Mark on Media

Tuesday, December 14, 2004

BLOGGERS GATHER

Canada's first conference on blogging will be held in Vancouver in February. Tod Maffin, who is going to run a session on podcasting, has details, as well as links to the Northern Voices web site and online registration.

Among those who are scheduled to speak are Robert Scoble, Suw Charman, Roland Tanglao, Marc Canter and some other folks that you will not recognize unless, of course, you are one of us.

UPDATE: Okay, that last sentence is meant to be humourous. I don't know any of these people, although I have read them all.
11:15:09 PM LINK TO THIS POST

HANGING OUT WITH WOMEN

J.D. Lasica points to a new survey that shows the majority of bloggers (56 per cent) are women. But that's not why I live in the blogosphere. Honest.

(The link above takes you to Lasica's blog, not the specific item. You really should read the whole thing. Regularly.)
9:29:22 PM LINK TO THIS POST

YIKES

First podcasting. (How big has it become? Podcast Alley is tracking 538 podcasts. Almost all launched in the last 60 days or so.)

That's not the big news, this is: Me-TV, the free video blog browser.

SOURCE: UNMEDIATED.ORG
9:21:17 PM LINK TO THIS POST

BIG NEWS FROM THE LIBRARY

If I ran source links on this, the number of sites would be longer than the post. Which should tell you something about the significance of the news that Google has signed agreements that will bring the public domain contents of major university libraries to the internet. All searchable, of course. This is Google after all.

From the NY Times:

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.

This is big news. Even if the ultimate end of all this is a service that end users wind up having to pay for (perhaps along the lines of the recent Nexis/Lexis a la carte system), this sets the stage for everyday access to resources unlike anything currently available.
8:31:07 PM LINK TO THIS POST

GO READ, TUESDAY EDITION

Three sites to spend some time with when you have a moment:

1. Photojournalist Philippe Roy spends a day in Shanghai with Joachim Ladefoged and finds the power of hanging with the great.

To many I had whispered I was going to spend my day with God. To others I screamed it high and loud. It was a day of experience. Experiments. Discovery. And, learning. My photography was (rightly so) criticised and I learned a great deal.
Seeing the world through this man's eyes opened mine. Here is a short photo-essay of a day with Joachim. Of course, these are only my photos, nothing compared to his. I fell on my ass everytime he flipped his camera around to show me the pics he came up with.

2. Simon Waldman ponders Newsweek's coverage of an A-list of bloggers and finds power down in the depths, too.

All of this is important, and newsworthy. And without these focal figures, blogging would appear to those outside it as a random swarm, with no recognisable shape or structure — and therefore ultimately either incomprehensible of insignificant, or both. However, this focus on 'Alpha bloggers' makes the whole phenomenon feel allo too much like something straight out of traditional media. Substitute 'Blogger' for 'Columnist' and a remarkable amount still holds true.

The more I learn (and frankly, I still feel pretty dumb in these matters), and the more I look, the more I realise that blogging's great legacy is likely to not the individuals who sit at the top of the power curve, but the incomprehensible swarm: and, critically, the order that emerges from it.

3. Tim Porter does a lengthy riff on OhmyNews' interview with Dan Gillmor and finds power in the people.

The technical ability of people to participate in the creation of media — from video to gaming to news — fundamentally alters expectations citizens have of journalists. They are no longer satisfied to watch information loop endlessly through the traditional closed Mobius strip of newsgathering and reporting. Even though many people will continue to place value on the professionalism of journalistic institutions, these same people want access to the process and to the journalists behind it.

2:15:29 PM LINK TO THIS POST

STARTING TO GET IT?

A quote from a Miami Herald article suggests that some newspapers are starting to figure things out:

Now many in the industry say they've come to realize it's not the content that's the problem, it's the form of the newspaper itself.

Which drew this from Terry at The Pomo Blog:

How true, and it applies to local television news as well. The Herald editor notes that the newspaper of tomorrow will be delivered via new "gizmos," and I have to concur. The only problem, however, is this. Do/will media executives understand and act upon the reality that not only is the "form" of distribution the problem but also its dependence on mass marketing?

This is the real issue confronting media in the 21st century, and if it's not adequately addressed, all the gizmos in the world won't help the bottom line. Life in a bottom-up marketing world is the question. "Form" is only part of the answer.

I told my students today that they could be the generation of journalists that sees the disappearance of newspapers as we know them, form being the disappearing part. But new gizmos for delivering the journalism doesn't solve what newspapers are really suffering from. Things are changing and big media is going to find it tough to remain monolithic in a distributive world.

SOURCE: UNMEDIATED.ORG
12:26:56 AM LINK TO THIS POST