Center for Citizen Media

Wired News has posted a draft of a story on wikis on its site and is inviting readers to help edit it.

Blake Fleetwood (Huffington Post) Media Blood Sport: “Snake”, “Ghoul”, “Prissy Perv”, “Wolf”. It became a game – a blood sport to be played for the greatest entertainment value. The public craves this stuff – the sexual abuse and murder of a blond child beauty queen – and has a pathological need to hate.

John Karr became the perfect media Piñata. Sell newspapers, get ratings. Who cares what it does to the justice system or the idea that suspects should be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Here’s a fact. While the major media were turning this story into the BIGGEST THING in months, the most widely read people in the blogosphere — while not ignoring the story — were not nearly so preoccupied.

This happens again and again on the tabloidish tales that make TV people and the New York Post (and, sadly, the San Jose Mercury News and San Francisco Chronicle, though to a somewhat lesser degree) go utterly berserk.

This isn’t to say bloggers’ collective focus is always the best one. What’s really scary is the utter shamelessness of major media right now.

UPDATED

Over at the TPM Muckraker site, they’re asking for help unmasking a U.S. senator who won’t fess up to holding back vital legislation. What’s up?

Just before the August recess, the Senate was set to vote on a bill co-sponsored by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) that would create a public, searchable database of all federal grants and contracts. Envisioned as a Google-like website, it would provide free, immediate access the information, which can be alarmingly difficult to obtain.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously passed the measure July 27th, and S.2590 seemed to be speeding on its way to full Senate passage when, in the dark of night, an unknown Senator placed a “secret hold” on the bill. According to Senate rules, the bill will never come to a vote as long as the hold continues.

So who’s the culprit?

Give them a hand if you can.

UPDATE: Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens is the one.

Jay Rosen says here how he’s contemplating the development of his important project, NewAssignment.net. I’m helping out in small ways, and hope to help in bigger ones…

It’s in Vienna, Austria, in early October. Details here.

Good video summary from last spring’s Beyond Broadcast gathering here.

David Weinberger is taking great notes at FooCamp, now in a session on the “Future of news” — lots of interesting ideas from folks at Digg, NewsVine and elsewhere.

Coming off the incredible Strong Angel III, I’m heading today to Sebastopol for the annual FooCamp, another kind of human and technological mashup. My brain is overwhelmed…

From Strong Angel III:

This image (click on it, or here, for larger view) is a very low-tech proof of a concept: turning SMS messages into news flow. With the help of people from several companies, including Mitre, 2SMS.com and Google, we’ve created a small demonstration of how citizen journalists could create location- and time-based data that might be useful in any number of ways.

The idea, in this case, was part of a scenario involving a major disaster. We assumed people would be telling each other what was happening in their communities and neighborhoods, and that if they could post such information straight into maps they’d have better information to work with.

So we sent SMS text messages to a gateway phone number, converted the results into a format that Google Earth could understand and ended up with a map layer showing SMS postings. With GPS-equipped mobile phones this would be trivial. Ours aren’t, so we asked senders to make the message body start with the San Diego street address, followed by two semicolons, with the rest of the message body comprising the actual information being sent from the location. (Note: it was stupid of me to use semicolons as a way of separating the message from the location; just try to find the semicolon on the average mobile phone.)

There are lots of questions about such methods. Such as: How do we prevent, or at least deal with, gaming of the system? People surely will post from locations where they are not present. Do we have to have GPS and images before we can begin to believe what people post?

Newspapers and other traditional media should be setting up such things. The potential for citizen-augmented news seems clear.

Meanwhile, we can be rolling our own. This is a long way from rocket science. I’m already contemplating some ways to use these techniques in a variety of situations and with other tools such as camera phones, and blogs. More experiments to come…

If any of this interests you, check out ICT for Peacebuilding. Great summaries of what’s going on.