Over at TechMeme, Gabe Rivera has introduced a new sponsorship model that has the potential to truly shake up the online marketplace. He’s giving “Sponsor Posts” a prominent spot on the page, letting other content sites market what they’re discussing in related areas.
This is very, very smart stuff. The test, of course, is how good it’ll be for the advertisers, who are paying real money for the placement.
Watch that space.
AP: Pirate radio stations challenge feds. The rapidly proliferating scofflaws — and there are now hundreds of them broadcasting at any given moment in this country — are usually only audible within a few miles of their “home-brewed” transmitters. They find unused sections of the FM dial, fire up their mini-transmitters, raise their antennas and set up their station.
Congress and the Federal Communications Commission have been slow on the uptake with low-power radio, and people are just going ahead to do it themselves. The evidence of any widespread interference is minimal, and this movement makes us wonder if it’ll turn into a virtually unstoppable force.
Except: All the FCC has to do is make a few stern examples of violators. That’ll bring a lot of the activity to a halt, or virtually so.
The answer would be for the government folks to get off a dime and help people create stations, not put more barriers in front of them. Too much to hope for?
In Belgium, Google is prohibited from even linking to newspaper content. See this story in the International Herald Tribune.
It’s beyond idiotic for the newspapers to do this. Google is sending them customers.
No wonder the newspaper business is going in the tank. It has leaders who can’t understand fundamental reality.
The mission of OneWebDay: to create, maintain, advance, and promote a global day to celebrate online life.
The Knight Foundation is seeking
new ideas, pilot projects, commercial products and leadership initiatives that will improve the flow of information and news in the public interest.
This is a HUGE opportunity for all kinds of citizen journalists. Go for it, folks.
I spent part of yesterday at a small conference organized by WGBH, the huge Boston-based public broadcasting operation. The topic under discussion was “open media,” which means different things to different people.
The ground rules were no blogging, which presumably meant not covering what other people said. A few thoughts, however, about what I told the group that consisted mainly of public broadcasting folks.
I gave them my usual observations — that digital media are having a profoundly democratizing impact on both production and access. I also observed that access is not the same thing as distribution; we are not talking, or shouldn’t be, about “content providers'” ability to deliver media but about other folks being able to get what they want and need. It’s a crucial distinction, and not one that I think most traditional media people, much less the cable and phone duopolists, understand.
In a world where consumers are producers, and vice versa, the traditional producers should be anxious to invite their audiences into the process. So far, with a few exceptions, they are failing to do this in any serious way.
How could today’s public media organizations be more open in this context? I offered one example, which relates to the class project we’re organizing at the University of California, Berkeley, this fall — an ambitious collection of all data we can put together about a congressional campaign near the Bay Area.
Here’s a simple way public TV and radio stations could help seed the public sphere: Every time they go to a press conference or cover an event where a public figure — politicians, celebrities, high-profile business people, etc. — is speaking, the media organization should post on the Web the entire event, not just the snippets it chooses to run as part of a news report. Moreover, the material should be posted under a Creative Commons license allowing further and wider use.
Then, public media should ask the public for the audio and video the rest of us capture of public figures, and post it all. Then work with search engines to ensure that the material gets indexed properly so we can find it. (One simple approach would be to post it on the Internet Archive.)
This would be a start on creating a collaborative public media archive, and I’m hoping at least a few stations will consider it.
Jay Rosen has announced that Reuters has given his new project enough money to hire someone as an editor for NewAssignment.net. This is a great endorsement for Jay and his work.
SF Chronicle: Bail revoked for journalist in contempt case. Freelance journalist and activist Josh Wolf is heading back to jail after a federal appeals court on Monday ordered his bail revoked unless he changes course and gives a federal grand jury outtakes of footage he shot at a violent San Francisco protest in July 2005.
Congratulations to our Berkman Center colleagues at Global Voices Online, who have won the grand prize in the 2006 Knight-Batten Awards. To say “well deserved” is an understatement.
This podcast features an interview with Courtney Hollands of WickedLocal.com. WickedLocal is a citizen journalism initiative that is a companion to the Old Colony Memorial newspaper of Plymouth, Massachusetts (Yes, the one with the famous rock).
Hollands discusses how Wicked Local mixes pro content from the Old Colony Memorial and other papers in the region that are part of the same chain with citizen-contributed content. Photos and sports are particularly popular, she says — and Wicked Local has come up with an interesting spin on contributed and staff photos: allowing visitors to buy prints of photos.
I found Hollands’ discussion of the videoblog that she produces for the site particularly interesting: to say that this popular feature is produced on a shoestring is probably an overstatement. A lot of what Wicked Local is doing emphasizes the fact that some of the best innovations are the least expensive. This isn’t to say no money is being spent: the site uses commercial software from Prospero and Spotted, a web app that allows photo uploads with social networking features; and commercial grade products such as these aren’t cheap. However, this investment has passed on unintended benefits, in the form of creating the fastest, easiest way for reporters working alongside Hollands to get breaking news onto the web quickly.
WickedLocal may have touched off local competition for community initiatives — or, at least, the talent that created Wicked Local is being dispersed regionally. Memorial Press Group/Enterprise News Media, which owned the Old Colony and Wicked Local up until July, was bought by Gatehouse Media, which simultaneously bought several regional dailies and the Community Newspaper Company, which publishes 80+ dailies and weeklies in the Greater Boston area. Not long after, Bob Kempf, who held the reins at Enterprise while Wicked Local was taking shape, has moved to the Boston Globe’s Boston.com. Boston.com launched a whopping 27 blogs earlier this year: does hiring Kempf mean community initiatives are next? And how will Gatehouse, whose local weeklies compete directly with the Globe’s zoned editions in the suburbs, respond?
Here’s a link: Center for Citizen Media Podcast: Conversation with Courtney Hollands. Thanks to Courtney and to Colin Rhinesmith, who hosts our podcasts at Audio Berkman, where you can find all sorts of fascinating stuff from the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.