Center for Citizen Media

Lawrence Lessig: I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. “Corruption” as I’ve defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve.

I do this with no illusions. I am 99.9% confident that the problem I turn to will continue exist when this 10 year term is over. But the certainty of failure is sometimes a reason to try. That’s true in this case.

Nor do I believe I have any magic bullet. Indeed, I am beginner. A significant chunk of the next ten years will be spent reading and studying the work of others. My hope is to build upon their work; I don’t pretend to come with a revolution pre-baked.

Instead, what I come with is a desire to devote as much energy to these issues of “corruption” as I’ve devoted to the issues of network and IP sanity. This is a shift not to an easier project, but a different project. It is a decision to give up my work in a place some consider me an expert to begin work in a place where I am nothing more than a beginner.

A fair amount of the work I’ve done in the past few years has been influenced by Lessig, a man whom I admire and who has become a friend. His contributions in the copyright arena have been essential.

Yes, the problem of corruption will still be around in another decade. But here’s a bet that Lessig will have an impact for the better in that arena, too.

WeFi: With WeFi, each user contributes to the rest of the community by using the client and discovering more networks around. All this is reported to a centralized server and shared seamlessly among all users, resulting in easy connection. With our software you can also map your favorite hotspots, find your friends, share your WiFi with other WeFi members and do many other cool things.

Google has launched a Public Policy Blog that is a model of the genre. A principal author is Andrew McLaughlin, the company’s director of public policy and government affairs (and a Berkman Fellow to boot).

This is the kind of thing Google should do to excess, because the its growing clout — and knowledge of what so many people are doing — is making a lot of folks nervous.

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.

Andrew Leonard takes a look at the World Bank’s remarkable BuzzMonitor project:

BuzzMonitor purports to make ample use of state-of-the-art techniques for rating the authority, relevance and popularity of whoever is commenting on whatever. Because we don’t just want to know who is talking about us; we want to know if we should take them seriously, if we should respond or ignore or merely chuckle dismissively.

I’m planning to install it and give it a try. Fascinating tool, amazing possibilities.

Well, Dell Computer is learning about the web. See the confession at Consumerist, in which the company admits its mistake in demanding that the site take down a posting about its kiosk sales operation.

Some things do change.

Journalism.co.uk did a nice job covering last week’s conference in London, including this posting about a talk I gave there.

The Institute for Interactive Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism is looking to fill the new position of Assistant Director, a key position in a small grant-funded center. The Assistant Director will work closely with the Executive Director in producing all of the center’s training activities, editing and writing for the center’s five Web sites and all print publications, outreach and marketing, grant development and strategic planning. The Assistant Director must track new developments in new media, participatory journalism, citizen journalism and innovations in journalism and use that information to write, edit and assign freelance stories for Web and print publication. The Assistant Director will help applicants for J-Lab grants and entries for J-Lab awards programs and track progress of J-Lab pilot projects.

UPDATED

NY Times: G.E. and Pearson Are Said to Study Bid for Dow Jones. The General Electric Company, the parent of NBC, and Pearson, the publisher of The Financial Times, are exploring a joint bid for Dow Jones & Company to rival an offer made by the News Corporation, people familiar with the talks said yesterday.

The journalism coming out of the GE part of this potential deal — from NBC and CNBC — is no great shakes, but the Financial Times is one of the planet’s great newspapers, probably the best in the English language if you need a global economic view.

It’s a near-certainty that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. would muck badly with the Wall Street Journal. That kind of interference is much less likely with these other bidders, though still possible if the often-terrible journalistic instincts at NBC and CNBC were to take over such a partnership.

So there’s hope, anyway…

UPDATE: The Los Angeles Times got a copy of an editorial-independence proposal from the family that controls Dow Jones to Murdoch, a document the paper calls “unusual in the severity of its prescriptions; stunning in its unspoken assumption of Murdoch’s reflexive bad faith; revealing in that, all that notwithstanding, the Bancrofts correctly saw that the guarantees proposed still were insufficient.”

The Times then listed several of the conditions. But it didn’t publish the actual document, even online.

This is a demonstration of how traditional media organizations persist in failing basic journalism principles in the Web age. If there was a deal with whoever provided the document not to publish it, say so. If not, there is no conceivable reason to keep it from the readers.

(Note: I sold most of my Dow Jones stock last week, on the assumption that Murdoch would end up getting the company. The remaining shares are being transferred as charitable donations.)

Check out this Tutorial, “a step-by-step process for finding free company and industry information on the World Wide Web.” I looked through it and it’s quite good.