This is an excellent piece of work, surely the most well-researched
around at this point. Meticulous footnotes and all. These guys don't
just "really get it", they're documenting what's going on at the
intersection of social software and journalism in a very thorough and
useful manner.
I especially recommend Chapter 4 which dissects the "why we do it" question in detail - I feel they're hitting the nail on the head there. As Stephen observed,
many of the report's observations and conclusions are fairly general
and carry over to other communication-intensive areas such as academic
research and education.
(There's a 4 Mb pdf version in case you want to print it out.)
Stefano Mazzocchi (whom I mentioned previously here and in a post titled "The challenge
of getting people to author metadata") has been blogging sporadically for a while
now. It's time I found out about it... This list of past post titles looks awesome.
Tim O'Reilly's wishlist for 2004
focuses on what big players such as Amazon could do to foster
innovation and generally make Good Things happen. It all makes good
sense, but I'd throw in a wish that small players find ways to work together even better and keep on delighting us with daring stuff.
MIT Media Studies' Henry Jenkins is now coblogging at the Technology Review, along with Rodney Brooks, Simson Garfinkel, and David Kushner. The blog is comments-enabled.
