I am not a Citizen Journalist
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 06/29/2008 - 09:53Lowell, MA – Saturday, the New England News Forum convened a gathering of professional journalists, journalist educators, bloggers, citizen journalists, and others interested in the future of journalism to discuss ‘Sharing the News’. The most important thing I learned from this gathering is that I am not a Citizen Journalist.
There were many ways in which the phrase or idea of Citizen Journalism was challenged. Some wanted to see it broadened. Why ‘Citizen’? What about people who are not citizens? Do not people visiting from other countries also have a say? Should we instead use the word ‘Resident’, instead? Yet others spoke about journalism as a civic duty, similar to being called to serve on a jury. From their perspective Citizen Journalism has everything to do with citizenship. Everyone is likely at one point or another to report about what they have seen in a journalistic manner, and people need to understand that and how best to do it.
The word journalism received even more challenges. Some people recognized that not everyone who writes something online, even if they are writing in a journalistic style, even if they are writing for an organization that provides news created by professional journalists, such as people that participate in CNN’s iReports project, consider themselves journalists. This is compounded by the issue that many journalism professionals seem to think that if you don’t have a journalism degree, aren’t a member of a professional journalism guild, and aren’t getting paid for what you do, then you aren’t a journalist.
Various other names were presented, such as ‘resident correspondent’, which seems to fit much more nicely, especially for those resident correspondents that are corresponding with a traditional news organization.
Doug McGill led a fascinating discussion about discussion about the ‘Journalism in a Day’ workshops that he has been leading. One of the ideas that he presented is that it is unethical to write “I went to a meeting” type reports, listing out what happened in chronological order and expecting the readers to make sense out of it. I’m not sure that I agree with that. There are times that what is needed is simply for someone to document what happened, without trying to make sense out of it or present it in an easy to read, coherent story.
Random End of the Week Stuff
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 06/28/2008 - 21:19It has been a long busy week, finished off with a drive to Lowell, MA for the New England News Forum’s conference on Sharing the News. There are a lot of things to write up about the conference, but I’m too tired to focus. Those wanting some details should check my messages on the content sharing sites and microblogs. I put a little bit up there while I was there.
I did put up one post from the day, which should count towards meeting my NaBloPoMo goal for the month, but I figured I would write something a little more substantial I also managed to drop EntreCards on 300 sites for my 17th consecutive day. I didn’t read some of those blogs as closely as I have on other days.
Last night, I spent some time exploring a curious virtual world/web mashup called RocketOn. I haven’t gotten a chance to explore it any more this evening, and that will also have to wait. However, if you’ve looked at it and want an invite, drop me an email.
All of this, perhaps, foreshadows the month of July. We are going camping. I doubt I’ll drop 300 cards a day as often in July as I have in June. I may even struggle simply to get a blog post up some days.
More later. . .
Wayne Sutton addressing Share the News at #NENF
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 06/28/2008 - 11:54
Mobile post sent by ahynes1 using Utterz. Replies.
Exploring the Social Networks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/27/2008 - 10:49Over the past few weeks I’ve been pretty busy with conferences and doing some computer programming, so my exploration of the social side of the Internet has been a bit lame. However, last night, I spent a little time exploring a few different developments in this area.
Alexa
This month, my Alexa ranking has been plummeting.
This didn’t seem right, so I checked my monthly uniques on Quantcast. Quantcast bases its information based on a pixel embedded on the webpage and appears much more accurate. Sure enough, according to Quantcast, my traffic has been growing nicely this month, as I thought it was.
This matches reports on my server logs as well as on Google Analytics. It appears as if Alexa is seriously broken yet again.
atniz suggests that it is because Alexa is somehow ignoring EntreCard traffic. On the other hand, What About Brazil is claiming their traffic, as measured by Alexa, as increased because of EntreCard and looking at their recent graph, it doesn’t look like EntreCard traffic is being somehow deducted from their counts.
Having done a lot of programming, and remembering the old adage, never attribute to malice what can better be attributed to stupidity, I doubt that Alexa is deliberately discounting traffic generated by a popular new advertising site online. If they are, they should probably remove traffic from DoubleClick and Google Adense as well. However, that would make their data completely worthless, and I doubt they want to do that.
EntreCard
On the other hand, they may be wanting to filter out EntreCard because the ads there do encourage people to click on the ads to receive EntreCard credits. EntreCard users that click on an ad receive a credit, as does the website that has the card clicked on. This has encouraged some people to create pages so that people can very quickly drop on a website and move on. It is called ‘quick-dropping’ and does nothing to increase readership of the website. I’ve been ambivalent to quick-dropping. I don’t do it. I want to read the sites I visit and I hope people read my site as well. Based on Google Analytics, it does seem like people spend a bit of time on my site, at least scanning what I have to say.
However, EntreCard is not ambivalent to quick-dropping. In a recent blog post there, they have announced that anyone who supports quick-dropping will be banned from EntreCard.
I think this is a good idea, but I hope they have a way of appealing if someone gets delisted incorrectly.
While we are on the topic of EntreCard, I thought I would check my internal logs to get a better sense of where the EntreCard traffic is coming from. 58% of my traffic is coming from people clicking on my card in their inbox. 25% is coming from ads. Another 6% is coming from the categories. Less than 1% comes from my details page. I don’t know where the remaining 10% comes from.
MyBlogLog
From EntreCard, I visited RockFuse which has an entry about MyBlogLog new ‘Connector’. What the connector does is it displays all of your contacts in MyBlogLog with a table showing which other services the contacts are using and if you are currently connected to them on that service. The services that they list are Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Pownce, Last.fm and digg. They have a nice link to bring up your friends pages in each of these systems so you can easily add them. So, if you are a contact of mine in MyBlogLog and you recently got several requests from me to be a friend on other systems, that is probably why.
Unfortunately, the connector page doesn’t properly show if you are connected to a person in the other systems. Sometimes it works, often it doesn’t. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it work with Twitter. However, since the connector is in beta and Twitter has enough problems as it is, it isn’t too surprising.
Linux Inside
As I followed the links and saw some of what my friends were doing, I found to other interesting sites. The first is Linux Inside. They have a tool for tracking traffic on Flickr pages. I set it up last night. As of this morning, there isn’t any data, but I expect it will produce an interesting graph in the days to come.
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retaggr
Retaggr is yet another site to create a badge providing information about you and links to all the different social networking sites you are part of. It is an impressive list of sites they support. Here is my tag right now:
Tumblr
Another person was making good use of Tumblr, so I’ve started tweaking my Tumblr page. It should be getting information from various sources, have the retaggr badge and be themed to look a little bit like this blog.
So, I’ve tweaked various sites, added friends, now I need to head off to some offline tasks, and then return to writing some computer programs.
Recent ma.noglia bookmarks
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 06/27/2008 - 02:58Here are pages I've recently bookmarked with ma.gnolia:
Dabbleboard
Shared Whiteboard. Shape recognition. Saves the files. Most importantly, many people can write on the same whiteboard at the same time.
