Center for Citizen Media

At the BlogHer conference, Lisa Stone discusses BlogHerAds — billed as “quality advertising for women bloggers” — a new advertising network and service that could be a big deal indeed.

It’s a gathering in Amsterdam in late September, and I’m among the many speakers. Details here.

Here’s a page listing on-demand videos from the OhmyNews Forum held earlier this month in Seoul. (I was a speaker.)

Slate magazine has a nifty feature called “Hot Document,” in which the site posts documents, highlights key portions and then, with mouse-over popups, tells you the significance of the highlighted text. But there seems to be a Firefox bug preventing this from working properly, or a bug in the Slate page coding.

Here’s a partial screen grab from this story, using Safari, showing how the Hot Document site should work:

Now here’s the same page in Firefox:

As you can see, the rollover doesn’t give you the full explainer text in Firefox. (I’ve reduced the size of the screen shots to fit in this page, which is why one has larger text than the other.)

I raise this issue because I think what Slate is doing with this feature is a genuine innovation in online journalism. To see it thwarted by inadequate software code (whoever is responsible) is unfortunate.

Once again blogs are proving, for a least a few people, to be a great farm system for the journalistic big leagues. As Reuters reports in a story entitled, “Time.com hires former Wonkette blogger,”

Former political blogger Ana Marie Cox, better known as Wonkette, will rejoin the so-called mainstream media as the new Washington editor for Time magazine’s Time.com Web site later this month.

Makes perfect sense to me, and it’s a probably a good move for both sides.

The New Yorker: Know it All: This is not the first time that encyclopedia-makers have snatched control from an élite, or cast a harsh light on certitude. Jimmy Wales may or may not be the new Henry Ford, yet he has sent us tooling down the interstate, with but a squint back at the railroad. We’re on the open road now, without conductors and timetables. We’re free to chart our own course, also free to get gloriously, recklessly lost. Your truth or mine?

USNews.com (I won’t link to it) is using a remarkably obnoxious technique to help its advertisers but infuriate readers: banner advertising that turns on audio you don’t ask for. I’m not sure whether simply loading the page is enough to set off this noise, or whether it happens when when you accidentally move your mouse over the ads.

I’m working in an office today. The ad that just blared out of my speakers was discussing erectile disfunction. Now there’s a conversation starter.

So: I’m now making a point not to visit USNews.com. In a sense, then, the ad was effective — in driving me away.

ABC News The War on the Web: The opportunity to offer information from the ground is also hindered by a lack of accountability.

When The New York Times makes a mistake, there are more than enough critics to ensure that the newspaper takes action against the offenders and reworks its policies to ensure more accuracy.

When an anonymous blogger espouses his view of a situation from the ground, or posts a piece of video, there’s no one to hold accountable and therefore no way to ensure that what’s being viewed is accurate or fair.

Several misunderstandings are contained in this piece. First, the NYT doesn’t always “take action” — though it’s gotten much better in that regard in recent years.

Second, there’s an assumption that bloggers are all anonymous. This is just false. Most bloggers who want to be taken seriously use their own names, and it’s certainly possible to track down the author/owner of a given website.

Third, in a world where mass media is being complemented by masses of media makers, the reader/viewer has new responsibilities, too. Specifically, we are obliged to be more skeptical of the things we don’t have reason to believe at the outset. The anonymous poster or video uploader deserves much less credibility than that media organization (or blogger) standing behind the material.

This shouldn’t be difficult to understand. Yet it is for just about everyone in the traditional media.

Mary Hodder and her colleagues have launched the beta of Dabble, which they says is “about people describing, discovering and organizing video, wherever it’s found or hosted.”

My colleagues at Global Voices Online are among the winners of the Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. Here’s the press release.

Congrats to all…