[[Start of morning podcsting session, ~9 AM]] dave winer has decreed... (rmack is saying) that the word of 2005 is "faaahbulous" the word of 2004 is... not a nice word, and he won't announce it back to the topic at hand: POOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODCASTING. * _sj_ decaffeinates quickly PRX is up on the screen. Brendan is here to talk more about what they do and the future of "non-text media" [brendan] am I on? you guys can tell that I'm a radio guy, right? clearly on top of this [audio thing] good morning! It's hard ot explain the public radio exchange without talking a bit about public radio. Podcasting. is everybody here familiar with what it is? I'm gonna tell you about it. it's putting media enclosures into an rss feed... little differences make everything change... putting media enclosures into rss feeds... it would show up on your desktop automatically. somebody procduces a stream in his baement... the next morning you wke up, see it on your desktop, put it on you ipod, walk away with hit. what it's done, this little difference, has turned anyone into a broadcaster. so anyone with GarageBand on a Mac and a 'net connection can have a radio show now. what's going on now in public radio is: everybody has these producing skills they know how to make something sond good they're just gettting ued to sharing this with eachoter over the internet. theyr'e very used to the satellite system... if you're a Pub radio station mgr, you're either accepting from the national stream or turning off the strem and turning the microphone one and producing yourself. the idea of moving files around is fundamentally alien to them. podcasters get distribution, but are just getting used to mixing things and making sounds... there are podcasts where you can actually hear them say "is this thing on?" which is charming.. but the basic profit model is, give something away and see if people will pay them for it. the basic model for both is "here's sth I've produced, take it!" "New voices" is now a catchphrase at public radio events... how are we going to do it? people ask. everyone agrees it's a good idea; nobody really knows how to do it; the system is really stacked against it. the audience has really grown since 9/11; basically people trust the Voice of Public Radio... the problem is thta, while ngendirng trust, public radio is used by some farmers to keep their cows mellow. we've all heard this voice, we're familiar with it... it was mocked on SNL... when what you dohas been mocked in an SNL skit, it's time to rethink what you do. and they are reasons they can't qucikly change the tone of public radio (PBR): 1) they prouce blocks of content. station mgnrs have to chedule this months ahead of time; easiest thing is to make one decision at the start of the year, filling in hour blocks makes it hard to change. it's also expensive to produce so much content. 2) ther's a community of people around who know and expect what pbr sounds like. it's good, makes support consistent, but it makes change hard. every station has trouble with say closing down the local folk hour; people call in all the time complaining. you ask them how many called in, they say "only five, but they wouldn't shut up!" we're going to pay something now... ira glass liked it enoug he wanted to shill for it it got all sorts of great reviews, and sounded funamentally different. garrison (keillor) sat down an decided he wanted sth new; he wanted to talk about pop music, without it sounding like pbr. all of a sudden, the program ends. and you start hearing this on a pbr station; : (playing clip) [[tech difficulties]] [pop music from the top 40s] this is pop vultures andthis week, ew're oing to get right with god oops "this is a PRX audition only mp2 file... not for bcast and distirbution those things are prohiited by your user agreement, thanks for using the PRX" [soft music] "I hate evanescence" (it's in the backgrond") two high-school girls talking about evanescence and all bands that are sort of religious "all I'm going by is the vibe, and it's very quasi-eligious" "you can sort of go, "did she just have her first orgasm, or did she see Jesus?" " ...our guetss will include gillian churchill, ... and kate wayland?? this song is like no joy at all.. pretentious, and no creatiity no interesting turns of phrase, imagery,new way of looking at things it's an insult to the lord, and it's an insult to th dark side if they think this crp is gonna get tem into heaven they've got another thing coming [playing 'wake me up inside' over the discussion] " [[end of clip]] [brendan again] this went around the system, to every public radio conference ("Leaving") but nobody was running it [Pop Vultures] "I can't find on the site how [the narrator; a teenage girl] became a music commentator..." the idea is you hear peope talking to you on public radio, the idea is they have to have a degree in folk literature to let them talk about pop music. [so nobody would touch it] now we come to podcasting. there's an "Mbox" that everyone's excited about... it's this great thing that gives you great audio quality, [it's a preamp] [$120 now, Ethan says] it's supposed to be very light, you can take it around with you, you don't need a studio., but for podcasters, the differnce b/t getting this preamp and just using the mic on your computer [in sound quality] is minimal. If you have a mac, you can just use GarageBand... you don't need anything [else] you just filter out the bad noise, post-production... pod-casters use Skype: they just tell someone on the other end, download skype, I'll talk to you eompletely free. I'll listento a podcast interview, and I can tell, that's a Skype interview but it doesn't matter, b/c the content is the same. it turns out that ther are many things that are really simple to do that we make realy complicated for just al ittle bit of sound quality. * dberlind has joined #webcredtrans I've had the xperience of [oitching sth to NPR, getting it into production, and having it turned down post-interviw by people who are actually called "The Sound Nazis" * ethanz has joined #webcredtrans because there's [this idea that sound has to be perfect] the first podcst I heard is by Adam Curry, along with Dave [W] the godfather of podcasting. for me, the moment I recognized what I was going to do: adam was tlaking, playig musci files... you hear him walking around, walking back... and suddenly he leans into the mike and says "I'm sorry, I have to go let my dogs out" and there' s just dead air on the podcast... he ends up talking to his plumber for a bit, in Dutch, and then he comes back. It makes his voice more reliable... I know that he's telling me the truth, b/c he had to stop telling me the truth to go deal with his dogs. [[playing another clip... ]] ~ singing... hard to parse tapdancing in the background it's about recent politics... * sannse has joined #webcredtrans * zwitter has joined #webcredtrans "noone cares what bin laden thinks but promoters... voters are wary t o... endorsed kerry.... according to the demo...crats! ;let' s give congrats to whoever bats... a thousand.... house of representative .... stay tuned for late breaking updates that's the tap dancing podcaster neeeeeeeews yeah ~ [[end of cast]] this woman does this two or three times a week. I sort of did some digging on her; she was on a local LA station in the eighties,doing exactly this! she discovered podcasting nd discovered she can do whatever she wants. adam curry gets this feed... and puts it in *his* podcast; he picks up her material and puts it in his network, by analogy. (in podcasting terms, she's now a star) ... If you look into podcasting, eventually you'll hear of [this couple]: from Wisconsin they just talk about what they happen to be thining about. [[clip]] "dawn and drew 2105?" hey little children, gather round the fire... put your weenie on a stick and burn it... blakc and black and black and charred. dawn and drew show, jan 1, 2005... who am I? "I'm dawn roselli' now, you wish you wree, I'm dawn roselli.. h - "baby, I'm dawn roselli, I rule the world!" (faking his wifes voice) w - "no you're not..." [[end of clip]] form a radio produer's perspetive, it wold be easy to ignore this... but the interesting thing is, when [this drew?] decided to start talking about [bush], it really meant something because he had been building credibility for so long. ew oforget theter are real people out there talking about the news, and presenting the news. when I used to work in public radio, and commute to the bronx,... I used to listen to public radio and start shouting "wake up!" andl isten to howard stern for a bit... if you listen to the long-tail argument: The Family Guy went back on air, b/c it had such great DVD sales. it it's possible now to start talking about podcasting, and when there's enough demand, you can present your audience to a producer and say "I've built this audience; these people like me; it's a prven show' there was sort of an ap[prenticeship in public radio, there is a sort of priesthood, and it keeps you from finding new voices that we're so depserate to find. podcasting, like a blog, is going to find its own audience. the problem with pop vultures is nobody knew who it was itched towards... nobody knew who the audience was; it ended up being this very well produced, very expensive mistake. if you're podcasting, finding your own audience, you can develop it on the way up, and the present that to a broadcaster. * Matthew has joined #webcredtrans A few thoughts before turning this over: I thnk podcatsing is going to be picked up a lot faster than blogging was. one of the reasons it'll be picekd up so quickly, is that people are aware (now) tha tthese things can change the way we look at media... 2) how do broadcasters find these voices and bring them into the fold? 3) where does the raw material come freom? oe of thereason s blogs work so well is you can go onto whitehouse.gov [or some site listing PD speech transcripts :) ] and grab a segment of a speech and comment on it. the fed government, the RIAA doesn't konw what to do about podcasting yet, so they're not commenting... there's am ovement within podcasting to avoid pushing out songs/podcasting songs that are rights protected, but the [verdict is out on that] and 4) just b/c the medium has changed, that odesn't mean we've thrown out the laws of presentation. the dawn and drew how: the intro was developed over a month. that's sth that has [a very long history] the first thing they do is give you the name and date of the show... these are very old techniques. it's not any different from leaving the station and timestamp oin a regular newscast. it's interesting to watch this hpapen an see what urles an be suspended and what rules can't. [[opening the floor to questions]] . [Rmack] thank you very much! [Alex] this is quite interesting to me I was in radio for a while; I posted a show in WNYC called "on the media" and it's wonderful. really believe the taber of a human voice does have huge credibility,. thta's why I think NPR makes a special connection with people, bc when they hear that vice they someties do, even more than on television, make a connection. this is interesting b/c it offers everyone th opporutinity to get theri voice out ther.e.. but based on what you said, anyone out there could go to their garage, buy an Apple, and make a pdcst. ut one of the limits of radio is time, there's ainite amount of it, and you have to liste to it; have to make a commitment there. is it going to be overwhelmed by choices, program effectively weeded out? [brendan] there are sites that have been developed that are starting to rank podcasts... people will isten to your stream and comment on it. that's one... the other interesting thing: what's fundamentally different from trrestrial broadcasts is you don't have to program in any specific chunk of time maybe you want a 37-min podcats b/c that's the avg commuter length. [alex] do you organize them by identifying the audience you're amimng for? if my wife and I decided to do a show just talking about world affairs? we would probably not be intersted in the things that you indicated. how would we reach them? [dave w] you would just use the channels avail to you to cmmjuicate about that... sending emails to peopl eyou think would be interested.. spoe podctasts dn't need to reah a lot of poeple there's an ag commissioner in txas who does crop reports on podcast not many people outside his district care about what's goin gon there, but for the poepole there it's a very imporatn way to do tis. then there ar eleaders to getthyem out htere.. adam curry [promotes good casts] he's been a poro his entire career; the relaxation of the rules cam about b/c radio amateurs like mysefl were doing it, not knowing the rules; we didn't have any idea th fascinating thing was adam broke lots of rules [too] doing things I as a software programmer never would have done that's how innovation comes about/... [alex] are there any limitations based on publi caccess? if you did some of these programs like they did, you couldn't do an ad for bertha's kitty boutique b/c they were a sponsor of you? [brendan] there are public radio statios that podcst; the urles are slightly different you don't have to obey FCC in terms of advertising as strictly as you do when you're streaming it terrestrially but for the most part, podcastst hemselve don't have anything to do wiht pbr there is no real proofit model yet; people ar doing it b/c they love it. I'm sure people will make money off of it like they do off everything else\but they haven't igured it outyet. [edcone] oen of the ay people find out about podcats is on their sibling/first cousin blogs. if I hear sth I like, then my readers are going to et pointed to it. ("( www.nnscript.de :: NoNameScript 3.81 :: www.XLhost.de )") i just did a podcats about ourwhole greensboro/chapel hill [thing] in the way it works with blogs, I'm sure my mom ctually listeened to the podcast of me, but my other readers will probably go to the site and find things that are cutally interesting to them weblogs to me are a critical tool I learned about it from david adam. I hate to say [weblogs] are th emarketing vehicle but they're a distrib vehicle for the idea. [??from nc] in adition to our blog, that's poretty well known, we also have a radio show! anyone who is intersted in [us] can listen... people have said to us in the past, you should podcast that stuff! we already have an RSS feed; I have no idea how many people subscribe to that, but It must be thousands... forget about all those commercials, which we're not getting paid for anywya we could just as easily do our radio shoiw without the radio station it would go out to everyone's rss feed that they could isten to at their leisure... it would give people a reason to promote it [via our weblog]... [dave w] you didn't metion something interesting: time-shifting and location-shifting... and domain shifting; any domain name could be a webloc [or a podcast] and I want to say that PCs can do this too; it's not just about macs. [RMack] one peorson I want to make sure speaks before we do anything else is Andy Carvin, who is doing work on the nest-- i think the next thing we need to do is integration of podcasting with mobile phones. people will record something on their phone and this will become a podcats. this has very interesting implications for 3g as everyone starts to get thing on their cell phones; in japan people are watching tv on their hones, listening to streaming music from their phones... people are not going to listen to streaming mpe3s fom their computer, but from their mobile phone... andy's been doing a ot of this, not only olooking at the US and what's happnening here, but the third world, and places where people don't havem uch in the way of connectivity. [andy carvin] thanks, I wanted to talk about two things: first, mobile podcasting (and then about where to find cointent) I was experienceing with audioblogs while travelling to converencs over the past year, using a service called Audlink which lets you set up an account, leave a msg to a ovicemail server, which then creates an mp3 file and sends it to you or hosts it for you, it doens' t have enclosure tag for an rss feed, but at leatst it gets the voice part on a server. then there's audioblogger.com which is a fee service to users of blogger.com... I used both a while ago, but then grew bored and went aback to text logging for many months but it was just in the last monht or so that I started freating my own podcasts just a week ago I published my exporeeice runing into an icestorm while going downtown to do a CNN interview. I sent this out to a group who said, 'its really reat htat you could to this on a mobile phone' and I said no, it wasn't am obile phone, I did it on my iPod but I thought that was very interesting, and wnet back over my notes... the missing tool [for doing this with phones] is sth called Feedburner. one of the things it can now do is add enclosures to your rss fee,d and so turn any links to audo files into podcasts. so sometime last sat morning I had this epiphany that you could stick all this stuff together and without spending a penny do this from yourmobile phone. so I immediatly set up a site called MobCasting, immediatly people though of Mobile phones; biut I was also thinking about smratmobs, the concet developed by howard rheingold the idea of groups of people at a protest, doing some activity, using comm tehnologies to linkn their [experiences] together.; I started to think what yif you could createe multople accounts on on eof these blogs, and let groups of people create a whole lot of podcasts at the same time... so ?? and Ethan and I have been podcasting little blurbs from the conference; there have been a few technical glitches, but so far it's worked pretty well. I set up sth called bushprotest.blogspot.com, and told a few people at the inauguration but nobody used it... I thinnk that may be b/c audioblogger failed... Ethan has been thinking a lot about mobcasting in developing countries; while people in ghana and other countries are likely not to have net access, they probably will have cell phone access. if we can [combine these] and allow you to type text while doing it, we would be letting a whole lot of people who had no access [to such channels] to create their own blogs. 2) as for source content for podcatss; the very first did were boring as all hell; they had no music, no sound effects. then I remembered that wired mag/cc have put out a cd that were all created using the new CC sampling license, which basiclaly allow you to sample songs that use this license, only non-comm or for some comm... so when I did that cnn-icestorm podcast, I sampled about 150 loops [from that cd] and spent and entire day doing this. and for the first time I was getting complicments about my podcasts as well. so I think CC is important, not b/c wired put up this one CD, but b/c you can go to the CC website, CC.org and do a search on it for [content under a variety of licenses] [RMack] and your other site is digitaldividenetwork, right? [AC] yes, after the '99 national digital divide conference, I launcehd this with pres clinton's help... we wnt to the EDC in Boston, our website is digitaldivide.net a community of people trying o tus eth e'net as a tool for themselves and their colleaues to help brigde the digital divide at their local leel so anyone who's invovled in this/net activism can get a blog on our site... and learn about creative comons and podcasting... hopefully we'll get rss included, since that's something we didn't thin of when we set up the site. [rmack] thaknyo. u* :) before we go on: ethanz is being a good boy and turning his table tent up like this [edgewise] indicating he wants to speak... [Ethan Z] I wanted to point out that in the same way that blogs started out wiht one particular mode of ocmmunication, and a very personla, chatty view of what's going on have divresified into expert newsletters, RSS feeds, ... the same thing will be true for audioblogging. we;ll not only end up with taodancing news, but in a lot of cases the repurposing of audio content. I have to say the pace where this has become morst important tfor me is a site calld "IT conversaiotns" going around, reconding conferences, and putting up the speech from individula conference.s I've realized that I spend so much time going around giving talks, this is replacing writing paper sfor me... so I now essentially just point people towards the podcast of those talks so it's intersting that this tech/culture make sit possible to repurpose as much of the audio as we can. [rmack] bill buzenberg, MPR : anything you want to add? you guys are podcasting, I know. [bill b]] I'm frascinated, and want ot play with it when I get back, since there are things I've learned here... we have a podcast, and [the related] radio show has been going crazy. I just want to say that what PRX is doing is amazing it's freeing radios from the satellite service, making it easy for people coming in... I have a son and his girlfriend? have a radio show... they're playing different documentaries, and it's a good show b/c they're doing [all kinds of stuff] on there. [and this wouldn't have been possible before] [. [jay rosen] you've bene saying that public radio was all about filtering information... but that's not how they operate[d]. they exist to maintain the barriers to entry... this is what keeps them the pros this is their thing! b/c when that goes (the need for high sound quality) what's left is the human voice, and that's common enough. they hang onto that (sound quality standard) b/c that's what makes the professionals! these technologies that are truly diruptive (that's what this is) -- you're going to see a split. soe will recognize immediatel that the sound quality barrier is being threatened, and will react to that. others will say "this is great!" but hte notion that before they wanted this flood of material... this isn't [what they wanted] has anyone ever tried to *speak* as an individual person on public radio? you can't do it. and you can't do it on public television either. people woh have more experience in pbr can tell me if I'm wrong, but this is my impression I've been on your show, on a lot of shows, I'm not hostile to pbr at all... [brendan, responding] re: the barrier to entry in pbr I only started working in pbr a year ago. my sense of it is, the leaderswhip does not have an accurate sense of what it has become when you hear them talk iat conferences, everyon ehas these great stories about "yeah, I just walked in the door, and there was bob simon, and we went out for a cup of coffee, and the next day I was out there interviewing him" we get resumes all the tim.e we hvae people desperate to get some kind of job close to pbr. but I don't think the people in charge of making decisions hae a sense of this. [rmack for hoder] podcasting needs hosting, and it's not available in dev countries like iran... [celeste ?, reporter for New Scientist] Q for brendan: don't you feel threatened and terrified, b/c why should anyone litsen to the radio anymore? * cimon has joined #webcredtrans [brendan] I don't... it's my jpob to get them to change what they do! they shouldn't feel threatened either. they love these communities.. its a dedicated community they've got these channels and should send people out to bring people to their websites. they've got these people who litsen on their frequency... they should start using the communities they already own. [dave w] wow, that was really stimulating what you just said. I don't believe a word of it! I used to live in boston; listened to wbur; I pledge to every station where I liave. * blobster has joined #webcredtrans they kept repeating during a pledge drive that "you own the station" they kept reapeating it and rubbing my nose in it... to test this, I called the management of the station, and I said "well, this is my station, what can I do with it ?' ("Leaving") [ac: did you tape this? :)] [dave w: I wish.. tihs was before we were doing podcasts] they [at the station] thought I was just being stubborn.... there's a technological seachange now. people were talking about onvergence a few yars ago... * Matthew has joined #webcredtrans cellphones ar very good at communiating, adn this has a lot to do with podcasting... but iPods are really good for playing mp3s. btw, iPods have a really lousing interface for (listening?), try (?) on an ipod while driving, and youll die. but what's really interesting is that al ot of major cities re panning of doing WiFi for their entire downtown this year. coupe this with a wifi device, imagine an ipod that can do wireless; put the subscription software on the ipod itself... you can tun in in settle if you have wifi, to a channel that's in china if you want. you have infinite reachl this is all going to be happening so quickly, that any dragging of heels by pros at all will leave them wondering what happened when the dust settles. [john h, quick question] [he was the other speaker, above] sound strems are like a book... you can read it for a bit, [open and close it at a page], there's no reason we shouldn't have the same rights to do with our sound files what we can do with a book! [alex - blizzard's acomin... if you were planning on heading out today, you should maybe reconsider...] next session coming... no break. [ethan z] we've got a real treat this session we've been talking about revoutions in news media.. and we've got two peopl ewho have been very actively on the front lines of this revolution fomenting change as we speak what they're hoping to do with this session is rais a set of ethical issues, and have us debate about it; I don't want ot let them entirely off the hoook, and want to hear them tell us a bit bout their own projet, which I think are revolutionary and arechanging the face of news as we know it. so I want to introduce both of them befoire we open up a more general discussion of ethics. any pref of who leads off? jimmy wales is one of the founders of wikipedia. * Submarine has joined #webcredtrans * Mark_Ryan has joined #webcredtrans * JRM has joined #webcredtrans if you'd asked people the question a few year back, "could you build an enyclo significantly larger than EB, in some cases deeper than EB,in a number of differnetlangs, for free solely with volunteres" for the omst part people would laugh at you. but he's gone and done significantly that, and a bunch of architecture for it... one of the intersting things that he's experimented with and the comunity as a whole has experimented with, is Wikinews: how does a group of contributors around the world come together to jointly produce news? there are a bunch of principles the community has adopted, one of which is NPOV; I want him to talk about about whta wikinews is trying to do, what's the role of NPOV within that, and what he sees as the future of wiki. What's Wikinews, Jim? [jwales] wikines is the lastest sinoff from the wp community ew view it as very experimentl; a lot of the social rules are left open-ended at the moment it's interesting: when we tarted wikipedia, ew followed the sme kind of openedned process, * sam has joined #webcredtrans not prejudgng how we're going to do the work... with wikipedia noone was watching for the frist year or so... with wikinews, we didn't get around to announcing it before reporters were calling to ask me about it. we're just doing our wiki thing... oe of the centrl principles of wikipedia has always been NPOV - neutral point of view one of the ground rules I set at te start of the project. for two reasons: neutrality is the basic requirement for an encyclopedi; giving you all ith einformation you ned to think for itself. * dannyisme has joined #webcredtrans but the deeper reason ist hat for a social community, it gives us a way to work together; if we say this is an encyclopeida written from a progressive epoint of view, a catholic point of view, we would significantly reduce the number of contribs adding to the proejc. as it is, the neturality policy which we rally stongly buy into as a community, lets us say: I don't agre with you on this or that, but wer canm present this in a wea that we both agree [on] its a real dirty, human, messy process, but we do our best. and people who cannot deal with this, who can't write neutrally, aren't veyr comfotable in our community. (Read error: 104 (Connection reset by peer)) te ones who gin respect and become centrlal to our community treat eachother with respec.t that's a very important htings; we talk about this to a point - people in the tech world laugh at me - we talk about love and respect a lot. that's NPOV, and that's being applied a lot in the wikinews commuinty as well. this is diff from a lot oc citizen njournalism; take for instance indymedia. they're a pretty farleft group; they're very good at what they do, but it's not excatly neutral. that's very different from what we do. [ethan] I wondre if you can follow up on this... * JRM has joined #webcredtrans we saw something very interesting yesterday with a news story in belize... I wonder if you could talk about this a bit. [jwales] this proj is veyr young, adn we're just gteting off the gorund thsi was one tim when I was very proud of our success on this story. yesterday there was a big protest, and a clash b/t protestors and the police we scooped all the media by 12 hrs. what happened was, we had people on the gorund; we had a respectd wikiedian who started talking about thes tory.. people said, is this true? ew can't find anything about this onlie... he went out and took pictures. we had 20 or 30 people looking into this on the web... we finally confirmed with the british government we ran a very simple story, with picutres... finally this morning, the AP ran a story. they didn't have any pictures, of course. yesteray people talked about the nyt and their bureau in baghdad; I don't know how many people they have in belize; it's a tiny country; but apparently there's no big operation of any major nes ervice there,so they didn't have a story. or, take a look at ethans work about what's of interswt to the media: bleize is just not that intersting. so, it wasn't a *big* story, there wasn't a coup, etc but it was a story, [and we got it first] so one of the things is, how do we determine accuracy and credibility?' * zen[zizi] has joined #webcredtrans Ethan asked me how do I find this story on wp if I'm not used to wp? * Jill has joined #webcredtrans and I said, maybe you can't b/c there was an edit war on the Current Events * Reene has joined #webcredtrans page -- it wasn't confirmed... when we got the phoots, we said ok, it was legit. * mindspillage has joined #webcredtrans we know th eperson who brought the photos; it was a known wikipedian, so we ran the story. * Project2501a has joined #webcredtrans there's a vetting process going on trying to dtermine which stories are real or not, much like tehre would be in any newws room. [ethan z[ once yu have a nes service jointly written by potentially hundreds of people around the world, how does this chnge our thinking about what is credible journalism online or on wikis? something to thin about going froward. * Biekko has joined #webcredtrans [the other moderator this session]: Dan Gillmor: he's recentl stepped down from one fo te great [bastions?] of journalism, the SJMerc, writing on technology. I'm going to ask hiem waht everone's been asking him over the past month since he stepped downb: [Dan; right, am I crazy?] [ethan: right, I already asked that...] no, what are you doing? what's news? [Dan G] I don't know aht I'm doing. that's part of why I stepped down. * britty has joined #webcredtrans I hae a bit of time to think about this citizen journalism business] * TimStarling has joined #webcredtrans it will happen whether I do it or not, but I'm helping it along a bit. the high-level description of it... I really don't hae details. What I'd like to do is bring to... the ferver and energy and knowlege of citizens, the grassorots I'd like to bring ot that, orfer to it the best practices and principles that we've learned in a lot of decades of pro journalism. I want to be clear that I'm not setting "rules thou shalt follow" but just to marry the bes of each if it will work. the wya I hope to do that is working with soe folks to cerate a kind of methology /platform not like a sw development comany, just pieceing tgether the best stuff, and offer that to folks including some instruction or educational things and then put that to work on a couple of sites to start with, that look at community in several ways: communities of interst and geography. all my entrepreneur friends tell me that the plan will change before we get very far... so this will probabl be different within a short time. [ethan] any quetsions on wikinews or dan's model, before going on? [david w, to jimmy] * kzhr_ has joined #webcredtrans I'm all okay for postmodern squabblin, and nttrality... but have a quesion about it it's ok for neturality ot mean it's where everyone stops arguing... it seems to work out well but raises the question of who this "we" is. [jw] yes it does * tabby_mya- has joined #webcredtrans a big part of that helping to ake sure this works out to be somthing good is a strong paralle ocmmitment to be as open as we can in the community first of all any woman on he plnaet who wants can come edit a page. you don't even have to log in. we try to make it as easy as possible to join the conversation. particularly once you log it, you gain within the community a certain degree of civil rights... you cn't be banned for disagreeing on a political issue, for anything but behavioral issues; drwing the line b/t thee and political arguments can be tricky, but by and large it's lear cut. there's a way to approach a conv and say " iI'm a catholic priest; I don't htink the way you present the pediphilia scandal in the Church is accurate, I'm going to come add information and back it up with arguments/sources" you can also come in and say "this is terrible, there's no such hting" and you'll get bane.d the openness is a part f that; if we had a system where the system admins could just block people b/c they don't like them, this could careen far off path. I don't mak any grand philos. claims to have solved for all time the bias/neutrality, but I think we've got a neat approach to it. [dw] yes, but this is a community... relatively small compared to the [rest of the world] do you have any demographics? how diverse is the group, what are you doing about it? [jw] it its definitely an issue. one way of addressing it is opneness, social norms of kindness and htoughtfulness, tyring to be open to people... we don't always succeed; we have our share of annoying jerks. the demographics (in the englihs-lang wikipedia) are mostly white, male... [more americans than non-americans, but not by a large factor] we're in over 50 langs, but 12 of 13 have over ?thousand articles... [ to those in the room here: Daneil Okrent at NYT had a great column a few months ago addressing this: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E06EEDC17 3FF937A25752C1A9629C8B63 ] in the ja wikieia, it tends to be male... in de: it tends to be german, swiss... it tends to show up it he wikipedia in terms of: if you go to an article about the USB standard, it's a fantatic article. if you go to an article about emily dickenson, it will be ok... it used ot not exist, now its getting better. we're trying to reach out to people in diff areas. one thing I'm reallly intersted in is reahin gout ot the arabic wp ther'ws a real need in that culture for a good, neutral encyclo. so we're trying to reach out, but it's difficult. [Ethan: lots of people have their flags up!] [Jimbo: Who defines what's neutral, though? aint "neutral" subjective?] [??] financials for wp: community groups of interest dan is trying to create. two questions. [jw] ([[[ if anyone has questions for the speakers, post them in #webcred, not this chan!]]] the WP foundation is a [non-profit] foundation... the way we do things is unlike any other org I've ever hear of. it's completely insane.. we're all volunteers there are almost no defined roles runing the 40 servers (we have 15 more on order, we will have 55...) are managed by volunteer sysadmins all ove rthe globe most of whom i 've never met. we have people with root poasswords on the servers who I've never met... they could erarse everything but they don't; I trust them. we have a grant committee, we're applyin for grants... people always ask me "who's responsible for this? who did that?" I always say "I dunno... I'm just the person who gets credit for all the work" it's a big jieke in the commuinty that I barely know how to edit the website, befause I don't do that... it's so different from what you can imagine that, to ansewr the financial question, this changes the entire picture. there are a whole lot of things we'd love to do but we just don't have the money; if onobody wans to do it, it won't get done. but for things [perople are interested in] the costs are so low... we're probably gpoing to have to hire someone to look after the machines * britty_ has joined #webcredtrans b/c I just don't have enough time to insert new machines. * ayashii has joined #webcredtrans but we've budgeted or spent about $250k this year. the BBC looks at us; they have a budget of $100M a year; so thy look at us and say you have 1/10 of our traffic, you must have a budget of $20M or so... well, no! so other institutions thinking about their business models, [you should really] take this into consideration. [Dan G] grant making organizations, I hope you'll really consider this [Wikipedia]... as for communities: I hope there's a way to franchise like sites; I don't want to be like McDonalds, that would defeat the purpose. to have people who are aligned in some sense, that would be really useful. but I'm [only] in week 3 of thinking about this. * britty__ has joined #webcredtrans I'll put this out now - I'm looking for a really great person to join me on this... [q : ??] [jim kennedy] re: Wikinews, I'd like to know in particular what you are trying to accomplish. [jw] (Nick collision from services.) what we'd like to be is... [a truste source of news] like CNN or the AP wpidetn whether we'll succeed in that, I don't know we're going to see what the ocmmuinty comes up with. it grew from a demand wihtin the community that people wanted to try ths, and it sounded cool and interesting, so we're going to try it. if it ends up being a fntatic news resource that puts the NYT to shame, that's fine, if it ends up being niche journalism, that's fine too... if it ends up being magazine journalism, fine... we'll see. [xiao Q] this is to jim and wikipedia news: * FutureCrash has joined #webcredtrans first, I admire your project tremendously. you're exploring a bottom-up collaborative effort, which i beleive many people in this room are also [pursuin] but, what are the challenges?[ if a project really matters, that is a contested pace. people will have interst; people will come in... how does politics pay out in your owndreful way of how tod o things? if someone had more time in their hand, be more stubborn, more self-righteous, will they get to write more? with google visibility and everything, will that be a contested thing? or, your project won't matter at all and people will just [read] something eles [jw] to ansewr that, you should look into hwo this really works. [technically] the essential game theortic structure of how a wiki woks, is that 1 or 2 people can easily hold off an annoying army of trolls.. you can just revert until they go away. there are differentkinds of conferted effots we miht see... "what if MS wants to come in and edit any entry to do with them?" that's very unlikely... we're big enough and have enough public voice that it would be very embarrassing to them to find out heey had some campaign to subvert WP I don't htink they would try that. for othe things, i's a lot mre decentralized (religious movement) we haven't seen a lot of that yet, but I'mconfident wr will be able to do with it. It's important to understand wp has a veyr tight-knitocmuinty; the vast majority of work is done by a tight-knoit grou of 200 people who [look after]the quality of the content. on eof the key answres is that we've alway sconsidreed the qulaity of the content ot be a cnetral organzing principle that tkes precdence over a lot of the things, such as allowing anyone to edit any article... ("Verlassend") a lot of people think when they hear that "oh, these must be relativists who allow anyone to say anything at all" * van_Flamm has joined #webcredtrans * ungaro has joined #webcredtrans but no, if there's a problem, we'll find a way to deal with it. We may not lock the articles down, we'll find another way. [jane singer, neat stuff!] * Rdsmith4 has joined #webcredtrans ("Verlassend") jim - when you start to do news, is the idea things people have observed themselves/' I'm thinking of taking some things I've [done elsewhere] and contributing to you... legal issues? if there are rumours and other unsubstantiated things, perhaps you can work this out by verifying... * uwe has joined #webcredtrans Dan: also an interesting project; what ar ethe htings you're taking from journalism and hoping to spread? [jw] we're keeping things openended. ("Leaving") i believ our early and pirmary strength will be synthesis of the news as opposed to orig. reporting. that's hard to do wb/c of our strong commuitment to neutrality and verifiability. in the encyclopedia we say "no original research" this came up originally b/c of physics cranks, of whom there are apparently an infinite number on the net instead of saying "you're a crakpot, go away" we say we don't accept orign research; please get this pubvlished in a journal somewhere and we can look at it. on wikinews, we're not limited to that... yesterday for the bleize story, we have a number of pictures, and some original statemnets... but its' from a trusted member of the community. on wikipedia, we don't violate copyrights, party as a matter of intellectual pride; we're not plagiarists, we're producing a brand new refernc work. if we catch it, we delete it; it's a very tight-knit ocmmuinty. someone can come in from outsdie the community and post a copyvio... it will bel ooked at and might be missed for a while... but for aonyone in the community to post a copyvio, it would be ... like a scandal in a newsroom; it would be horrifying. noone would do that. [q: so, re: primary reporting? how...] [jw] it's a synthesis; if you thin about a newspaper, and the frot page ad editorial page: blogs are simialr to editorials; they're commentary.l genreally not frontpage reporting. wikinews is similarly a resonse to the front page. if the NYT and Wapo and fox and cnn are all reporitn ga story in different ways with different spings.. hopefully our process can synthesize that into something usefl. [q - do you list your sources?] [jw] yes, that's a very imporant ting; if you come and add something and don't back it up, people are probably going to delete it. [.*.] [same q] dan: what do you want to take from citizen journalism/ ? dan: most people don't konw what the FOIA is. there are some very good sites that tell you how... part of what i want to do is this thing that journalists do every day... [zittrain] * paddyez has joined #webcredtrans I remember once scott bradner of the ietf giving a presentation, in which he smugly pointed out that ibm said you simply can't biuld a corporate network out of tcp/ip * KleinerPinguin has joined #webcredtrans an dno his next slide he had a swarm of friendly bees, and said "why do you think I have bees on my slide?" b/c earo engineers [once] projected there is no possible way they could fly...l furry, tiny wings... I've been thinking about this for a wihle; the open process of net standards. all of this has led me to think about wp the more I look at wp the more truly amazed am my questino is how it an avoid flaling victim to catastrophic success: * dyer has joined #webcredtrans now that it has enough Google karma that if youre seraching for, maybe not dickinson, but most any academic topic, you'll find wp... and someday soon, if it hasn't alreayd, businessweek is oing to do an article on you or on the cover, "Wiki: what you need to know!" it's one thng to deal with what you describe ads the annoying jerks... via the 'priesthood (and it is a preisthood - in that it's an idealogically unified community) what if ms comes in to edit it, the way they were psraypainting the butterfly on the sidewalks of nyc for a while? with enough money and undrstanding in pr... by hiring some consultants in this room... you'll have very sophisticated influences over the wiki from intersts that don't subscribe to neutrality, but aren't so hamhanded as to be easily exposed and embarrasee. what yo'dhear form ms and walmart (I was jlooking at its entry) and they haven't edited it yet, I gather it's b/c they're behind... and thye'll say 'corporations are people to' and you may say more powr to you... but I'm worried that the fraglile norms you've set up can get totally swamped through the catatrophic success of attention that the thing is bound to get. 'm wonderfing how to bateten down the hatches against that kind of influence the way the ietf has not battened down ITS hatches against similar influences. [jw] two htings; 1) so far so good... we've been able to think of things in advance, but not solve them before they happen betterto wait an dsee if wre really hav ea problme. the comm scaled very much larger that I'd eever have imagined. somehwere there's a mialing list post from me saying "we're gonna put this u, but obviously soon we'll have to implement some osrt of passwrod sstem and not loet peopl edit) at the time I was thinking, "once ew're past 50 people or so, how will we keep track of things?' well, we've found other ways to keep track. 2) there's no magic way to cope with htis... I want to make a sarcastigc joke and say 'luckliyl this never happens in the media' noone's ever been accused of influencing that... [jz] fair enough.. but i f the foront page of the nyt was a wiki... and it was just frozen at 6am at some point... I think there would be real trouble. [jw] well actually, we're now about as popular as the times... [dwiner] and the fornt page can't be frozen, actulaly, it doesn't hvae that feature... [jw] its securit through obscrity, sufficient ot keep *me* from editing the front page... again it's - the key is, within the community we hae a verystrong commitment to the quality of the work we're dooing. that outweighs how the community is organized. if we came at this and said "we'll always be a wiki and if the encyclopedia goes to hell, that's ok, b/c its this open, crazy experiment" but as it isall that wiki stuff is a means to an end, and the high quality is that end. [&] look at wikipeida, but look at the discussions that go on *about* the articles... * cohutta has joined #webcredtrans the community they have built around articles is amazing. (sorry, that's dan g) [jw] wikipedia has a rule against original researhc, but wikinews *does not* have a rule against original reporting. (in response to such a question from faye anderson ) [FA] here's why I wsa so ecitd about wikines: in the 2002 midterm election,s the mianstrem reported that low black turnout was resplponsible for dem losses... i was very involved [withthat] our field operations [knew] that in the targeted states, there was an increasin black voter turnout. ??? in 2002 said they didn't have confidence in the data, and so didn't release the polls. then the pundits talked about low black turnout... the polling data wasn't released, os this was just sheer speculation. ("Verlassend") I wrote etters to the edior, talked to oped organizers... the storyline was fixed. low black turnout leads to dem losses. and what happens? FF to july 2004. the census bureau reports that in 2002 the only demog group that had an *increas* in turnout was black voters. the same thing reported about the 98 electin. if wikiews had existed in 2002 you can guarantee that I woul dhave been posting to this site. [jw] in the long ru,n I think this is realy where it's hat, whether this innovation will take place in wikinews, the blo community, or something I haven't though tof yet. I haven't actually checked the stts on who's editing WN... it's not credible to say we have people weknow an d turst in vevery part of the world now. what will happpen whethn there are 300k people in the web of trust, and people can say, this person is as credible as any rndo news reporter, at least... if you were known in the community and posted observations, it wold stand. but it's gonna take time. we can' tjust open it up to that right away. [ethan] we asked dan and jim to be with us to help us focus on where we've been so far, and help us opne up I hope they'll forgive us for the interest... I want to turn it over to them. I know they had questions for the wohle room: [dan] our assignment was to find the brushfires and pour gasoline on them... what we wnated to do was to thorw out a few scenarios... see whether people would check out stories before posting them... sayyou get an email linking improprieties in a local gov, but can't verify the sender. would any of us just post it on our blogs, ? what if that weren't an email but rather an anon blog... jim, how would you deal with this? [jim ? ] we found images of navy seal abuse; the wife of a seal posted pictures... similar to abu ghraib.. a reporter found thoes pics, cheked it out, called the person who posted them, confirmed they were real, and did a story about them. the family's suing us for using those pictures... we're fighting it. we're using the rules we would if those pics had come into our possession some other way. whether you find things or it comes to you, you foollow the rules you normally would... (Success) [dang - jay? what would you do?] [jay rosen] I wouldn't run it... verification. I don't run thngs I can't verify. I can't think of a situation where I've linked to sth I can't verify... I'm very conservatitve that way. I tend to be slower, days after they're in the news my particualr niche is reflection. you'll find sth in pressthink 2 days after you see it in the news. maybe I'm not a good person to answer. [dg] dave you're a linking machine... do you post such things? [dave w] I do a bit of soul searching on a couple of axes. first is, what do you think? do you think it's true/ if you think it is, what are you basing it on? where did it come from, who is vouching for it? I guess a third axis is, I love getting a scoop! I'd hate to think that b/c of hesitation, I didn't get a scoop a fourth one is, how ontopic is it? if it's about the health of a chinese leader, it's probably never going to be on scripting news, even fully verified. if there was a securiyt hole in Win Server 003, and it came from a bugrracking service that hs claled them correctly in the past... that would totally go on SN, with a caveat: you have to say how much you know about it. ("Ewige Blumenkraft!") If I don't know it's true, I have to say "this has jjust crosse dmy desk, take it with a grain of salt" my readers know infinitely more than I do; they're gonna help us verify it. * jwales has joined #webcredtrans * mahu has joined #webcredtrans [dave w] I got emails, too; I got them aftere chris ran the retraction and apology. one thing is, they really hit you hard if they don't like what you wrote [chris pirillo] I've walked that line very carefully; I have been challenged bvy that publisher in the past; I did link to chirs p's thing, b/c I thought it took guts for him to challenge what he did. [RMack] going back to the previous case, they *had* verified the photos were real, they *had* checked they were available. [pub] (Read error: 110 (Connection timed out)) they had put their photos up on a site where they could protet them from the public, and they hadn't done it; of course they did later. we did the next steps, old-fashioned: calling up and verifying (the source) and all that stuff. just "I found sth aout, I'm pretty sure about it, here you go, join me in verifying this" is -- I'm not comfortable with that. [RMack] * waerth has joined #webcredtrans you wren't content with linking it; you reproduced the photo and ran it on ap. publishing it on your own site, wherever it is, vs linking to it on another site whree someone else has responsibility for the content.. in what ways is it different? [Dave W] on a pragmatic level, there's no diff b/t pointing and copying if I write an article about sth and they take it down... I've een burned too many times by that to let that be ar ason that *my* archive goes bad. [Rmack] * Grunt has joined #webcredtrans this leads back to sth that was going on before the conference.. can we blog on anything we can't verify?' I blog on north korea... I constantly blog about things there's no way in heck I can verify, since it comes from NK, but I want to gateher it an dlink to it so others can create their own pinions about what the bush admin'n is saying and what otehrs are saying. if I ony included facts in this, I wouldn't have a blog. [Dave w] I thnk Jim is right in this, b/c he's the AP. he's l[playing a diff role than a blogger. our philoso[hy is very much, put things out there andl et others hope to check it. if the AP started to do that, the world axis would be tilted in the wrong direction. [dg] let me ask bill mitchell, then david... [bm] in the pub industry, we do distinguish what we publish and what we link to we acknowldege that our pub and teaching guidelines are different... we teach to point out only in [unusual] instances. what we're trying to do on the romanescu? site, is give people in the business news about news. we think in the spirit of reality people need to konw what's being recorded about the business. [jill a] I want to point out that in the old journalims craft, just verification isn't enough. re: a company with layoffs, even if were were sure it was true that there were layoffs, that would have to be combined as a fairness isue with comment. you need comment from the company beore the news article would be ready for either the web or the paper. [john h] as bloggers, we do things idff from what we might do in a newspaper. at powerline, we don't go with anything anonymous. we have a source I've talked to on the phone, I know he exists, he's widely known as someone doing military commentary... if I were doing a piece, I don't think I'd link to him... sorry, I don't think I'd quote him (in a print piece) but we view him as basically a good source, and we do link to him. [dan g: let's speed up, get to the 2d scenario!] * advance has joined #webcredtrans [dave w] [weinberger] I absolutely report on rumors and gossip and speculation on my weblog ("Quitting") I try always to qualify it with some english language; rumor, speculation, etc. but its fun. I AM NOT A LITTLE JOURNALIST. it is NOT a continnum... my weblog is NOT reporting. my weblog is a way of talking to my friends over the watercooler... "I hear jen and brad are breaking up!" 0 or 1% of weblogs think of themselves as journalists. it's a TINY sphere. it's like jimmy said: look at the EB, look what they've built up... the existence of infrastructure is not a guarnatee it is going to continue. I think you should look, not at the people who are trying to be journalists, but the vast majority of people who AREN'T writing articles, they're just blogging. [xiao q] ...you're putting up a product, that's the difference. another way to look at it: in the digital wold, it's not that there's a truth out there and we're going to get it; there's something deeper. [zephyr] I want to point out a site: "this is rumor control.org" I'd love to see an experiment with this... one thing you ese happening, is a lot of people put "8" next to their stories that's wehre people feel comfortable [rumor level on the stories?] [dan g] don't forget the snopes site, and brooks' factcheck.org we need omre of these, debunking/verification things. ok, jon, jay, ethan, then we've got to go on. [jon bonne] I was hearing [this] on pbr recently, and was really impres that a) the AP found it, and b) you guys didn't protect it, were out there publishing it. going back to verification [[what was jb referring to?]] back in 2003, a story was circulating about an MS conract worker ("Chatzilla 0.9.66 [Mozilla rv:1.7.5/20041107]") who was dismissed b/c he was caught posting a picture of Macs being unloaded at a loading dock... and there was some question whether this was related to his being laid off * danbri has joined #webcredtrans I went out htere to interview him, talked to his contract company... obviously bloggers were way out there ahead of us. but we finally did publish the story, *with* the photo that got him dismissed, *on* a site [Slate] owned by MS. obviously the guy's out there, his story is out there... but what RM was getting at is, when you're stuck with unverifiable stories, and your ability to verify is opaque... how do you shade things you can't [completely] verify? [jane singer] one thing we haven't mentioned is: there's a real ethical issue here. particularly with the first issue, a local councilmember who did something wrong. if you pass on sth you can't verify, you've done real harm to that person [which may not be warranted] information is poewr, and that's all true, but there's an ethical obligation to the people about whom you are writing.. you're going to harm that person. if it's true and needs to come out that's public info and is important, BUT. [dg - and attorneys are champing at the bit for that one] [ethan] I wanted to challenge my friend dr. weinberger. I agree there shouldn't be this continuum b/t blogger and ournalist, and if we blog to a big enough audience, we've become journalists. but the idea that what we're doing is the online version of water cooler gossip, I don't think that's right. I just checked techonrati, you have 2200 links... you have an *extremely* effetive water cooler. anything you say shows up immediately, and is indexed. so because you are indexed so well, anything you say about a popular subject shows up and is [often] indexed higher than anything journalists are going to say. [dg - are you properly chastened?] [jay rosen] the on ly definitoin of information that I trust is that information reduces uncertainty. the kind of information we've been talking about *increases* uncertainty, but the it i reduced online. it used to be, this reduction took place behind the scenes. that's what journalists were for. now, we need a new kind of person, maybe we need a new name for it, who says "there is uncertainty out there that needs to be reduced!" then we work on that and tryto reduce the uncertainty, moving [forward] online. my weblog, I consider my personal magazine. Idon't want anything in there that increases uncertainty... but I have to admint the world is changing, and I"m using an outdtaed notino of the editorial process; it's not going to be the only way we deal with information anymore. [dg - you probably need to turn off your comments then... after i rad one of your posts and all the comments and the things people put in there... I don't generally feel more certain.] [dg- jimmy has something he wants to raise, and it's important.] [jw] - yesterday I mentioned free licensing at the end, and since we're supposed to pour gasoline on the explosion, thta's something we should really bring up If your biz model is based on eyeballs to your website, and based on free (as in beer, not as in speech) then free licensing doesn't do you nay harm at all. there are alot of different kinds of licenses out there (from CC,...) , you can find oue that suits your particular circumstance and youcan find a license that requires attribution back to you, b/c it will increase trffic to your ewbsite if you think your content is so proprietary and special b/c people only come to your site for it since noone else has it, you're fooling youreslf. particularly for commodity news, the bulk of your traffic, I can get it here or there, it doesn't really matter to me. but if you put a free content license on it and people link back to you, you'll be very popular. at wikipedia, we see a lot of benefit from this: people say wow, you have so much google power; well, it's because we have all these mirrors and we let them do what they want and they link back to us; * mahu has joined #webcredtrans that populariy is eithre from the inks back or indirectly from having [the content out htere] [dg - back to jim first; picking on you today] [jim] we worry about certain things people might do, for instance just as an ap or nyt story would be changed or rewritten and presented as an AP story * Gaspar has joined #webcredtrans if you're set up to police copyright against those kinds of [fake] uses... that's good but I'm worried about what kinds of abuses would occur and where the brand would be taken/hijacked by people who felt they had a license to do so the other issue I hvae: different media types I think text is one thing, headlines one thing, when you start talking about images, video... [jw] images seem to me the simplest obvious case; it's indirect: you're not trying to get people to your website [via the AP photo] [jim] I think it would be a horrible thing to say 'here are these pictures, do what you want to them in photoshop' [dave w] why? [jw] there are a variety of licenses... you can say 'tke our content exactly as we gave it to you, and attrivute it to us... f you change it, don't attrivute it to us' maybe this doesn't apply so much to the ap, but if you're a newspaper with a photog on scene, and you have some cute crazy photo you're going to run in your paper; noone's going to find your paper with this funny photo if you just post it and say noone can copy itl.. but if you post this image and say 'feel free to copy it' you'll have a whole bunch of people linking back to you. [dave w] re: the picture of the huge trooper in the elian photo... the blogosphere loved it. I decided to crop it, take the boy and soldier, move them closer together, associated them with the AP story, and used a little piece of [your] picture as an ad. an the blogosphere erupted as a riot, "how dare you use their picture?" meanwhile it was passed all around the blogosphere, and everyone visited you... and the AP ended up getting huge negative pr for being such stinkers about that picture its' not a licensing issue; nobody's given us permission to do this, but we've done it anywya. [dg] I've decided to use on images larger than what google uses... and if they rethink this, bc they've been litigating this, I'll rethink it. [jw] it depends on your biz model, but I'd say: newspapers with their own photogs, going out and taking pix, and runinng them on the paper or website: they should let go of 10% of their content. maybe not their pulitzer prizewinning content, but routine news photos? what a fantastic way... if the LATimes, just to pick a rando oaper, put half of their photos on a free license... so many bloggers would link to it, their popularity would just skyrocket. [dave w] the photos (and articles) come down and are available for pay, after a couple of weeks (AP : 14 days) why is that? it's terrible. how can we link to something that's going to come down? [jim] b/c we sell archive access to the reporter... information is valuable when it's old and when it's brand new? [jay r] you will, in 5 years you will * fpzilla_ has joined #webcredtrans [dave w] how can we verify the authenticity of an author, if we can't see their history? [jim] we don't have a place for it right now... I agree with you, dave, if we can fid a way to store the content where we can maintain control over it [[and not lose its value? --Ed]], we might do that but we don't right now. [dg] ("Lord, what fools these mortals be!") I used a license that says "you can do what you want with it, for non-comm purposes [re his book] and... I think it increased book sales. [dave sifry] technorati: rather than pulling content our or using full-sized pictures, we link back to them. ftsearch engines have worked that way, and not gotten nailed for it... but we'll see what happens. the second part of the quetsion is; what happens if you change the photo when you thumbnail it? NG got into a huge discussion when they moved things around re: pyramids [image manipulation] if i'm thumbnailing I'll try to always maintain the integrity of the picture... by moving elian and the guard closer together, doesn't that affect the integrity of the picture? and b/c I don't get a chance to talk much, one more point: there's a big elephant in the room, and it's about business omdels: and why peopl edo and don't do things theres a big discussion about how current journalism['s biz model] works until we discuss how can people continue to make money doing this, we're avoiding this issue and bouncing off of it I rally hope before the conf is over, we actually talk about business models. I'm a *hug* fan of CC and free content..., [jw] are you going to release your tags under a free license? an rss feed doesn't actually help me that much for what I want to do with it [ds] every single page (and tags) are licensed with CC... NC-by (it's a little smaller, the link at the bottom of each page, but there) [dg - let me set up the business thing: [dg] journalism is under challenge less b/c of blogging, which I thin will make pro journalims better, but the buisness model: it's unravelling to places like ebay [the world's largest classified ads site] and a hwole bunch of other things; attacked by people woh arenimble, well-funded, able to work on smlaler margins, and worked on by people for whom real Journalism would be a ridiculous distraction [jay] let me talk about archives. most paces produce content which after some poeriod of time goes behind a wall, becomes lost to bloggers, google, cultural memory, high school student doing papers. lost to the power of permanence on the web. I don'thtnk most jurnalists around the country know that if they do a great 6-part series on a polluting oil company in their backyard, that it's gone after 2months and will really always be gone... b/c it's not gone for them... they have lexis/nexis... they can get it whenever they want! the journalists weren't involved at all iwth the original discussions that created this policy.l.. they didn't really know much about it, still don't they don't see it as crucial for them but obviously it IS crucial for them. I see 2 possibilities; the entrenched people at news co's who made these decisions, don't want to back away form them b/c they were wrong or are addicted to the revenue they get from this... they keep the journalists in the dark about it [what has happened so far] and conitnue denying the journalsits work to the rest of the web. OR journalists will get enlightened aobut this, join up with bloggers, and put pressure on their companiees... moving journalims outside those industries, which *will* reduce revenue for these companies . the place to watch, is (eg) greensboro, NC: the editor of the paper has a suggestion on his desk by a suggestion that the paper shift to a new format, permanent URLs, forever. as far as I know, ed left, it hasn't made a decision about this yet. but really, how much revenue ar we talking about, that the GN-R gets from their archive?' I think it's probaly mnimal, and there's no reason why they should make things retreat behind a pay wall. for other places, it may be more substantial [this amount] newsj ournalists should be involved in this discussion. they should *demand* to know how much revenue is really being gained by this wall... it's a crucial part of [their jobs as journalists] when I wrote to [a colleague] about a piece that he wite [the media writer for the LA times] and asked him, "do you know that this piece you wrote (a wihle ago) is unavailable now?" and he said "no!" what I want to know is: how did ALL THESE smart people get left in the dark about this? it's really important. for the bloggers, it's [just] an annoyance. [[but for the journalists themselves... it's more than that -Ed]] [.^.] my experience is that when I link to the nyt, it's a py link, it's cumbersome to link through and actually get to the article [even though I'm a subscriber] and the $2.50 price that I recall for an article seems /high/ to bloggers... the thid piece is, just a thought,bloggers are probably delivering value (collectively driving an awful lot of traffic) fcfreating traffic there. there ought to be a way this could be recognized, so that the times could make arts available in some reciprocal traffic... hey, we've driven a lot of traffic to you, so give us something in retur. [Dave W ] we ewnt through this to them, and they *do* provide bloggers with access to their [articles] if you get the link from an RSS feeed, you'll have direct access to them. their worry is that lexis-nexus somehow was distributing things that made the archives open [via their service?] so there was this workaround [?? form nyt.com] I think we always have had control over our archives... [?%?] I came in[to journalims[] with the veiw that archies were the primary source of revenue for these firms... at least that was true of a few major companies. but the more I hear about the social discussion here, for instance the desire for advertisers to lock in ad space on old pages for high-traffic news stories... I think if there were some way to recognize this traffic, we could change this before it becomes so difficult [Rmack] I thnk part of the way the jurnalists fell out of this negotiation process is, if the journalists rae involved in the negotiatoin dicsussions, they might not be as objective in reporting; if as bureau chief in china I had something to do / knew about the deals the copmany was making with the olocal government... I might be more wary about reporting on certain things. but most of the rank andd file journalists [were] in journalism b/c they wanted to serve society, our democratic discourse... the execs, when I asked them... I asked richard parsons of [now aol/time warner] I asked, do you view thingssuch as cnn/time mag any differently from your other properties, like mad magazine, ... he said "no! you're a product, like everything else". there's a huge disconnect b/t what the management views and what the rank-and-file journalists wish it was. [jay r] here is a piece simon waldman did for the [guardian review?] on "the Importance of Being Permanent" everyone go read it... Bob, what do you think would happen if every news reporter knew that their work was disappearing... and then argued with their companies about it? [bob g] I think most people know about this... after a few weeks, the articles go offline... but I don't know, what do you think, jill? [jill a] I don't know, these things don't come to me... ] [rmack] and they do know; I knew tat content I was sending in from our office [wasn't always getting used] but I put up with it, I made do... and you have a whole field of people who are just making do [with things they don't like] b/c they don't want to be unemployed... [alex] I think old stories would have a huge appeal if they didn't have to be paid for, and they would then pay for themselves in advertising... and i thnk it would have a huge impact, then everyone would do it it would do things that papers esperately want; it would bring people! I konw they make a littlemoney withthis archive busienss, but if they could draw people to their site... that would be a tremendous value to them, an increae in their authority... [jim] In our case, we *do* have enlightened management about this; we're just stuck on technologies... we're moving an old telegraph model to a database model... links between all that stuff. will it all be free, and cost nothing? no. but will it be free and open? yes, and it will be that way within... two years. [dan g] I just want to go around the room, [at the end] and talk about the tools authors need, around the world and I'd like to create a wiki, and talk about it there... I think that might be more productive... [ethan] (applause) thanks to the moderator of the morning session! [john p] any changes to what we're doing, moving into the last session? [agreement on a one-minute break...] [john p, before] the berkman center is going to race jimmy to creating a wiki [for that purpose] [jwales] its already up. we won :) [john p] well, that's because you're in the business of doing it... [[end of flahback]] http://webcred.wikicities.com/ [wacky music in the background] ;d :D that is can you describe the wacky music? ("Leaving") * britty admires sj's typing and thanks him yeah this is pretty impressive. your fingers must be purple laste session starting, please take your seats :) then open session... * Rdsmith4 has joined #webcredtrans [Alex moderating again] I want to say howm uch I've learned, how grateful i am, to Berkman, Ethan, Rebecca... who have taken suh labour to make this work this was aimed at two particular things: the journalists who are clearly moving in the direction of incorporating some or many aspects of blogging...I'm hoping that we will get to address the questions of what seems clearly to be the case: that there are so many kinds of blogs, blogs that do and say different things... the RMack model of blogging about a place entirely inaccessible, so you have to post the unverifiable.. the Weinberger model, with standards entirely his own... then you have Jay Rosen, with a conservative approach; winer, with a matrix of reasons he uses to approach things with common sense... there is room, speaking as a practtioner, not consumer -- room for further refinement to further explore the idea of making distinctions, if only in language... to call all these things 'blogs' is true [but not necc useful] [not necc meaningful] there is a dicussion yet to be had about thow the blogosphere will find ways to give people expectations about how decision-making is made, how transparency and acountability that is inherent in blogging... allowing people who rae consumers to have a standard of performance for bloggers. I don't knoe fi the blogosphers as a whole would find that a valuable thing... I 'd love to hear what bloggers have to say about [that]... I have an enormous sense o creation in the blogosphere. if there's so much energy being put into creation, I don't know where the consumer will fall... if every conceivable method of comunicating grows and grows, who will do the communicating, and how is that going to happen (given our limited time) how sustainable is the passionate amateur model? will that be the driving force on the web, or will it give way to a more commrecial and omre complicated kind of environment? talking to Dave Winer at dinner: I thought it was important that this passion, this idealism in the web world, if at all possible, should be sustained. I think the ideal of blogs as aplace for interactivity is somehitn I've been educated on: blogging is not necc about a conversation... it is in some cases, and in some blogs (just as some have ifferent standards for what they will post or link to) different blogs have different standards for interactivity... I just learne that Dave W's site for instance is not interactive... he does not take comments. he is effectively publishing something... Jay rosen does self-publishing also, and takes comments... the idea that the power in the blogosphere is entirely one of tapping an untapped resource of knowledge and having ths conversation rather than a lecture, is not really true. there are a lot of variations in there as well. I tihnk it will be interesting to see how this unfolds... with success comes an overwhelming response, which can be crippling...we got a little taste of it last week, when we [berkman] became, by our standards, bombarded and deluged. that's a tiny fraction of what well-read blogs can et... but doest hat infact then undermine the criteria chris lydon was talking about earlier, about letting other people have control of information by letting them speak? these are things I find fascinating, even unfolding... I believe the attitude here is there is a very important role for institutional journalism. my concern was expressed well by joe abramson: the worst possible scenario: the power and attraction of hearing what everyone has to say will be adoopted by competitiors to mainstream media... that will be[come] the model, and the result will be a significant downgrading of the idea and resources available for pro journalism. I don't agree with jimbo that a group of distributed people can replcae these pro journalists... as journalists go into these new environment,s they become more accessible, transparent,and better [therefore] at what they do... I want to thank you all for coming and participating... if it were possible to have some kind of followup, the next thing, certainly the Shorenstein center would be interested in doing so. [john p] I echo the gratitude from berkman towards shorenstein, you, edie... we could not have done this, obviosly, on our own and are hugely grateful for your help, and to the ALA as well -- this was a good instantiation of partnership, in my opinion for the others, thank you for braving the cold... in the early session, we talked about credibility, readibility... we talke about part of a process system emerging, but aren't particularly close to soe statement expressing that. on the other hand, ew learned a ton and achieved a lot. what the [consctuctive] poewr of this technology might be, and what our rolees in that might be. I was heartened by the number of people in this room trying to put a disruptive technology to work to the betterment of this world... it's not clear how to do that, how do you engage the person who blogs once a week, in the tail, in a distanct country... someone who podcats a few times and whose family listens to it. but I got the sense of a shared commitment. a leadup to a followup to this conference that struck me so clearly was: the people who will exercise the most leadership in this space, are people not here people writing to wikinews, or out there with a microphone somewhere... the huge amount of interest in this space, outside this room... is what's going to produce change. whether we're running or writing the nytimes... what's our personal leadership role going to mbe? * BF has joined #webcredtrans I think john zittrain is writing about how we are participating to create a future... which is building on these techonlogies. I think this is not going to turn out because of what we want, but through these other people; I hope we can through this little conclave, and as we leave this room, hraness and push forward that energy, and make use of this extrordinary opportunity to take advantage of this. ("I've had enough, you do it") I want to give a round of applause to catherine bracy (and edie holway?) for their work on this :-) [applause] [jonathan z?] [no, first ...] dave s can do the analysis, but I think there were about 100M blogs, and if you counted down the list, you quickly got to a hundred readers a day... [dave sifry] it's closer to 10k or 15k (big blogs), but then it drops off * ploppy has joined #webcredtrans the area under the tail is muuuuuch larger than the area under the big ones [f...] I run a little blog [in New York] about kids in the [sports] programs, about the kinds and the games they pla. we can do things with the blog they can't do with the paper... like put a basketball game story up that night... while there are lots of themes, this very active level of community blog; what's going on with those other thousands of tiny ones? [jon ] what I kept coming back to is: this 15 minute span of time we're dealing with folks who really don't hav that much time to absorb outside data... so the high-traffic blogs, it's great they have the readership they do and news blogs, sources, online or otherwise... but I keep wondering: people who have 15-30 min a day to expand their world beyond eating breakfast, getting to work, home, dinner... watching some sort of tv? how do they squeeze in things that are meaningful? I wondered, at whoat point is there an intersection of the useful, personal interactivity, and the topdown, 'this is what's happening in the world beyond you? for a while I've been thiking I'm just so sick of law... and copyright in particjular. In some ways I think copyright is still the big issue; reporters know that they have to change the fact that what they write disappears after a few weks. acadmeics have to deal with the same problem... they write something, publish it in a journal... and in exchange for publicationn give all right and title to the journal, and can't redistribute it save for under extreme restrictions. "most students produce papres which would be [unacceptable] for faculty papers, since students base their papers on lectures... faculty hae always accepted this..." proposed notice: "whereas you are authorized to take notes in class therby creating a derivative work this only allows you to create one set of notes, and no further use. you are not allowed to make furthre copies, or make further use of them, save via explicit permission from me" directly from the university counsel's office at UTexas [!!], [[beginning of the legalism cut off]] the original meaning of the creators of creativ work, and the filters set up to negotiate among individuals so great work can be recognized and make its way to the world and make it a better place... to say there's no need for any structure is foolish; one of the things I like about wikipedia, is there there is a structure, even if it's a very light structure, literally personified in the peron of jimbo but [it] does limit what can be produced by one person or the rough linking ov people as the look at and commment on eachothers blogs. I think we should think about the institutions that sever the urpose of organizing people around tasks to do this: make menaing, filter it, improve upon it, publish it, make it available to as many people as possible. the tech config is such now that the institutios suited ot doing that efore need wholesale revision. what i hear from some of the representative of thes inst's is that thye're ready to do it; I just wanted to put out the idea that our view of IP, whether it's to be cfreated and made scarce for end-reasons, or created to et out there as much as possible... the new institution[s] to do that is sadly the qustions before us, and the underlyig tension. [[morning transcripts: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/20 05/01/22#a748]] [j%j] I think it will be the journalists that will dirve movement [within the pub orgs] with their drive and fcreativity but I think the newspapers will benefit from 1) opening up discussions about the gathering & publishing process, and 2) improving their ability to make community connections. at some point the business office[s] will recognize the value of that and create soe kind of biz model if possible. [ethan] this is the point where I usually harangue conf organizers about not being international enough, etc. being on eof the org's this time, I will forego that. we knoew this would be a small group, with largely a us focus. that said, I'd like to start thnking about parallels in the rest of the world. while there are unresolved issues here, there is a shared sense of inevitability: we're heading towarda s diff world of news, journalims; more open, interactive, blurred lines... ("Leaving") the ideas getting tossed around here are significantly more revolutionar in some parts of the globe that they are her e- that enyone could be a reporter, or have a voice... is utterly revolutionary and, sometimes, dangerous... there's a whole nother layer about what these tech's mean when we start thinking about china, iran, places where it's significantly aharder to even have these conversations in a public space... [%^%%] what makes you think you have so many deg's of freedom to control the iints's and arragnements which are coming out, which seem to be growing faster than our capacity to deal with them/ blogging is new, but what's next? the old dupont saying: science discovers man follows; what about the power of tech to drive changes faster than requisite inst responses? [weinberger] what direves interest and change is not oging to be credibility but interest; b/c the blogospher consists of people writing about their interests, has a wider range of interests than newspapers. if interest is going to drive this change, and I think it drives it woards, inevitably, the blogosphere... if it were credibility, it would drive interest from papers. [xiao q] let me anchor this for other parts of the world I know not only is this significant, what we're doing here, to to eh other part of the world: the tools used in other places [ohmynews, etc] are also important to the entire 'sphere. Point 1) sth we didn't touch on much: international reports. when we touch on journalims and democracy... int'l reporting is from one community to the other (people not living in thes ame comm/culture) epecially in 'net days, not only does ecah community need to know about others, but communities need to know how they're being talked about -- so both com's have interest to talk to eachother * sbw01 has joined #webcredtrans that aspect of change to int'l reporting is sth we can explore Point 2) how can we *think* about what ew're talking about? Citizen journalism? from a certain point of view. the way I look at it: think of the blogosphere as chaos, and think of the mainstream media as order. we're looking at the edge of the chaos, where the two meet. that's where the life is happening... exciting, I don't know the word to put on it, but we're on a fabulous journey. [dave sifry] [[gives thanks]] one thing - stepping up to a meta view - that's bene clear to me, is this is all about human communication, talking to eachother... to do something good. I've always thought the blogging side to me is a new way for people to cnnect with eachother, ideally to ereinvigorate civis. hopefully it's that, and then it's a lot more! the other thing that's become painfully clear: while we have some tools,it's stll not good enough there's still so much to be done. mobcasting... to hear about some of the things people are doing how that could have tremendous use in 3W countries also in so many unintended ways, leads back to this huge responsibility that we as toolmakers have to behave responsibly, recognize there are sometime s unintended consequences. secondly, never forget that the users are the most important people it's not just about people creating the news, but about people listening, participating...giving them the tools they need. [j palfrey[] [[cheers and applause for technorati]] [^&] ("Leaving") I'm not a techie, again, an activist/journalist. ("ChatZilla 0.9.52B [Mozilla rv:1.6/20040113]") I'm interested in the uses of these tools to promote civi participation, voter education... for the last couple years I've been looking at vottere rights, voter databaess, electronic voting machines... * fpzilla_ has joined #webcredtrans there have been a lot of key tools for getting ovters, keeping them engaged... thank you for that. ("Chatzilla 0.9.66 [Mozilla rv:1.7.5/2004110 7]") [dave w] it's been a great conerence. the best thing about it is the dialogue, actually being able to put faces -- the human face makes a huge difference. it's harer to be dismissive of an individual. that's worked out pretty well. Ithink that for continuing the discussion, we should [do it] on the mailig list. we had a great thing going before the conference; conflusions -- I think that's a great place to put conclusinos, to share news... perhaps it will dwindle over time. there is a community to come for this, that would be a great place to organize it. [john p - good suggestion; we'll enable people *to* unsubscribe...] [rmack - there's also the wiki] [dave w] if you want to udnerstand whatsgoing on here, I htink of it as the human hive mind... it's sort of a human social collective of intelligence. you give to it freely, and what you get back is what you draw out of it. I was on the ege of realizinghtis when philip greenspun - a fantastic blogoger, great at cutting to the heart of the matter and not caring what peope feel about it. he ays, "i'm not into any of the things you guy are into. I just narrate my life, and drop into my blog what hapens. I just dropo it into my blog every few days, and I know googls is going to be able to find it, and maye other people will to" this is the impulse that drives many] repporters... and where we're gonna find commonality os is [maybe not david w] we have a passion for news... I grew up readin ghte nyt, in the city,adminring the reporters... I wanted to be one of them when I grew up. but I'm a very stubborn person, wanted to do it on my own terms. that's blogging, right? do you want to make a contribution and do you want to do it on your own terms? then you're a blogger. I thinkn we can get along, without dismissing ecahother as being trivial or obsolete, b/c we do have a negative image of ecahother at times... on the other hand, remember that we're all people, trying to do the best that we can... if we look at it that way, maybe we can all get along... [my turn to ask a qustion...] round of applause for sj few people mentioned that newspapers have to find a better way to make biz profitable losing ads to ebay, readers to blogs even that is looking short term what happens when every part of producing a paper can be outsourced to a hive of people who do it because they love it iraq burea costs $1m a year? much of what people publish could be put together by people who did it for free, for love newspapers might look like specialized bureaus for dangerous places, but might outsource lots of other reporting to hives of independent people [john h] sorry to be problematic there. thanks! it's great to get to know eope... people hwo i'd heard of but met for the first time... that's important. i have a picture on mydesktop rightn ow of my posting with Kos and ? -- I think it's important for personal relatinoships to help cross these diffretences in idealogies... I'm what I would call a pure blogger; my blog has nothing to do with my career; i'm not a techie, I'm not a journalist... I blog for two reasons: one is for fun, and the other is for political reasons. I'm intensely intersted in the subject of podcasting... and essentially how I could use that, for fun and for activism. I'm curious about what the lady in the back [%$$%] brought up -- that etechnology is developing faster than our ability to catch up to it ("Lord, what fools these mortals be!") it seems to me that the blogosphere right now, is close to a perfect market. there's no cost, there's no nothing... and I think I speak for most bloggers, who were simply bloggers, and not bloggers/journalists, not bloggers/academici ans that we may fear that the market will be less free, but have no desire for that to happen. [john p - jay, then rebecca] jay - it's been great, surprising, and the organizers desreve a grat deal of credit for thinking of the conference in the first place and the simple fact that the shorenstein center, and the berkman center cooperated -- is itself significant... the dialogue beforehand is itself significant. what happened? the little tempest online... that part of life was interesting. I don't think it was illuminating myself, but interesting. this conference takes place at what I see as a turning point. right now, the time that I have been paying attention to the press, this is a mooment. the reason it's a momet has been demonstrated here. it's not justthat tech is changing the world, we're moving Platforms!, there's Innovation! New competitiors... tnhat's aprt of it, but it's alsot hat maninstream American journalism - one of the strengths of the US, one of the assets of the country - part of the strenght of our democracy has come to a point of crisis. and the reason it's coe to a point of crisis has ntothing to do with the internet... the causes go way back to before the internet. it's a crisis of participation, b/c this has bene a relatively closed participation... relatively complacent over a longperiod of time, not challenging itslef very often about journalism partily because america has been build on production routines. production routines, sometimes called the daily miracle in newspaper, are the building blocks of the american press... they're efficient! they allow us to tdo this amazing thing: reproduce the world hevery 24 hours... but they eat up evryone's time, everyone's mental energy, the god to be served... there are no other gods to be served. over a peroid ofitme, the American press became closed to outsiders, deaf to criticism, unable to reform itself for it s own reaons, hostile to those who brougt these things up, hostile, close -- and convinced that it was none of these things, *utterly* convinced. I tried to fight against these things for a number of years... and in the process, I leaed a lot about the *reasons* for these defenses of journalism. the main resons for these defenses are that journalists are uniquely vulnerable to criticisms of their work b/c every day they have to reproduce theirworkd and do it under hast, rushed conditions about things thye may know something about but usually know very little about... put it out every day with an impromitur of confidence [that they don't necc. have] and frequently the reason why sth was written on eway or another has to dow ith the fact that someone's deadline was coming up... no other reason. and if they had to *explain* hy they mde these choices, why they did something like this... it would be "it was 5:00! and I had to go with what I'd got" In all the ways I listed [above] journalists were functional... from 1945 to 1995 that's a long time for a set of cultures, of ideals, that worked pretyt well and the routines that produced a certain autnhority and credibility in ojurnalism, now are undermining it. the clothes that worked as insulationn before now work as isolation. keeping the biz side away from the newsroom so as not top ollute the newsroom worked for a whioe, and now has just disempowered journalists to deal with issues that are critical to their future. and all these things that were building up over time, just now, are being recognized. and Tom ? who i've quoted many times at pressthink was one sign of it, the greensboro N&R is another sign; this conerence is a third sign of it... and there are others. the wall is breaking down; confidnece has been chipped away at. now, the thing to watch is: experiments like Greesnboro's; it's not just what tyey're doing, but what they're thinking. they've decided that for the peoplein Greensboro they have an online paper witha print capcity, and will act, think, redesign themselves like an online paper. so we'll see... whterh they set the pace and others follow... [any paper in the country that wants to be on the edge of citizen journalism could just do what they are doing! it's there] or whether they'll be [the only ones...] but I was surprised at this, peopl eare urther along tha I thought [before the election they'd be [in terms of recognizing the importance of these new actions] the reaosn I wrote bloggers v. journalists is over, isn't b/c the tension will go away. it won/t journalists, in the most enlightened form, have realized they're not quite with it in their world. and it pays for us to monitor the tension in their profession... I see, basically, the forces of denial are in retreat. [john p] the last word goes to the incomparable Rebecca MacKinon. [rmack] I want to commont on something david said and ethan said... and conect this conference with some other things we've been doing, and connect us with other conferences where we've been related. david talked about how interst, not credibility is driving htis new online media that's emerging, and the content, and so on... one of the things we need to think about and perhaps be concerned about: who's deciding what's interesting? for the omst part in the blogosphere, you have the white, upper-middle-class, geeky early-middle adopters talking about [their interests] and they primarily dominat e the blogopshere. incerasinbly now the instream media keys off of the blogs to get its story ideas, information, content, and so on. so you have an intrest feeddback lopp that is perhaps in danger of reinforcing the early-adopter elites. to ethan's point: how do you expand the tools, and the conversation, so that this interest feedback loop is not dominated by the wealth, comfortable, first-world early adopters and the people who want to be in the conversation have the means to do that. tools that make it easy for an american to blog (high bw, pc access) are not as readily available in [africa, parts of asia] how can ew help direct toolmakers to expanding the kinds of tools that enable this conversation and diversify the interests. and this is one of the reasons why ethan and I organized a workshop that ended up being called Global Voices where we brought together bloggers from around the world, including [Hoder] who is talking with us on irc. ew did initiate this american conversation... (here) but that's a completely artificial boundayr. our interests should not be driven a muhch as they are, by what people in the white house are saying we should be intersted in... we need to be finding ways to broadn that conversation, expand and diversify the way that interest is driving the formation of new media, and really ask who'se interst is it, that's driving htis media? [john p] thank you, everyone! adjourning for this session... 20 min break, and then an open session in 20 minutes :-) End of #webcredtrans buffer Sat Jan 22 13:41:41 2005