The Rocketboom split-up is the talk of the blogosphere. Amanda Congdon and her ex-partner, Andrew Baron, couldn’t reconcile their differences. (Their stories vary, to put it mildly.)
I’m a fan of both of these people, and hope they work things out. If not, the world won’t end.
The citizen media world is growing up. Sometimes there’s pain in the process.
Wall Street Journal: Free, Legal and Ignored. As a student at Cornell University, Angelo Petrigh had access to free online music via a legal music-downloading service his school provided. Yet the 21-year-old still turned to illegal file-sharing programs. The reason: While Cornell’s online music program, through Napster, gave him and other students free, legal downloads, the email introducing the service explained that students could keep their songs only until they graduated. “After I read that, I decided I didn’t want to even try it,” says Mr. Petrigh, who will be a senior in the fall at the Ithaca, N.Y., school.
The entertainment industry’s belief that we should all be in a pay-per-view world runs contrary to common sense. Digital restrictions management is more than a speedbump; it is an outright barrier.
The worry for citizen media is several-fold. First, the entertainment companies are trying to force technology companies to build restrictions into pretty much everything, and to block technologies and services that will be essential for access to edge-in media. Second, we are losing the right even to quote from copyrighted works, a huge barrier to creativity and new art.
The postings in TPMmuckraker’s Ann Coulter Archives lead to various articles and other evidence that her rancid writings aren’t always her own words, and the site is looking for more examples that it plans to publish soon.
I have many objections to her work — such as her too-frequently lack of accuracy and fairness — but I didn’t suspect until now that she was also a plagiarist.
From Jimmy Wales’ Mission Statement of the Central Campaign Wikia:
This website, Campaigns Wikia, has the goal of bringing together people from diverse political perspectives who may not share much else, but who share the idea that they would rather see democratic politics be about engaging with the serious ideas of intelligent opponents, about activating and motivating ordinary people to get involved and really care about politics beyond the television soundbites.
This will be difficult to pull off but worth the trouble.
I’m in the process of proposing a demonstration project or two that would incorporate these ideas. Stay tuned on that, but I’m excited about the possibilities.
(Disclosure: Jimmy Wales is an advisor to this Center, and I’m an investor in his company.)
The Creative Commons Add-in for Microsoft Office
enables you to embed a Creative Commons license into a document that you create using the popular applications: Microsoft Office Word, Microsoft Office PowerPoint, or Microsoft Office Excel. With a Creative Commons license, authors can express their intentions regarding how their works may be used by others.
Much needed, and it should be an inspiration for other companies. (Hey, Apple, that includes you…)
Microsoft deserves credit for this one.
Jeff Jarvis isn’t happy with the expression “citizen journalism,” and says:
“Networked journalism” takes into account the collaborative nature of journalism now: professionals and amateurs working together to get the real story, linking to each other across brands and old boundaries to share facts, questions, answers, ideas, perspectives. It recognizes the complex relationships that will make news. And it focuses on the process more than the product.
Not a bad distinction. But the most vital part of this is the fact that it leads us to a better informed citizenry. That is the ultimate goal, at least in my thinking.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines “citizen” in four ways:
1. A person owing loyalty to and entitled by birth or naturalization to the protection of a state or nation.
2. A resident of a city or town, especially one entitled to vote and enjoy other privileges there.
3. A civilian.
4. A native, inhabitant, or denizen of a particular place: “We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community” (Franklin D. Roosevelt).
I’m a proud American (even when I’m not proud of my nation’s official actions or its political leaders). I am a citizen, for sure, in the first definition.
But in this context I use the word more to reflect the other definitions, not just as one who is a formal citizen of a nation-state. In a globalizing world, the distinction is less important than it used to be — not unimportant, by any means, but no longer necessarily the defining status of a human being. Before this radical evolution is over, in a few decades, formal citizenship may seem almost quaint.
The citizens I refer to are members of communities, large and small, geographic and interest-based. We inform each other, using networks and other tools.
Citizenship carries responsibility in any community. Indeed, the idea of being responsible to one’s self and one’s neighbors (virtual or otherwise) is an essential part of what I’m trying to accomplish.
So while I’m all for “networked journalism,” I’m also going to stick with “citizen journalism” — because in the end journalism is a service, not just a method.
Reuters: Google says bill could spark antitrust fight. Google warned on Tuesday it will not hesitate to file antitrust complaints in the United States if high-speed Internet providers abuse the market power they could receive from U.S. legislators.
Good for Google. As Congress prepares to give the big telecom players — the phone and cable companies — the means with which to turn the Net into their own walled gardens, we’ll need the deep-pocketed companies like Google to challenge them.
UPDATED
No matter how many times I edit in WordPress, it runs paragraphs together in certain circumstances. How lame is that? Jeez…
Update: if I edit the post in Ecto, all’s well. Even more weird…
Tom Stites is an old friend and mentor. He has had a long and honorable career in print journalism, and thinks deeply and wisely about this craft. He gave the following speech — entitled “Is media performance democracy’s critical issue?” — last weekend at the Media Giraffe Project‘s conference in Amherst, Mass. Read it all, please; it’s brilliant — and important. (I will be adding URLs later.)
Nick Denton, in a posting called “Battening down,” faces some financial music as he shakes up his blog titles. By far the most interesting line:
“For editorial talent, we now pay within the range of mainstream media.”
The business model from the start has included low pay to rising stars. For some the gig was a segue to a book deal and/or other media deals. But that will work only for a few folks, not all, and ultimately people want to make a living if they’re doing this professionally.