Just got back from giv­ing a talk about Our­me­dia at the Apple store in San Fran­cisco, fol­lowed by a house­warm­ing party thrown by Renee Blod­gett. Barb Dyb­wad of Weblogs Inc.‘s Social Soft­ware Weblog has a good run­down of tonight’s appear­ance at the Apple store. (Sorry I didn’t get to meet you, Barb!)

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Today’s San Jose Merc car­ried a story head­lined, Promise of online film­mak­ing starts to pay off.

The arti­cle notes that as of June, 58.6 per­cent of U.S. homes had high-speed Inter­net access, and that is lead­ing to more peo­ple tun­ing in to movies over the Internet.

A side­bar lists web­sites for watch­ing video (they omit­ted Our­me­dia, even though — with 10,000 videos in four months — we dwarf most of the sites listed here; the line between film and video becomes hope­lessly blurred in the dig­i­tal age):

Con­tinue reading »

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This is the sec­ond AP story I’ve been quoted in dur­ing the past week. (Photo above, Getty Images.)

Asso­ci­ated Press:

Mr. Gore’s name may help attract the curi­ous, at least initially.

“Peo­ple may not have heard of Cur­rent TV, but they will have heard that Al Gore has a tele­vi­sion sta­tion,” said J.D. Lasica, co-founder of Ourmedia.org and an expert on dig­i­tal media.

Mr. Gore’s team bought the for­mer News­world Inter­na­tional chan­nel to ensure it has at least some ini­tial dis­tri­b­u­tion. About 20 mil­lion homes (out of about 110 mil­lion nation­ally) will get Cur­rent TV right away. Suc­cess depends on more than dou­bling that within a cou­ple of years, said ana­lyst Mark Macken­zie of San­ford Bernstein.

To do that, Cur­rent must suc­cess­fully strad­dle the rapidly chang­ing worlds of tele­vi­sion and the Web.

“Cur­rent TV is impor­tant not for what it is today as for what it her­alds tomor­row,” Mr. Lasica said. “What is impor­tant about Cur­rent TV is that it’s open­ing up the world a crack to Inter­net tele­vi­sion becom­ing mainstream.” …

Mr. Lasica said lying on a couch still beats sit­ting at a desktop.

“Most peo­ple still want to watch tele­vi­sion in the liv­ing room or the fam­ily room,” he said, “and that’s where Cur­rent TV has an advan­tage over any of the Inter­net startups.”

I ran into Cur­rent TV’s Anas­ta­sia Good­stein at BlogHer yes­ter­day, and wish them the best of luck. It’s quite an under­tak­ing. One of these days I may even shoot some video for them.

Tech­no­rati tags: Cur­rent, Cur­rent TV

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Just fin­ished upload­ing 32 pho­tos to Flickr, taken at the BlogHer con­fer­ence in Santa Clara, Calif., July 29–30, 2005. This was by far the nicest, most engag­ing group of blog­gers I’ve ever met. I’m hon­ored to be des­ig­nated the cit­i­zen jour­nal­ist who gets to chron­i­cle the images of the con­fer­ence through pho­tos and videos. More (text) on Sun­day after­noon, with videos to fol­low in the com­ing week.

Tech­no­rati tags: BlogHer, BlogHer­Con

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If you’re on this planet, you can join Saturday’s global cha­t­room dur­ing the BlogHer con­fer­ence in Santa Clara, Calif. Here’s how.

Mean­time, I’m head­ing to the BlogHer din­ner tonight, where 170 peo­ple say they’ll show up.

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Now show­ing on Our­me­dia: Echo Cham­ber Project Vlog Episode 1. This is the first video blog entry about an open source, inves­tiga­tive doc­u­men­tary about how the tele­vi­sion news became an uncrit­i­cal echo cham­ber to the count­down toward war in Iraq — and pro­posed tools for col­lab­o­ra­tive jour­nal­ism that can pro­vide some solu­tions. Fea­tur­ing: Jay Rosen, Dan Gill­mor, Doc Searls, Jonathan Lan­day, Pamela Hess, Bill Plante, Tom Rosen­stiel, Hal­ley Suitt, Mar­i­lyn Schlitz and Kent Bye, among others.

As film­maker Bye says, “Every­body knows the media’s screwed up. I wanted to do some­thing about it.” He’s releas­ing this open source video under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, allow­ing oth­ers to remix it. Bravo.

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Blog­ger and doc­u­men­tary film­maker Rory O’Connor at MediaChannel.com: Jour­nal­ism: It’s Not Just for Jour­nal­ists Any­more. Excerpt:

In Amer­ica a grow­ing num­ber of citizen-journalists are refugees from the main­stream who have aban­doned the media sys­tem that once nur­tured them. Jour­nal­ists like Dan Gill­mor, until recently a renowned tech­nol­ogy writer for the San Jose Mercury-News, and Rebecca McK­in­non of CNN have joined the ranks of those seek­ing a bet­ter way of report­ing through less hier­ar­chi­cal “dis­trib­uted infor­ma­tion sys­tems.” Gill­mor, whose recent book “We The Media” detailed the phe­nom­e­non, quit his news­pa­per col­umn to form Grass­roots Media Inc.

Oth­ers such as Online Jour­nal­ism Review colum­nist J.D. Lasica are try­ing to take things fur­ther. Lasica, whose book “Dark­net: Hollywood’s War Against the Dig­i­tal Gen­er­a­tion” focuses on the chal­lenges faced by citizen’s media, is one of the cre­ators of Ourmedia.org, which bills itself as “the Global Home for Grass­roots Media.” Our­me­dia is a “global com­mu­nity and learn­ing cen­ter” ded­i­cated to the idea that com­pelling grass­roots endeav­ors deserve a wider audi­ence. To facil­i­tate that, it promises to host your media for­ever — every­thing from “vlogs” (video blogs) to pod­casts to doc­u­men­tary jour­nal­ism to home­made polit­i­cal ads — all for free.

What does it all mean? Sim­ply this: Jour­nal­ism is again becom­ing a demo­c­ra­tic medium. “No one owns jour­nal­ism,” blogger/pundit Jeff Jarvis exults on Buzzma­chine. “It is not an offi­cial act, a cer­ti­fied act, an expert act, a pro­pri­etary act. Any­one can do jour­nal­ism. Every­one does. Some do it bet­ter than oth­ers, of course. But every­one does it.” And Jacob Weis­berg points out on Slate.com, “If you don’t like this rau­cous clamor ema­nat­ing from cyber­space, you’re not really com­fort­able with democracy.”

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Bob Cau­thorn has a provoca­tive first post at the new Corante blog Rebuild­ing Media: Memo to main­stream media: You don’t get to blog. Excerpt:

You have a pub­lish­ing appa­ra­tus. So you don’t get to blog. You have a broad­cast­ing appa­ra­tus. So you don’t get to blog.

In case you missed this the point while you were read­ing up on youth slang, I’ll repeat it for empha­sis. You. Do. Not. Get. To. Blog.

Not that you won’t try. Cur­rently, there’s a rush among tra­di­tional media out­lets to get into that wicked bitchin’, snaps induc­ing “blog­ging thing.” Almost all of these efforts are ago­niz­ingly misguided.

Buzz­word com­pli­ance is a big deal in tra­di­tional media. Unfor­tu­nately, in Amer­ica, media lead­er­ship is mar­bled with mediocre minds. And, like lone­li­ness, medi­oc­rity craves company.

Pub­lish­ers, edi­tors and broad­cast­ers feel pre­cisely naked if they are not par­tic­i­pat­ing in the trend of the moment. They yap about inno­va­tion and then sim­ply sham­ble along, fol­low­ing the lead of others. …

The DNA of blog­ging is a com­pli­cated mat­ter that touches on being out­side voices and tak­ing per­sonal con­trol of the media. But at min­i­mum the DNA of blog­ging has to do with dis­trib­ut­ing the con­ver­sa­tion. Con­trary to that, the DNA of main­stream media – to date – is all about dom­i­nat­ing the conversation. …

I agree with Bob (whom I’ve met a few times and mod­er­ated a jour­nal­ism ethics panel he was on) that the mass media are rid­dled with mediocre lead­er­ship and like to fol­low fads while shun­ning inno­va­tion. I agree that aggre­gat­ing off-site con­tent, as The Bay Area Is Talk­ing, is one of the most valu­able ser­vices a news site can per­form. I agree that mass media very often do blogs poorly, believ­ing them to be sim­ply a new chan­nel or for­mat for deliv­er­ing content.

As Bob cor­rectly notes, “dis­trib­ut­ing the con­ver­sa­tion is one of the most impor­tant forces alive in media today” (empha­sis added).

In fact, I agree with almost every­thing in his piece, except his cen­tral the­sis. As Kevin Ander­son of the BCC says in a com­ment below Bob’s post, “I think we can take part in this ‘dis­trib­uted con­ver­sa­tion’. We just need to do it with a lit­tle more humil­ity and under­stand that we’re participants.”

Bob’s right: don’t blog for the sake of blog­ging. Instead, do it right, as a way to engage read­ers and allow users to become part of the conversation.

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Neil McIn­tosh, an edi­tor at the UK’s Guardian, writes: Let’s for­get about cit­i­zen journalism.

McIn­tosh cites approv­ingly this com­ment on another blog: “Weblogs and flickr can com­ple­ment tra­di­tional jour­nal­ism, but they can’t sup­plant it.”

Well, that’s absolutely true. And it’s what Dan Gill­mor and other pro­po­nents of the idea have been say­ing for years and years. Which doesn’t in the least under­cut the argu­ment that cit­i­zens have begun pick­ing up today’s gad­gets to serve as eye­wit­nesses to the news and thus to per­form real jour­nal­ism.

Let’s not set up a straw man — cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists over­throw­ing the pro­fes­sion­als — only to knock him down, although I must admit that the fret­ting of the old guard about the emerg­ing new order is enter­tain­ing to watch.

After toss­ing darts at Ohmynews and mak­ing the mis­take of call­ing the emerg­ing wave of per­sonal pub­lish­ing “me media” (it’s about we, not me), McIn­tosh starts mak­ing sense. He talks about cit­i­zen sto­ry­telling as a valu­able com­mu­ni­ca­tion form, one that all of us can par­tic­i­pate in.

Thanks. Agreed. But we’ll dab­ble in jour­nal­ism, too, if you don’t mind.

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Xeni Jardin, Mike God­win, Susan Craw­ford, Ernie Miller and I are the judges in the Elec­tronic Fron­tier Foundation’s Blog-a-thon. In the con­test, entrants are chal­lenged to post to their blogs some­thing about their “click moment” — “the very first step you to took to stand up for your dig­i­tal rights — whether it was blog­ging about an issue you care about, par­tic­i­pat­ing in a demon­stra­tion, writ­ing your rep­re­sen­ta­tives, or get­ting involved with EFF.”

For me, it was a com­bi­na­tion of such click moments that led me to write Dark­net, a book about dig­i­tal rights and the future of media (though I’m not entered in the contest).

Blog-a-thon is held in con­junc­tion with the online civil lib­er­ties organization’s 15th anniver­sary. The con­test ends Wednes­day, so get those entries in! The win­ners get an EFF blog­gers’ rights T-shirt, spe­cial EFF-branded blog­ger pajama pants, a pound of cof­fee, a pair of fuzzy slip­pers, and tons of blo­gos­phere love. What more can you ask?

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