Cit Media

Rebecca MacKinnon has compiled a thorough and fascinating study of foreign correspondents’ views in China of the blog scene there — “Blogs and China correspondence.” Most interestingly, she says in an email:

people generally found the question comparing “reliability” of blogs vs. msm to be completely beside the point.

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.”

Brilliant use of mashups, in a worthy cause.

The Media Bloggers Association’s Bob Cox has relaunched a website for the organization he founded and runs. Lots of interesting new ideas here. Bob is among the people who are working hard to improve citizen media.

Editor & Publisher reports that Wendy McCaw, the eccentric owner of the Santa Barbara (California) News-Press, isn’t just presiding over the meltdown of a newspaper. She’s suing a freelance journalist who wrote about her activities, claiming an American Journalism Review article was defamatory.

Needless to say, people familiar with journalism and the First Amendment are incredulous. E&P quotes several:

“I am surprised that any publisher would do this,” said Gene Roberts, the legendary former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer and part-time instructor at the University of Maryland, where AJR is published. “It’s pretty clear that there is an owner there with no sense and no respect for newspaper traditions and for the First Amendment.”

Alex Jones, director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University, agreed. “It is outrageous,” he said. “It is especially a betrayal of the principles that most journalists understand for a libel suit of this kind to be filed. It is apparently a grudge.”

David Ardia, who practiced media law and is heading up a soon-to-launch citizen-media law project, is incredulous from a legal perspective. He said in an e-mail:

“It’s unfathomable from so many angles. Can you imagine what a case like this would look like in discovery, as senior editors from the Santa Barbara News-Press are forced to sit for depositions probing whether their publisher is a tyrant? She must be out of her mind.”

UPDATED

SimplyHeadlines delivers headlines to mobile devices. It’s an obvious and useful tool.

Knight Ridder, the company I used to work for, registered the domain Headlines.com in 1998 — and proceeded to do nothing with it.

UPDATE: Mark Potts tells me: “Knight Ridder didn’t register headlines.com in 1998 — they got it as part of the breakup of New Century Network, which had owned the URL previously.”

New Century Network was the newspaper industry’s failed attempt, back in the mid-1990s, to counter the competition that more far-sighted folks saw coming from the online world. The venture was a fiasco (see this BusinessWeek story), to put it mildly.

About two years ago I gave a talk to some senior people people at Knight Ridder, before it was sold to McClatchy. I begged them to use this domain, or sell it to me so I could do something with it. I believe they thought I was joking about the latter idea. I wasn’t. Any random person off the street could have made something of Headlines.com.

The domain now points to the “RealCities” network that McClatchy bought along with Knight Ridder’s digital arm. Maybe the new ownership will do something with it. Or maybe not.

Digg has new features: a video by co-founder Kevin Rose explains some of it.

The New York Times “public editor” writes of the paper’s tentative steps into having journalists speak directly with the readers:

There should be even greater reader interaction ahead. Mr. Landman told me in September that further interactive features are being contemplated. One possible feature he mentioned: allowing readers to comment on every story on the site, not just one major article a day

The fact that this is news speaks volumes about the Times’ slow start in involving the readers. But while other papers are way ahead, this is still better than we’re seeing at many. And it’s more complicated for an institution like the Times to open up than for a small daily.

We should enjoy progress wherever we see it, though, however modest it may be.

(Disclosure: I own a small amount of NYT stock.)

UPDATED

It’s fitting, and somewhat overdue, that Time Magazine’s person of the year is “You” — as in all of us.

Don’t get me wrong here. The cover story and the supporting articles are a terrific bunch of pieces. They capture well what has been happening for the past few years in the democratization of media.

But there’s a tiny bit of reality in the fact that the cover didn’t say “Us” instead of “You” — in part because it was a vestige of the magazine’s traditional, royal thinking wherein they told us everything they thought we needed to know (and what to think about it). Our role: We bought it or didn’t.

If the people of the year are all of you out there somewhere, that leaves “we the deciders of what is news” still inside the gates.

The world has changed, as the magazine’s writers, photographers, artists and editors captured in this issue. Here’s the issue: It’s changed even more than they may want to concede deep down in their essentially top-down, corporate gut.

I look forward to the day when Time and other traditional magazines fully embrace us when it comes to the journalism. This is coming, and faster than anyone (including me) would have predicted just a year or two ago. It can’t come fast enough, because the time is short to make the transition.

Anyway, excellent work from Time.

UPDATE: See Jeff Jarvis’ related thoughts, which he posted earlier. Also, William Beutler says he predicted this would happen two months ago.

UPDATED

You may have noticed that our home page was going to a blog deep inside the site, as opposed to the regular page.

UPDATE: We’ve got part of that fixed, but are still having other difficulties…

Also, if you posted a comment in the past day it may have been lost due to another glitch. Checking into that, too.

Apologies, and now back to your regularly scheduled programs…

The sometimes correct prediction-makers at Gartner suggest that blogging will peak in 2007, AP reports:

Could blogging be near the peak of its popularity? The technology gurus at Gartner Inc. believe so. One of the research company’s top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide.

Heard of Peak Oil? It’s the idea that we’ve topped out on drawing oil from the ground, which is probably going to be true soon. But it’s not the same thing as peak energy, or of peak efficient use of energy or any of the other metrics that mean more in the long run than whether we run out of affordable oil.

Back to blogging: It’s entirely predictable that the number of regular bloggers — that is, people putting text on web pages in reverse chronological order — will level out at some point. Maybe it’ll happen next year.

But what’s not leveling out anytime soon is the number of people who are publishing on the Web. When we include discussion boards, podcasts, videocasts, mashups and all of the other kinds of things folks are doing on their own and in collaboration with others, we can be sure only of one thing: We’re in the early days of this phenomenon. Leveling off? Not for a long time to come.