This is just weird: a conference called Audience.

There’s a reference on the About page to “engage”-ment with the audience, but the real thrust is ” the bedrock of reaching, addressing and influencing an audience of some kind.”

It might have been more interesting 30 years ago.

Here we go again — a new attack on anonymous speech, misusing the facts ripped from the current headlines about a case of one person’s slimy online attacks on another. So, as what Maureen Dowd today called the “Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger” gains publicity steam, Dowd and too many other commentators seem to be missing some key points and drawing the wrong lessons.

To refresh your memory, if you haven’t heard about it, this case involves Liskula Cohen, a model who was on the receiving end of some vile comments next to suggestive pictures, posted under a pseudonym on one of gazillions of such blogs at Google’s Blogger service. Cohen’s lawyer persuaded a judge that the posts were arguably defamatory, and the judge ordered Google to turn over the email address and other logged information it had about the blogger. The company, after first denying Cohen’s request and saying she’d need a court order, then complied and handed over the information. The data trail led back to a Cohen acquaintance named Rosemary Port. Cohen, in a demonstration of her own better instincts, said she would forgive Port instead of suing her.

That’s where this nasty little incident might have ended. Unfortunately it appears to be heading off in new directions.

Port says she’s going to sue Google, arguing that she had a right to confidentiality. Give me a break. I’m a privacy nut, but I believe Google did exactly the right thing in this instance, in part because it obeyed a clear order from a judge who also did the right thing.

No one can dispute that we have a category of human slime that uses online anonymity (or, usually more accurately, pseudonymity) to attack other people. These people, classic cowards, hide behind the virtual bushes to take potshots, and they do so with the ugliest kind of satisfaction.

But as Cohen’s case shows — the postings about her weren’t even close to being the worst material I’ve seen from anonymous sources –  online media creators aren’t exempt  from defamation laws, though it may take more effort to find out who they are. The judge in New York, Joan A. Madden, looked at the facts and, in my view, correctly decided that Port’s blog postings were sufficiently crude to justify Cohen’s plans to file a defamation lawsuit — not that they were absolutely defamatory, but that they were within the ballpark that could justify letting a jury decide.

Port, for her part, told reporters that almost no one would have known about her sleazy behavior had Cohen not gone to court in the first place and had Google not turned her name over. Talk about twisted logic. Cohen, and most likely some of their mutual acquaintances, knew about it. And the likelihood, given the Internet’s staying power, is that at least some others would have seen Port’s remarks, too. Let’s hope the courts toss any lawsuit from Port into the nearest trash can.

But, as sometimes happens, the larger case is growing, in part due to the large amount of attention it’s received from media of all varieties — newspapers, TV, radio and, of course, blogs. It’s turning into a morality play that could have a real impact on the issue of anonymity. If that impact comes in the form of helping us to establish new norms of behavior, great. If it turns into new laws, watch out.

One of the norms we’d be wise to establish is this: People who don’t stand behind their words deserve, in almost every case, no respect for what they say. In many cases, anonymity is a hiding place that harbors cowardice, not honor. The more we can encourage people to use their real names, the better. But if we try to force this, we’ll create more trouble than we fix.

People who’d ban anonymity don’t seem to realize that it’s technically impossible unless we’re willing to turn over all of our communications in every venue to a central authority — a system that would herald the end of liberty. They can’t really want such a regime, can they? Meanwhile, even that kind of structure could and would be hacked by motivated types, though with more difficulty.

Moreover, anonymity has crucially important value. We need it for whistleblowers, for political dissidents in dictatorships — for those who have important stories to tell but whose lives or livelihoods would be in jeopardy if their identities were exposed.

In other words, to save the heroes who tell us about vital matters, we have to recognize that we’ll also have people who use free speech to ignoble ends. When they cross the line to defamation, they deserve the woes they may bring on themselves.

But we don’t want, in the end, to turn everything over to the lawyers. The rest of us — the audience, if you will — need to establish some new norms as well.

We are far too prone to accepting what we see and hear. We need to readjust our internal BS meters in a media-saturated age.

So start with this principle: When you read or hear an anonymous or pseudonymous attack on someone else, you should not just assume — barring persuasive evidence of the charge — that it’s false. Assume that the accuser is an outright, contemptible liar.

This wouldn’t solve the problem. But it would help.

I’m declaring victory. I’m moving on, into a new project to help persuade passive consumers of media to become active users.

And, once again, I hope you’ll help.

A few years ago I wrote a book called We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, suggesting that we were on the verge of an evolutionary leap. Amid the democratization of media tools and access, I said, the lecture mode of journalism was giving way to conversation; and that stemmed, in part, from the simple fact that the audience always knows more than the person telling the story.

This evolutionary shift is still in its relatively early days. We are in a period of immense disruption, especially notable in the demolition of the business model that has paid for most traditional journalism for the past half-century or so.

Like everyone else, journalists have always been publicly preoccupied with their own situation. Unlike almost everyone else, they’ve owned a higher podium and a louder megaphone.

So we’ve been bombarded with angst, recriminations and, lately, panic emanating from an industry in jeopardy — a business that can no longer rely on the monopoly and oligopoly profits that spun off some occasionally brilliant journalism during the industry’s fattest era.

But look around. The messy process of reinvention is well under way.

Not a week goes by without a new announcement of an experiment in journalism. Today’s news regards a project, featuring finance writer Jane Bryant Quinn and her husband, aimed at helping local news reporting find a business model. Good luck to them — and the thousands of other folks who are working on these problems.

Last week’s news was from an Aspen Institute conference where a high-powered group of folks publicly agonized about the future of journalism. From a distance, the highlight looked to me to be the New Business Models for News project from Jeff Jarvis and company at City University of New York.

More recently it was GrowthSpur, a consultancy created by digital media pioneer Mark Potts and some colleagues, and aiming to “provide tools, training, services and ad networks that will help local sites grow and become successful businesses.”

And True/Slant; Huffington Post; Journalism Online LLC; Spot.US; EveryBlock (sold to MSNBC); and countless others (including our terrific media-entrepreneurship students at Arizona State University) who are proving out Clay Shirky’s observation: “Nothing will work, but everything might. Now’s the time for lots and lots of experiments.”

So I’m declaring victory, albeit early, on the supply side of the equation. Democratized media are giving voice to everyone who has something to add to the emergent global conversation, and the same tools are enabling smart people to experiment with sustainability models for tomorrow’s news and information. We will have plenty of quality news and information — though sorting the good stuff from the sludge will be just one of the huge issues we’ll have to deal with as we move forward into this new era. And, of course, we’ll need to help people creating that supply do a better job at all levels.

But that doesn’t solve what may be a bigger issue: crappy demand.

We have raised several generations of passive consumers of news and information. That’s not good enough anymore.

The media of today and tomorrow require us to become active users. And that’s a prime focus of this new project, Mediactive, the title of this website and an upcoming book. (Here’s the early chapter outline.)

My publisher, as with We the Media, is O’Reilly Media, the only company of its kind that truly gets this stuff. We’re going to be experimenting, in part, with the very nature of what a book is in a Digital Age.

Indeed, this entire project is about experimentation. Some of what we try will not work. Some of it will. But in the end, I hope to have created a solid user’s guide to news and information, for people who realize that they have to take some responsibility for knowing what they’re talking about.

Being active users of media is not an “eat your spinach because it’s good for you” exercise. It’s definitely good for us, but it’s also interesting and/or fun — and in the end truly satisfying.

As with We the Media, I’m not working in a vacuum. Lots of other people are thinking about these questions and trying to come up with answers, too. As always, we’re in this together.

A number of folks whom I admire greatly have signed a petition aimed at Amazon’s control-freakish policies with its Kindle e-book reader. The most notable recent example of what’s wrong with the Kindle is the remote-deleting of books that people had bought (with a refund).

The irony in Amazon’s action, since the deletions included George Orwell’s 1984, contributed to the mini-firestorm that erupted. In any case, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, publicly apologized. That was a smart and welcome move, but his letter to the Amazon community carefully didn’t promise not to do it again. This disappoints me as an author, Kindle owner and owner of a small amount of Amazon stock. (And I’m glad to see that a student is standing up in court against what happened to his own note-taking in the electronic edition.)

The petition to Amazon was organized by the good folks at the Free Software Foundation, an organization I respect immensely. You can read it here.

Although I agree with almost everything the petition says, I declined to sign. My reason was the use of the word “demand” — a word that, as I said to a foundation staff member, feels wrong in every way.

It strikes me as hollow to demand anything. Just as the incessant use of the word “must” in newspapers editorials — as in “President Obama must do this or that” — betrays editorial writers’ fundamental impotence in such matters, demanding that people do this or that seems so unlikely to lead to action that it’s nearly pointless.

I prefer to urge, and try to persuade. So here’s the petition language (which I proposed but which was not adopted) that I’d have gladly signed:

Our way of life based on the free exchange of ideas, in which books have and will continue to hold a central role. Devices like the Kindle are setting the standard for how people interact with books, but the use of software to control, monitor, or eliminate users’ books from afar constitutes a clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.

That is one reason why we — readers, authors, publishers and librarians — strongly urge that Amazon remove from the Kindle device the ability to control or access the books its users have purchased.

Amazon’s assurances that it won’t abuse this power are insufficient. Having this power is the problem. Until the company gives up this capability, the company will be tempted to use it — or may be forced to use it, by narrow private interests or by governments. Whatever Amazon’s motives for maintaining this control may be, they are not nearly as important as the public’s freedom to read books without interference or supervision.

Meanwhile, we are actively seeking alternatives to the Kindle. We will support — with our dollars, and the common sense that when we buy something we should own it — the companies that understand, and provide, true freedom of speech in the marketplace of ideas.

In the end I think Amazon will come around on this, but I also believe the people there will be unnecessarily put off by your petition, which may make it counterproductive to all of our goals.

Digital journalism pioneer Mark Potts and some colleagues have launched GrowthSpur, a consultancy aiming to “provide tools, training, services and ad networks that will help local sites grow and become successful businesses.”

More about this on Mark’s blog.

Count me as one of Mark’s fans. He’s had his setbacks, including the ill-fated Backfence project (when it failed, that was the end of my Grassroots Media Bayosphere project as well, as we’d sold it to Backfence). But he has kept working to help journalism stay alive and thrive in this new century, and for that he deserves kudos.

How well will this project work? We won’t know for a while. But Mark has lined up some excellent colleagues, and he knows a great deal about the topic at hand.

Most importantly, he and his team are among the thousands of people who are reinventing media and information — experimenting our way into a future that seems certain to be one of plenty, not scarcity. That’s the best news of all in his announcement.