debate to its own web-based video editing service Jumpcut, to make it easy for the footage to be spliced and diced as citizen editors saw fit. “Users will be able to create their own mashups and post the footage onto their websites afterwards — that’s for the hardcore fans who want to engage with this video,” spokesman Brian Nelson told Wired News.
But on Monday, Nelson called back to say the company had changed its mind. Instead the “mashup page” will only [let] citizens pick and choose which candidates they want to hear from on particular issues, by pointing and clicking on a web interface.
Geraghty concludes, “So in the end, users can… watch 15-minute interviews with the Democratic presidential candidates conducted by PBS host Charlie Rose. Thrilling!”
(Click the following link to read six articles published on the Times op-ed page last month as responses to the question, “What would a real new-media debate look like?”)
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