The Social Software Weblog

IHT, OhMyNews partner

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-30T14:45:00+00:00

I just watched Hong Eun-taek, Editor-In-Chief of the of South Korea based citizen journalism project OhMyNews speak at the NetSquared conference (disclosure: I work for Net Squared). Amongst the interesting details of Eun-taek's talk was a statement that the organization aims to become a global news wire similar to the AP and Reuters. One of the most recent steps towards that end is a partnership begun in recent weeks to swap headlines between the prestigious International Herald Tribune.

I think there is an important difference between the recent high-profile partnerships between the AP and Technorati and between Sphere and Time Magazine and this partnership. Specifically, while it is meaningful for a mainstream media organization to include links indicating "what the blogosphere is saying about this topic" - I would contend that it is meaningful in a different way for prominent parties in the citizen journalism camp and in the traditional media camp to permanently display each others' headlines in a box on their sites. It's an interesting form of mutual recognition that goes beyond the relatively casual link list to the medium in general.

The IHT/OhMyNews partnership is also clearly important because it involves two parties that are not based in the United States. Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices Online is speaking now about the huge explosion of content producers from China, Africa, Brazil and the Middle East/North Africa that is on its way. This partnership is liable to be remembered as a key development in the relationship between old media and new media on the global stage.

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Global Voices Online begins compilation podcast

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-25T15:37:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, podcasting, aggregators

The international blog aggregation community Global Voices Online has released its first edition of the Global Voices Podcast, a compilation of clips from podcasts around the world. The first episode manages to fit in satire from South Africa about the visibility of queer people, coverage of bloggers' take on an upcoming election in Mexico (in Spanish) and clips from Jamaica, Israel/Palestine, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. Set to music from Creative Commons label Magnatune, the whole thing fits in 17 fast paced minutes! It's hosted by the very charming Georgia Popplewell, from the Carribian Free Radio podcast (an Adam Curry favorite).

The show reminds me in of a more grass-roots, web 2.0 version of the Global Shortwave Report, a fantastic, long running weekly 30 minute compilation of international shortwave news in English.

Global Voices recently received funding from Reuters. Its primary function is to aggregate content from bloggers all around the world. The project has long published interesting interviews with people from around the world, but this newest foray into the news and culture serialized audio space wil be interesting to watch. Many Global Voices participants are aspiring mass audience journalists as well, so whether new mainstream media stars emerge from this space or whether it thrives as a niche media project will help make the history of Web 2.0's impact on media.

Found via David Weinberger.

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Case study: Web 2.0 tools and an arrested Egyptian blogger

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-24T14:39:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging, citizen media, paradigm shifts

Mark Glaser at PBS has posted a long, detailed story on the case of arrested Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah. Alaa is someone Glaser interviewed for a previous story and today's coverage follows up after the man's arrest earlier this month. It's a great discussion of various tools being used in a no-cost, rapid-response human rights campaign. Some very interesting insights from Egyptians on online vs. off-line activities, democracy campaigns and more. Worth a look for sure. It's important that all these exciting technological developments impact more than the shopping habits of people of privilege. Glaser's write up is a great source of detail and thought on one key case study - and a real human being's trip to prison in an autocratic society.

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Digital natives and newsreading: how do you dive deeper?

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-22T15:27:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging, citizen media

The Berkman Center's John Palfrey has an interesting post proposing a theory on how digital natives, those who have grown up with the web central to our lives, read the news. No more daily papers, broadcast TV or big anchors acting as the central source of information, but instead following a path of graze, dive deeper and a feedback loop like blogging. That sounds like as good an explanation as any to me, though I wonder how many of us skip the dive deeper step? If that step isn't taken it would seem a major flaw in the quality of the discourse.

Much attention has been paid to the blogosphere's alleged lack of fact checking as is supposedly key to traditional media - but how many of us take the time to check other online information regarding our topic of interest before blogging? How do we know when we've dove deep enough? I know that before I write about a particular URL I at least search for other links to it. Sometimes I'll do a Sphere search for related blogosphere resources, or look in del.icio.us popular under related tags. If we don't have a formal structure for fact checking, research and editorial oversight - what do we have?

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Richard Edelman on PR 2.0

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-17T21:04:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, paradigm shifts

David Wienberger isn't just ClueTrain smart and cool, he's also a really good liveblogger! Check out his text of PR powerman Richard Edelman's conversation at the Syndicate conference. Edelman knows the story on quality communications in a world shaken by blogs and other social media. Edelman's company does PR for Walmart and employs Steve Rubel.

In the above linked talk he provides succinct thoughts on the future of marketing, the pace of corporate adoption of Web 2.0 tools, the Walmart bloggers debacle and more. Worth a read or listen for sure.

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YouTube now accepts video from mobiles

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-05-10T13:45:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, mobile, moblogging, portable media, videoblogging

Via Heather Green at BusinessWeek, YouTube has announced that users can now upload video from their mobile devices. This sounds like a very good move. We'll see if it turns into a citizen journalism type thing, documentation like Peter Gabriel's Witness or just more trash like so much of YouTube. The technology has a lot of potential though. Imagine how fast video can spread now: shoot and upload from your phone, supporters grab the code snippet to display your video on their website and it goes from there. A lot of potential.

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GreenScanner searches reviews by UPC

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-04-19T16:57:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, mobile

UC Irvine informatics researcher Bill Tomlinson has set up a web site called GreenScanner.net where users can search for product reviews by UPC. Intended to primarily cover environmental impacts, the site really shows any reviews posted by users. Easy access by mobile devices make this a simple but workable project I think. Check out this sample search. The limitations are obvious, but so is the potential in my mind. Press release.
Found via Gristmill.

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Niche blogs cover true crime

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-04-19T12:56:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging, citizen media

Another interesting niche in the blogosphere can be found over at the Carnival of True Crime Blogs. Some of these are just breathless "no one knows why he did it..." type coverage, but the medium certainly seems to have potential. Crime reporting can always benefit from added context, history, analysis and voices. The downside might be that crime victims might not appreciate random bloggers putting their stories up all over the web. Found via the always interesting Carnival of Blogs directory.

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On Jill Carroll: Ellen Goodman says blogosphere needs to grow up

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-04-07T13:18:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging, citizen media

After a number of bloggers went after kidnapped journalist Jill Carroll for saying nice things about people while they held her life in their hands, veteran columnist Ellen Goodman says this was one of the worst episodes of blogosphere ugliness so far.

"These attacks raise the question of what bloggery is going to be when it grows up," she asks, "An Internet op-ed page? Or a polarized, talk-radio food fight?"

Add this to the growing list of recent blog blunders: the Huffington post's George Clooney debacle, the pro-Walmart bloggers' failure to disclose their reposting of company PR, and any number of others. It's enough to make me give up blogging myself. Not! It would certainly be nice if we all behaved a little better so as to not reflect so poorly on the medium as a whole. But this is one of the lessons that the public has to learn about distributed communication: it's only as high-quality as the people who are using it. Why is blogging getting a black eye instead of the pea-brained people who are responsible for these particular posts in question? Would it be better for the vast majority of us to be silenced, for the public to only hear from well groomed professionals and thus to sustain some sort of delusion that the populace is made up of well reasoned thinkers? I don't think so. Dealing with low quality free speech is the price we pay for getting the good stuff. Let's not let snobs tell us that those of us associated (via blogging) with the most unsavory don't deserve any credibility ourselves. Those of us who earn credibility deserve it and obviously those of us who don't - don't.

Found via Morph

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Blogswana: Blogging for others in AIDS-struck Botswana

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-04-06T19:08:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging, citizen media, nptech

Fascinating sounding project unveiled yesterday by the folks at the Committee to Protect Bloggers. The project is called Blogswana and the idea is that they will train 20 university students from Botswana in journalism and blogging, then those students will go into the field once a month and interview some one who does not have access to the web or blogging.

The interview will be turned into a blog post for the interviewee's blog, the interviewer will have a blog of their own as well, and the most recent posts from the blogs written by the 20 students will be aggregated onto a central site. Comments left by users will be delivered to the interviewee next month and their answers will be posted back on the blog.

The AIDS angle is that all the parties involved will be people who have been impacted by AIDS in one way or the other, though that won't be the central topic of the interviews.

The instigators of this project hope that it will be a pilot for many others based on the principal of overcoming the digital divide and doing citizen journalism by actually visiting and talking to people who are not online. This particular area was chosen because one of the US instigators lived in Botswana for some time. I think this sounds like a great project. If you're interested, you should read their write up on it. The project is currently looking for a variety of forms of support, so stop on by if you'd like to be of assistance, too.

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US State Dept. posts ugly eJournal covering new media

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-29T14:09:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging, citizen media

Wow, I can't believe they didn't do better than this: Media Emerging, eJournal USA. That's the US State Department's attempt to cover the space at issue. Some of the contributions and contributors seem pretty good, but talk about a publication that remains behind the times despite its best efforts!

There's no RSS feed, for one thing. There certainly aren't any comments enabled, though blogging and user generated content is a huge part of what it's all about. The site's editors seem enthralled with online video and the safest forms of user generated content. Unsurprising, I suppose. Plus the site design is as ugly as anything I've seen in awhile - I imagine it's an attempt to follow the pared down aesthetic of many blogs. Whatever. Found via The Media Center's blog Morph, which is way cooler.

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Philly journos and bloggers had a great unconference

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-28T14:24:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, MSM

Jeff Jarvis has a long summary with many comments following about Norg, an unconference aimed at helping newspapers turn into news organizations. Looks like it was great, and the write up is a good place to read more about the old media/new media nexus. Thanks to Alex at Podcast on the Floor for the link.

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Upsides and downsides of Evoca podcasting service

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-27T13:02:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, podcasting, VoIP

The above is a cell phone call I made to the new podcasting system Evoca. Reviewed today by both TechCrunch and Mashable, I found this service via eHub. There's browser based recording, phone-in recording, descriptions, tags, RSS feeds, groups, albums and oh so much more. You can also charge a fee for listeners to be able to listen - but the first one here is on me, ok?

Update: I've tried two more times to make recording through Firefox on a Mac. Both times I got choppy recordings that were lost when I tried to save them. I saw an error screen about browser difficulties and am now frustrated enough that I will be darned if I try the browser record again.

The service is free for pretty basic use but for $5 per month you can do lots more, including recording Skype phone calls! Very nice for those of us on a Mac.

Problems:

I hit error messages more than once.
My browser recording got cut off on the beginning and end, though I've only tried it once so far.
I'd sure like a direct link to the MP3 file up there in that iframe player. I presume, for example, that the file won't be delivered as an enclosure in this RSS feed as I have the file inserted now.
There's a couple of pages that seem disconnected. At one point it looked like I could only "add to a blog" in blogger.com, but at another point I got this nice little iframe code you see displayed above. I imagine that means to publish automatically, which would be rad. I'd like to do that on Word Press.
The company blog takes pride in their international users, but it sure would be nice to have an 800 number for people in the developing world to call. Maybe this is totally unrealistic and Skype recording is the way to do it. The blog is stoked about a user from Ghana, but only certain kinds of folks in Ghana are going to want to drop $5 per month for premium membership. I guess that's just how things work and I should go take it up with the UN or something to plunk down the money for an 800 number podcast recording system.

All in all, though - I'd say this is a pretty awesome service. Very usable, not intimidating. As others have pointed out, they have a business model, which seems to be more than you can say for Odeo. Evoca could probably use more chicken icons though.

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US FEC "goes easy" on bloggers

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-27T12:20:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging, citizen media

Per a story on ZDNet, new elections regulations concerning internet communications have been released by the US Federal Elections Commission. The regulations needed to be approved at a meeting today and reports are now in that the regulations were passed by a 6-0 vote. Analysts say the 96 page document was rewritten in response to concerns from bloggers of all political stripes and a number of advocates in congress.

Paid advertising, including banner ads and sponsored links on search engines, will be regulated like political advertising in other types of media. One strange omission is that disclosure that a blogger has been paid for by a candidate or committee to take a position in an election is explicitly mentioned as not required, according to one law prof quoted by ZDNet. If ethics are to be regulated on any level that would make sense to me to be a requirement.

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Roll your own Digg clone, it's a utility now

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-20T10:30:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, aggregators

There's quite a number of anemic Digg clones out there, a real testimony to the community building skills of the original. But an interesting new service I found this morning is CrispyNews, a site that lets you create your own topic specific subdomains for Digg-style newswires voted up and down by users. Adsense all around and site creators share revenue after a certain point.

This is probably too much like Newsvine to really take off, but who would have guessed that Digg style services would hit utility status so quickly? What exactly is the word for them even? It only makes sense that some day soon we'll all be clicking up and down on FeedFlare type links after each item in many of our RSS feeds and have top 10 or 20 lists reflected accordingly on our dashboards. Or some combination of RSS and Digg-style up and down for our community of interest or work. Anybody else read the recent Harper's excerpt (in print) on Chinese media gaining or losing points and thus pay according to who in the government praised their stories? Hmmm....

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When pitched bloggers go bad: Walmart and the blogosphere

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-07T18:10:00+00:00

Filed under: blogging, citizen media

Big NYTimes story today on Walmart's outreach to bloggers via Edelman PR (the new home of Steve Rubel). Apparently some of the bloggers reposted emails from Walmart PR without disclosure or attribution. Hay is being made.

As a number of people have pointed out, however, bloggers are far from the first people in media to do this. (Dan Gilmor has a good overview of the controversy.) People say all the time that Mainstream Media cover various corporations or government initiatives as if they were just reproducing press releases. What about the Video News Releases, stories planted in the Iraqi press, or a quarter million dollars for favorable coverage of No Child Left Behind?

To be fair, the political left did drop the ball in an ugly way when lefty bloggers claimed that Walmart was being intentionally racist when its movie recommendation engine connected some African American films and Planet of the Apes. It turned out that the recommendation engine was mapping a large number of unrelated films together, including Power Puff Girls, Home Alone and some films about African American history.As Gilmor and others point out, though, the problem isn't Walmart's (or rather Edleman's) actions here. They appear to have done a good job pitching the bloggers, delivering short bits of info with links, warning them (according to the NYTimes story above) not to copy and paste the emails after it appeared to be happening (what a nightmare for them!). Regardless of the moral implications of doing PR for Walmart in general, the fault in this scandal seems to lie with the bloggers who failed to heed requests to use the pitches for inspiration - not copy.

Interestingly, within weeks of Edleman's much celebrated hiring of the #1 blogger in the blogosphere (at least according to Technorati Favorites) , Steve Rubel doesn't seem to be saying anything about the blogospheric troubles. Here's what the head of Edleman had to say about it.

I'll be tagging this story into my archive of resources on pitching bloggers for sure.

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Digg.com introduces comment rating feature

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-03-04T14:41:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, paradigm shifts, aggregators

Those wacky folks over at Digg.com have introduced a new Slashdot-style means of rating commenters' comments (though it seems that it may be simpler than Slashdot's?). Found via.

These sorts of community news sites seem to provide a huge amount of their value in the comments section of each post, so it only makes sense to take the user-centric model a step further and have readers move comments up or down by quality.

With the rise of automated memetrackers and community edited newswires, those of us seeking to add value to readers' experiences by just plain blogging about the industry have our work cut out for us! Perhaps our value proposition is in serving as distinctly flavored super-filters for the news that's still overwhelming even when run through the above mentioned systems (even the guys at Digg do this with the DiggNation show), drawing unique connections that aggregators and comment heads are unlikely to draw and...analyzing the impacts of things in the news.

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Channel 101 leverages FireAnt

Marshall Kirkpatrick — 2006-02-23T19:19:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, videoblogging

The good people of FireAnt.TV report that the innovative online/f2f media phenomenon Channel 101 has plugged into FireAnt technology (RSS feed submission and FA one-click subscribe button, specifically). FireAnt summarizes Channel101 like this: Here's how Channel101 works - creators submit short "pilot episodes" that are screened in front of a live audience in LA. The audience votes on their favorites and the top 5 pilots make it to "prime time" and go on to the next screening - the others get "cancelled." Prime Time shows continue month to month until they finally fail to get the necessary votes, at which point they too become "cancelled." Apparently at least one Chanell 101 contributer has gone on to SNL.

They also point to a NY version called Channel 102. I guess LA and NY aren't interesting enough anymore and even people there have to look online for their entertainment. I think this type of thing seems like a great combination of online and real-world media. I'm impressed.

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Craigslist slapped with suit by fair housing group

Barb Dybwad — 2006-02-23T15:20:00+00:00

Filed under: citizen media, e-commerce, lawsuits, web services

The Chicago Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law has filed suit against Craigslist, citing the appearance on the site of discriminatory housing ads that violate the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Such ads are illegal in newspapers and other print publications, and the housing group maintains that online publications like Craigslist should be held to the same standards. Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster counters with two arguments: one, that the site is a "user-controlled commons" and as such should not be treated exactly as if it were a newspaper; two, that mandating a manual screening process for all two million free housing ads (of unlimited length) submitted per month would be unreasonably burdensome for his company of 19 employees to implement.

His second argument is pretty weak. What about the first one? We're still taking baby steps in the process of applying legal structures from the offline to the online world, and a case like this could set legal precedent with far-reaching ramifications for online publications. What happens when the wisdom of crowds isn't so wise, after all? Who is then responsible? IMHO Craiglist is benefiting from the "wisdom of crowds" and should in turn bear the responsibility that comes with it. It seems to me they can't have it both ways -- reap the benefits of the crowd's wisdom, yet turn around and scapegoat the crowd's ignorance. I think the housing group has a good case, and should they win, we may see the cost of social advertising rise dramatically.

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