I came up with a “reading” assignment for my grad students that would give us a good basis for a discussion about user-generated video. You can see it here: The mwesch Assignment (feel free to copy it). I posted a summary (with two additional video examples embedded) on Slideshare: mwesch Reloaded. Last fall I heard [...]
Do you know enough about Twitter and Friend Feed? Are you adequately socially networked? Read Alf Hermida’s post about Scoble’s keynote talk at the Online News Association annual conference. Scoble didn’t say anything I didn’t know (and there are many like me in this room), but at least he wasn’t like the Reuters guy at [...]
Call me optimistic, but I think literacy and education lead to reduced conflict and greater prosperity, and I think access to cheap computer power is the key to education around the world. Paper is too expensive — and too slow. Information is power, and information is available free all over the Internet. It’s slightly off-topic, [...]
Jack Lail, managing editor/multimedia at The Knoxville (Tenn.) News-Sentinel, wrote a comprehensive post about allowing online comments on newspaper Web sites. It’s an excellent treatment of the topic and well worth reading for both journalists and journalism students. Commenting and comment management systems will evolve for newspaper Web sites. We’re at 1.0 versions for managing [...]
Many people have commented on the actions of Mayhill Fowler, who went to a fund-raising dinner for Barack Obama and later wrote about remarks Obama made there. (Today Jeff Jarvis commented on Michael Tomasky commenting about Jay Rosen commenting on the matter.) Much of the fuss revolves around questions about who is a journalist, when [...]
Clay Shirky has a new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. It’s about technologies of social networking. I don’t know if this is in the book; Shirky wrote it for a blog from his publisher, Penguin: A good deal of user-generated content isn’t actually “content” at all, at least not in [...]
The question: Should we allow comments on our (news stories / columns / reporters’ blogs / multimedia packages / etc.)? The answer: Yes. But … ah, yes, there must be a “but” in this answer. Moderated? No, because no one has enough money to hire enough people to read every comment posted on a news [...]