Open source radio — that is, pod­cast­ing — is now open for busi­ness.

Andrew Nachi­son at the Edi­tors Blog­Conf in Seoul:

In a ses­sion I chaired yes­ter­day at the World Editor’s Forum in Seoul, Google News cre­ator Krishna Bharat revealed, well, vir­tu­ally noth­ing about the sources Google spi­ders and “clus­ters” to cre­ate Google News, other than that it’s “more than” 4,500 — a num­ber the com­pany had cited in the past.

What val­ues, biases and edi­to­r­ial judg­ments are reflected in the inclu­sion of those 4,500+ sites, and exclu­sion of oth­ers? We don’t know because Google won’t name the sources.

Call­ing all hack­ers and web ana­lyt­ics geniuses: couldn’t you spi­der Google News and fig­ure out the iden­tity of their sources over a period of time — and pub­lish live/continuously updated data about Google’s sources?

Last fall JD Lasica thought he sniffed bias in the Google news results, and Erik Ulken recently described in the Online Jour­nal­ism Review a study he con­ducted, which con­cluded, “arti­cles returned in Google News searches are sig­nif­i­cantly more likely to have an ide­o­log­i­cal bias than those returned in searches on Yahoo News.”

Dan Gill­mor, who joined our panel dis­cus­sion (along with Joi Ito, who wrote about the ses­sion) said at the con­fer­ence (and more here) that Google should be more trans­par­ent about its sources and the algo­rithm used to cre­ate its results, so that users can judge for them­selves whether there’s bias in the process. …

Absolutely. Come on, Google. What’s the harm in a lit­tle transparency?

Ter­rific story by Matt Mar­shall in the San Jose Merc about a new online ser­vice that lets you map out where you’d like to live with a lot less fuss: Cross craigslist with Google and get … Hous­ingmaps.

Paul Rademacher, … a for­mer Microsoft employee, has taken the homes listed on craigslist and inserted them within the detailed maps offered at Google.com.

Buy­ers and renters can now search for an area where they want to live — say, down­town Moun­tain View — and then scour the map for the homes in that area. Each home is rep­re­sented by a lit­tle pin. Click on the pin, and you’ll see the exact address and infor­ma­tion on the house. If there are pho­tos, you get an instant vir­tual tour. There’s also a Web link to the home’s full details on craigslist.

One use­ful result is that users can avoid time trawl­ing through craigslist’s text list­ings and won­der­ing if the house or apart­ment they’re look­ing at is actu­ally new, or the same one they saw two weeks ago. It’s clear, just by look­ing at the map.

Fan­tas­tic. It works any­where where Craigslist list­ings are found. This was com­ing; thanks to Rademacher for mak­ing it hap­pen today.

And note some­thing else: Nei­ther Craigslist nor Google is com­plain­ing about their intel­lec­tual prop­erty being violated.

I don’t usu­ally blog about pet peeves, but let this go out as a warn­ing to any­one think­ing of sub­scrib­ing to DirecTV’s MLB Extra Innings (the major league base­ball sea­son pass) next year.

When DirecTV signed me up last win­ter (they do that … I was a MLB sub­scriber two years ago, not last year, yet there was the bill on my state­ment), I called and asked how many of my team’s games would be broad­cast. (I’m a Mets fan; can’t help it.) They said they didn’t have that information.

With the sea­son now one-third over, my pay­ments to DirecTV are com­plete, or nearly so. Mean­ing, if I can­cel now, I get none of my money back and miss the rest of the season.

Here’s the prob­lem: I haven’t been able to see a Mets game in some time. It’s not because I’m in a black­out zone; I’m not (north­ern Cal­i­for­nia). But DirecTV broad­casts are pre­empted when other cable com­pa­nies buy the rights to those games. All four Mets-Marlins games? Not avail­able. All four Mets-Diamondback games? Not avail­able. Unless you pay extra to sub­scribe to MSG (Madi­son Square Gar­den) cable or FSAZ (Ari­zona cable).

Johan­nes­burg, South Africa: Blog­gers take on the world of media

South Africans – the 7% who use the Inter­net – are slowly wak­ing up to the blog phe­nom­e­non. A num­ber of local sites offer easy blog­ging, and a cou­ple of thou­sand have been set up, but I can find only one or two worth reading.

That’s the same story I heard from a South African news­pa­per edi­tor I met at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas, Austin.

One of the best-kept secrets in the his­tory of inves­tiga­tive report­ing is out of the bag. Wash­ing­ton Post:

The Wash­ing­ton Post today con­firmed that W. Mark Felt, a for­mer number-two offi­cial at the FBI, was “Deep Throat,” the secre­tive source who pro­vided infor­ma­tion that helped unravel the Water­gate scan­dal in the early 1970s and con­tributed to the res­ig­na­tion of pres­i­dent Richard M. Nixon.

The con­fir­ma­tion came from Bob Wood­ward and Carl Bern­stein, the two Wash­ing­ton Post reporters who broke the Water­gate story, and their for­mer top edi­tor, Ben­jamin C. Bradlee. The three spoke after Felt’s fam­ily and Van­ity Fair mag­a­zine iden­ti­fied the 91-year-old Felt, now a retiree in Cal­i­for­nia, as the long-anonymous source who pro­vided cru­cial guid­ance for some of the newspaper’s ground­break­ing Water­gate stories.

The Van­ity Fair story said Felt had admit­ted his “his­toric, anony­mous role” fol­low­ing years of denial. …

Spe­cial Wash­ing­ton Post pack­age: Deep Throat revealed

Water­gate time­line

Mean­time, looks like Bill Gaines’ inves­tiga­tive report­ing class at the Uni­ver­sity of Illi­nois struck out.

New at Our­me­dia: A one-page PDF of videoblog­ging resources, handed out by Jay Ded­man and Ryanne Hod­son at BlogNashville.

New today on the Dark­net site:

Story: The Prince of Dark­net — The most com­pre­hen­sive look inside the movie underground.

Inter­view: A major pirate in the movie under­ground — The first pub­lished inter­view with the head of six major movie release groups. A Web exclusive.

Inter­view: Andy Wolfe, for­mer CTO, ReplayTV — He reveals what the Hol­ly­wood stu­dios and tele­vi­sion net­works were really after in their law­suit against Sonicblue’s ReplayTV: con­trol of your television.

Bonus: Top 10 assaults on dig­i­tal liberties

Before I fin­ished read­ing the first para­graph of this lat­est entry on the Amer­i­can Press Insti­tute Media Center’s morph blog, I knew who’d penned it: Nashville blog­ger Terry Heaton, who’s try­ing to drag TV sta­tions into the 21st century.

Terry writes:

J.D. Lasica, author of Dark­net: Hollywood’s War Against the Dig­i­tal Gen­er­a­tion, calls the cit­i­zens media move­ment the “per­sonal media rev­o­lu­tion.” I’ve adopted the term, because I think it’s more fit­ting as regards what’s hap­pen­ing in our cul­ture today. Besides, “cit­i­zens media” sounds like it was coined by the Bolsheviks.

I also like it because putting the per­sonal against the pro­fes­sional helps shine a light on one of the great mys­ter­ies of our time — why pro­fes­sional media peo­ple are so com­pletely ignor­ing the tech­nolo­gies and con­cepts that are dri­ving the revolution. …

Con­sider how this has evolved in the tele­vi­sion news­gath­er­ing process. Mod­eled after the only thing avail­able, Hollywood’s sin­gle cam­era film style, early TV crews included a spe­cial­ist reporter, a spe­cial­ist field pro­ducer, a spe­cial­ist cam­era oper­a­tor, a spe­cial­ist sound oper­a­tor, and any other spe­cial­ist that was required. While tech­nol­ogy is now able to take the place of nearly every spe­cial­ist, the indus­try still hasn’t fully accepted the dis­rup­tive innovations. …

In the past year, we’ve wit­nessed numer­ous jour­nal­is­tic scoops com­pli­ments of a world that pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists abhor — the blo­gos­phere. The more famous cases involved the explod­ing of cer­tain vis­i­ble news pedestals, such as the one for­merly assigned to Dan Rather, but through­out the land, thou­sands of local issues and sto­ries are being cov­ered by com­mu­ni­ties spring­ing up within the world of the blog. This is due to Lasica’s “per­sonal media rev­o­lu­tion,” and pro­fes­sional news orga­ni­za­tions need to do more than sim­ply pay atten­tion. We need to embrace and mas­ter the tech­nolo­gies they’re using. …

I’ll be get­ting together to com­pare notes with Terry when he heads to the Bay Area in early June. Excit­ing times ahead in the realm of per­sonal broad­cast­ing, now that the bar­ri­ers to entry have all but disappeared.

Lively, inter­est­ing reports out of the 12th World Edi­tors Forum’s Edi­tors’ Blog­Conf held in Seoul, South Korea. Dan Gill­mor, Joi Ito and Andrew Nachi­son are among those who spoke today. Susan Mer­nit is there, too.

Dan posted the text of his talk at his Bayos­phere blog: What Pro­fes­sional and Cit­i­zen Jour­nal­ists Can Learn From Each Other. Both Dan and I have been dis­cussing this sub­ject for years, sep­a­rately and appear­ing on pan­els together. For those inter­ested in dig­ging deeper into the sub­ject, I wrote a series about par­tic­i­pa­tory jour­nal­ism here, and my arti­cle Blogs and jour­nal­ism need each other appeared in the fall 2003 issue of Nie­man Reports.

Dan also cov­ered many of these themes in his talk at the Inter­na­tional Sym­po­sium on Online Jour­nal­ism in Austin, Texas, in April, and I video­taped his talk and pub­lished the half-hour videos to Our­me­dia here and here.

Marc Can­ter, who just jet­ted off to Lon­don for the week, and I just agreed that I’ll be tak­ing on the title of Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of Ourmedia.org — I’ve been per­form­ing those duties any­way as Marc heads up the back-end tech­nol­ogy end of the non­profit grass­roots media project. So I hope to be wing­ing my way to some of these inter­na­tional con­fabs in the months or years ahead.