A Redditor started a Wiki on the stimulus bill. The purpose: to translate its provisions into ordinary language so regular people can understand it, filtering out the legalese. And to sort out exactly how much money is assigned to what and whom.

The initiative got some 870 up votes (and lots of discussion) on Reddit, and it seems like a fair spread of people is now working on the Wiki. I thought it was interesting: both the idea and the resonance it had. Citizenship in action?

Of course, as with every Wiki, the risk of pranks and manipulation looms rather large. But at least, as one commenter notes, it seems like an interesting social experiment. And even just the act of creating it should acquaint a bunch of people with the specifics of the bill, maybe better than many of the Congressmen who had to vote on it hours after the final version was released.

It’s also distinct from a partisan initiative like readthestimulus.org (offline right now), which was sponsored by the Heritage Foundation.

No idea how useful or complete it will become. For one, while the site links to the post-conference version of the bill, it also notes that it is still largely based on the version that was passed by the House on 28 January. Whereas the bill was of course significantly modified since – first by the Senate, which made changes that according to Krugman would have created 600,000 jobs less than the original House bill, and then by the conference, which crafted a compromise between the two bills.

I’d also worry about reinventing the wheel. For example, as noted in the Reddit thread, the CBO already created a table, stretching for a few pages, that summarises the stimulus expenses, year by year, by section of the bill. (Table 2 in the enclosures of this letter from the CBO director to Nancy Pelosi.)

But still I thought it was great. At best it will make for a very neat tool, and at worst it will still, as initiative, be an encouraging sign of the times.

In my previous post I wrote about the under-30s who are supposed to be the “digital natives”:

And yet they seem to be very much adapting still. After all, in 2006 and 2007 just a third of 18-29 year olds listed the Internet as a main source of news and information. It’s only this year that the big push to 50%+ came. And that’s America; I assume developments in Europe are lagging.

As a footnote of sorts, the world of blogging in Europe, in any case, definitely seems to lag behind its US counterpart, Technorati’s study of the State of the Blogosphere 2008 showed last September. The most conspicuous difference: both European and Asian bloggers are overwhelmingly male (73%); in the US, women have almost caught up, and men only make up 57% of bloggers.

Image used under CC license from Flickr user minifig

In Europe and especially Asia, bloggers are also more likely to be youngsters, or students specifically, whose income logically tends to be below-average. Although previous editions of the report don’t give data by continent, I’m guessing this is a question of development over time. As in: older and wealthier people in the US have already gotten in on blogging more – presumably also involving a higher share of professional and corporate bloggers. Unsurprisingly, then, US bloggers also tend to invest more money in their product.

Nevertheless, the Technorati report asserted that “All studies agree [..] that blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream” and that “Blogs are Pervasive and Part of Our Daily Lives”. Go, digital adaptives: 63% of bloggers is 25-44 years old.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at RWW, however, panned these conclusions. For one, according to Technorati’s own data, the number of blog posts written each day has been fairly stable for a couple of years or is even slowing down, so what’s that about “hitting” the mainstream? Secondly, well:

Although reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream, is writing them? [..]

Of those 133 million blogs that Technorati has indexed – guess how many of them have been posted to in the last 7 days? 1.1% of them, or 1.5 million total. [..] Globally, fewer people are posting to their blogs each week than go to the Minnesota State Fair or speak Esperanto.

Kirkpatrick’s description of the future of blogging, in fact, make blogs seem like the new “old media”, at least in America. “Blogging may become centralized, profesionalized and increasingly scarce – just like other forms of media have, perhaps to a lesser degree.” Digital natives, meanwhile, are going elsewhere to air their thoughts:

Reading blogs is becoming increasingly mainstream and the line between a blog and another kind of website is growing increasingly blurred. Writing full length blog posts even as regularly as once a week is hard, though. We expect that microblogging may become more popular than blogging, if it hasn’t already! From updating your status message on Facebook or MySpace, to posting 140 word updates on lunch or politics on Twitter [..] – there are a whole lot of people already microblogging, if you will.

At an expert meeting about the future of broadcasting I attended a month or two ago (as mere observer, obviously), one participant simply observed that “the broadcasting era is over”. Not that broadcasting itself will stop, but the era in which it is the primary, central means of disseminating and receiving information and entertainment is over.

An exceedingly smart guy, he waxed a little all too rhapsodically for my taste about what this meant. In an effort to impress the import of the developments on a group of mostly aging, European veterans of old-media policy, he sketched how participatory, democratic online media infrastructures will win an “epic battle” with the traditional ‘command and control’ infrastructure of broadcasting. Which is all fair enough, but reminded me a little too much of those glory days of the 1990s, when visionary internet philosophers declared the dawn of a new age of democratic empowerment. Remember how the net would remodel society into bottom-up communities that would change the very nature of nations and democracy?

To some extent, of course, we did eventually – ten to fifteen years on – come to witness that the net can transform how democracy works, at least in the US: Dean, Obama, etc. But post-national, bottom-up democracy is still a long way coming, and in the meantime the logic of corporate capitalism has firmly reaffirmed itself on a commercialised net.

In defense of idealistic visions, individual users do time and again show that, whichever corporate overlord owns the means of publication, so to say (YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, Flickr), they create most of the content and interaction in ways they never could with newspapers or TV – and pioneer ever new ways to do so.

Results from the Pew survey, overall population. For the under-30s, changes are more drastic (below the fold)

They generate today’s mash-up culture, the corporations merely chase after the results, buying up or clamping down accordingly.

The meeting belatedly acquainted me with the notion of digital natives, coined back in 2001 by Marc Prensky (even their brains are different, did you know?): the new generation of consumers who grew up with the Internet, video games and cellphones. Roughly speaking, that’s everyone born after 1980.

In case you missed it, a Pew report released just before Christmas appears to show these digital natives truly coming into their own.