A busy, busy week. Tonight I’m heading to the chichi Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco for the Aspen Institute‘s roundtable on Mobile Media and Civic Engagement. Leaders from the technology and Internet industries, advocacy groups and academia will be exploring examples of socially productive uses of mobile technologies and their potential for strengthening future communities. The event is being held in association with the Centre for Renaissance Journalism at San Francisco State University. Will be participating Tuesday and part of Wednesday.

Won’t be able to attend the Web Video Summit taking place in New York this week. (Spoke at the last one.)

Also won’t be able to attend Le Web 3 in Paris, where a lot of my friends are heading.

For those in the Bay Area, you might want to swing by this event tomorrow night: Media Web Meetup: Portable Playlists and other POSH-ibilities.

Lifehacker: Track Down Anyone Online, Anywhere. A guide to locating people through search tools. In short:

• ZabaSearch – to find names, phone numbers, addresses.
• Pipl – to bring up information
  that Google might miss. Pipl indexes pages that the Googlebots have
  decided are not worth visiting.
• Wink – to search several social networking websites at once. 
• Zoominfo – will give you the employment results on the person you’re stalker-searching

If your blog isn’t getting enough uptake with the major search engines, here are Top 5 SEO (search engine optimization) Tips for Bloggers, a bit rewritten and courtesy of Lockergnome:

1. Keyword-focused content – Keep your content laser-focused on
   your keywords. While you can write about anything, you need to make
   sure that your article stays on topic. Any straying from the main topic
   at hand could confuse the search engines – and your readers.
2. Proper keyword use – Always remember to put the keywords of
   your article in three places: the title of the post, the beginning of
   the post, and several in the content of the post.
3. Don’t overdo keywords – While using keywords throughout the
   article is a good idea, if you use the keywords too often, the
   search engines will think you’re a spammer. Keep
   your keywords down to about 3 percent of the article. 
4. Use tags! – Tagging is a super-important part of a
   blog. They give internal cross-reference links, as well as links from
   other non-Google search engines like Tagjag and Technorati. Ultimately
   the right tags are just as important as the right keywords.
5. Link back – Linking back to earlier articles that reference a similar topic helps – a lot.

I don’t agree with the premise at all — citizens’ media has never been more robust or reliable — but here is a new meme beginning to make the rounds.

Shaping the Future of the Newspaper blog: Citizen journalism on its way out?

Citizen journalism is being hindered and may even be dying at the hands
of citizens themselves, a growing number of media experts believe.

Steve Boriss, associate director of the Center for the Application of
Information Technology at Washington University in St. Louis, concluded, Citizen Journalism is dead. Expert Journalism is the future. A somewhat amazing conclusion, given that his treatise focuses almost exclusively on newspaper-sanctioned citizen journalism — a very small subset of citizen journalism.

This meme presents a false choice, similar to the notion of economic vitality vs. environmentalism. As Doc Searls likes to say, it’s "or" thinking instead of "and" thinking.

In his latest column in E&P, An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media, Steve Outing writes about the lessons learned in the closing of citizen media site the Enthusiast Group. "Quality matters," he points out. (I made a similar observation in a recent entry about Web video.)

Outing’s conclusions are true enough, but he’s talking about citizen media as a business model rather than citizen media as a cultural phenomenon and as a tool to empower citizens and pursue social justice. Newspapers, alas, are rarely in that business anymore, and other sites are picking up the slack.