1 See “The Former Audience Joins The Party,” We the Media, Dan Gillmor, O’Reilly, 2004, and “The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” PressThink, Jay Rosen, June 27, 2006
1.1 What They’re Betting On: The World of User-Generated Content
2 I share Derek Powazek’s aversion to the phrase “user generated content,” about which he says: “They're words that creepy marketeers use. They imply something to be commodified, harvested, taken advantage of. They're words I used to hear a lot while doing community consulting, and always by people who wanted to make, or save, a buck.” [“Death To User Generated Content,” Derek Powazek, Powazek.com, April 4, 2006.]
3 See “Facebook’s On The Block,” Steve Rosenberg, BusinessWeek Online, March 28, 2006.
1.2. Online Engagement Strategies: Four Approaches and One Bad Idea
4 See “Amateur Hour: Journalism Without Journalists,” Nicholas Lemann, The New Yorker, August 8, 2007
“Citizen journalism: Actual Content vs. Shining Ideal,” Tom Grubisch, USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, November 5, 2005
5 “One Fifth of America: A Comprehensive Guide to America’s First Suburbs,” Metropolitan Policy Program, Brookings Institution, February, 2006
6 Except for the system administrators whose job changes quite a bit when there’s a wholesale change in the organization’s web platform.
1.4. The Math of Online Engagement: Can It Succeed in a Local Context?
7 See “Statistics, Wikipedia,” for an automatically updated count of the number of articles on Wikipedia.
8 See “Modeling Wikipedia’s Growth.”
9 As of this writing, Digg is #19 on Alexa’s ranking of the most visited sites on the net; Wikipedia is #6. See Alexa: Most Visited Sites
10 As of this writing, the Wikimedia Foundation, which is Wikipedia’s parent organization, has five full time employees. Not a typo: five. Digg has fewer than twenty.
11 See “Bias, Sabotage Haunt Wikipedia’s Free World,” David Mehegan, Boston Globe, February 12, 2006 and “Wikipedia: Social Innovation on the Web,” Jimmy Wales, conference presentation, “Web Designs for Interactive Learning,” Cornell University, June, 2005
12 “Top 100 Digg Users Control 56% of Digg's Home Page Content,” Rand Fish, SEOmoz blog, July 20, 2006
13 “Who Writes Wikipedia?” Aaron Swartz, Raw Thought, September 9, 2006
2.1. Big Investments, Uncertain Returns: Why Are News Organizations Taking Big Risks Online?
14 Business Week 's Jon Fine, in a recent column on Gannett's "New Lease on News," a Merrill Lynch analyst as praising the company's moves, citing the likely incremental revenue and profit.
15 The crisis caused by lack of customer access to source code if a software company fails has been countered by some attempts at “technology escrow,” contract provisions where customers get access to source code in the event that the business fails or discontinues development of a product. However, transfer of code and the related code management systems are nontrivial operations, even when escrow is in place.
2.4. New Community Platforms Developed by News Organizations for News Organizations
16 A “framework” is a programmer’s toolkit with pre-built modules. Django is a CMS framework that contains prebuilt CMS elements so that coders don’t have to start from scratch, but can configure and extend Django’s elements into a CMS that suits their needs.
