RSS MAD

Collective Intelligence

Check out this Wikipedia entry for "collective intelligence."  It's a concept that connects with the founding fathers' belief that an educated citizenry is the basis for democracy.  It's also the root premise behind participatory journalism: The group, properly dealt with, is a great deal smarter than any one individual.

Chris Lydon's Open Source -- the first broadcast

Chritopher Lydon has produced the first edition of his long-awaited (for some of us who think he's one of the best radio personalities around) Open Source radio program.  He interviews Doc Searls, Dave Winer and Dave Weinberger about the grassroots, open source media movement.

First of all, way to go Chris!  I hope stations around the country (including Minnesota Public Radio) end up syndicating this.  I was a long-time admirer of The Connecton, and got to know Chris in the months he spent here as fill-in host for MPR's Midmorning show.  I'm eager to hear more.

But, listening to the first installment to Mssrs. Winer, Weinberger and Searls, it began to strike me that the real proponents of this "revolution" are the cultural descendants of ham radio operators--technophiles with a strangely powerful need to engage and share information with people across the globe, almost just for the sake of doing so.

Their output, for the moment, I don't think would be terribly interesting to anyone beyond the grassroots media cognoscenti. So, while I think this notion of open source media has tremendous power, I've begun to think talk of its revolutionary aspects will remain a bit frothy until it moves beyond early adopters like the folks Lydon interviews. 

I'm like most members of what some call the "former audience": I want great radio, writing and analysis.  If I, as someone at the grassroots level, can help feed that process, then great.  But all of this talk about doing away with filters, gatekeepers, etc. to me is dead wrong (at least if your goal is educating and informing people).  We need them more than ever!!! We need the best and the brightest to discern noise from signal. 

Sure, blogs, RSS feeds, wikis, etc. all will help make our media more transparent and to some extent more democratic.  But new mediators, gatekeepers, filters will emerge.  I would argue that people like Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls, Jay Rosen, Alan Mutter, et. al. are attempting to establish themselves as the new media for the grassroots age.  Nothing sinister there--they deserve it: People trust them and look to them for interesting new information. Sounds to me like any other media since the beginning of time.

It's not that nothing's changed--something big is happening.  Grassroots information sharing IS subverting big media's power, it's making news anchors (right now at least to a select few people) look like absurd artifacts of a bygone age, it's forcing some news organizations and corporations to be more transparent about what they do. But the old hierarchies will be replaced by new ones, and the "former audience" will still, more often than not, want someone or some organization they trust delivering news and human stories to them in simple, compelling language, images and sound.

CBC turning to podcasts?

With KYOU's reportedly rocky start, I was curious to know when another radio operations would turn to podcasters and audio bloggers for content.  Who would bravely take on the task of managing this still chaotic and ragged world?

Well, it appears the CBC is giving it a shot, via Canadian blogger and podcaster Tod Maffin.

We at Minnesota Public Radio will look on with intrigue.  Stay tuned, we might even try something similar ourselves, but on a smaller scale, sometime soon.

Jarvis leaves Buzzmachine, starts work with the NYT and About.com

In the last month or two, I've seen a veritable explosion of enthusiasm about grassroots media enterprises. Most of it seems to be coming from entrepreneurs who see a great and perhaps lucrative/sustainable business model in tapping the knowledge of the audience. 

And why not?  Your raw materials (people's insights and ideas) are more or less free.  Your overhead (software, some smart engineers and some information managers/analysts) are minimal, and there is endless scalability.  And, what's more, you can "democratize" media, enabling more people to become active and engaged observers of the world around them, bringing  journalism closer to the ground and forcing (eventually) government and business to be more transparent.

The perfect business model, right: Doing well by doing good? 

The New York Times seems to think so.  Jeff Jarvis, of Buzzmachine and (now formerly) Advance.net, is working on a new venture with the New York Times Company and About.com to do something related to distributed media, grassroots journalism. He shares tantalizingly few details. 

But let me take a stab: Maybe the NYT is going to transform its readership into an online community of sorts, harnessing their collective knowledge/discernment to create a massive social network--like friendster+zagats+wikipedia. And they'll link activity in that online community to their news offerings, creating the newspaper of the future. 

In the end, furor over their move to a subscription-based online service will die down as people see the immense value they've created by tapping into the distributed intelligence of their readers.

I could be embarrassingly wrong about this.  But it's fun to think about.  After all, we in public radio land have similar ambitions.  More on those later.

Cooperative Research

This is yet another example of the promise of new-ish collaborative technologies.

The Center for Cooperative Research creates unified historical records/profiles on any number of events/issues/people, including: 9/11, W's environmental record and, of course, Kenneth deGraffenreid.  Kenneth de huh?

It's stated aims are to reduce the fragmentation of the historical record, and to increase efficiency of information exchange -- not to mention "Encourage the transition of oversight responsibilities from governments to civil society on a global scale."  Hmm, not so sure what that even means, even less if it's possible.  But it sounds like an appropriately outsized ambition. 

I'm more than a little curious about how sites like this, Wikipedia or Wikinews will fit into our rapidly evolving information ecology. 

Social software

I attended a sort of impromptu conclave in SF focused on grassroots media this past weekend.  Mike Orren of Pegasus News, a yet-to-be-launched community journalism site, remarked with a degree of amazement that he'd never truly met (as in shook hands and stood eye-to-eye with) many of the people in the room.  Yet he felt as if he knew many of them intimately through exchanges he'd had via their blogs.

I've yet to fully absorb/understand the import of what at the time seemed a prosaic observation. But it's starting to dawn on me, slowly, tsunami-like: in the open sea it feels innocuous, like a small wave. But on shore ...

To help the thinking along, consider this treatise on "social software."

See also Many2Many, Tribe, and, of course, Friendster.

Handheld storytelling with StoryCast

HP has unveiled a very cool new app that allows you to create stories with your phone.  You simply record your voice over a slideshow of photos, and then can send them to whomever you like.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/storycast/

Citizens Media "Summit"

Friday morning we were putting together the outline of a presentation for a community journalism project, when I stumbled upon word that a group of grassroots media pioneers was gathering in San Francisco for what host JD Lasica was calling the Citizens Media Summit.  I was on a plane by 2:30, and by 6:00 was at the at the Varnish Fine Art Gallery mixing with a diverse and engaging bunch of people:

- Jonathan Weber, formerly editor of the now defunct Industry Standard, now editor of New West, an online magazine covering culture and life in the Rocky Mountains from HQ in Missoula.  - Mike Orren, one of the founders of Dallas-based Pegasus News, a community journalism project set to launch sometime late in the year.  - Mary Lou Fulton, of the Northwest Voice, a community-generated journalism site out of Bakersfield California. - Well known bogger Evelyn Rodriguez- Ron Cooper, of Access Sacramento and executive director of Sacramento Community Cable Fdtn- Matt McAlister, VP and General Manager of Online for Infoworld (also formerly of the Industry Standard)- Ron Cooper, Executive Director of Access Sacramento--a cable access television channel- Renee Blodgett, marketer of various blogs like 5across and others

It was all a prelude to today's camping/brainstorming/grassroots media strategy session in the Presidio. As I've explained to my loving wife (who I guiltily left, pregnant, at home) and my good friend Josh Hawkins (himself on the vanguard of new trends in marketing) -- it feels like something's happening.  One need only look at today's guest list to believe it:

Dan Gillmor, Grassroots Media Inc., author, "We the Media", founder of BayosphereJD Lasica, co-founder, Ourmedia.org, author, "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation"Craig Newmark, founder, Craigslist.orgMary Hodder, entrepreneur, creator of Napsterization.orgScott Rosenberg, managing editor, Salon.com (on leave, writing a book)Brewster Kahle, founder, Internet Archive

Howard Rheingold, author of “Smart Mobs”Robin Sloan, Current.tv (San Francisco-based citizens television network)Mary Lou Fulton, managing editor, Bakersfield Californian/Northwest Voice citizens media projectHolmes Wilson, director, Downhillbattle.orgWendy Seltzer, attorney, Electronic Frontier FoundationRich Skrenta, CEO, Topix.net Denise Atchley, director, Digital Storytelling FestivalMark Potts, founder, and Susan  DeFife, CEO, Backfence (new citizens media site based in Washington DC)Ari Soglin, editor, and Edgar Canon, publisher, GetLocalNews.comZack Rosen, CivicSpaceBruce Koon, Executive News Editor, Knight Ridder DigitalJonathan Weber, Founder and Editor in Chief, New West NetworksAmanda Michel, fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & SocietyFabrice Florin, CEO Handtap and founder, TruthSquad ProjectKaliya Hamlin, Identity CommonsMichael Tippett, founder, NowPublic (Vancouver)Gary Lerhaupt, Stanford student and founder of Prodigem/torrentocracyRon Cooper,  E.D. Access Sacramento and Chair of the Alliance for Community Media WestJoan Walsh, editor, Salon.comMike Orren, Pegasus News - Journalism 2.0Peter Leyden, Emerging Agenda, a Bottom-up Think Tank for the 21st Century. (It's trying to figure out how to harness some of the new web tools to help catalyze an emergent social and political agenda that fits the new realities of this century.)

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