Center for Citizen Media

The Project for Excellence in Journalism has posted a roundtable discussion, Charting the Online Revolution. I’m a participant.

Wired News: Digg Fights Top Users For Control. Some of the generals in Digg.com’s army of volunteer news readers are in revolt over new abuse controls that could undermine their influence on the site.

In an item on Poynter Online about the likely dismissal of a libel lawsuit against a website where a commenter posted allegedly libelous material, a staffer from the San Diego Union Tribune is quoted thusly:

While protection to ferret out the truth is nice, I kind of wish the courts or Congress would revisit this law. It bothers me to run content online that is clearly defamatory but to get to say it’s OK because we can’t get sued. It’s like a legal neener-neener.”

He should take the time to understand the law. The 1996 Communications Decency Act carved out a “safe harbor” for online sites that host conversations. The law said essentially that the speakers, not the sites, were responsible for what’s said as long as the site doesn’t edit or otherwise muck with what’s being said. The idea was to provide a robust place for discourse.

The analogy people often make is to the phone company. The telco isn’t liable for the contents of conversations even when criminals use phones to plan crimes.

There’s no neener-neener going on here. If the traditional media guy wants to force websites to monitor all postings for libel before letting them go online, he’s arguing for wiping out a fundamental value of the Net.

It’s no surprise that some bloggers on the political right have been enthusiastic supporters of the fake history that ABC and Disney are passing off as “almost fact” this weekend — the so-called “docudrama” about 9/11. What is dismaying in the extreme is that some people for whom I’ve had a great deal of respect in other ways are joining this parade of propaganda.

I will read what they say in the future with vastly less trust than I’d done before. Their readers deserved more honesty, more honor.

There’s a fascinating experiment taking place this weekend. It’s called “dropping knowledge” — a meeting and project that

challenges the notion that only the media and so-called ‘experts’ can speak out on matters of global relevance. dropping knowledge invites you to participate actively in a global dialogue and make your voice heard. dropping knowledge means questioning conventional ways of thinking and acting, finding new perspectives and creative solutions. We believe that the exchange of ideas, insights, values and opinions by free voices from all over the world can create a foundation of wisdom that grows, inspires and benefits us all.

How will this work? Bill Joy, who helped fund the effort, says by e-mail that he (and his former Sun Microsystems colleague John Gage) will be participating this Saturday in Berlin

where 112 engaged individuals from all over the world sit at a single table and, simultaneously, each answer 100 questions selected from those submitted by people from around the world to get hundreds of hours of video q+a. This information will then be conceptually indexed to build a “living library” which will be extended over time, of people answering hard questions. Such a library can then become a resource for NGOs (non-governmental organizations) to use in promoting change.

dk combines a number of interesting trends:
1) video
2) semantics on the web
3) use of natural language
4) first person material
5) open source educational materials (copyleft)

Socrates complained about books that you couldn’t ask them questions. Here’s a way to use the Web so that you can ask questions and get spoken responses.

There’s lots more information on the dropping knowledge site.

Wired News’ Ryan Singel asked his readers to rework a story on wikis. In “The Wiki That Edited Me,” he offers this debriefing summary:

Certainly the final story is more accurate and more representative of how wikis are used.

Is it a better story than the one that would have emerged after a Wired News editor worked with it?

I think not.

A good topic to pursue…

Many thanks to the Sunlight Foundation, which has awarded us one of its “Transparency Grants” for a test in California. It’s to

develop an Election Year Demonstration Project for citizen journalism in one Congressional district. CCM will oversee the creation of a website that will seek to cover everything that can possibly be reported on a Congressional election, with an emphasis on drawing on the talents and ideas of local citizen reporters. The site will include in-depth biographical and political information on candidates, audio and video archives, campaign finance profiles, first-person reports, links to articles, etc. This project is designed to serve as a model for possible nationwide implementation in hundreds of districts in 2008.

More on this soon.

WikiPatents – Community Patent Review says it

contributes to the US patent system by commenting on issued patents and, soon, pending patent applications.

OK, but what does the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office say? They’ll decide whether the overworked examiners — this is the charitable explanation for the garbage patents being issued all the time — will look at any of this.

Still, bringing more eyes to a problem can often bring better answers. It’s an experiment to watch.

Google’s latest foray into gathering information sounds promising. Its News Archive Search is described as an:

easy way to search and explore historical archives. Users can search for events, people, ideas and see how they have been described over time. In addition to searching for the most relevant articles for their query, users can get an historical overview of the results by browsing an automatically created timeline. Search results include both content that is accessible to all users and content that requires a fee. Articles related to a single story within a given time period are grouped together to allow users to see a broad perspective on the events.

If the material is in a database owned by someone — even if the stories have long since passed into the public domain — we’ll still pay for them. Not so great, after all: one step forward, three-quarters of a step backward.
Still, there’s a good aspect to this. Perhaps journalists and students will stop believing that the world was created in 1984, which is approximately the year when the news archives began going into databases.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism is making is voluminous data available to anyone who wants to use it in new ways:

Perhaps the biggest change is the new Numbers section, which contains virtually all the data PEJ has produced since it began in 1997. Here users can search our data archive by industry, by trend and by news event. Once they have found what they want, they then can customize that data and create their own charts. Through an advanced customization option, they can even change the colors and look of these charts and graphs to make them camera ready for their own use.

This is great, as far as it goes. Letting people roll their own reports, remixing the data in ways the PEJ folks might not have thought of themselves, is a valuable addition to the media research scene. It will pay dividends for all concerned.

Unfortunately, PEJ is insisting that people ask permission first before actually using the data for commercial or educational purposes. I can understand why PEJ would remind folks that data from third-party sources may require permission (though fair use will allow lots of use in any event), but why throw this speed bump in front of its own material?