Center for Citizen Media

I’m at the Incheon airport, heading home, after a conference that has, by turn, inspired and amazed me. The OhmyNews Citizen Journalism Forum, which concluded last evening with a dinner in Seoul, brought together people from around the world to share experiences and ideas about their work.

It’s been a remarkable several days. Although I gave one talk and moderated a panel, my goal was mainly to listen, and learn. I’ll be sharing some of what I heard and learned in an upcoming post, but at least three impressions are already indelible.

First, and of course I’ve believed this all along, this phenomenon is for real. Period. Yes, there will be lots more fits and starts, and setbacks that infuriate and worry us, but every year shows progress.

Second, the citizen journalists here, some of whom write for OhmyNews and others of whom have created their own operations, and incurably optimistic. They have discovered the power of their own work and voices, and are pushing ahead despite the very real obstacles we all acknowledge.

Third, the search continues for business models, and there’s great debate on how to encourage people to participate in ways that give them value for what they’re doing. We’re seeing some examples of ideas that work well, and projects that haven’t worked. (OhmyNews is an example of the former, and its hybrid, pro-amateur method may be a key reason.) We learn from all of it.

I keep reminding folks that we’re in the very early days of all this. It’s crucial to keep that in mind when we’re tempted toward pessimism. The current mini-backlash against citizen journalism, meanwhile, is a natural and even valuable state of affairs: When something gets built up in the public sphere, well-meaning (and not so well-meaning) critics point out the flaws. None of this approaches perfection, but it’s getting better all the time. That’s the best news.

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Gary Chapman, professor at UT Austin and director of the 21st Century Project, closes the conference with a speech on “Citizen Journalism and the Digital Divide”, a topic near and dear to my heart. He starts by explaining that “digital divide” is a term that’s falling out of favor, and that people are reorienting towards the more positive “digital opportunity”, a phrase that stresses inclusion, not exclusion.

We’ve just passed 1 billion internet users. It’s the first communication technology to reach 1 billion users all through the same medium (more or less.) It’s reached every nation other than North Korea, which has chosen not to connect to the Internet. People in the US are now spending more time on the Internet than watching TV. But the internet is growing fastest in places where access is most sparse, like the Middle East and Africa, where it’s growing at 200% a year – growth is slowing in industrialized nations, where the market is saturated. Growth is striking in India and China, the two markets people are most interested in. Broadband is increasing at 900% a year in China, a truly astonishing rate.

In urban markets, solutions being offered for the Internet access include cybercafes, Community Technology Centers, PC Bangs (super cyber-cafes that have up to 1,000 machines in a single building), Yahoo! Tarjeta Prepago (prepaid cards for 100 pesos, which opens a Yahoo! account and gives them an email address for use on business cards), and Brazil’s Computador de Uno Reale (a CD Rom which costs 1 real – about $0.40 – and allows users to have a personalized desktop at a cybercafe.)

VOIP is a major driver for internet access in rural areas, especially in Africa. Satellite connectivity, and asyncronous connectivity – “data mules” – are also important. The Arid Lands information network uses Worldspace satellite radio to deliver information from Sudan to Mozambique to PCs powered with special radio reciever cards. MP3 files can be downloaded, then transmitted over traditional radio, potentially reaching nomadic tribes and people in very rural areas. Because power is a major problem in Africa and other areas, hand-cranked devices like the Freeplay radio and the hand-cranked Motorola phone are possibilities.

Chapman is enthusiastic about store-and-forward technologies which use physical transport – trucks, motorcycles – and wireless connections to bring bits from rural areas to connected villages. (He shows an example from Cambodia – I’m most familiar with DakNet in India.) He shows Negroponte’s “$100 Laptop” and the AMD Personal Internet Communicator, which he prices at $180. Chapman works with the PIC in Uganda, and notes that it runs on 10% of the power required by a traditional PC, can run on a car battery or a solar panel, and has a 10 gig harddrive. (The power consumption – and price – don’t include display technology.) Using PICs at a refugee camp for Katrina refugees, Chapman plugged 50 PICs into a single power cable, something you can’t do with a normal PC. The price on the PIC is supposed to come down to $50.

The mobile phone is becoming a universal phenomenon – the mobile industry predicts sales of a billion devices this year. Chapman shows off the Simputer – one of the major failures of handheld experimentation – and blames the failure on the falling cost of PC hardware. Another option is thin clients, like Inveneo’s solar powered Internet station, which include mesh connectivity and provide VOIP infrastructure.

Global warming, he suggests, has made hydropower less reliable in many African nations, leading to regular power cuts in major cities. The need for flocks to follow scarce water pulls children away from schools – if you’ve installed computers in a school and the population moves away, it’s hard for them to use that resource. So climate change affects power and digital divide issues in the developing world.

Chapman points out that devices like AMD’s PIC are targetted to people with some income – $1000 to $7000 a year, decidedly middle-class by developing world standards. This is a large and growing market, and one that businesses are beginning to address. Wireless connectivity – and the potential of Wimax – represents a major advance in bridging divides. If Wimax meets its promise of allowing use within 20 miles of a router, this will make creating wireless networks orders of magnitude easier. And free online tools from Google – email, spreadsheets, word processors – and open source tools like Ubuntu are making it easier for people to take advantage of the machines and connectivity they have.

Making the point that people in the US can learn from the developing world, Chapman points to the SEAEAT blog that emerged in response to the Boxing Day Tsunami – the model of the blog, he argues, was replicated in the US in the aftermath of Katrina.

Effective bridging of digital divides will rely on several factors:
– Falling hardware costs
– New devices – interesting that major technology companies are focusing on these markets
– Improved connectivity
– Improved literacy
– Appropriate applications – “the key that opens the door” – what is it that gets people online?
– Government leadership

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Inkyu Kong, a citizen reporter for three years with OhmyNews, has some fascinating perspectives on the success of OhmyNews in Korea as opposed to in other parts of Asia. His presentation offers some background thoughts on social forces in Korea, and case studies of OhmyNews versus JanJan, a Japanese citizen media site, and on the success of the domestic PC market in South Korea.

South Korea has branded itself as a wired nation – more than 70% of the population has access to broadband. The president is considered the “Internet President”, and there’s been a focus on eCommerce for job creation. South Korea has some unique phenomena – PC bangs, cybercafes where people get together and play computer games, as well as gaming leagues, whose matches are televised live. (Below is a screenshot from my hotel room TV earlier today, featuring a televised Starcraft match.)

(Kong has an excellent explanation for the broadband penetration in Korea – it’s not just national will, it’s also geography. Getting to 70% penetration required 14,000 miles of optical fiber in Korea. In West Virginia, by contrast, it required 20,000 miles.)

In this environment, OhmyNews’s success makes some sense, though is still impressive. It’s now the 6th most influential news medium, with 40,000 “news guerillas”. It’s no surprise that a Japanese company, Janjan, tried to mimic the model. But Janjan hasn’t had nearly the success of OhmyNews. One possible explanation is that Japanese broadband penetration is 45%, versus 70%. But there’s a social explanation as well – Kong argues that, in Japan, people are reluctant to express opinions while Koreans feel freer to speak out. In Korea, young people – the wired people – are very politically active, while in Japan, the politically active are the people over fifty. The Confucian respect for learning translates into a respect for journalism and the written word, another advantage for OhmyNews.

South Korea and Japan also differ in the adoption of the PC. South Korea’s Chaebols – conglomerates – advertise that they produce everything “from chips to ships”. And they very aggresively promoted the PC as a learning tool, taking advantage of a Confucian respect for education and learning. Ad campaigns had children saying “I cannnot afford not to have a computer, Dad”, and showing the child’s dreams fading away without a machine.

Of course, Korean kids used the machines for games, as well as for study. In Japan, gaming took place on Gameboys and Playstations – there was no educational overlap as in South Korea. The presence of PCs was a catalyst for the spread of broadband. Kong sees Japan and Korea as connected to two different internets – a Keitai (mobile) internet versus the PC bang internet, with the latter being more conducive to citizen journalism.

Hideki Hirano, the managing editor of OhmyNews Japan appears on behalf of Shuntaro Torigoe, the senior editor for the new property, which is slated to launch in late August. Hirano has recently finished a book on how business leaders can motivate and persuade through storytelling – before delivering Mr. Torigoe’s speech, he offers his own story: a move from skepticism about citizen media before deciding to join the firm. With 20 years experience as a financial journalist in the US for Japanese publications, Hirano had to be convinced by Mr. Oh, an article in the Economist and a speech by Dan Gillmor before he came on board.

With this as preface, he offers Mr. Torigoe’s slides, which start with a history of his 41 years of experience as a journalist, with major Japanese papers, a US newspaper and as a war reporter in Iran and Iraq. His enthusiasm for journalism has led him to enthusiasm for citizen journalism, but some caution about whether the model will work in Japan.

Democracy, he notes, is new to Japan, introduced after WWII. And it’s still not very popular – despite Koizumi’s popularity, only 67% of people voted in the last election. (This would be a phenomenal turnout by US standards!)

Citizen – “shi-min” – sounds a little odd in Japanese. It calls up implications of “taxpayer”. But it’s important that citizen reporting include housewives, students, and foreigners living in Japan. But there are differences between Korea and Japan that may make the OhmyNews model difficult to replicate:

– South Korea had a succesful democratic movement in 1987, which generated a great deal of political will and power. In Japan, a dominant political party has ruled for over 60 years. Thus politics in Japan tends to be covered as a horserace or a baseball game, not a participatory phenomenon.

– There’s a strong distrust of mainstream media in South Korea, but great respect for mainstream journalism in Japan.

– The relationship to the Internet is complicated in Japan. Yes, there are 8.6 million bloggers, many of them writing expert blogs on esoteric subjects. But there’s a lot of resentment of this culture, largely based on the culture of “Second channel”, a Japanese site that shows much of the worst of the participatory internet.

– Many Japanese aren’t comfortable connecting their names to their opinions – they’re more comfortable in a culture of anonymity.

In bringing OhmyNews to Japan, these questions and disparities will need to be addressed and bridged.

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

A second panel of citizen journalists – all reporters for OhmyNews – help diversify the picture of the people who report for the service. Several of the panelists have strong political views which have led them to their work as citizen journalists.

Ramzy Baroud is a Palestinian academic and journalist, who is in the process of moving to London to head a Palestinian cultural center. Growing up in the Gaza strip as a refugee, his upbringing was a politically charged one – he felt a strong sense that the Palestinian story was not being told, or not being told right. His family had hoped he’d become a doctor – he was diverted by his passion for media, and for reacting to coverage he felt misconstrued the Palestinian situation. His first contribution to a newspaper was an angry letter to the editor – this opened a career that led him into a fulltime career as a journalist, writing about the US embargo against Iraq, the effect of depleted uranium on child health, and mass funerals of children. His work has moved online, starting a site called Palestine Chronicle, which Ramzy concedes is decidedly opinionated, pro Justice, pro Peace, but includes Palestinian, Arab and Jewish writers. His recent writing has focused on the Jenin massacre, which became a book on interviews published with the assistance of Noam Chomsky and other American academics – it became a best seller on Amazon. He’s involved with OhmyNews in part because he believes it’s critical to “bring back the public sphere to make our democracies meaningful.”

Njei Moses Timah is Cameroonian pharmacist, whose love of magazines led him to an online course on feature writing, and to a career in citizen journalism. He reflects on a fact that’s been on my mind through my time in Korea – Cameroon was at approximately the same level of development as South Korea in the 1960s, though the countries have since diverged sharply. He notes that Cameroon’s leaders don’t understand the importance of the Internet and urges the Koreans in the audience not to take their broadband access for granted. He notes that rich natural resources don’t neccesarily lead towards prosperity, recounting the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the installation of Mobutu by western powers. “It’s not in our interest to have resources – resources invite predators and predators keep you down.”

Korean citizen journalist Sung-young Song tells us he’s “just a country boy”, from a mountain village, who makes his living the traditional way – growing rice and writing articles for OhmyNews. He lived in Seoul briefly, working for a broadcast company, but was miserable, behind on his bills, cramped into an apartment. He moved to a small town, bought a house for $2000 and renovated it, and is now living a radically different lifestyle – he grows food, helps teach his children at home, and wears the clothes his wife sews for him. “As we moved away from the playground of capitalism where everything is counted in monetary terms, our life became more joyful.” He began writing on OhmyNews about his unusual lifestyle, living on about $600 per month – he experienced some ridicule, but some enthusiasm as well. He’s now worked for OhmyNews for almost four years, writing a book composed of his columns. OhmyNews also made it possible for him to travel to North Korea and report on the situation there. But there’s a major downside – citizen journalism has caused “internet addiction”, keeping him online many hours a day, while he tells his children only to use the computer twice a week. Finally, he wrote a piece titled “Dreaming to be away from OhmyNews”.

(I wish I’d known a bit more about Song’s background before he interviewed me yesterday. Asking me what I thought about the US/Korean Free Trade Agreement, I gave my standard free, fair trade response: the US needs to drop agricultural tarrifs, but protectionism doesn’t help anyone – South Korea has benefitted greatly from global trade over the past 40 years. It was pretty clear that he wasn’t thrilled with my answer – he finally said, through a translator, “You look like Michael Moore, but you don’t think like him,” one of the most wonderful two-sided putdowns I’ve ever experienced…)

Jung-hee Lee is another Korean correspondent, a teacher who works on “hard news” articles in contrast to Sung-young Song’s more personal journalism. He’s got a lovely, poetic way of describing his enthusiasm – when OhmyNews accepted his first article, “I cannot describe how happy I was – it was sweeter than my first kiss.” Unfortunately, the article didn’t receive any comments – heartbreak! But he’s remained a committed journalism, submitting 110 articles, roughly one every ten days, and identifies himself as a “news guerilla” – “News guerillas are irregular soliders who carry a digital camera in one hand, a pad in the other, sneak into internet cafes and dissapear silently after their work.” One of Lee’s articles led to a gardener – whose garden was destroyed by a US military helicopter – being compensated for the damage to his land. Other stories have had sadder results – reporting on a story on an apartment fire, he recognized the name of the woman killed in the blaze as one of his students from ten years earlier. “I wish there were no sad news in the world.”

Ana Maria Brambilla trained as a mainstream journalist in Brazil, but was fascinated by the contrast between mass media and citizen media: “Mass media are only partly living up to the definition of communication. A small group speaks, and everyone else listens…” Interested in journalism that was more like the conversation Dan Gillmor speaks about, not a lecture, she found Todd Thacker and interviewed him – Todd responded by asking her to report on Brazil for OhmyNews International. It’s been a difficult path for her, as she finds it easier to write stories than to communicate the importance of open source journalism. Brazilian journalists have accused her of “betraying her profession.” She believes this is because reporters in Brazil think of themselves as “a special person who never makes mistakes and always knows the truth.” But, on the web, there’s a space for everyone to express ideas, as long as people acknowledge that listening is more important than speaking.

Lily Yulianti is a professional journalist from Indonesia, who works as a language specialist for NHK in Japan, helping run their Bahasa language service. Despite her journalism background, she was reluctant to join OhmyNews due to her inexperience writing in English. The experience of working with OhmyNews has convinced her that your perspective is more important than your writing skills – the skills can always improve. Much of Lily’s writing has focused on the experience of being a visible Muslim woman in a non-Muslim nation (Lily wears a head scarf). She’s also written about the need for Muslim tolerance of Christians in Indonesia, which resulted in a church in Australia writing to thank her, and asking her to write for their church bulletin. She accepted, as an opportunity for more cross cultural communication.

Chinese journalist Xu Zhiqjang drew the short straw, and abbreviated his remarks, which is unfortunate, as he’s got a great perspective on the development of the Internet in China. He observed that venture capital has had a huge influence on the shape of the net, leading to Chinese competitors to eBay, Yahoo and other web services – he speculates that there could easily be a VC-backed competitor to OhmyNews. If so, it will probably focus on the mobile Internet, which is surpassing the traditional internet in China, as people find it easier to explore via their mobiles than via laptops.

It’s truly amazing to be hearing the stories of citizen journalists from around the world here at the OhmyNews Forum. These folks have done an amazing job at getting a cross-section of the folks who are really doing this.
(Huge frustration for me: I was hoping to interview a lot of these folks, but I keep getting interviewed myself and haven’t had the opportunity to hear as many of their stories as I’d like…)

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Michael Weiss was the only Israeli attendee at the OhmyNews forum last year – now he’s one of three. He tells us that, at this rate, the official language of the forum will be Hebrew in a few years.

Weiss certaintly took good notes at the forum last year, and has used this information to launch Israel’s first citizen journalism site, scoop.co.il. Israel’s an interesting place to launch online media – 3.6m of 7 million citizens are daily internet users – 70% use broadband, and 60% read online news on a daily basis. These readers usually triangulate their news coverage, reading 2-3 different sites a day to get different perspectives. Readers report they trust online news more than other channels.

In founding Scoop, Weiss saw some troubling questions: Were they too early? Too late? Would people want to read what “regular” people had to say? Would they be squashed by competition from large newspapers? And how much editorial influence should they have?

This last question is an interesting one – rather than moving towards a low editorial control model like Wikinews, they decided to use a heavy editorial model, like Ohmynews, “with Israeli improvement”…

To recruit reporters, Scoop looked for succesful bloggers, people with strong writing skills and lots of comments – then they recruited them via personal emails. They worked hard on PR, and recruited 250 writers when they launched last December. Writers are promised the chance to build skills, to gain a reputation online, and are rewarded via an incentive system: write ten articles and you get a t-shirt. For 25, a webcam, for 50 a night in a hotel or a digital camera – hit 100, and you win a subscription to an Israeli daily paper, worth about $300. There’s no other financial incentive. But there is a strong sense of community, a closed bulletin board system for citizen journalists – a “reporters’ zone”.

Scoop now has 800 writers, who are chosen quite carefully – they need to fill a detailed registration, then get a phonecall to confirm their identity. As an author, you can write only two stories a day – “more than that, and you are unemployed, or probably lousy.” And editors check stories

The service supports comments, which are not edited – readers can report comments that are potentially offensive. So far, they’ve only removed two. And readers can vote on stories, helping promote them to the front page, where the six top stories are listed.

In the future, Scoop is planning “ScoopTV”, the ability for people to post short video commentaries. They’re offering polls, petitions and a way for people to build rankings, not just of their favorite stories, but of most and least favorite politicans, sports teams, etc. And Scoop is trying to begin Scoop International, inviting people from around the world to submit stories that will get read by an Israeli audience, an interesting opportunity for dialog across national borders.

An interesting question was put to Weiss – can Palestinians write for Scoop? They can, he tells us, but none have chosen to. There are Arab reporters, and “a full spectrum of Israeli society”, but Palestinians haven’t chosen to join, perhaps because they’re not comfortable writing for a site that’s so consciously and proudly Israeli.

While Scoop is taking off very quickly, backed by venture capital funds and expanding quickly, flix.dk has grown much more slowly and carefully. Started in 2003 by Erik Larsen as an open, experimental site, flix.dk provides citizen’s media in Denmark. It’s a “bonsai” version of OhmyNews, inspired by an article Larsen read in Wired Magazine on the Korean site. Run from a home computer in Larsen’s apartment, it began with three writers and has expanded slowly, so far without funding, revenue or advertising, though Larsen is now considering adding ads so the site can expand.

The goal of flix is to provide an alternative news outlet, something Larsen feels is lacking in Denmark. There are three major newspapers, one recently bought by a British conglomerate, and the other two (a left and a right-leaning paper) which now have joint management. A new Icelandic-run paper plans to distribute free newspapers to every household. But Larsen worries that there’s a race to the bottom in these papers, sensationalizing news in the process. flix tries not to compete purely on a news level, focusing instead on high-quality writing of all sorts.

An early success story came in covering “the Keld-Bach case”, where a Danish blogger was threatened with legal action for posting a link to a link to the copyright-infringing Grey Album. The threat was illegal under Danish law, and by reporting the story, it became a major national issue, and the law firm eventually apologized to the blogger on national radio.

A report on graffiti in Copenhagen ended up generating a huge number of pageviews. Evidently it was picked up by other graffiti communities in Iceland, Canada and the US – Larsen sees this as a lesson that you’ll never know where your audience will come from.

Another story makes him less comfortable – a Somali musician was prevented from playing a concert by an Islamic group opposed to public music performance. He wrote a story for flix in English, which Larsen translated and posted. He worries that this may have increased anti-Muslim sentiment in Denmark, which he sees as a major problem. (Commenting on the notorious Danish cartoons, he interprets them as an obvious provocation, and a result of Islamophobia in Denmark.)

Larsen believes that OhmyNews has been more succesful than flix in part due to a difference in national character. Individualstic Danes are more likely to start their own websites than to contribute to a group blog. South Korea may have more of a sense of community, and less of a sense of competition.

Ethan Zuckerman writes:

So, who are citizen reporters? That’s the question I’ve been asking based on the folks I’ve met at the conference thus far and the questions I got from the audience after my talk. The after lunch panel gives an overview, featuring six citizen journalists who work with OhmyNews, representing a wide range of origins and viewpoints.

Leading off is wandering Tennessean, David Michael Weber, who’s spent the past five years in Japan teaching English. His writing is primarily travel writing, providing historical and cultural context to the experiences he has while travelling. This isn’t without controversy – writing about the celebration of the Emperor’s birthday in Japan, Weber found himself in the midst of not one, but two flamewars. On OhmyNews, some readers felt the story was too pro-Japanese, and let him know their concerns. On another site with more Japanese readers, a reader took offence at Weber’s comments that history textbooks have controversial revisions – his debate with Weber largely consisted of yelling, “HAVE YOU READ THE TEXTBOOK?” Weber describes his experience with “crazy nutters” – extremists on the left or the right – as convincing him that citizen’s media can be a tool to mediate away from closed, extremist viewpoints.

Gregory Daigle is another sort of content creator – an industrial designer who worked with Herman Miller before becoming a software designer and CD rom designer. In recent years, he’s been working on projects to let students monitor environmental factors in urban areas and upload that information to central websites. Through the University of Minnesota, he ran a conference called “Wireless Cities”, generating an enormous pile of notes and ideas. Looking for a place to share these ideas, he found OhmyNews and wrote a series called “Why Wireless Cities Matter.” It was well-received, and Gregory has found that OhmyNews is willing to offer useful commentary on his technical writing.

Roberto Spiezio claims he joined OhmyNews to improve his English – clearly it’s worked for him, as he’s confident and well spoken on the stage. He’s inspired by OhmyNews’s “unconventional approach to news” – not a top to bottom approach, but more of a peer to peer approach, of news made by the people, delivered for the people. This, he believes, is critically important in his native Italy, which is “not an ideal environment for press freedom.” Berlusconi, he tells us, has effected freedom of the press, bringing Italy down to 79th place in Freedom House’s press freedom rankings. OhmyNews opens a space where highly individualistic people – like many Italians are! – can contribute to a global press freedom movement.

Fernando Mariano-Aguirre reminds us that a worldwide audience is watching our gathering, wishing us a good afternoon, evening, night and morning. Drawn into OhmyNews by an interview with a Chilean reporter, Fernando found that Todd Thacker and his team were very generous in transforming “my poor english into something understandable”. At the same time, he learned some key lessons about writing for a global audience: omit details that are only interesting for local readers, and talk about things that are implicit to local readers, but not known by global readers. Like Italy, Argentia doesn’t have an unconstrained media environment – the broadcasting laws were written during the last dictatorship, and don’t let cooperative societies own cable stations. “It’s difficult for journalists to swim against the tide.” But citizen journalism lets him break through some of these pre-existing constraints – “In a world where freedom of trade tramples freedom of the press,” OhmyNews has let him express himself as a journalist and as a person. The network is so unique because it breaks traditional North-South media dynamics – there’s an “informational South in Berlusconi’s Italy” for instance. OhmyNews links the south to the south and the south to the east, inverting some of the usual relationships of media flow.

Alexander Krabbe, a medical student and citizen journalist from Germany, reminds us that mass media was misused as a tool for terror and destruction under Hilter. He believes that these techniques are now being used by mass media in democratic societies – “misuse of media is not a faraway phenomenon… one need only switch on the US propoganda channel, Fox News.” He argues that Fox News created a mood in the US to support the Iraq invasion, and asks whether Rupert Murdoch would have been able to make his argument for invading Iraq national policy if he’d only been a citizen reporter, not the owner of a media network. He asks whether the war on terror will be won by soliders, or by involved citizens, perhaps citizen reporters.

Pierre Joo, a Frenchman of Korean descent, tells us he discovered OhmyNews while researching CyWorld – the Korean equivalent of MySpace. The best source of information he was able to find was on OhmyNews, written by a CyWorld addict… who could be a better source than a journalist who was deeply attached to the online world? Pierre wonders why citizen journalism has been so succesful in Korea and less succesful in France. He believes it has to do with the educational system of both countries – while South Korean students learn to take standardized tests, French students are trained to write essays for four hours at a time. The French don’t need entertainment on weekends, he tell us – they get together and argue. The French press – which is suffering financially – has a great deal of diversity. But citizens already have a lot of ways of speaking, so may be less interested in becoming citizen journalists, while Korean people grasp OhmyNews as “a chance to speak in the midst of massively conservative media.” Perhaps participatory media could help slow the decline of French mainstream media.

CNET: Apple abandons effort to unmask leaker. The case, filed in the superior court of Santa Clara County, drew national attention not only because it involved unreleased products–but also because it was one of the first to set the rules of how the rights of uncredentialed online journalists should be balanced against the rights of trade secret holders. By not appealing its loss, though, Apple has set a legal precedent that could embolden other journalists (and perhaps other leakers) in the future.

This is extremely good news for the citizen journalists of the world, or at least California.

It’s too bad, in a way, that Apple didn’t take it to the state Supreme Court or even higher. (Steve Jobs publicly vowed he would do just that; like some of his other assertions over the years, this turned out to be, uh, inoperative.) A precedent from the highest court is always better than one from a lower court.

But this is still a valuable precedent, and one we should all celebrate. The appeals panel understood that protecting journalism, not journalists, is the point. We should all remember that.

(I’m proud to have filed declarations in these cases, at the request of attorneys for the defendant websites — no, I wasn’t paid to do so — saying that the sites in question were doing journalism and that they deserved the same kind of protection that traditional media organizations would have in such cases. The trial judge ducked the issue, but the appeals court looked at it squarely, and came down on the right side.)

So the folks at Public Knowledge put out an audio of Alaska U.S. Senator Ted Stevens’ astonishingly ignorant — and inadvertently hilarious — treatise on the Internet (and why he’s against Network Neutrality). That was helpful.

Now comes Boldheaded.com with this remix of the senator’s remarks. This is citizen-media commentary at its most original, and an object lesson for the future.

Listen, laugh and learn.

(Public Knowledge has also posted a timeline of the Stevens saga, with links to several other remixes and send-ups.)

This week’s OhmyNews International Forum has opened, with some interesting commentary and suggestions from early speakers. Ethan Zuckerman, who’s here (and on a panel I’m moderating in a few minutes) is taking his usual great notes — and (update) even better, has agreed to cross-post them here.

I’ll post links to other folks’ blogs as I see them.