Author: fms

Andy Carvin’s Waste of Bandwidth: At the U of Missouri Scholarly Communications Conference: This morning I’m in Columbia, Missouri to speak at the Scholarly Communications Conference at the University of Missouri. I’ll be giving a keynote entitled ‘Open Content vs. Closed Doors (Or Closed Minds?).’ I’ll post more about it later; in the meantime, here’s the powerpoint.

Meet Local and Brand-Name Bloggers — New York Magazine

A Timeline of the History of Blogging — New York Magazine

Linkology – How the Most-Linked-To Blogs Relate: “here are upwards of 27 million blogs in the world. To discover how they relate to one another, we’ve taken the most-linked-to 50 and mapped their connections. Each arrow represents a hypertext link that was made sometime in the past 90 days. Think of those links as votes in an endless global popularity poll. Many blogs vote for each other: “blogrolling.” Some top-50 sites don’t have any links from the others shown here, usually because they are big in Japan, China, or Europe—regions still new to the phenomenon.”

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Blogs to Riches – The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom — New York Magazine: “wo years ago, David Hauslaib was a junior at Syracuse University who was, as he confesses, “totally obsessed with who Paris Hilton was sleeping with.” So he did what any college student would do these days: He blogged about it. Hauslaib began scouring the Web for paparazzi photos of Hilton and news items about her, then posting them on his Website, Jossip.com. (Sample headline: PARIS HILTON SPREADS IT IN THE HAMPTONS.) “My friends got a chuckle out of it, but it didn’t get really big or anything—maybe a few hundred visitors a day,” he says.

Then one day Hauslaib took a good look at Gawker, a gossip site owned by the high-tech publisher Nick Denton. Gawker’s founding writer, Elizabeth Spiers, had pioneered a distinctive online literary style and earned a large following in the Manhattan media world. What really got Hauslaib’s attention, though, was Gawker’s advertising-rate sheet. According to Denton, the site received about 200,000 “page views” a day from readers. The site ran roughly two big ads on each page, and Gawker said that it charged advertisers $6 to $10 for every 1,000 page views—almost the same as a midsize newspaper. There was also a smattering of smaller, one-line text ads bringing in a few hundred bucks daily. Doing a quick bit of math, he figured that the income from Gawker’s ads could top $4,000 a day. The upshot? Nick Denton’s revenues from Gawker were probably at least $1 million a year and might well be cracking $2 million. more . . .

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PJNet Today: What Can We Do to Define Community Journalism?: “ome elements we should be considering in building community journalism:

1. Closeness, intimacy and really getting to understand the community and care about what is happening in the community.
2. Personal connection
3. Have a cultural connection, understanding to the community.
4. Community transcends geography because of shared experience–communities of interest.
5. Not telling a story; we are telling someone’s story.
6. We are mirroring the community, we have to mirror the people within the community,
7. News organizations don’t live in a vacuum; we are interdependent with our neighbors as well as with the traditional sources.
8. Community is a process– a process through which people live their lives.
9. A good community journalist has to care about the community, but also about the people.
10.. Digital technology–using it for conversation
11.. Leadership role. The news media can span community boundaries. Can be the stabilizing magnet to help the communities to work together.
12 Can enhance the conversation to seek the truth.”

This article points to a fact I’ve been thinking about for some time. The openness and flatness of the blogosphere utopia is not as egalitarian as one might think.

The New Gatekeepers: “In a word, we created some new gatekeepers that we now know at the blogging A-list (and, to some extent, an equivalent B-list and C-list). Membership on it is limited and many have said that the way to disprove the power of the A-list is by showing that new members have appeared on it: what few are willing to admit is that the new members are really only allowed as one of these groups if they are vetted by enough existing members. This creates a self-fulfilling cycle where members of the small club of ‘blogs that matter’ get to shape the agenda.”

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DailyTech – Wikipedia Now Blocking US Congress From Making Edits

This article begins to discuss the issues around politians editing material on Wikipedia. Seems that when you set up a completely open system this is bound to happen. As the rarified communities of open source and social networking begin to be inundated by the masses, will free and open seems as rosy. Whose community has been broken into? How big can an online community get before those who created it loose control? What is true and real and to whom? Are those who control Wikipedia simply building a new kind of information elite? Or is there really democracy there?

ACMEBoston: Weekly Media Analysis Podcasts

These are useful for media literacy course