The Difference Between Crowdsourcing and Exploitation

by David Cohn on February 15, 2007 - 10:11pm.

By now you’ve probably heard about the recent Zogby Interactive poll on the importance of citizen journalism:

A majority of Americans (55%) in an online survey said bloggers are important to the future of American journalism and 74% said citizen journalism will play a vital role…Most respondents (53%) also said the rise of free Internet-based media pose the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism and three in four (76%) said the Internet has had a positive impact on the overall quality of journalism.

That citizen journalism will be important in the changing media landscape should be nothing new. That it poses “the greatest opportunity to the future of professional journalism” is probably a relief to those who aren’t aware it yet.

The imputes to realizing this is seeing real working models (something we are working on at NewAssignment.Net). In the meantime, here’s a new project from Personal Democracy Forum called techPresident.

Run by a motley crew of journalists and bloggers the site will monitor how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the Web. And it will include the following crowdsourced features.

Best hotel booking service

A searchable repository of emails from each campaign [to come]

Up-down voting on each candidate’s use of the Web [to come]

Live from-the-campaign-trail photo feeds created by voters

The most famous journalist to be jailed is probably Judith Miller. But on Feburary 6th a young independent citizen journalist in San Francsico, Josh Wolf, became the longest incarcerated journalist in U.S. history for refusing to comply with a court subpoena. Below is a timeline of the events leading to Josh Wolf’s arrest and into the future. Please leave a comment if we are missing important dates.

July 8th, 2005: A G8 protest in San Francisco turns violent. Josh Wolf was on the scene getting live footage of the event. You can see his edited video of the demonstration here. (note: contains profanity)

August 1st, 2006: Wolf makes waves as “the first blogger to be thrown into federal prison…One of the Internet’s earliest video bloggers, Wolf refused to testify before a U.S. grand jury and also refused to hand over unpublished video footage he shot during a clash between San Francisco police and anti-G8 protesters in July 2005.”

Top Picks of Citizen Journalism Databases

In a world where large volumes of information can be produced in the blink of an eye, citizen journalists need tools to access and cross-reference information. Several online database applications have sprouted up to fill that need. Here is a run-down of sites that are making it easier for citizen journalists to connect the dots:

Footnote: A repository of historical documents in a sleek Web 2.0 interface (think Flickr for documents). Footnote provides access to the original versions of millions of scanned historical documents, many of which are available on the Web for the first time. Here’s the Gettysburg Address (now tell me that’s not cool). Users are invited to share, discuss and annotate documents collaboratively to increase the ways they can be referenced. They have also partnered with the National Archives to bring millions of pages of historical documents never before available online.

Diplomacy Monitor: St. Thomas University School of Law produced Diplomacy Monitor to be a one-stop shop for diplomacy-related documents. It crawls hundreds of government and other diplomatic sources to index documents by nation, region and issue. This makes it easy for the user to see where countries stand on a given issue. They also boast near real-time indexing of documents, which makes it a good source for material which is usually filtered and edited by the mainstream media.

Davos Questions Crowdsourced -- No Need to Panic, It's Normal

by Kelly Nuxoll on February 8, 2007 - 9:30am.

You wouldn’t think a non-profit’s annual meeting in Switzerland in the middle of January would be a big draw. Yet, since the World Economic Forum started the Davos Symposium in 1971, it has attracted an all-star line up of political, business, and social leaders, gathering to discuss global issues too big to be tackled by only one sector.

This year German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave the opening address, and Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin threw the must-go party of the week. But what was truly different at Davos this year was that the public was also invited, and rightfully so. You were Person of the Year, after all.

“At last year’s symposium, some of the attendees were already blogging about it,” said Mark Steckel, a software entrepreneur speaking on behalf of the Huffington Post. “With that understanding, the symposium decided to open things up. The thinking was, ‘we’re not going to be able to stop this, so let’s interact, participate, and be part of it.’“

Nudged by the Huffington Post, the World Economic Forum, BBC, BuzzMachine, Guardian, and Daylife created the Davos Conversation. As Steckel explained it, the Conversation is a Web page that aggregated news stories and blogs posts about the symposium, posted videos of discussions, and hosted blogs for journalists and symposium participants. The public was invited to comment on the blogs and submit video questions. Attendees’ responses were videotaped and posted online. “It was a collaborative effort among all the partners,” said Steckel, who coordinatored two Columbia School of Journalism students to moderate blog comments.

If all of this sounds a bit ordinary, that may be the point.

The Blurring Lines Between Media and Politics

by John McQuaid on February 9, 2007 - 6:20am.

The lines between traditional media, new media, and politics continue to blur. Bloggers are covering the MSM reporters testifying at the Scooter Libby trial. After the Edwards blogging dispute, bloggers thinking about careers in politics are now scanning their archives, wondering what hidden time bombs they may contain.

We’re on the cusp of something new, especially with a presidential campaign getting underway that will produce unprecedented amounts of online coverage and chatter. With the formerly clear dividing line between “media” and the rest of us rapidly disappearing.

Rick Perlstein has a piece in TNR Online in which he notes the rough treatment that Jay Carney received when he made some mistakes in a post on Time.com’s new political blog, Swampland. A swarm of commenters, many directed his way by Atrios, quickly pointed out the errors. Though they were right on the facts, Carney lashed back at them. The Swampland blog is interesting in part because you can see the journalists adjusting, at times awkwardly, to the demands of blogging.