Colin's Corner

Vive Les Blogs

Neville Hobson notes Les Blogs, is a one-day conference about social networks, blogging, nanopublishing and where it's all heading. It's taking place at the French Senate on Monday 25th April. Neville has covered the rise of blogs in France noting the launch of VNUnetblog.fr in particular referencing weblog SVM  (Disclosure VNU and IDG have a joint venture in France). Additional coverage here

WIRED's Vive Les Blogs notes The French blogeur revolution is being spearheaded by precocious youngsters. According to government figures, half of all schoolchildren are bloggers, an estimated 3 million. Almost 2 million of them use Skyblog, a service operated by youth radio station Skyrock that is growing by around 600 new journals and 200,000 entries every day. French is now the most common language in the blogosphere after English -- and the craze is building, with a rash of regular blog soirees, the launch of several political weblogs and the emergence of more French bosses in CEO blogger

The mainstream media (MSM) in France such as Le Monde have been much more willing to embrace participatory journalism. It is very enlightening to see an "Old European" country at the forefront of Internet innovation. Maybe the US mainstream media will follow their example.

Tags and links: Technorati LesBlogs Flickr LesBlogs  Blogdigger LesBlogs Blogpulse LesBlogs

Be a Thumper in a forest of clueless Bambis

In a concerted attempted to shake off the LameStreamMedia tag, various MainStreamMedia (MSM) publications have been covering all aspects of participatory journalism. The most attention getting being BusinessWeek's May 2nd Issue with the cover story Blogs Will Change your Business

The Economist's article Yesterday's Papers covers the future on journalism, picking up on Rupert Murdoch's speech to The American Society of Newspaper Editors noting,"What is clear is that the control of news—what constitutes it, how to prioritise it and what is fact—is shifting subtly from being the sole purview of the news provider to the audience itself"

Ourmedia

Ourmedia a start-up community content service from Marc Canter and friends, is current in Alpfa but due to launch this fall. Ourmedia is a global community and learning center that allows its members to host  personal media including video blogs, photo albums, home movies, podcasting, digital art, documentary journalism, home-brew political ads, music videos, audio interviews, digital storytelling, children's tales, Flash animations, student films, mash-ups etc. Ourmedia is:

• An open-source project built and staffed by volunteers
• A destination Web site that freely hosts grassroots video, audio, music, photos, text and public domain works
• A community space to share and discuss personal media
• A learning toolkit to help our members create rich and compelling works
• An archive so that these works can be preserved for the ages
• A clearinghouse that allows anyone to search for licensed video, audio or music, download it and remix it, with proper attribution. Legally.

      Soon they hope to become:

• A 501(c)(3) non-profit
• A resource and global registry to bring freely shareable media to the desktop so users can create image albums, slide shows, jukeboxes and media libraries with a few mouse clicks

The Ourmedia project was started by members of the creative and technology communities in the summer of 2004. Major partners in this effort include  Internet Archive, Bryght, Creative Commons and Wikipedia. All share with a vision that compelling grassroots works — now scattered across the Web or hidden away on laptops and closed networks — deserve a wider audience.

Ourmedia is open to amateurs, hobbyists and professionals alike. The only requirement is that you must be willing to show off your work to a global audience. To date 10,000 have registered. Check it out.

Bluffton Today – A new kind of newspaper

BlufftonToday.com – promoted as “A new kind of newspaper” is a grand experiment in citizen journalism, a complete inversion of the typical "online newspaper" model with an Internet-powered interactive community center. It’s a place where community members take the lead in telling their own story.

    •     Everyone gets a blog. Not just staffers
    •     Everyone gets a photo gallery.
    •     Everyone can contribute events to a shared public community calendar.
    •     Everyone can contribute recipes to a community cookbook.
    •     RSS feeds are everywhere -- all the blogs collectively, all the blogs individually, classified ad search results and so forth.
    •  Those with Windows XP, receive BT Reader, a branded, customized RSS application that fully supports podcasting. It comes preloaded with RSS feeds from BlufftonToday.com and SavannahNow.com

In return, members are required to be a good citizen and exhibit community leadership qualities.

The experiment comes at a time when Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley, recognizes that "AP is on the cusp of a historic shift from the telegraph model that has characterized AP's business for the last century and a half to a new database model. He notes "News enthusiasts have already begun to shift away from the newspaper, the scheduled broadcast and even the bookmarked Web site, instead consuming their information on the desktop, on the cellphone, or time-delayed on television."

Another AP story  discusses how many local newspaper are adapting to the changes brought by the internet – specifically noting the changes at the News & Record, a 93,000-daily circulation in Greensboro. There's a page for reader-submitted articles, another for letters to the editor and an online tips' form. The Web site hosts online forums on 23 topics, including safety at a local high school, FedEx Corp.'s move to the area and cameras at local stoplights. Traffic cams monitor local road conditions.

It's all further evidence that traditional media publishers are being forced to embrace the growth of community and grass roots generated content.

Furl bookmarks: Community Journalism
deli.icio.us bookmarks: Community Journalism
Technorati Tag: Community Content
  

Boost for Social Networking

  As further evidence of the importance of user generated content, Yahoo Inc. confirmed the introduction of a new service, "Yahoo 360" that will blend several of its popular features including instant messaging, photo storage and sharing, and Internet radio with two of the Internet's fastest growing activities — blogging and social networking.  Yahoo 360 will also offer tools for sharing recommendations on restaurants, bars, movies music and other forms of entertainment. The service, which is due to launch on March 29th, will enable “social networking” allowing users to connect with others who share common interests and friends. It is designed to enable Yahoo's 165 million registered users to pull content from the Web site's discussion groups, online photo albums and review sections to plug into their own Web logs, or blogs.

MySpace.com, one of the most popular social networking sites, recently raised $37.79 million. According to comScore Media Metrix MySpace.com drew 8.9 million unique visitors in February who generated 4.6 billion page views. Still modest compared to Yahoo's 110 million unique visitors generating nearly 30 billion pages.

Computerworld's Premier 100

The sixth annual Computerworld's Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference, at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge Resort in Scottsdale, AZ. brought together over 750 of the top CIO and Enterprise IT business executives. The conference focuses the spotlight on great ideas, strategic use of best practices and real-world IT leadership.

Computerworld used the event to launch their weblogs service with 10 volunteer attendees blogging with live, unscripted, personal views of the event. Additionally Computerworld's editorial staff are blogging from the conference site. Check out extended coverage of the event.

Media and Technology

Rob Enderle reports from the American Press Institute and makes a call for traditional media to integrate community content.

[Media] needs to refocus their offerings on their traditional strengths of integrity and trust while improving them to embrace the need for “actionable information” over just data and embrace the advantages of blogs. They also need to market their advantages over blogs and integrate information from trusted blogs into the data stream they use to create their actionable and focused product. They also need to showcase and roadmap where they are going and engage on the direction so that existing customers (particularly advertisers) stay with them for the ride. Finally, they need to step up ahead of the technology curve by providing product that can be “Pod Cast”, sent to cell phones and two way pagers, and the reemerging class of e-Books.

The MediaCenter helps individuals and organizations worldwide acquire intelligence and apply insight into the future role and use of media and enabling technology and has a wealth of information and resources that is well worth checking out.

Social Bookmarking and Tagging

Embedding key words and phrases in meta tag descriptions and within content are used by publishers to maximize returns from search engines such as Google and Yahoo! Now, bloggers are adding free-text tags to their weblog content employing services such as Technorati and del.icio.us.
Folksonomy (peoples' classification management or as some have described it – taxonomy with feedback !) is a rating system for popular tags allowing users to save, categorize, rank content and bookmarks and share their favorites with others. A selection of tagging and social bookmarking sites is listed below:
Flickr  (photo sharing)
Del.icio.us  (bookmark sharing)
Furl  (Looksmart's social bookmarking tool)
Stumbleupon  (sites rate using a toolbar service)
Spurl  (similar to Stumbleupon)
Vimeo  (video sharing)

An in-depth analysis of tagging (Taxonomies and Tags) can be found in the recent issue of Release 1.0 . Also, it is worth following Jon Udell's coverage of structured search at Infoworld. Finally, a great tool to search blogs, to build your own blog groups and create RSS feeds on your chosen content is Blogdigger.

As more and more community content is embedded into online sites, think about the tools and services to offer your users to enable easy tagging, rating and the sharing of content.

Technorati tags Folksonomy Bookmarks Tags
Del.icio.us tags Folksonomy Bookmarks Tags

Billboard launches digital music blog

Billboard, which is run by former IDG Books CEO, John Kilcullen has launched a digital music blog, Billboard Postplay in conjunction with PaidContent.org. According to the press release, the site has an RSS  feed, and will soon offer a e-mail newsletter. They've hired Todd Beals, a digital music expert and writer, as a contributor. Billboard journalists and other writers will chime in from time to time. This is a smart move, by a venerable B2B publisher to embrace the blogosphere. Billboard clearly recognizes that the internet provides a platform to showcase content from all aspects of their industry and community but at the same time they are using their brand to reinforce credibility and trust.  They have taken a bold move to go outside their in-house edit pool. Other B2B publishers should carefully analyze this approach. Linked from RexBlog which has some excellent content covering the transition from print to online.

What's the Orange Box ?

Techies often take for granted that their readers know what this orange box means. However a cursory review of many web sites with XML/RSS wedfeeds shows that many fail to adequately explain in plain English how webfeeds and RSS readers work. Many have no explanation at all. (A good overview on RSS is available at PCWorld's News on Demand).

The recently released Pew Internet & American Life report on The State of Blogging identified that only 5% of internet users use RSS but this number is likely to grow substantially over the next year. So, does your site explain what the orange box means ? Do you have an easy to understand up to date guide and FAQ on RSS ? Do you explain your policy on advertising and other embedded RSS links, privacy issues and so on ? Are you maximizing your syndication opportunities by placing the box in a prominent position or do you bury it at the bottom of the page ? Do you encourage and make it easy for other sites to syndicate your content and do you impose any copyright or licensing restrictions ? Check out your site's policies to ensure your readers have information clearly presented so they appreciate the benefits of RSS.