Center for Citizen Media

Here’s his introduction to the unconference session he’ll run next Monday, entitled “Above the Noise“.

A few months ago I introduced Bill Wendel, author of the Real Estate Cafe blog, to the folks at Platial, which does a terrific user-annotated online mapping product. Bill had come to a Berkman Center session where I talked about various methods of doing citizen journalism, and I’d shown several mapping sites.

He immediately got how important this can be, and has been working hard to create a site that takes advantage of the genre.

Now take a look: The Real Estate Bubble Map is exactly the kind of thing I think Web mashups can do best.

There are potential problems with this, such as gaming by people who don’t like what he’s doing or who just like to wreck things. But careful attention can fix such problems.

Bill will be at our Citizen Journalism unconference next Monday. We’ll make time to showcase this project.

Steve Garfield, a great videoblogger, will lead a session at next Monday’s Citizen Journalism Un-Conference. Here’s his summary of what we’ll discuss.

The people who would rule our lives in the most minute ways are now trying to stop picture-taking in public places. They are the ones who should be stopped.

Citizen media tools are in the hands of just about everyone these days. If the authorities insist on the right to spy on our every move in public — witness the spread of video cameras operated by police agencies and private citizens alike — they should not be immune from reverse surveillance.

NY Times: Mel Gibson: The Speed of Scandal. A winner in all this was clearly TMZ, a celebrity news site that began operations just last November. “This was huge for us,” said Harvey Levin, the site’s managing editor and something of an expert in celebrity scandal, having created the now-defunct television show “Celebrity Justice.”

The LA Times editors are in a tizzy about the prospect of advertising on their section fronts, according to a story in the paper today. Quote:

Times Editor Dean Baquet said he “expressed concern” about ads running on the front of the Calendar section. He said he feared that articles about movies would run adjacent to advertising for films, perhaps giving the appearance that coverage had been compromised. But Baquet said he was reassured that there would be ways to set the ads apart from the editorial content.

The publisher, whose memo was leaked to a local blog, said there are no plans for ads on the paper’s front page.

Have they looked at their website’s front page lately?

This is what’s missing from almost all of the discussions about the moves by many papers to put ads on section fronts — and in the case of the Wall Street Journal, on Page 1. The websites have been putting loud ads on all pages since they started.

The widespread angst expressed by editors is for a product that will someday be supplanted entirely by the Web operation. If they’re holding back a tide of some sort, just what is it?

This one in the Times of London — “Unique film set ‘wiped out’ in 007 blaze disaster” — transcends idiocy.

Let’s reserve the word “disaster” for the really bad things. No wonder readers often think journalists have no sense of proportion.

Chicago Lawyer: Law Related Blogging Starting to See a Coming of Age: Berman is among a growing number of law professors, law students, lawyers, and even judges who have gravitated to the world of blogs, the interactive online medium that allows people worldwide to publish their ideas, and others to comment on them — all with an ease and immediacy that many legal professionals have come to embrace.

Every profession — practically every human endeavor — has a collection of blogs about it. The lawyers are making especially good use of the medium, though.

NY Times: Newspapers to Use Links to Rivals on Web Sites. Newspaper Web sites, which commonly post articles from sister publications, wire services and even blogs, have typically stopped short of providing generous doses of news from competitors. The move made by these papers is not a result of cooperation across the industry as it is a counterattack by publishers against Google and Yahoo, which have stolen readers and advertisers from newspapers in recent years, both with their search engines and their own news aggregation services.

When I started my newspaper blog in 1999, I immediately began pointing to stories in competing newspapers, trade publications and just about any other outside source I could find. Why? Because the readers expected me to tell them where the best stuff was, and if my paper hadn’t done it, that meant pointing elsewhere.

News websites have been notoriously stingy in their crediting of others’ work, for the same reason that they hate to write stories that are catching up with other people’s scoops. It’s a competitive thing.

It’s a stupid thing, though, if the point is serving the readers.

Let’s hope this move catches on in a bigger way.

That’s what CNet says:

CNN wants some of the clips being uploaded to popular video-sharing sites, such as YouTube, to find their way to the cable news channel.

Of course, the questions include:

• What are the licensing terms?
• Do the citizen journalists get anything but a pat on the back?
• Etc.

Still, this will be an interesting move by CNN, and I’m looking forward to hearing a lot more.