Blog

Finally worked my way through the very useful report We Media by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis at the Media Center at the American Press Institute. A good overview of what they term participatory journalism, with many connections to my own research. From this report, several further references also need investigation:

Yay - the International Internet Preservation Consortium, which I'm a member of, now has a public Website (which will, in good time, hopefully be preserved by the IIPC). The Consortium is a group of about a dozen national libraries around the world, aiming to develop tools for archiving noteworthy Internet content in their collections. I'm on the researchers' group which will advise on what we consider archive-worthy content, and how we would want to access it once it's archived.

Like, wow. MIT has created a massive repository of open source-related research papers. I need more time for research.

As if the music industry didn't have enough to worry about: Slashdot reports that users are now Shifting from P2P to Stream Ripping - that is, using their computers to 'tape' online radio stations 24 hours a day. Quality is good (and getting better); song IDs enable sorting and selection of incoming songs - as broadband spreads and bandwidth increases, this virtually untraceable brute-force approach to downloading music might really become a viable alternative...

A new Wired about the rise of blogging approaches to news reporting: The News, One Entry at a Time. Might be time to pull together all of these individual reports into a greater whole...

Lawrence Lessig's new book Free Culture is out now - for free as a PDF download... It will be interesting to see how this plays out for the publisher. He spoke via videolink to an audience in Brisbane last week, to launch the Australian component of the Creative Commons project. Very interesting, and one of the most inventive uses of Powerpoint I've seen so far. Lessig eloquently made the point that his free release of the book (under a CC licence, of course) alongside printed versions will work out as long as the number of new readers attracted to the printed book through the free release of the PDF outweighs the number lost through downloading the PDF. If only other content publishers could see such common (or indeed any) sense. Anyway, looking forward to seeing more of this work as the CC project continues.

Always interesting to read the meta-discussions about Kuro5hin at Kuro5hin. As a site which seems to have been developed in good part in response to perceived shortcomings at Slashdot, there's still a fair bit of debate about what this site is or should be...
Not quite sure about the title We are sheep, though.

Looks like I need to work this one into my book as well - probably in the chapter on syndication and RDFs. Not especially news-related, but I feel that many of these technologies will be increasingly interconnected as they mature... From Slashdot: PeopleAggregator - An Open Source Social Network - a story about the latest open source p2p social network engine.

I came across this through a call for papers for an online conference called Memefest - part of their approach is to invite articles inspired by a 1993 piece called "Cyberwar Is Coming". Should be interesting to see what new articles emerge from this, and the original article also seems useful.