Category: Weblogs
Welcome, Bayosphere
As I reported late yesterday on paidContent, Dan Gillmor’s first Grassroots Media project is underway: Bayosphere.com. The first phase — moving Dan’s blog from Typepad to Bayosphere — was close enough to being accomplished to go live last night. (No RSS feeds yet.) Registration is required for comments, as part of the community-building effort. This makes particular sense for Dan, who has been plagued by a troll and comment spam. I’m all for a high quality-to-noise ratio although registration, particularly when anonymity is allowed, is no guarantee of quality. Good luck on all counts, Dan — and please give "wretchedaccess.com" a home as soon as you can.
One more thing: I’ve grown increasingly disconcerted by use of the term "citizen journalism," which seems to suggest that professional journalists — those of us who do it for a living — aren’t citizens. Grassroots media works in some instances, as do a few other terms (including we-media, as in Dan’s book "We The Media" ), but I’m going with "p2p media" or "peer media" for now.
Listen Up
Anyone who thinks they know Dave Winer based on the reports from BlogNashville should listen to this 25-minute podcast for a conference in Pisa. But that’s not the real reason to spend a half-hour or so downloading and listening; listen if you want a clear understanding of the hows, whys and whats of today’s internet — blogs, RSS, podcasts — and how the "unconference" concept fits in..
Julie Leung transcribed a bit of it; her post, too, is worth reading for other reasons. This is another part that jumped out at me:
"We have moved from an age of information poverty into an age of information excess in an incredibly short period of time, in 10 or 15 years. Not only has the amount of information gone up but our expectation of information has gone up dramatically. "
Dave goes on to talk about managing information and how that led to the popularity of RSS, which got me thinking about the side effects of information management. More on that in the next post. In the meantime, listen up.
Techy note: This was the first time I used my Nokia 6620 to listen to a podcast. I didn’t want to wait until I got home from my WiFi-enabled coffeeshop and thought it would be good company for a round of errands. I didn’t have the right cable to move it to the iRiver I’m testing so downloaded it to the laptop and ported it by infrared to the phone, popped in the bluetooth headest et voila. Little strange grocery shopping with Dave …
Trust But Verify 