Center for Citizen Media

Over at Slashdot, in a posting entitled “Places Rated, Skeptically,” the editors sorted through more than 500 comments about a previous item

suggesting that, after accounting for local price differences, the best-paid tech jobs aren’t in Silicon Valley or other areas well known for computer jobs, but rather in smaller cities around the country.

What did they draw from the responses?

Quality of life is overall more important than salary, though, and it isn’t an easy thing to measure. Several readers pointed to reasons why the most expensive places to live get to be so expensive, and why (for those who can afford to live there in the first place) locations like Silicon Valley are often worth their premiums.

The essay is interesting by itself, but I wanted to note the technique Slashdot is using: pulling the most relevant items — that is, the ones that add real value to the conversation — out of the mass of comments in a way that makes it easy for the rest of us to get that extra value. It’s surfacing signal from noise.

Here’s the schedule, as listed on the Citizen Journalism “Un-Conference” page, for our gathering on Monday. We have an excellent group of moderators, and an equally compelling collection of participants. (The moderators have posted short descriptions of what they’ll cover; you’ll find details via the link above.)

Remember: The audience is the panel, and the moderators — experts in their own right — will be drawing out our collective knowledge.

Schedule:

* 9 a.m. — Welcome from Dan Gillmor
* 9:10 a.m. — Lisa Williams, who runs the H2otown blog covering Watertown, Mass., on local sites and how they work best.
* 10 a.m. — Andrew Lih, a major Wikipedian and former Columbia and Hong Kong University new media professor, on what would be the ideal toolset for citizen journalism, and what’s still missing from the toolset.
* 10:50-11:10 a.m. — Break
* 11:10 a.m. — Steve Garfield, a top videoblogger, on using multimedia tools for better citizen journalism.
* 12-1:15 p.m. — Lunch
* 1:15 p.m. — Tom Stites, whose recent speech on media and democracy has raised such interest, on how (and if) citizen journalists can fill the enormous gaps being left by traditional media organizations.
* 2:05 p.m. Phil Malone, co-director of the Clinical Program in Cyberlaw at Harvard Law School. He’ll lead a conversation about citizen journalists and the law, including seeking to better understand areas in which the activities of citizen journalists are being chilled by legal concerns and ways in which they could benefit most from help in avoiding legal trouble.
* 2:55-3:15 p.m. Break
* 3:15 Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices Online, which helps “amplify, curate and aggregate the global conversation online.” Ethan will lead a discussion on how citizen media people can make themselves heard amid all the online noise.
* 4:05 p.m. Wrap-up and more.
NOTE: All sessions will be in Pound 102 at Harvard Law School.

ShareSleuth, the new online news venture created by Chris Carey and funded by Mark Cuban, is taking its time in launching — in part to think through some serious issues. For example, the most recent posting explains that the initial story is being held in part due to a legal threat but also due to a rethinking of the editorial process.

Techdirt pulls apart a remarkably hype-filled Business Week cover story on Digg.com, where people identify important news stories and vote on their importance. Digg is doing valuable work, but the Business Week story is indeed fairly ridiculous.

I will be mostly heads-down into several projects (incuding attending Wikimania and getting stuff together for my Monday un-conference) during the next several days. Postings will be infrequent.

Heading to Boston today for Wikimania and our Monday citizen journalism unconference. Looking forward to seeing everyone…

Lots of folks are wondering who’s writing the hilarious fake blog, “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, Aged 51 1/2.” I have no idea, but it’s great.

NY Times: U.S. Wins Access to Reporter Phone Records. A federal prosecutor may inspect the telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources, a federal appeals court in New York ruled yesterday.

When I was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, I published for several years at the bottom of my column something called a “PGP Fingerprint.” This was a way of letting people who understood a little bit about encryption, the scrambling of information to keep it away from prying eyes, a way to contact me in a way that would improve the security of the communications.

It would not have solved the problem the Times (and, no doubt, other organizations soon) has in this case. And, in all the time I offered this aid to careful correspondents, almost no one took me up on it.

But the time has come, plainly, for journalists to start getting savvy about the use of technology for secure communications. This includes finding ways to help sources contact us in ways that are difficult or impossible to trace, and to encrypt the communications once they’re moving back and forth.

Actually, we all need this capability. Or we will, at any rate, as crooks, government and business snoops encroach further and further into what we once considered our private lives. The tools still aren’t easy enough to use, in most cases, or cheap enough, but they will be.

Meanwhile, if the folks at the NY Times aren’t thinking hard today about how to preserve their ability to do their jobs, I’ll be surprised.

In Vanity Fair, Michael Bronner has produced a tour-de-force, “9/11 Live: The NORAD Tapes,” a dramatic reconstruction, based on newly released audio tapes, of how military and civilian authorities responded during the 2001 attacks. (Among other findings, Bronner makes clear that the military and White House dissembled like crazy in the aftermath.)

He’s combined terrific journalism — solid reporting and writing — with an element that transforms the resulting piece into something greater than the already powerful text. Throughout the story are links to the audio transcript excerpts.

The result is stunning. I encourage you to read and listen for yourself.

Nicholas Lemann, dean at Columbia University’s journalism school, takes to the pages of the New Yorker to rehash the same old bloggers-v-journalists straw man, contributing practically nothing to this long-tired conversation, though he does come up with some interesting items from journalism history.

The best responses:

Steven Johnson, tired of this, too, briefly offers “Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About Them Now?)

Jeff Jarvis, meanwhile, rises to Lemann’s bait at considerable length here, saying he “would have hoped for something more expansive, imaginative, open, creative, generous, constructive, strategic, and hopeful from the head of one of America’s leading journalism schools…”

Then, again, Jeff is an optimist.