Some of the commentary about Reddit and the bombings has made it seem as though all of Reddit was engaged in a massive “witch hunt” to find the identity of the suspects in Boston. But the reality is that other parts of Reddit were doing things that were much more valuable, and I think we shouldn’t lose sight of that. So here are a few things that I think Reddit got right:

• It collected verified information: There were multiple Reddit threads that did nothing but curate or aggregate information about the bombings, including links to police reports, news articles and other sources. These threads also helped collect photos and video clips of the Boston marathon that might have contained useful information — and asked anyone with that information to also send those photos and clips to the authorities.
• It helped people who wanted to help: A number of the threads early on in the aftermath contained lists of all the things that users could do if they wanted to assist not just the investigation but the people who had been injured — from links to Google’s Person Finder and the Red Cross help line to information on where to pick up bags left at the scene, or airlines who had changed their policies on cancelling flights as a result of the attacks.
• It helped to verify facts: In most of the information-gathering threads, there is real-time verification of the info occurring, as users challenge other users to prove their claims. It is almost identical to the discussion that occurs on a Wikipedia “talk” page, in which editors try to verify the information that is being posted to an entry. Multiple updates occur within minutes of each other, and each one is marked with the time and any edits that took place.

Is Reddit capable of journalism? Yes

Even Reddit itself posted a disclaimer on one of its threads that said it isn’t trying to be a media entity, and that what it does isn’t journalism. And the user who created the “Find Boston Bombers” sub-Reddit or thread told The Atlantic that he doesn’t think of it as journalism either, and that no one should ever rely on such threads as a source because there is so much conflicting information flying around. He also admitted that the attempt to identify the bombers from photos was “a disaster.”

So if even Reddit itself doesn’t claim to be producing journalism, why do I keep saying it is? Because I think Reddit and Twitter and other social tools are broadening the concept of journalism. Some, like my friend Raju Narisetti from News Corp., believe that we should call this kind of thing something else — like that horrible term “user-generated content” — and leave the term journalism for things that are produced by professionals who are held to standards (although some might question whether the New York Post fits that description).

@mathewi you should fear. Find a new definition for non-journalism and use it. Why call ugc, crowds as journalism. It isnt.—
Raju Narisetti (@rajunarisetti) April 22, 2013

In a nutshell, I believe that journalism is being atomized — that is, broken down into its component parts. One of those is the news-gathering function, whether it’s from eyewitnesses or just on-the-ground observation. This part of journalism can and is being done by anyone, thanks to what Om has called the “democratization of distribution,” and it can be hugely valuable. And the verification function has also been outsourced, so that people like Eliot Higgins can play a key role in identifying Syria weapons without leaving their apartment.

Reddit may have failed badly in one specific thread, and that is unfortunate. But other parts of the site have and continue to perform valuable functions that I see as part of the broader landscape or ecosystem of networked journalism. Instead of focusing just on the downside of that community, we should be thinking about how to take advantage of it — how to turn a negative feedback loop into a positive one.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Shutterstock / wellphoto K

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Within hours of the explosions in Boston, members of the Reddit community had created a thread (or sub-Reddit) about the incident, in an attempt to identify potential suspects. Users posted photos that had been published online or submitted by onlookers and analyzed video clips, piecing together clues like a specific kind of zipper that was used on a backpack found at the scene. Eventually, two potential suspects were identified — including one who posted a message on Facebook about his innocence.

Plenty of mistakes to go around

After some more investigation and crowdsourced information gathering, users on the Reddit thread seemed more or less convinced that the two were not likely to be the actual bombers, and eventually declared them “cleared.” Meanwhile, the New York Post identified the same two people as potential suspects and published their photos on the front page (both suspects have now been identified — one was reportedly shot by police on Friday and as of mid-afternoon on Friday the other was said to be on the run).

Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic wrote that the process taking place on Reddit amounted to “vigilantism,” and was reprehensible, and warned against encouraging untrained people to try and determine the validity of forensic evidence after such an event. But is what happened on Reddit so bad? And is it any worse than what the traditional media have done in similar situations? I’m not convinced.

Yes, users of Reddit made mistakes — plenty of them, including identifying the wrong person as a suspect a second time on Thursday after erroneous information emerged from police scanners and other sources, something which caused a considerable amount of grief for a young man’s family and led to an apology posted on Reddit by a moderator.

But it should be noted that CNN and the NY Post have made plenty of mistakes as well, something Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review doesn’t really mention in his post about how brilliant the traditional media was and how wrong Reddit has been. The larger point is that this isn’t an either/or situation — crowdsourcing is valuable, and has been valuable for journalism and will continue to be. This is admittedly not an example of it at its finest.

Remember when we didn’t think random people putting together an encyclopedia would ever work? And yet it has — in part because it has a lot more structure than Reddit or 4chan. And those sites would probably be a lot more useful in these cases if people spent more time thinking and less time typing. But that doesn’t negate the value they can provide. The idea of using the knowledge and resources of the crowd is the whole point behind Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s “open journalism,” and it is a force we need to figure out how to tame, not dismiss as irrelevant based on one incident.

Open journalism works better

Am I calling what Reddit has been doing since the Boston bombings journalism? Yes. It may not encompass the entirety of what we know as journalism, and it is clearly flawed, but it is certainly an important aspect of it — just as Eliot Higgins, an unemployed British accountant, is performing a valuable journalistic act (one that New York Times writer C.J. Chivers has recognized) in verifying smuggled weapons in Syria by watching hundreds of hours of YouTube videos every day, even though no one is paying him to do so.

Will Oremus at Slate makes a fairly persuasive argument that Reddit has in some cases been *more* responsible in its attempts to identify the individuals than some traditional sources, including the Post. This kind of crowdsourced fact-checking and verification of evidence has been going on for years — it’s just more mainstream now. And anyone looking for evidence of someone jumping the gun and encouraging vigilantism doesn’t have to look any further than CNN.

When I wrote recently about the benefits of having journalism occur out in the open, journalism teacher Steve Fox and others said I didn’t spend enough time on the need for verification, and maybe I didn’t, but I believe this also should be done out in the open. In fact, one of the benefits to doing so is the ability to have more eyes on the information at hand — thereby making it easier to filter out the noise and find the signal, or triangulate the truth. As Jay Rosen has said, journalism gets better the more people there are doing it. And that includes Reddit.

Post and thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr users Christian Scholz and Eva Blue and Jan-Arief Purwanto

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With its AaaS, United Kingdom-based Boston will use software from Ellexus to essentially provide Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to customers. Once enrolled, developers will be able to spin up or down multiple nodes on Boston’s Viridis microservers, which use the low-power Calxeda systems.

The impact of the Boston AaaS could trickle down the supply chain to Calxeda and AMD as well as other companies making or planning microservers and, naturally, ARM itself.

As I reported last month, the microserver market is expected to keep growing, and the new ARM cloud could bump up the growth rate. One might say it could help kick some AaaS.

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Speaking at Bloomberg LLC headquarters on Thursday morning, Alan Patricof of Greycroft Partners rejected the idea that New York needs a “big win” to show it can be a real rival to Silicon Valley. Patricof noted that New York companies like Buddy Media could have gone public but were acquired instead; he added that tech giants like Facebook, Google and AOL all employ thousands in the city.

Other speakers touted New York’s recent climb in relation to other cities.

“New York has surpassed Boston as the clear number two,” said Jonathan Bowles of the Center for an Urban Future. Others said that, outside of biotech, Boston has “lost luster” as a tech hub.

Ann Li, an economic advocate for the city, added that, unlike Silicon Valley, New York is not just about “tech” but instead “dash tech” — for example, “ad tech,” “fit tech” and “fashion tech.”

The boosters did concede, however, that New York still doesn’t offer the same financial support for tech as the west coast.

“There’s a dearth of B-round funding,” said Patricof. “There’s not enough $10 million or $15 million rounds.”

Patricof attributed the money deficit to the presence of too many angel investors and too many copycat startups. But he noted that, unlike venture capitalist Fred Wilson, who famously didn’t make a “single new investment “ last year,  Greycroft invested in 18 companies. Patricof also predicted that several New York ad tech companies would go public in 2013.

As for whether New York will ultimately displace Silicon Valley as the pre-eminent tech hub, that seems unlikely — and it’s not just a question of venture capital or talent. Like Hollywood, which other cities have tried to replicate for decades, the Valley has an intangible people quality that defies duplication.

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Coupled with the markets T-Mobile has already upgraded, it has a new HSPA+ network running in the PCS 1900 MHz in 37 cities, including many of the country’s largest. T-Mobile isn’t updating its coverage figure for the overhauled network, but these new markets will add considerable numbers to its last count of 100 million people covered.

T-Mobile will begin selling the iPhone sometime next year, but in the interim it has been trying to lure customers with unlocked iPhones over to its network. Its biggest obstacle, however, was the fact that its old network configuration could only supply the iPhone with 2G speeds. By relocating its HSPA+ from the Advanced Wireless Service (AWS) to the PCS band, it can now link to the iPhone’s 3G radios, but T-Mobile also clears up space for its LTE launch next year.

Update: Interestingly enough, T-Mobile customers won’t be the only ones benefiting from this upgrade. T-Mobile mobile virtual network operator Solavei said it would take advantage of its wholesaler’s reconfigured network to support the iPhone as well. Like T-Mobile it won’t sell the iPhone, but it will sell a micro or nano-SIM that fits into an unlocked iPhone and allows customers to take advantage of its $49 unlimited voice, text and data plans. Other MVNOs like Straight Talk already offer similar iPhone SIM activations, though they work mainly on AT&T’s HSPA network. Now that the reconfiguration is well underway, expect more MVNOs to start offering iPhone support over the T-Mobile network soon.

Here is the full description of the new upgraded markets from T-Mobile’s blog:

• New York, including The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island
• Newark, N.J., including the surrounding cities of East Orange, Elizabeth, Jersey City, North Bergen, Paterson and Union City
• Boston and Cambridge, Mass., including the surrounding cities of Amherst, Andover, Arlington, Bedford, Belmont, Billerica, Braintree, Brockton, Brookline, Burlington, Canton, Chelmsford, Chelsea, Chicopee, Dedham, Everett, Framingham, Hadley, Holbrook, Holyoke, Lawrence, Lexington, Lowell, Ludlow, Lynn, Malden, Marblehead, Medford, Melrose, Metheun, Milton, Nahant, Natick, Needham, Newton, Quincy, Reading, Revere, Salem, Saugus, Sommerville, Stoneham, Swampscott, Tewksbury, Wakefield, Walpole, Waltham, Watertown, Weston, Westwood, Weymouth, Wilmington, Winchester, Winthrop and Woburn
• Springfield, Mass.
• Providence, R.I., including the surrounding cities of Cranston, North Providence, Pawtucket and Warren
• Philadelphia
• Detroit and Warren, Mich., including the surrounding cities of Dearborn, Romulus, Royal Oak, Sterling Heights and Troy
• Dallas, including the surrounding cities of Arlington, Carrolton, The Colony, Denton, Farmers Branch, Flower Mound, Frisco, Garland, Grand Prairie, Irving, Lancaster, Lewisville, McKinney, Mesquite, Plano, Richardson, Rowlett and Southlake
• Fort Worth, Texas, including the surrounding cities of Keller and Mansfield
• Austin, Texas including the surrounding city of Round Rock
• San Antonio
• Tampa, Fla., including the surrounding cities of Clearwater, Largo, Safety Harbor, St. Petersburg and Vinoy Park

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Boston won the opportunity to pick the brains of six IBM engineers — including one from Tokyo — who flew in to check out its traffic situation and figure out a way to consolidate, analyze and use existing traffic data feeds as well as new data sources including (of course) Twitter feeds, to ease the city’s notorious traffic jams. The effort was reported in Friday’s Boston Globe.

The Internet of things links data flowing from traffic lights, CO2 sensors, even cars themselves, in a way that could automate traffic re-routing in what could be a time- and gas-saving assist for  commuters.

“There are literally millions of data points per second — from GPS and cellphone technology — that can be analyzed and made intelligent,” Steve Wysmuller, an IBM Global Services exec, told the Globe.

The IBM experts, along with techies from Boston University and the Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, were to come up with a plan to better manage traffic — by spotting problems faster — and to minimize carbon emissions with better bicycling, parking and traffic management policies, according to the City’s web site.

In what may come as a shock to a city that perversely prides itself on its awful traffic, researcher Inrix ranks Boston tenth on its list of most-car-choked U.S. cities after Honolulu (number 1), L.A., and (gasp) New York (see chart.)

It is not clear how much it will cost for Boston to actually implement IBM’s proposed changes. There’s plenty of data, but the infrastructure needed to connect it and manage it to make it actionable, still needs work.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user David Boyle

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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, along with MIT president Susan Hockfield; Intel CTO Justin Rattner, and CSAIL director Daniela Rus will speak at the kick off of these efforts later on Wednesday. Funding for bigdata@CSAIL was not disclosed but The Boston Globe reported that Intel is backing its effort with $2.5 million. Xconomy has more on the event here. 

As GigaOM has reported, Massachusetts has good bloodlines when it comes to databases and big data. Companies like Endeca (purchased last year by Oracle), EMC, as well as startups like Akiban, NuoDB, VoltDB, Cloudant are all fielding big data efforts in or around the Boston-Cambridge metro area. Hewlett-Packard, which is based in Silicon Valley, hosts much of its big data effort here as well.

MIT, always a tech powerhouse, is well placed to jump-start more big data efforts but given the size of the big data wave, it certainly won’t have the field to itself.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user cking

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Boston and Cambridge are battling it out to be the site of Google’s proposed expansion in the area.

Google wants to expand at or near its existing site in Cambridge’s Kendall Square, but hit bureaucratic roadblocks with the City Council, according to The Boston Herald.  

The Kendall Square area is densely populated, and the proposed Google expansion would impinge on an existing park.

That’s all it took for Boston officials, including Mayor Thomas Menino, to sweep in, pitching the city’s waterfront Innovation District as an ideal spot for the local Google office, which is will be split between engineering and sales functions. This area, also known as the Seaport District, has lots of free land — the bulk of it now is parking lots. Developer John Hynes III has contacted Google several times about relocating there, according to The Herald.  

The Boston-Cambridge corridor is eager to attract high-tech companies. So far, Kendall Square, close to MIT, has been the hotbed. Amazon is about to move into the Cambridge Innovation Center building, and Hewlett-Packard is setting up a big data center a few Red Line stops away, at Alewife.

Kendall Square is also home to  Microsoft’s New England Research and Development (or NERD) center, as well as local IBM, and Oracle operations. But Boston is aggressively courting biotech and high-tech companies to the nascent Innovation District near the harbor, where MassChallenge has already set up shop.

With the two cities scrapping for tax revenue and jobs, don’t expect the competition to ease up any time soon.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user soelin.

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1: The social aspect is big

Many participants, and they varied from undergrads to folks in their 40s and 50s, came to see what others are up to, and to network.

Marsh Sutherland, CEO and co-founder of Referral Bonus, loves hackathons because, he said, they make his “brain tingle and adrenaline pump,” and he bonds with new friends. And, he said, “I help create something I’m proud of.”

Andres Douglas, a Boston-based developer who has participated in Facebook hackathons, Music Hack Day and TechCrunch Disrupt events, agreed that it’s all about the people. “It’s great getting to work with new people. It’s kind of like dating. We came with two [team members] and added two here,” he said.

Aaron Roth, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, said he loves the enforced focus of the event.  ”You’re working with a team to create something new and great, in a short period of time, and work continuously through the night,” he said.

2: Don’t underestimate the thrill of adventure

There is huge appeal in trying out new things.  ”If you’re a developer, this may mean learning a new language, using a new set of APIs or building a product that’s different from your ‘day-job,’” said Jeffrey Peden, founder and CEO of CraveLabs, a Cambridge,Mass.-based maker of social network marketing tools. The same motivation holds with marketers and sales people, he said. They all want to try something new.

Cheryl Tom, whose day job is as a Montreal-based director of front-end development for CrowdTwist.com, said she welcomes the opportunity to hone her skillset and add new expertise. This weekend she learned Facebook and Twilio APIs.

3: They’re great talent pools

Several attendees that are already in established businesses use hackathons to check out prospective programmers and developers. Said Peden: “There is no better way to evaluate folks than to see how they go through a 30-hour, start-to-finish marathon of trying to build something — and it’s not something you can just show up at the end to discover.”

Several attendees said they’d received feelers from prospective employers.

4: They’re addictive

Nearly every AngelHack attendee seemed to be a hackathon veteran.  Sutherland has participated in several Boston Startup Weekends and is helping to build a similar event in Spokane, Wash.

Patrick Leahy, a business student at Penn’s Wharton School, may be an extreme example. On January 13, he was in the 48-hour PennApps 2012 hackathon. On February 27 it was the 72-hour paid hackathon for Wharton MBAs. This weekend was AngelHack. And Tuesday he’ll be aboard the StartupBus Boston for a 73-hour traveling hackathon to South by Southwest.

5: People like prizes

For all the talk of camaraderie and collaboration, free pizza, Red Bull and beer — there are also prizes. Teams get cash money for the best use of APIs from sponsors — Microsoft Bing, Box, Viximo, Twilio — and others.  There’s a free Geeks on a Plane trip. And tickets to the upcoming GigaOM Structure:Data conference.

Asked if the prizes mattered, Penn’s Roth said: “Oh, yeah. Big time.”

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While the area is more famous for the tech luminaries and startups it lost to other regions — Harvard alums Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft’s Bill Gates being the most famous examples  – it still can claim a roster of impressive tech startups.

As a Silicon Valley-based partner for Boston-based North Bridge Venture Partners‘  Paul Santinelli has studied the differences between the two technology hotbeds up close and come up with a few conclusions. ”Boston is strong in infrastructure, comms [communications], and enterprise software — the kinds of technologies needed to build businesses,” he said in a recent interview.

Silicon Valley — which led the league in VC money with more than $3 billion invested in Q4 2011, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/NVCA MoneyTree Report, is much more focused on the consumer markets, Santinelli said.

But in the post-minicomputer, post-PC world, why build a business in Boston? “That’s a question we had to answer in a very real way when we got started,” said David McFarlane, Co-Founder and CEO of Akiban Technologies, a Boston-based NewSQL database startup. Some of the company’s backers wanted it to relocate to Silicon Valley, he said, but Akiban resisted.

“There’s a tremendous amount of talent in the Boston area where there are quite a few database and data integration companies. There are a number of founding architects that came from Object Design, from Archivas, Blue Agave, and Oberon and InterSystems,” he said. Object Design was a pioneer in object-oriented databases; Blue Agave, a demand management specialist, was acquired by I2 Technologies (which was then acquired by JDA Software); Archivas was a storage startup acquired by HDS; InterSystems is the company behind the Cache database (an outgrowth of the  MUMPS database) used by many hospitals and healthcare organizations.

Ori Herrnstadt, McFarlane’s co-founder and Akiban CTO agreed. “The caliber of architects you found here in the database world was unmatched. The Vertica, the Netezza, the Object Design guys were all here,” he said.  (Vertica, Netezza and Object Design ended up at  Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Progress Software respectively.)

Other hot database or storage oriented startups in the Boston area include Kinvey, ParElastic, Ginger.io, Sonian, Hadapt, Cloudant and VoltDB, the latest brainchild of serial database entrepreneur Michael Stonebraker, who backed Informix, INGRES, Streambase and, Vertica.

It doesn’t hurt that MIT, Harvard, Tufts, Boston University, Boston College, Brandeis, Bentley, Babson, UMass/Boston and other colleges are shoehorned into a compact area around the city. Those schools provide a steady stream of young talent to power startups. Another key part of Boston’s deep bench comes from its background as the home of the minicomputer — the mid-range machines that bridged the mainframe and PC eras. Those minicomputer companies — Digital Equipment Corp., Prime Computer, Data General, Wang Labs, ComputerVision — have gone the way of the dodo bird, but left behind an impressive array of technology experience that remains relevant.

Boston’s proximity to east coast financial companies is another plus. Those companies are not only a possible source of investment but a potential customer base, Santinelli said.

Still, as evidenced by the number of local companies snapped up by outside tech giants, the Boston-Cambridge nexus can feel more like a farm team to distant big leaguers. IBM alone has bought 20 local area companies since it purchased Lotus Development Corp. in 1995. IBM’s most recent purchase was Burlington, Mass.-based Emptoris last December.  Oracle (bought Cambridge-based Endeca in October) and others have cherry picked promising startups in the area. There simply aren’t many tech giants based here any more. On the plus side, the well of expertise still runs deep in the area that witnessed the rise (and fall) of the minicomputer era.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user John Stracke

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