Center for Citizen Media

Gregg Zachary: A Journalism Manifesto. Professional journalists can restore their status only by taking radical action. They are getting torn to pieces fighting the wrong battles. Journalists keep telling critics that they are committed to hearing all sides. That they are committed to “objectivity,” which in practical terms means giving ink and airtime to various viewpoints in a fair and even detached way. This so-called balance is supposed to translate into the all-important objectivity.

I tend to agree with this, as I noted in a posting last year called “The End of Objectivity” — but Zachary’s call to arms is even more pointed than mine.

Also: CBS News’ Vaughn Ververs responds to Zachary.

James Love: A UN/WIPO Plan to Regulate Distribution of Information on the Internet. But what the broadcasters and the webcasters really want has nothing to do with protecting copyrighted works. They want to “own” the content of what they transmit, even when they are not the creative party, and even if they can’t acquire such rights from the copyright owner (if any).

In the words of the treaty critics, the treaty proponents are guilty of piracy of the knowledge commons. They are seeking to claim ownership rights in works they did not create, and which today they do not own. They want something different from copyright, and different from the legal regime that exists in any country. They want to own what they simply transmit. And this will be quite harmful to the Internet.

These issues tend to be fought as abstractions. But the results are anything but abstract.

This is a power grab of unbelievable proportions. It is, as noted, theft — stealing from the public commons. What can we do to stop such arrogance?

David Weinberger has an update. Scarier than ever.

MediaShift: CBC Offers Moderated Forum for Every Precinct. The Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC), which is Canada’s national public broadcaster, tried to solve these problems during the recent national election campaign, which ended with the Conservative Party triumph on January 23. CBC launched an ambitious project called Riding Talk with 308 moderated forums on its website — one for each riding in Canada. (A riding is the equivalent of an American voting precinct.) The idea was to allow people to talk about whatever political issues were important to them and their district — and to do it in a civil way. Jonathan Dube, the editorial director of CBC.ca , the CBC’s online portal, said that every one of the 10,000 forum submissions went through human moderators.

The key innovation here was moderation. It added enormous value to the project, because readers would be taken to what looked like the best parts (to the moderators) of the conversation.

Were readers therefore missing something? Sure. But they were gaining something else, probably more valuable.

All in all, a terrific experiment.

(Jonathan Dube is a member of the Center for Citizen Media’s Board of Advisors.)

I’ll be giving a talk on Monday, Feb. 13 at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. It’s the first in a series of conversations on citizen media this winter and spring at the University.

Here’s a summary for Monday’s talk: As technology collides with journalism, democratizing the tools of media creation and distribution, news is evolving from a lecture into a conversation. As individuals become more engaged with the news and its creation, they will be taking steps beyond simply being better informed — a journey toward enhanced civic activism as well. This talk, the first in a series of four, explains recent developments in grassroots media and why they are so important to the notion of an informed citizenry.

Alex Jones, the center’s director, and David Berlind, ZD Net executive editor, will discuss the issues with me after the formal part of the event. (There’ll be pizza and other refreshments, too, if that also helps…)

Time: 7 p.m.
Location: Malkin Penthouse, 4th floor, Littauer Building, Kennedy School of Government
Sponsors: Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Shorenstein Center

ARS Electronica, in its annual “International Competition for CyberArts,” has opened submissions for its “Digital Communities” category. This is open to

political, social, and cultural projects, initiatives, groups, and scenes from all over the world utilizing digital technology to better society and assume social responsibility. It is meant to recognize the initiators and propagators of these communities as well as the developers of the relevant technologies, and to honor those whose work contributes to the establishment and proliferation of Digital Communities as well as provide understanding and research into them.

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.

I took the photo on a bridge as I was driving here from Seattle’s airport, using my Treo 650 phone camera. I’m using it as a demonstration of how easily anyone can publish from almost any place. (The wireless network in the hotel is busted; I’m connected via the phone’s Bluetooth connection.)

You can barely make out the snowcapped Cascade Mountains in the background of the picture. Next year’s phone camera will be crystal clear by comparison. This one does video, too, and next year’s model will do it better.

That’s part of the message: the relentless progress of technology that is turning our notions of news-gathering and business models upside down. It’s not slowing down, which means enormous threats and opportunities.

Looking forward to the questions…

Richard MacManus, Rating the Meme Trackers, says Memeorandum is still on top.

Dave Sifry (Technorati CEO): State of the Blogosphere, February 2006, Summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

Global Voices Online has excerpts from Arabic-language blog commentary on the Mohammed cartoon fight.

From the Mohammed Image Archive:

While the debate rages, an important point has been overlooked: despite the Islamic prohibition against depicting Mohammed under any circumstances, hundreds of paintings, drawings and other images of Mohammed have been created over the centuries, with nary a word of complaint from the Muslim world. The recent cartoons in Jyllands-Posten are nothing new; it’s just that no other images of Mohammed have ever been so widely publicized.

With this site, which is being widely linked to on the Web, that is changing. Fast.