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Posts from ‘June, 2007’

Blair on Media, Media on Blair

The Guardian: Right sermon, wrong preacher. There is an easy response to Tony Blair’s lecture on the failings of the media, and some will seize on it. It is to accuse the prime minister – the master (some will say) of half truths, evasion and spin – of breathtaking hypocrisy and an almost clinical lack […]

"Human-powered Search" Paying Humans

Jason Calacanis, who calls his new venture Mahalo “human-powered search,” says the company will pay freelance searchers a fee for links the site accepts. He says he hopes for hundreds or thousands of people in this part-time capacity. This sounds to me like an updated version of the Open Directory Project, but this time with […]

London Calls

I spent most of the day at the BBC in London, visiting with people in several departments about the organization’s online work. Then it was over to the Guardian for a brief chat with several folks. Tomorrow I’ll be at the NMK Forum, a new-media conference, doing a keynote talk on citizen journalism’s present and […]

Two New Supporters

The center has received new financial support from charitable organizations affiliated with two of America’s great journalism companies. They are: The Philip L. Graham Fund, founded in 1963 and named after late Washington Post publisher and president of the Washington Post Company. The funds will go, in part, toward citizen media workshops and lectures, as […]

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.” Klein calls this “yet another lost opportunity for mainstream media, which simply lacks the resources to […]

Newspaper Barred from Blogging Baseball Game

Louisville Courier-Journal: Courier-Journal reporter ejected from U of L game. A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events. Gene McArtor, […]

Lawyer Threatens Suit Over Online Review (of Him)

Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Avvo’s attorney rating system draws fire. Setting up an online rating system that attempts to rank the best and worst attorneys, is kind of like dipping your toes in shark-infested waters. Sooner or later, you are bound to get bitten. That’s the situation facing Avvo, the heavily funded Seattle startup that just four […]

Dangers Coming for Open Net

My Berkman Center colleague Jonathan Zittrain has written a piece for Harvard Business Review, “Saving the Internet.” Quote: The runaway successes of the Internet and PC with the mainstream public have put them in positions of significant stress and danger. Though the Internet’s lack of centralized structure makes it difficult to assess the sturdiness of […]

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 […]

Note to American Express: Just Call them Customers

An American Express vice president (in charge of online communications), at the Edelman/PR Week New Media Summit for journalism educators, keeps referring to the company’s credit card holders as “cardmembers” — a longstanding practice at American Express that is one of my longstanding peeves. I”m not a member of anything having to do with American […]