Citizen Media Watch met with blogging veteran, super-entrepreneur and CEO of Creative Commons Joi Ito during the SIME conference in Stockholm. He told us about how he (possibly) made the New York Times change their contract for freelance material, and he sent a message to anyone wanting to make it as a semi-pro or pro journalist or photographer.

Mainstream media is struggling with how to use photos with Creative Commons licensing. The reason is they’re not used to attribution models, but rather to pay the photographer and get the exclusive rights for the photo, says Joi Ito.
But they are starting to learn.
- They’re realising that atleast for certain situations and certain people it’s impossible to get a photograph in time. They’re realising it’s a resource. They’re starting to learn the rules, says Joi Ito, who saw a lot of abuse of the license in the early days.

He reveals that it took him three years of refusing to sign the New York Times’s standard contract after having written an article for them before they gave in – and actually changed it for everyone. At first they simply wanted the exclusive rights, period. Now the contract says they get the exclusives for one month, then you can re-use it in any way you want.
- But they changed. It took me three years of saying no no no. You just have to keep working. Don’t sign bad licenses, advices Joi Ito.

This is part of a longer interview also addressing the need for new business models, why hyperlocal journalism is failing and the two ways for photographers to make money. We’ve made the full-length uncut interview available on our blip.tv account. It is licensed under a creative commons license.

A big thanks to Joakim Jardenberg who pinpointed one of the questions for Mr Ito. And to Björn Falkevik for the filming/camera crash-course.

/Lotta & Gitta

Lindberg writes (my translation):

The blogosphere won the FRA debate because it was right. It was an issue that was pretty much dead everywhere else. It touched a nerve, it made people react. And – although not each individual blogger could get all the technical facts of a very complex issue right – it was possible to discuss it on a fundamental level.

Lindberg expresses criticism against the mass-emailing staged by evening paper Expressen, which urged people to copy a text about the FRA law and send it to all the members of the Swedish Riksdag. She thinks this is a form of spam rather than a good way to communicate people’s opinions to decision makers. There blogs are a better option, and Lindberg stresses their role as opinion media.

She writes (again, my translation):

Blogs are first and foremost opinion based media. When competing with tv or papers that have greater resources for investigative journalism, fact checking and the like, they are underdogs, even if they can compensate for this somewhat through networking. But misconceptions and errors can still spread through blogging networks. In such cases you lose credibility.

And she concludes:

The lesson to learn is that the impact of a medium depends on trust. Trust is volatile. You have to nurture it, or you will lose your readers.

(Video clip from the demonstration outside the Riksdag, which to a great extent came to pass because of activism from bloggers)

Today the BBC is collaborating with the site by sponsoring the feature called “the 12second challenge”, a daily question that users reply to. Users get to reply to the question “Economic downturn – how bad can it get? Give some examples.” The replies may then appear on BBC TV.

Further, 12seconds.tv today announced to its users plans to involve them in extensive coverage of the US election day.

In an email to the service’s users, the 12seconds team writes:

Citizen Journalism is pretty important for the health of a democracy. For this reason, we’re going to put a lot of effort into Election Day. Where appropriate (and legal) we’d like 12ers covering reactions, parties, exit polls and emotions on November 4th all over the world. We’re assembling a team of people and will feature their content on Election Day.

News Manager Olivia M calls out:

So here’s where I turn to you guys for help! If you see examples of fellow YouTubers doing great work in journalism and reporting, please let me know. If you’re a citizen journalist yourself, tell me how YouTube could better serve you. I want to hear how you guys envision news on YouTube and what you’d like to see. My ultimate mission is to make the site a go-to destination for news on the web.

A good ambition, for sure. But after 18 text replies, Olivia hasn’t yet got back to the users commenting her post. And with comments as this one, dated May 26, I feel it’s urgent that she should, if she wants this effort to be taken seriously:

We are very concerned about YouTube’s implementation of geolocational censorship in Thailand and elsewhere. How do you intend to distribute real news to its intended audience without being compromised by YouTube’s secret agreement with Thai government? Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT)

Wishing Olivia and the YouTube the best of luck with the initiative, and hoping to see a bit more interaction with the users.

1. From a lecture to a conversation
2. The rise of the amateur
3. Everyone’s a paperboy/girl now
4. Measurability
5. Hyperlocal, international
6. Multimedia
7. Really Simple Syndication
8. Maps
9. Databases
10. Just a click away

I’d like to add an eleventh change/challenge for journalists. One that is closely connected to no. 1, but I think it deserves it’s own mention.

11. Personal transparency

As a consequence of blogs, wikis and citizen media sites becoming more important sources of information for the general public, I think we’ll see a new awareness of the importance of trust, and knowing who your source of information is. Bloggers are often open about what their views are and who they are affiliated with. If they’re not, you bet someone else will find out and make it public.

I am convinced this openness will be demanded of journalists as well. You might not need to reveal details about your private life, but you will need to give your readers/viewers/listeners an idea och what you represent. This is an important distinction, since for instance journalists working with sensitive information, infiltrating or walraffing will need to remain fairly anonymous when it comes to for instance how they look and sometimes even what their names are in order to do their job well. But they can still build up trust. Swedish blogger Beta Alfa is a good example that you do not need to reveal your real name in order to achieve this. Being open about your affiliations, for instance, and anything else that might influence or be suspected to influence your work, is a good start. Also simple things like providing a list of links to what you’ve written before on a subject.
I call this personal transparency.

Alf Fransson, 69, is blogging about a small area 1.3 Swedish miles from Askersund in Närke, Sweden. By putting up his own placards at the local petrol station/grocery store, he has managed to engage the people who are living in the area to read and to give response to his blog material.

The Åsbro blog has been up and running since the beginning of this November 2007. Fransson says that he got inspired to start blogging by his stepdaughter. The address for the blog is estabo.blogspot.com. Estabo is the name of the place in Åsbro where Fransson lives.
- I did not want to use the blog address “asbro”, because it is Swedish for something else but Åsbro, he laughs.

There are 1.600 people living in Åsbro and Fransson’s blog is about things which concern the inhabitants: “Do we need efficient street-lighting?”, “Why is there cable worth over a million lying down by the lake ‘Åsasjön’?” and “What is going on at the Åsbro kursgård?”

Fransson has been visiting and writing about the companies in the area. One of the companies is Alfapac, which is Åsbro’s largest industry and employs about 80 people.
- It gives me the chance to satisfy my own curiosity as well as getting material for my blog, he says.

There are some musicians and authors living in Åsbro and Fransson has plans for future blogging:
- I am thinking about interviewing people. I would like to write about personalities in the field of culture, he says.

Fransson also wants to blog about interesting places to visit in the area. Not so well known excursion spots.
- Most of the people do not see the beauty of their own neighbourhood, Fransson says and adds:
- There is an old sacrificial well situated in the forest that I would like to show to you and my readers.

Tjuvlyssnat.se is a Swedish version of the popular US blog ”Overheard in New York”. In a short period of time it has gained a great success, being the most read blog on Bloggportalen.se, and last summer the blog landed a book deal. The book is also very successful.

Last week Damon Rasti, one of the people behind the site, talked a bit about Tjuvlyssnat on Stockholm Media Week.
Tjuvlyssnat started out as a hobby project between Damon and his friend. They started publishing conversation they had overheard, and the site got a lot of attention. More and more people started contributing.
- It’s everyday conversation, but here they are collected in one place, said Rasti. It reminds you of gossip, but it is more innocent.
The people in the conversations are usually anonymous everyday people.
- It’s never been our intention to expose celebrities.

Tjuvlyssnat.se is ad financed, and it’s going very well.
- When you can influence and contribute content you are much more okay with ads. You understand they are necessary to keep the site going.

Rasti said he has many new projects coming up, one of them with a major media company. But as the papers were not yet signed, that was all he wanted to reveal. Also he’s working on a mashup and two new sites for young girls.

What is PodCamp Europe? It’s an UnConference of podcasters, bloggers, and new media professionals & amateurs for two days to share, explore, challenge, and grow our abilities in new media. Learn about audio and video podcasting, blogging, photography, Second Life, Twitter, and all kinds of other new and social media tools. Whether you’re a veteran or interested in getting started, PodCamp is for YOU.

(via Media Culpa)

A lot of Twitter mashups have popped up lately. The latest that I’ve tried out is Twittervision, a live world view where twits show in real time. It’s rather addictive watching people’s actions described all over the globe. I’m still pretty hooked on Twitter, and I like that they keep developing the service. Though the increase in numbers of users have caused them some server problems. At times today it’s been impossible to reach the site. Hopefully they’ll fix it soon.

Twittervision is in beta, and is a service from David Troy, who’s also behind Twittermap, which is also pretty cool. You can type in your location and see what others in your area are twittering about. I found myself in Stockholm, though since I haven’t given an exact address it’s not actually where I was at the time of twittering.

When Twitter adds gps data, this will be really interesting. Now the locations are often pinned wrong, twits from people travelling show up in their home town.

Troy is also behind Twittersearch, a search engine for Twitter.

There are also a large number of Twitter widgets to use on blogs or other sites. Twitter has added to their own widgets, or badges as they call them, letting users display the latest twits from their added contacts. Here’s an example on my personal blog.

Now that the site is live and I no longer have to obey the non-disclosure agreement, I guess I can go into detail about the stuff I like on Trig. The Timeline Content Browser is one such cool solution. You can browse Trig content in a timeline, letting you see how it changes over time (most trigged songs, profiles and blogs). Also the Live’n'Direct page which features the latest logged in users, latest uploaded pics and songs, and also a shout box where you can shout stuff to the community (nothing that hasn’t been tried before elsewhere though). Over all, I like the feel of the site, but am not sure how much usage it will get and if it’s a real contender to MySpace. I hope so though. It definitely has a nicer appeal.

Previous posts about trig.com:
A look at trig.com and the possible fall of Lunarstorm

It’s interesting to see that the site has journalistic ambitions.
– We like to think of it as an experiment to further explore the potential of citizen reporting, says Chris Haller of eParticipation.com, the company behind iCommunity.tv.
The focus is said to be local news, but there are also a bunch of entertainment/music clips with local connections. You can subscribe to the channels for different cities or news categories.
From the front page presentation:

We believe that Youtube.com offers more than diet coke+mentos and the beer cannon. This website is dedicated to giving citizen reporting a video platform, by adding location to news footage hosted on Youtube and distributing it through various local news channels.

Most citizen media ventures are shoestring labors of love, funded out of the founders’ own pockets, and staffed by volunteer content contributors. While they’d like more readers and revenues, site founders nevertheless professed a solid resolve to continue: 51% said they didn’t need to make money to keep going; 82% said they planned to continue “indefinitely.” Nearly all would welcome reinforcements and the ability to make even token payments to writers.

“While not all individual sites will continue to operate, we project that the phenomenon of citizen media will be sustainable, with new sites coming online in serial fashion to replace those that collapse as their founders burn out,” Schaffer said.

73 percent of 500 citizens who participated in the survey think of their sites as a success. Shaffer in the quote above is Jan Schaffer, J-Lab’s Executive Director.

Read more:
The full report at Knight Citizen News Network

(via Center for Citizen Media)

“This is an experiment. It may end up like reading a bowl of alphabet spaghetti,” Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing at Penguin UK said

Ettinghausen also writes about the project in his blog:

Over the next six weeks we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel. We honestly don’t know how this is going to turn out – it’s an experiment. Some disciplines rely completely on collaboration, while others – the writing of a novel, for example – have traditionally been the work of an individual working in isolation. But with collaboration, crowdsourcing and the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ being buzz words du jour, we thought we might as well see if these new trends can be applied to a less obvious sphere than, say, software development.

A couple of commentors on Kaplan’s post point to similar projects that might be worth checking out – Glypho and Poups (the latter in German).

The money will be shared in proportion to the number of pageviews the user’s clips have generated. The site has only been up for a few days, but it’s growing rapidly every day. Among others, Djurgården’s (Sw. soccer team, my remark) fanclub Järnkaminerna has chosen Tubearound for their exclusive channel for movie clip uploads.

This is provided that the site indeed makes a profit. Tubearound hopes that the promise of sharing the money will help draw users from YouTube and other similar services.
If the name Andreas La Torre Ek sounds familiar, it might be because he founded Mymilliondollarbody.com, a site where you could buy ad space on a person’s body.

Previous posts about Swedish YouTube clones:
Bubblare.se announces award to best video clip
Yet another YouTube clone in Sweden
Bubblare.se’s top eight viral videos for 2006
Swedish YouTube clone goes tv show

I think we have replaced MTV. MySpace is more convenient. You can search for things, while MTV is just delivering things to you. On MySpace you can pick your own channel and go where you want. That’s why TV viewership is dropping among the MySpace generation.

MySpace currently has 140 million members.
Anderson’s statement follows speculations that MTV might cancel their flagship show “Total Request Live” due to a gradual decline of ratings. Total Request Live reportedly has some 300 000 viewers.
Yes, it sure is a changing world. Young people no longer want to be passive consumers of entertainment.

Take a look at this guy. His name is Zak George, a 28 year old dog trainer who travels around the States and performs with his dogs, who’s learnt to catch frisbees. And, he’s got some pretty good questions for the YouTube community.

The Internet and YouTube in general are really gonna make the renaissance look like the Dark Ages. That’s the era that we’re in right now.
I’d like to know where you see the future YouTube going and how it’s going to impact the world globally.
Why do you tube?

Not everyone seems to take him seriously though, judging from a majority of the 3000+ comments his video has got. But there are people taking him seriously enough. There are 20 video replies, and a discussion – and quite a bit of ridiculing – going on over at YouTube.

On the same theme, Stephanie Kinnear at Pasadena weekly writes:

We are entering a new era of citizen involvement. Think of it as a high-tech Neighborhood Watch. Kids with obscenely expensive cell phones are looking out for the little guy, and that’s a good thing.

(via Social Media)

Guldbaggen and other film and tv awards disregard online video, despite its big share in many peoples film consumption. That’s why Bubblare.se has introduced an award for those who make their own online videos.

Bubblare presents five nominees, all of them videos uploaded to Bubblare.se during 2006. Clips to be considered for upcoming Guldbubblan need to be produced in Sweden, internet format, creative and entertaining, viral. And, of course, uploaded to Bubblare.se.

The award will be presented during the Guldbaggen ceremony – but outside the building. Now how’s that for symbolism…!

(via BetaAlfa)

What Joost is is basically tv on demand with interactive features. You can browse through the different channels while a program is running in the background, you can chat with other viewers (someone will have to explain the idea of the chat to me though – the way I get it you chat with other people watching the same program, but since it’s on demand you won’t be seeing the same things at the same time…?), add a ticker for any RSS feed you like, and some other stuff.

I’ve been trying the service out for a while, and apart from content that doesn’t really excite me, it looks promising. The content issue isn’t really an issue at this stage, though they’ll of course need better material when they get off beta.

Me: I’m really curious about your business model. Is there enough money in the local market to support the sites just by ads, or do you have other ways to make money? I’d like to hear some of the success stories when it comes to local advertising.

Mark Potts: Backfence is entirely advertiser supported, and we believe in that model. We’ve sold ads to more than 500 advertisers in just a few months.

Me: Has the public response when it comes to participating on the sites met your hopes and aspirations?

Mark Potts: The participation varies by site and by post; that’s to be expected.
It depends on what’s going on in the community and what people want to talk about. We’ve had posts with dozens of responses and
fascinating dialogues by the community about what’s important to them.

Me: What was the reason behind the layoffs and what are you doing to turn this around?

Mark Potts: Can’t really comment on that, except that we’re reevaluating our strategy and planning several changes to our product to make Backfence scale into many more communities and become an even more valuable local resource.

Me: Where do you see Backfence in a year from now?

Mark Potts: Hopefully in many more communities and very successful!

Backfence is still operational; our sites are up and running and serving their communities and advertisers. We’re still very excited about the opportunities for ad-supported hyperlocal citizens’ media sites, and we’ve got some great success stories in both content and advertising to point to at Backfence. And the Backfence managers and employees that I’m leading are really pumped about our plans to expand the company more broadly and to add many exciting new features.

Michael Wood-Lewis at Front Porch Forum, another local media site that seems to focus on neighbourhoods rather than towns, has this analysis:

Perhaps BackFence isn’t aiming at the right target. Stories that appeal to an audience across a 50,000 to 100,000 population, i.e., BackFence’s target (e.g., “city council enacts smoking ban in restaurants”) may best be reported by professional journalist, as has been the case for generations. Stories that appeal to residents of one neighborhood, supposedly the cornerstone of BackFence (e.g., “utility work closes Maple St. and Birch Ct. to through traffic this week”) are not of interest to the other 49,000 people in town.

So, a BackFence model runs the risk of combining (A) stories with broad appeal that may not meet professional journalistic standards with (B) lots of micro-stories that are each only interesting to a very small slice of their readership.

The blog I, reporter has a good point about interaction being a key issue.

In my experience, community-based online media thrives when there’s strong participation and collaboration. It’s not enough just to read the news there, or even to publish your own stories there.

Sadly, Backfence never really got the participation/engagement part down well, as far as I could tell. Matthew Ingram’s recent scathing headline nailed the experience of most Backfence community sites, I think: A back fence around a ghost town.

As I’m not a very economical person – that’s something I leave to people who are good at it – it is hard for me to figure out how a startup in a small local market, starting from scratch, could be expected to make enough money to break even in such a short period of time. But surely they must have a plan? Though without enough people (citizens) participating, it seems like a daunting task.

So far all I have to go on is speculations. So far, Dan Gillmor who sold his Bayosphere to Backfence in April 2006, hasn’t commented on the current situation in his Backfence blog.

At CyberJournalist, though, Mark Potts, the first co-founder who quit Backfence and who’s now come back to run it while the site recovers, has this to say:

“We’re very excited about what we’re going to be able to do and how the hyperlocal space is exploding,” he said. “We’re up and running and moving forward, and very excited about where we’re going, with an excellent team and very supportive investors and board.”

Update 2007-01-11 with Mark Potts comments in the first part of this post.

In a press release, Europeiska’s CEO Kenneth Sandén says (my translation):

– Resdagboken gives us unique insight into the habits of Swedish travellers. We know which countries the backpacker choose to go to, how long they’re there, and what mishaps they encounter on their trips.
- Backpackers’ needs are different from the ordinary travellers’.

eSnips will provide controls to the Microportal owners to monitor and control the content going in. Users will also be able to customize and edit the appearance and background of their portal.

eSnips has a number of widgets for use in blogs, and of course you get a personal eSnips page to display what you’ve uploaded.
The site also has a marketplace where you can sell art, crafts, fashion, music and gifts.

I don’t know how to make a web page. But there are many who do. You can see that not least looking at the many web 2.0 sites popping up. It could be financed by ads. I think that such a page would be both useful and successful.

The power of principled leaking to embarrass governments, corporations and institutions is amply demonstrated through recent history. Public scrutiny of otherwise unaccountable and secretive institutions pressures them to act ethically. What official will chance a secret, corrupt transaction when the public is likely to find out? What repressive plan will be carried out when it is revealed to the citizenry, not just of its own country, but the world? When the risks of embarrassment through openness and honesty increase, the tables are turned against conspiracy, corruption, exploitation and oppression.

But WikiLeaks isn’t restricted to leaks about oppressive regimes.

WikiLeaks will be the outlet for every government official, every bureaucrat, every corporate worker, who becomes privy to embarrassing information which the institution wants to hide but the public needs to know. What conscience cannot contain, and institutional secrecy unjustly conceals, WikiLeaks can broadcast to the world.

But how could it possibly be used as a journalistic tool? How does a journalist verify that the information is correct, that the documents come from where it’s said they are from? This could indeed become an efficient tool – for spreading misinformation and rumours. Though the documents are supposed to be scrutinized by the public, it is not necessarily so that the public knows much about the exact things being leaked – if they did, there would be little point leaking them.
Here’s what the site FAQ has to say on the issue.

WikiLeaks opens leaked documents up to a much more exacting scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency could provide: the scrutiny of a worldwide community of informed wiki editors.
[...]
If a document is leaked from the Chinese government, the entire Chinese dissident community can freely scrutinize and discuss it; if a document is leaked from Somalia, the entire Somali refugee community can analyze it and put it in context. And so on.

Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy has some objections against the project:

In the absence of accountable editorial oversight, publication can more easily become an act of aggression or an incitement to violence, not to mention an invasion of privacy or an offense against good taste.

“As we saw with the Saddam hanging video this week, gatekeeping is over”, responds Martin Stabe, and continues:

There is no way to require “accountable editorial oversight” as a barrier to entry to the public sphere anymore — a determined leaker will find a way to publicise their material online. But that doesn’t mean a responsible journalist has to cooperate with a project that carries a high risk of being used irresponsibly and seems to abdicate all responsibility for the actions of its users.

We live in a time when the English language affects most of our surroundings. News, web sites, computer games, email, course literature, company documents and so on are just a few examples of areas in which both English and Swedish are used, and often mixed freely. In such an environment the need arises for a tool to bridge to any language problems.
We think that Tyda.se can make a great difference in this field!
Tyda.se wants to become the obvious choice when you need help translating between English and Swedish.

My translation. I didn’t use Tyda for it, so pardon any mistakes.

Tyda is also developing a reward system, so that users get points for the stuff they contribute. These points can lead towards different kinds of rewards. There will be audio files helping with the pronunciation of words, and examples of their usage.
The new version of the site will be launched later this month.

(via Frihetens vingar)

everyone – added CNN Breaking News to twitter. ev – great API! — just do *add cnnbrk *and you’ll get the alerts as they are sent out 02:39 AM January 02, 2007 from im

In a comment at TinyScreenfuls.com, James Cox explains:

It was a mashup – been wanting breaking news on my phone for a while. CNN Breaking News comes as email, so I simply setup an email-to-twitter gateway using their really nice API.

All I have to do now is wait for the C&D from CNN :D

(via Martin Stabe)

“Placeblogger.com’s goal is to serve the community of placebloggers”, said Lisa Williams at a presentation at The Berkman Center at Harvard.
She wants to make it easier for placebloggers to find eachother, among other things by using geotagging. The site also provides OPML readinglists for each country (there are a few placeblogs listed outside the US, but they’re not many), state and city.
Each blog is pinned to a map, has a short description and a few lines of the most recent posts.
There’s a Yahoo Group and mailing list connected to the site.

It’s also a one stop shopping for people who are interested in citizen journalism in the United States. You can actually see, instead of just theorize.

Here’s more of what Lisa Williams had to say about Placeblogger in the video clip from Harvard:

Lots of people talk of citizen journalism and hyperlocal media. This is what I think a placeblog is. A placeblog is about the lived experience of a place. I think that’s a useful definition, because when we talk about these sites as citizen journalism, it’s very easy to go to even the best of these sites, take a look at it for 15 seconds, say “what a crappy newspaper” and hit the Back button.
And that’s because most of us are extremely fortunate. Our lived experience of the place we live in when we walk out the door is not news. And if it is, one of two terrible things have happened to you. 1) you have become a celebrity, which is awful, or 2) you live in warzone.
For most of these places where they live, they are talking about lived experience of the place. And, sure, there’s news in that, random acts of journalism. But they’re also talking about what it’s like to live in this particular place and talk to these particular people, eat somewhere and take the bus somewhere.
I think that the relationship between placeblogs and newspapers is that the newspaper publishes the slice of the lived experience of that place that is newsworthy.

I checked out the five blogs about Boulder, CO. One thing that would have been cool would be a combined rss feed for all of them, showing the different posts sorted by date rather than by blog, which would be the effect if I added them to a Boulder folder in my RSS reader.

Update:
A similar site (?) in the making seems to be K. Paul Mallasch’s Local journalism.net. Not much info there yet: “This is a project I’ve started to keep track of specific examples of local journalism (aka citizen journalism aka grassroots journalism) websites. Stay tuned for more.” Though the tagline seems to imply it’s more of a corporate initiative: “Your Guide to Citizen Journalism Startups”

Is it okay to publish images of real executions?
Is it okay that this clip now most likely is being spread between children’s cell phones?
Is it okay because it’s Saddam Hussein?
Would it have been wrong if it would have been an unknown person?
Would it have been wrong had it been an accident?
Should video sites take their responsibility and make this clip less accessible?
Where do you draw such a line – who decides what’s okay?

The questions could be asked of traditional media too. Still images of the dead Hussein have been shown, as well as video clips of the preparations for the hanging.
Beta Alfa writes that he has no answers to these questions. Neither do I. But they are important none the less.