As I work on the chapters for the book, I’m incorporating some of what I’ve been writing on these topics in recent years. Each of the following posts seems relevant to the chapter topic, “Tools and Techniques of Creation”. (Special thanks to Josh Sprague, who put these pages together.)
Chapter 4: Tools/Techniques of Creation
2009
EveryBlock partners with New York Times
Good news: EveryBlock, the terrific local data site started by Adrian Holovaty, is launching a partnership with the New York Times. more…
2008
Spot.us Launches
Spot.us home pageDavid Cohn, one of the bright lights among new journalists, has launched Spot.us, a site that aims to persuade people from communities to send money to support excellent journalism about specific issues. I’m an advisor to this project and believe strongly that he’s onto something important. more…
Skype Cannot be Trusted, Period
As Salon notes in “Skype sells out to China“, the eBay-owned service has collaborated with a Chinese company to enable spying on the allegedly encrypted messages that Skype users send each other to and from, and within, China. This disgusting sellout should surprise no one. more…
Blogger Libel Insurance
Bloggers are not immune from the law, and they need to understand this clearly. Insurance is a pain, but it’s not a frivolous expense. more…
Basecamp for Organizing Projects
For the past several years I’ve been involved in a variety of projects ranging from education to startups. All have involved collaboration, and in most cases the people involved were not in a single location. more…
YouTube’s Citizen News
The YouTube Citizen News Channel wants to highlight citizen videos with news value. more…
Citizen Huff’s Potential Big Score
New York Times: Citizen Huff: According to one person who was briefed on discussions but was not permitted to speak for attribution, the company has at least looked at the value of the site if it were put up for sale, and a figure around $200 million was used. That would put the price at more than $50 for each visitor, a high valuation. Using the site’s internal figures, 14 million unique visitors for the most recent month, the price would be closer to $15 for each user. more…
On Media Credentials, Billionaires Don’t Have to be Logically Consistent
Jon Garfunkel: Easy Mark: The Elephant in the Locker Room. (I)t’s still immensely foolish as it is to ban someone from the lockerroom because they call themselves a blogger. If a cutoff is needed, I’d suggest one based on the old standby, circulation. more…
Off the Record? Not Unless You Agree Ahead of Time
When I was a reporter and then a columnist, I had a rule that no public figure — that is, anyone who’d had experience with being interviewed — had the right to declare anything off the record after the fact. Now I might agree not to publish something if it wasn’t relevant, but if something was to be off the record it would be decided ahead of time. more…
2007
Utility in Google’s Mobile Maps
In Phoenix last week we used Google’s Mobile Maps on the Nokia N95 for a variety of tasks, and found the application to be a huge value. The software looks for the nearest mobile tower (or GPS location if you’ve turned on the GPS function), and when you search for a type of business — we were looking, for example, for a fabric store — you get the nearest ones. more…
Movable Type Goes Open Source
It’s the smart move: Movable Type is now open source. This will make life a little more complicated for WordPress, but that’s all to the good. more…
Citizen Journalism Tools in a Box
The folks at the Tactical Technology Collective are planning to release soon a “Citizen Journalism Toolkit” that
will provide accessible and effective training materials on selected free software tools and web applications with a focus on giving people what they need to know in order to create and distribute content. The materials will cover print publishing, using images, online publishing and audio.
Get the People to Take the Pictures
Pantagraph.com: Newspapers file suit against IHSA. The Illinois Press Association filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Illinois High School Association in an effort to overturn a rule that limits access to school sporting events and the use of photos taken at those events.more…
Views of the California Fires
It’s astonishing to see what people are doing to help us understand the California fires. Most intriguing are the mashups and postings from all kinds of entities. more…
A Common Traveler Tale: High Cost Net Access
My frequent travels expose me to a common problem: high-cost Internet access away from home. This is not a serious issue in the U.S., where I have a T-Mobile hotspot account and find no-extra-charge Wi-Fi connections in many hotels and other venues. more…
Making a Business of Citizen Media
Good news: We’re about to launch a first in a series of postings about citizen media as a business. Specifically, we’ll be exploring possible business models for citizen journalism and the processes surrounding the creation of a website. more…
Dan Rather: Still Not Getting It
On Larry King’s program, Dan Rather insisted again that the 60 Minutes story about George W. Bush’s National Guard “service” — based in part on the documents that CBS failed to prove authentic – was fair and accurate. more…
“Their” Homes? Come On
In the coverage of the housing bubble deflation, journalists continue to use an expression that defies reality. more…
Falling for the Big-Dollar Lawsuit Claim
When, oh when, will journalists stop falling for the bogus PR stunts lawyers and their clients play when filing lawsuits? Apparently, never. more…
Nokia E90’s Enormous Potential
This device, not yet officially on sale in the U.S., has game-changing potential for journalism. If I ran a newsroom and could talk the money folks into it, I’d hand out E90s to some of my journalists and Web developers. I’d tell them to experiment like crazy, and to watch what other people are doing with these and other powerful mobile systems. I suspect they’d do some amazing things. more…
Is Postal Rate Hike for Magazines Fair?
Free Press, a think tank and lobbying group, posts: “Stamp Out the Rate Hike: What’s at Stake.” This is a fervent call for the public to do what it can to change the terms of a postal rate hike for magazines. more…
Movable Type 4.0 Launches
This is a WordPress blog, but no one who’s looking into starting or upgrading their blogging platform should ignore the latest from SixApart. Based on its description and some reviews, Movable Type 4.0 boasts an astounding number of new features, plus a serious ease-of-use upgrade. more…
Sun Microsystems Takes Important Step in Releasing Information
The Silicon Valley company’s general counsel, Mike Dillon, writes that on Monday Sun:
will release our financial information first to the public via our website, RSS feeds and 8-K filing. Then, about 10 minutes later, we will release the information to the traditional private agencies and their paid subscribers.
Interactive Map Helps Describe British Floods
The BBC Berkshire’s interactive flood map:
takes the best photos and video sent in by you to berkshire.online@bbc.co.uk, alongside reports from our correspondents around the county and flood warning information from the Environment Agency.
‘Advocacy Mashups’ Take Mapping to Policy Realms
MSNBC: Advocacy mashups harness power of mapping. Advocacy mashups are tackling the most vexing problems of our time, from New Orleans post-Katrina clean-up to the possibility that some 2,300 Islamic mosques and schools across the country pose a homegrown terror threat.
Journalistic Map Mashup by Think Tank
The map at left comes courtesy of the Cato Institute, where Radley Balko has been looking into the increasing number of botched paramilitary-style police raids on private citizens. This presentation starkly shows how common this kind of thing has become — and, as Balko has testified before Congress, this data may only be the tip of the iceberg. more…
Why Wikipedia News Works
This is an important article, in part because it demystifies a process that many folks have found beyond bizarre. But the authority the author describes is a different kind than the top-down authority of traditional work. For the most part, the people exercising the authority are able to do so by general agreement in the community, not by fiat. more…
Twittergrams
In my keynote at the OhmyNews forum today, one of the things I cited as an idea with intriguing potential for news purposes was Twittergram, a service created by Dave Winer in the past few weeks. It connects audio with Twitter. more…
Citizen Media Campaign Coverage
The Huffington Post and NewAssignment.net are launching Off the Bus, a site where citizen journalists will help cover the presidential campaign. It’s off to a promising start with the hiring of Amanda Michel and Zack Exley, two young people who are old hands at political campaigns. more…
Grassroots (Sports) Media
At Poynter.org, Steve Klein discusses deals by niche sports sites YourMTB.com and YourCycling.com, which “have developed an innovative program to provide coverage for cycling races and events that allows competitors and/or spectators to blog, take photograph and shoot video.” more…
NewsMap: Stories that Move in Space
If you’ve been following the comments in this blog, you’ll note that Simon Dixon has unwrapped NewsMap, which he says
puts a newsroom-friendly face on the Google Maps API. The end-user sees an annotated map (or satellite image), with various points of interest marked on it, using custom icons. The points are presented in a sequence, allowing the map’s creator to tell a story in flowing narrative, or simply to encourage continued click-throughs.more…
Journalistic Malfeasance at Republican “Debate”
Paul Krugman of the New York Times nails it today in a column (unfortunately behind the Times’ pay-wall) lambasting the Washington political press corps for its utter blindness at the Republican presidential “debate” a few days ago. (I put debate in quotes because those events, with so many candidates, so little time and an electorate assumed to have a short attention span, are little more than press conferences.) more…
Journalists Don’t Need to Know Computer Programming
DigiDave asks, “Where’s the Money to Teach Journalists How to Code?”
Why? Makes more sense to me that journalists should work with programmers.
Where 2.0: Where are the Journalists?
I’m at the Where 2.0 conference in San Jose, California, seeing a bunch of amazing new geographic tools. I find myself wondering whether certain journalists are present. more…
New site plans collaboratively made films
This looks intriguing. YourBroadcaster is not just another photo or video sharing site, although you can use it like that. The goal of the site is to collaboratively create five feature films in five different genres (bollywood, horror, thriller, comedy, drama). Users upload scripts, auditions, settings, etc. Other members vote on which uploaded material will be used in the film. more…
Citizen Journalism Startup in Middle East
7iber.com is a new citizen media startup in Jordan. The aim is to create:
an independent web-based citizen-media news outlet from Jordan. 7iber provides original, creative and interesting content, seeking to better inform our audience of untapped Jordanian issues as well as providing local perspectives and first-hand accounts of news, politics, arts and culture. more…
Nokia’s Killer New-Media Gadget
The journalistic potential for the N95 is simply enormous. My UC-Berkeley students took some phones Nokia loaned us to New Orleans to work on a class project (more on that very soon), and I have plans for several cool experiments in the near future. more…
Outsourced Journalism
For the money he’s paying, he could hire local bloggers. They’d do it better, with more perspectives — and have the advantage of, uh, being there. more…
Ourmedia turns 2.0
Ourmedia, a site where citizen-media types — especially podcasters and video producers — can upload and discuss their work, has launched a 2.0 version of the site. The page is much clearer in its aims than before, with a clean design and many tools for citizen media creators. more…
A Citizen Media Experiment
I’m in New Orleans, or more precisely on a plane heading that way, with my class from the University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism. There, along with my co-instructor, Bill Gannon, and Dartmouth College researcher Quintus Jett, we’re planning to visit a neighborhood called Gentilly. more…
Consulting the Viewer with TV News
Dave Winer has created a smart mockup of what he calls MSNBC-of-the-Future. The viewers can use checkboxes to say what they’re interested in seeing covered, and what they’re not interested in seeing covered. (Update: Dave gets lots of responses.) more…
Chicago Tribune’s Hyperlocal Bid
It’s called Triblocal, and it’s like several other project already under way or in planning stages at major American media companies.
The more experiments in this arena, the better.
Needed: You, to Help Capture Public Events
Doug Kaye has started PodCorps, “an all-volunteer team of audio/video producers who record and publish important spoken-word events anywhere in the world.” more…
Mobile Phone Journalism at Virginia Tech
vatech.jpgThe horrific events at Virginia Tech this morning — the killing of “at least 21” (update: at least 31) are the top of everyone’s news in the U.S. The reporting, if you will, was enhanced by mobile-phone camera images that CNN is showing (available via the link above). more…
Why You Should Back Up Your Data
In Helsinki last Friday morning, I had a meeting-room accident just before a talk to some folks at Nokia, the mobile-phone company. The result was a non-functioning computer requiring the replacement of the machine’s internal hard disk. This occurred just hours before I had to give a talk at a large gathering of journalists. more…
A Report and a ‘Cookbook’ on Local Citizen Media Sites
Two new reports about citizen media have been released recently, both with a focus on local sites. Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News? The rise and prospects of hyperlocal journalism was released by J-Lab. The report by Jan Schaffer consolidates and analyzes responses from 191 people involved with or familiar with online citizen media, including 31 operators of citizen media sites. more…
New Journalism Projects Funded
The University of Maryland’s J-Lab has announced:
Ten new ideas for amplifying community news will receive $12,000 New Voices grants to launch news sites for under-covered communities, embed TV reporters in neighborhoods, network regional radio programs, and map the local impact of climate change. more…
Google’s My Maps
Google Maps personal version is going to be a huge change in the mapping market. It lets people annotate their own maps in rich ways, using the Web the way it was possible to use the application Google Earth before. more…
Slate’s Fray to be Updated: Your Input Requested
Slate’s a terrific magazine, but it hasn’t been very “webby” in ways that other publications have long since achieved. The singular innovation there, however, is the FrayWatch, where Slate goes into the comments to extract the best remarks and new facts, and then puts them in context. (Example here.) more…
Comment Spam and Its Consequences
In the past 24 hours this blog has received more than 1,600 comment spams — fake comments with links to the usual sleazy Web operations that pollute the online world. The spam-control system I use, Akismet, has trapped almost all of the spams, so you won’t be burdened with them. more…
NY Sun: New Technique Lets Bloggers Tackle Late-Night News Dumps. A time-honored Washington practice of trying to extinguish, pre-empt, or redirect news coverage by dumping stacks of previously secret government documents on the press may be in for some changes after a headlong collision with hundreds of liberal Web loggers in the wee hours of yesterday morning. more…
U.S. Media Media Outlets’ Audience-Blogs
Slowly but surely, some U.S. media companies are giving blogs to their audiences. The latest I’ve seen is from MyFoxDC, a Washington, D.C., TV station. As you’ll notice, staff blogs on the right side of the page are complemented with the audience blogs on the left. more…
Twittering and Missing the Larger Point
What about the journalistic potential of Twitter? It’s huge. more…
NewAssignment’s First Project
Jay Rosen and his crew at NewAssignment.net have launched AssignmentZero: more…
New Report Shows How News Orgs Encourage Audience Involvement
We’ve just posted “Frontiers of Innovation in Community Engagement” — a report that looks at how traditional media organizations are starting to involve their audiences in the journalism process. more…
Open Source Radio Wins Foundation Funding
Brendan Greeley reports “Open Source Radio’s Shiny New MacArthur Grant” for
developing tools at Open Source that are going to be useful in the future to a lot of people. People in public radio, people in public television, people tiptoeing toward that fantastic beast we’re beginning to call “public media.”more…
Relentless Comment Spam
The slime who use blog comment systems to peddle their often-fraudulent crap are innundating this and other blogs with spam. Luckily, the Akismet spam filter traps most of them and you never have to worry about seeing this garbage. more…
Co-opt or Collaborate?
No question that there’s a lot of activity aimed at co-opting the field. This is what traditional media do, after all. more…
Citizen Media Distribution Deal
Lost Remote: AP jumps into citizen journalism with NowPublic deal. In effect, with AP’s broad distribution, this is the biggest development so far in the short history of citizen journalism, although Reuter’s recent citizen journalism deal with Yahoo’s You Witness News is a close second. more…
So What Will The Video Creators Get Paid?
AP: Comcast, Facebook to launch TV series with user videos: Comcast Corp. and Facebook.com are joining forces to create a television series from user-generated videos that will appear online and through video on demand. more…
The Camera Phone Exposes Wrongdoing
The BBC reports that a patient in Russian hospital has captured chilling images of gagged babies with a camera phone. Quite rightly, the pictures are creating a huge, angry stir around the world. more…
Running for President? “Announce” on the Web
Hilary Clinton is — gasp with surprise — running for president, and made it official on her HillaryClinton.com website. Not in a crowded hall, packed with supporters and TV cameras, but on the website. more…
2006
Mapping Human Rights Violations
To creat the Tunisian Prison Map, Sami Ben Gharbia “pulled data from Human Rights NGOs report as well as a temporary list of Tunisian prisons prepared by Tsar Boris on TUNeZINE website.” more…
Continued Baby Steps at the NY Times
The New York Times “public editor” writes of the paper’s tentative steps into having journalists speak directly with the readers: more…
Peak Blogging, Kind of Like Peak Oil
The sometimes correct prediction-makers at Gartner suggest that blogging will peak in 2007, AP reports: more…
Frequently Asked Question: Is Blogging Journalism
A student wrote to ask “whether blogs are a valid form of journalism.” I replied:
An equivalent question would be: Is publishing on paper a valid form of journalism? more…
The Decline (and Maybe Demise) of the Professional Photojournalist
The rise of the citizen journalist is not a new phenomenon. People have been witnessing and taking pictures of notable events for a long, long time. And they’ve been selling them to traditional news organizations just as long. more…
Fear Itself
The company that once believed in, and for the most part lived, the HP Way — in part, the notion that the community was part of the company and vice versa — would have instinctively adapted to the world where conversations are no longer in the control of the marketing team. more…
Movable Type’s Next Act: Vox
Vox has launched with a fair amount of hype but also real promise. The key change is that the software easily enables private (or at least semi-private) conversations, a good idea.
Election Day Bloggers’ Legal Guide Needs Your Questions
If you’re a blogger or other citizen media creator and plan to cover happenings on Election Day, you may be wondering about some of the legal situations you may encounter. more…
Blogging From Home Saves Day for Newspaper Website
At the Providence Journal, where a systems glitch made for big problems, Sheila Lennon volunteered:
to stay home and take emails from reporters and editors. I would publish The Providence Journal’s breaking news on the Web by myself all day from our home den, barefoot. I would email headlines, permalinks and timestamps back to the newsroom to be manually posted on the homepage. No one inside the Journal could see any of it.
YouTube, in a New Bubble
The Citizen Media Gold Rush is in full fury, with Google’s buyout of YouTube as Exhibit A. more…
Congressional Family Favors Discovered
Ellen Miller, president of the Sunlight Foundation, which is sponsoring our Political Transparency project, reports early results from the organization’s Congressional Spouse Project, which is asking folks to help figure out “how many members of the House of Representatives hire their spouses to work for their campaigns—paying them a salary from campaign contributions.” more…
Another Journalistic Mashup
Baristanet has created a mashup map, chronicling housing changes in Montclair, New Jersey. Nice work, and it’s been noticed by the NY Times. more…
A New Online Advertising Method
Over at TechMeme, Gabe Rivera has introduced a new sponsorship model that has the potential to truly shake up the online marketplace. He’s giving “Sponsor Posts” a prominent spot on the page, letting other content sites market what they’re discussing in related areas. more…
Five Years Ago
Wired News notes the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with Birth of the Blog, an observation that blogging got its biggest boost with that tragedy. Indeed it did. more…
Political Transparency Project
As noted in an earlier posting, the Sunlight Foundation has awarded us one of its “Transparency Grants” for a test in California.
more…
Asking Questions for ‘Living Library’
There’s a fascinating experiment taking place this weekend. It’s called “dropping knowledge” more…
Journalism by the Numbers
The Project for Excellence in Journalism is making is voluminous data available to anyone who wants to use it in new ways: more…
Needed: Citizens to Query Legislators
Over at the TPM Muckraker site, they’re asking for help unmasking a U.S. senator who won’t fess up to holding back vital legislation. What’s up? more…
A Small Experiment with SMS
This image is a very low-tech proof of a concept: turning SMS messages into news flow. With the help of people from several companies, including Mitre, 2SMS.com and Google, we’ve created a small demonstration of how citizen journalists could create location- and time-based data that might be useful in any number of ways. more…
Strong Angel: Lab for Citizen Media and Much More
I’ve been in San Diego this week at something called Strong Angel III, a project/demonstration/exercise designed to improve responses to emergencies and catastrophes, both those which are natural and caused by humans. Several hundred smart folks looking at technology and its applications in this kind of situation, and as with the last Strong Angel exercise (which took place two years ago on a lava bed in Hawaii), this one is proving immensely educational. more…
A Citizen Journalist’s Images
Now the image I’m linking to here from the Flickr site, and the others in the sequence, aren’t earth-shaking. But they are the kinds of things that newspaper photographers feel fortunate to capture occasionally.
more…
Cit-J Project Aim: Expose What Congress Wants to Hide
A group of organizations from the political left and right, including a media company, has launched a highly worthwhile project to expose the origin of earmarks — little (and not so little) spending items in legislation designed as a special favor to a district, campaign contributor and/or politician. more…
ShareSleuth’s Careful Launch
ShareSleuth, the new online news venture created by Chris Carey and funded by Mark Cuban, is taking its time in launching — in part to think through some serious issues. For example, the most recent posting explains that the initial story is being held in part due to a legal threat but also due to a rethinking of the editorial process.
Text, Voice Combo Creates Powerful Journalism
In Vanity Fair, Michael Bronner has produced a tour-de-force, “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes,” a dramatic reconstruction, based on newly released audio tapes, of how military and civilian authorities responded during the 2001 attacks. (Among other findings, Bronner makes clear that the military and White House dissembled like crazy in the aftermath.) more…
Real Estate Bubble 2.0
A few months ago I introduced Bill Wendel, author of the Real Estate Cafe blog, to the folks at Platial, which does a terrific user-annotated online mapping product. Bill had come to a Berkman Center session where I talked about various methods of doing citizen journalism, and I’d shown several mapping sites. more…
NewAssignment: A New Way Toward Collaborative Journalism
As he explains on his Pressthink blog today, Jay Rosen has taken his biggest step yet into the world he’s been writing about for some time now. With the help of several grants he’s starting NewAssignment.net, based on this notion: “Reporter + smart mob + editor with a fund and backers get the story the press pack wouldn’t, couldn’t or didn’t.” more…
Collaborative News Survey: Hype versus Reality
Why are collaborative news, commenting and blogging sites such as Newsvine, Slashdot and Global Voices attracting users and visitors? Who are these folks? What do they want from their interactions? more…
Playing the Conflict of Interest Game
The San Jose Mercury News, as part of an investigative report on researcher-industry conflicts of interest at Stanford University, has created a clever animated board game entitled “You be the researcher.” The animation shows how easy it is to get into situations that are borderline (or worse) unethical. more…
Creative Commons Plug-In for Microsoft Office
The Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office
enables you to embed a Creative Commons license into a document that you create using the popular applications: Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, or Microsoft Office Excel. With a Creative Commons license, authors can express their intentions regarding how their works may be used by others. more…
Paying for Your Videos?
Lulu TV says it’ll help video creators make money, but I’m definitely unclear on the site’s concept. more…
Graphic Novels on the Web
Shooting War is a brilliant example of what could become a Web staple: graphic novels translated to a medium that is almost perfect for the genre. There’s a daily installment, and it’s addictive. more…
Student Journalists’ Major-League Project
A terrific project called News21 — sponsored by two major foundations to help figure out the future of journalism education (and maybe journalism itself) — is under way. This is an important initiative, bringing in students and faculty from five major universities in a multi-year effort that involves some serious journalism about the intersection of security and liberty. I’m proud to be assisting them in developing citizen-media components for their projects, which vary by school and media types. more…
Slate’s Innovation
Slate Magazine is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and I say congratulations. The online publication is cleverly headlining some essays by folks who explain, “What I Hate About Slate,” including in one case its “insufferable smugness,” by a writer who is occasionally insufferable himself in print. more…
Now Journalism Jobs are Being Outsourced
Journalists have been cheerleaders, for the most part, for the outsourcing wave. Meanwhile, other economic factors have threatened their employment much more. The professionals have much more to worry about now than Indian workers. more…
Community, Not Hive
The collected thoughts from people responding to Jaron Lanier’s essay are not a hive mind, but they’ve done a better job of dissecting his provocative essay than any one of us could have done. Which is precisely the point. more…
Easy Way to Record Skype Conversations
Just installed Call Recorder, a new Skype add-on (Mac OS X only) that lets me record both sides of a voice call as a QuickTime file. The application comes with a utility that converts the file to an MP3. With QuickTime Pro, each side of the call can be separated into a channel, which is handy to boost one side or the other when someone talks softly. more…
Linux Devices: Nokia turns cellphones into webservers: “If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially is equipped with a webserver, then very quickly most websites will reside on mobile phones.”
Interesting possibilities for citizen media in this — talk about real-time updating, among other things. more…
Thriving Wikipedia Pronounced Dead by Critic
Nicholas Carr announces “The death of Wikipedia” in a tendentious posting that doesn’t begin to prove his point. He does point out, fairly, that some of the Wikipedia rhetoric has not matched reality (such as the flat statement that anyone can edit anything; there are some speed bumps and a few trolls are banned outright). more…
It’s Everyone’s Media, and It’s Global
At the We Media conference in London after two amazing days in Berlin (more below), there are more people wearing ties in this room than at a similar event in New York last year. There are plenty of people blogging this gathering, so I won’t. more…
Great New Resource: Podcasting Legal Guide
The Podcasting Legal Guide calls itself “a general roadmap of some of the legal issues specific to podcasting.” more…
Personal Bee, Personalizing Recommended News
The Personal Bee is looking quite interesting in its early incarnation. more…
Journalism by Net-Funded Tip Jar
Joshua Ellis, at Zenarchery.com, wrote:
The first Saturday in April is one of the two days a year when the Trinity test site in New Mexico is open to the public — the next time is in October. Trinity, if you’re not familiar, is where the first nuclear bomb was detonated in July of 1945. I want to go to Trinity next Saturday, and write a long essay about it, and the Bomb, and the Manhattan Project. more…
Microformats, a Key Part of the Connected Future
I’ve been studying up on something called “microformats” — open data formats, such as tags, that are going to help make digital information vastly more useful. If you’re interested in citizen media, microformats are important to understand. more…
The “Living Web”
In this week’s cover story, Newsweek suggests replacing the term “Web 2.0″ with the more descriptive phrase “Living Web,” which refers to the dynamic quality of web content, the organic patterns of growth and expansion online, and the social interactions occurring everywhere. more…
“New Media Paradox”?
The L.A. Times picked up on an interesting thread from the State of the News Media 2006 report, released last week. more…
Newsvine: Smart and Getting Smarter
Newsvine took off the wraps today, and I have to say it’s one of the best efforts yet in combining the knowledge of the community with the news. I’ll be saying more about it in an upcoming post, but this is one of the sites you have to watch if you care about the future of news. more…
Yahoo’s Course Correction
The New York Times reports that Yahoo is shifting focus away from creating traditional, TV-like content on the Web to a major focus on bottom-up material. more…
A Hollywood Map Mashup
HBO is using Google Maps in a clever way to promote the the Sopranos series, which starts a new season soon. At Behind the Scenes: Sopranos Maps, you’ll find locations annotated with videos, photos and episode details from Season 5. more…
OhmyNews’ Global Ambitions Get Boost
Softbank, the Japanese investment company, has invested $11 million in OhmyNews, the pathbreaking Korean online newspaper. The goal, according to the companies: “spreading citizen participatory journalism on the global stage.” more…
The Blog Bubble?
It’s obvious that there’s been way more hype lately than is healthy. But the entry of Big Media into the blogging space is not a sign of impending doom. more…
Pacific Northwest (It’s Not Raining)
I’m in Port Hadlock, Washington, visiting with folks from a newspaper group based nearby. We’re here to chat (at least during my part of the program) about citizen journalism and how it might apply to what they do. more…
Signs, Sounds and Techniques of the Times
I’m coming to take for granted the accomplishments of modern technologists, but this week has brought home the progress we’ve made in communications in recent times. Twice, actually. more…
Walling Off Media Content: Face, Meet Nose
New kinds of discovery, recommendation and reputation systems are emerging for online material. It’s likely that people who want to learn about the news will find enough to be happy even without the major media’s full stories being available. more…
Sometimes Anonymity is Vital
I want to point out Blog Safer: the anoniblog wiki, which is helping people learn how to disguise their tracks. I don’t generally approve of this, but there are circumstances — such as when telling the truth in public is dangerous to one’s life — when it’s essential. more…
BBC Opens History to New Interpretation
BBC: BBC News opens archives to public. The scheme allows people within the UK to watch, download, edit and mix the clips and programming for non-commercial programming.
Too bad it’s only in the United Kingdom. But it’ll be absolutely fascinating to see how people “remix” these clips, creating works that tell old stories in new ways. more…
2005
Citizen Videos Counter Official Accounts
Today’s New York Times has a story, “Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest,” that is by turns infuriating and enlightening — infuriating because of the apparently unpunished official misconduct that it plainly suggests, and enlightening in its demonstration of citizen empowerment. more…
Joel Hyatt’s (and Al Gore’s) Version of Citizen Journalism
It’s called Current TV. I was briefed on this a few weeks ago. What I heard was very promising from the user-created content perspective. Let’s hope it lives up to its dreams. more…
So Where is Kyrgyzstan, Anyway?
I’m pretty good on geography, but when I read about the revolution and/or coup in Kyrgyzstan I had to confess to myself that other than knowing its general location in mid-Asia I couldn’t place it on a map. I’m betting I’m not alone in this. Yet few of the news stories came with a map. more…
OurMedia.org Launches
Congrats to JD, Marc and team on the launch of OurMedia.org, a place to share”videos, audio files, photos, text or software – for free – with a global community of creative individuals.” more…
A Terri Schiavo Aggregator
It’s an echo chamber, to be sure, but ProLifeBlogs.com’s Terri Schiavo aggregator demonstrates what committed people can do in a hurry, with low-cost tools. more…
The News & Record
As noted here before, the News & Record, the newspaper of record in Greensboro, North Carolina, is embarking on one of mainstream journalism’s most important experiments: turning the paper into a community forum, “to build a Web presence that invites readers in to share the news they know and engage in the civic discussion,” as John Robinson, the paper’s editor wrote on his blog. (See online editor Lex Alexander’s memo, chock-full of ideas, for more.) more…
Google, Wikipedia and More
Jimmy Wales, founder of the important Wikipedia project, has been in the San Francisco Bay Area the past couple of days. Looks like he’s gotten Google to help out with bandwidth and hosting for Wikipedia, which deserves such support. more…
Help Lawmakers Know Who’s Talking About Them
The folks at the Personal Democracy Forum have a fine idea: “to get Members of Congress more aware of when the blogosphere is talking about them.” more…
Newspapers: Open Your Archives
One of these days, a newspaper currently charging a premium for access to its article archives will do something bold: It will open the archives to the public — free of charge but with keyword-based advertising at the margins. more…
New Voices Wanted in Citizen Journalism
New Voices, a “pioneering program to seed innovative citizen media ventures around the country,” has some money available for promising new ventures. more…