Center for Citizen Media

Ethan Zuckerman, my Berkman Center colleague, writes:

Increasingly, it strikes me that there are three types of netizens I want to hear from:
– folks who are in the right (wrong) place at the right (wrong) time: the commuter in the London underground when the bombs go off; Gnarlkitty, as she visits demonstrations surrounding the coup in Thailand.
– folks who have an insight or perspective I can’t easily find in mainstream media: TheMalau writing about Congolese politics; Russell Southwood writing about African telecoms; Roland Soong writing about, well, almost anything.
– folks who make themselves part of a distributed effort to create new knowledge: the researchers who pick apart records of Congressional pay for the Sunlight Foundation, the bloggers who cover the Kenyan parliament for Mzalendo.

Washington Post: Report Says Nonprofits Sold Influence to Abramoff. Five conservative nonprofit organizations, including one run by prominent Republican Grover Norquist, “appear to have perpetrated a fraud” on taxpayers by selling their clout to lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Senate investigators said in a report issued yesterday. The report includes previously unreleased e-mails between the now-disgraced lobbyist and officers of the nonprofit groups, showing that Abramoff funneled money from his clients to the groups. In exchange, the groups, among other things, produced ostensibly independent newspaper op-ed columns or news releases that favored the clients’ positions.

Pretty slimy stuff…

Dave Winer: What comes after Who Knew What When: It was a question of Who Knew What When. Iraq, Katrina and Delay do not fit that template. So I have to wonder whether we should be concerned if CNN or MSNBC or the LA or NY Times are in trouble, if the only story they know how to report is WKWW.

Paul Henry’s “The War of the Words” is unfair in some respects and utterly one-sided. It’s also a brilliant example of how to use democratized media tools to make a point. Take a look.

Floyd Landis, who won the Tour de France bicycle marathon, was charged with doping violations. He’s put up his defense on floydlandis.com, replete with documentation and detail.

This is an excellent example of how to use the Web to amplify one’s own case in a complex situation. News coverage of the case has been, by definition, incomplete. So here’s a place where the accused can make his own best case.

Newsmakers have been surprisingly loath to do this kind of thing in this way. They should do more of it.

UPDATED

Business Week: Wal-Mart’s Jim and Laura: The Real Story. So are Laura and Jim real people? Or part of an elaborate publicity stunt? It turns out they are for real. However, their story, told in full, with certain financial payments disclosed, does not reflect as well on Wal-Mart as perhaps the company would like. The tale of how they started the blog reveals how hungry Wal-Mart is to find people who have anything positive to say about the company. And little wonder.

Jim works for the Washington Post. He repaid the Wal-Mart-sponsored organization that subsidized the trip, but there are lots and lots of problems here…

(Note: Wal-Mart is a client of Edelman Worldwide, whose CEO, Richard Edelman, is an advisor to this Center.)

Jack Slocum has created a brilliant WordPress comments system using a Yahoo toolset. This is an example of how people are creating impressive new things by linking technologies.

Susan Mernit wonders: Why did Google buy YouTube when they could have bought the New York Times Company?

That news got me thinking about what Google mighta coulda bought with their money and didn’t, and I got to asking myself where the paradigm shift was in that.

For instance, with that kind of dough, Google could have bought the New York Times Company. I remember talking with Timesman Martin Nisenholtz about how the NYTimes was one of the biggest consumers/placements for Google AdWords, right behin

Just part of an interesting longer post by Mernit, who’s an executive at Yahoo. Read the whole thing here.

The Sunlight Foundation is offering a Transparency Tools Training session today. Ellen Miller, the foundation’s president, advises:

To participate in the Transparency Tools Training Webinar on October 11th at 2 p.m. Eastern Time, go to www.infiniteconferencing.com/join, choose ‘participant’ then enter this code: 632518 and you should be able to see what we’re doing.

To hear, call 1.888.346.3950 and enter 632518 followed by the # key, and you should be in.

We’ll start with FedSpending at 2 p.m., then do the congressional databases, financial disclosure and junkets sponsored by third parties, probably starting around 2:30. There will also be a chance to ask questions.

Let us know if you do this and how it went.

Placeblogger

Originally uploaded by lisa.williams.

Thursday, Oct. 12, 7PM
Berkman Center for the Internet and Society
23 Everett Street
Cambridge, MA

Attendees will get the first, prelaunch, look under the hood at a live, under development version of Placeblogger, the site I’m putting together that will be a directory and live aggregator of headlines from placeblogs across the US. I’ve collected more than 700, with examples from communities in every state in the nation. (And one for…wait for it…Antarctica!). Click here for a screenshot. The project has support from The Center for Citizen Media and Jay Rosen of Pressthink.

Placeblogs — sites that focus on geographical communities — are the living laboratory of citizen journalism: they say interesting things about how nonjournalists approach covering a fire, or a town council. More on this session, including links to directions, after the jump. Meetings are an ad-hoc affair, but this session may have a live audio feed accompanied by IRC for remote participants if we can get it working.
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