blogging

After struggling with the idea of the value of blogging for a freelance writer --of which I've only written one prior to this (and the jury is still out on the topic) -- the new technology tool that plagues me this week is Social Networks.

Now while the idea of these networking beasts such as Classmates.com, MySpace.com, FaceBook.com, and LinkedIn.com are certainly not new to the World Wide Web scene, it's the growing number of users that surprises me. And also how they are utilizing and engaging these services that is more telling about the social implications of social networks...the good, the bad, and the unaccepted.

In providing a quick glimpse for purposes of explanation, I will refer to LinkedIn as an example. Unlike its competitors, its main purpose attracts those users whom are hoping to market themselves or services, and to (re)connect to others professionally (whom they would not otherwise be in contact with)...you recall the six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon.

Therefore, social networks in and of themselves are useful.

However, and it's a big "however" -- what are the hidden downfalls that are not evident at first glance? the ones that have social psychological implications that we (viewers) will use to judge others on the strength of their individual network?

Ever thought about it?

For many it will be like High School all over again, except with a class of 12 million.

- Will the number of connections on an individual's personal page be an indication of their popularity?

- Will the quality of those connections be a determining factor of their power (i.e., CEOs and entrepreneurs vs. stay-at-home moms and plumbers)?

- Will the strength of their past and present employers be a direct reflection of their degree of professionalism and acumen?

As extreme of a connection phenomena it may appear, I found out that I'm only four degrees from Oprah, three degrees from Hollywood power-house couple Bradgelina, and two degrees from Fed Chairman Bernacke.

Regardless of these scant connections...all of whom I'd likely never meet, nor do any of them have a LinkedIn page (I looked), but the six degrees theory still holds true. My point is that it's possible to make connections, and if it were also possible for me to add these particular "connections" would I be valued or judged accordingly? Would I be more popular amongst my peers and colleagues?

Now, let's take it one step further and put my theory in action in terms of being "valued" as a connection.

When LinkedIn users send out an invitation for others to join their network, they will quickly discover how others view them, or "value" them as a connection depending on their acceptance or decline of their invite.

And what about those who have a LinkedIn profile, but don't send an invite to everyone in their sphere of influence.

Does that mean that don't see the value of adding certain people? Is this an indication that the person is not of value to them? Does it speak to their popularity? power? professionalism?

Perhaps no one cares either way nor gives it as much thought as I do, but it's my job as a communications specialist and writer to take special notice on how people relate and interact, particularly on the Internet.

And despite my lack of time to fully analyze a person's individual network of connections, I have found myself comparing one person (with 15 connections) to another (with 500 connections) -- not judging, but evaluating. And it gives me pause wondering how others may be viewing the current state of my LinkedIn network.

- Will future potential connections accept me in their LinkedIn network only upon analyzing my pool of contacts?

- Will future employers investigate my social circle to determine who my friends and business acquaintances are before hiring me...you know, relying on the old adage: "if you want to know the value of a woman show me her friends."

With the immediacy of information at our fingertips, and as much scrutiny as we live with in today's world, Social Networks should be used with caution and care.

Perhaps there should be a warning disclosure that reads: "Connections in the network are not as large or as impressive as they appear."

On Friday, The New Republic columnist Carolyn O'Hara's taken a stab (shot, attempt to garrotte) at Assignment Zero in Net Zero:

His new online project, Assignment Zero, is designed to grant anyone with the inclination and the time the power to report, research, and write major news stories alongside volunteer professionals. No longer will citizens be oppressed and controlled by Big Media, goes the theory, forcing them to drink the Kool-Aid that prevents them from seeing how the news landscape has been redrawn forever. "The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power," he wrote last July. It's war, in other words--and Rosen and his fellow champions of citizen journalism have declared preemptive victory.

Methinks O'Hara's stretching it a bit into hyperbole-land here. I don't think anyone here is declairing "war" on professional journalism...we're just trying stuff to see how it works...I don't think anyone here's drinking any Kool-Aid. Frankly, lots of people are concerned that things are done with a certain standard and that many of the principles of journalism get upheld....

But to back up a bit, O'Hara opens the article with Josh Marshall's shout-out to TPM Muckraker readers to help weed thru the 3,000 pages of Justice Dept emails on the fired U.S. attorneys. TPM Muckraker's a bit different than AZ--it's got a different modus opporandi (sp?), a different community, a different reason to get together to do something like sort thru all those docs. Sure, it's a kind of loose "citizen journalism"--the kind a newsroom might send the college journo kids on while they're doing their summer internships....

O'Hara also indicts AZ as "Wikifying investigative journalism." That's not quite the right analogy. Rather, I'd say that things here are more along the lines of what Larry Sanger wants to do at Citizendium: there will be citizen contributions, but there will be professional journalists overseeing the various topics (they're our Editors) and some of the writing will be done by journalists as well (I think the writers are a mixed bag--gotta check that out further.)

And I don't think O'Hara's taken the time to come in and see some of the discussions we've had regarding how to cite information taken from blog posts, how we might deal with the troll issue (perhaps differently from how TMP does it) and how far an investigative piece that involves citizen contributions should be taken...(and if conversation is "wikization" then excuse me for being a serious wiki-ist.....just can't shut me up sometimes)

Yet the fact that TNR takes comments gives some value to registering and reading the full article. The discussion that evolves in the comments is great--and sounds just like something one might hear a bunch of folks discuss at some tony bar somwhere uptown. Sure, a couple of folks sling barbs at one another, but the tart-and-tangy flavor of the conversation is what makes it a great read. Nobody's solving the issues of the world here, but that's not the point. It's just a conversation--and a conversation that the people posting may not have had anywhere else.

Two blogs also picked up on the O'Hara column and had their own takes: refWrite refBloggers Insert comments :There is a roiling debate going on at the moment on the concept of "citizen journalism," which stretches blogging beyond its info-legitmate and valuable sphere of societal functionality to its veritable antization

Indeed refWrite makes an important point-- yet perhaps the "roiling debates", and the various experiments that spring from them are, at this point in time, important antecedents to positive change (check out what happened at the New England News Fourm this past weekend, as well as the report from JLab exec. director Jan Schaffer Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News?. AZ is part of a larger landscape of discussions on the fate of journalism that are beginning to precipitate action that heretofore was difficult if not impossible.)

The Khronikles of Kakkania slings back what O'Hara's dished out: Does your profession help me by reporting on who is winning the Irish Sweepstakes that is campaign funding, all without any awareness that it is simultaneously announcing that our elections are bought? Does your profession help my community by endlessly repeating, as it does, the little turds of thought we get from Kaiser W et al about "democracy" and "evil" and "freedom" et cetera? Or by covering stories of environmental damage with concluding "skeptical" quotes from those actually doing the damage and calling the resultant killed-space "balanced"?

Because if that's what journalism is — and most of it does seem to me to consist of just this sort of drivel, seasoned occasionally with the spice of contempt for ordinary people and everyday life that so enriches your self-satisfied little navel-gazing critique of Assignment Zero — if that is what professional journalism is in Kakkania today, then it's not good for the neighborhood, it's not good for the neighbors, and, baby, it's not good for you.

Yowch! but read the rest of the blog entry--which pulls apart other portions of O'Hara's argument, and also gets a comment from Jay...

Now that I've spent some time here at AZ (far more than O'Hara's spent with the site, I'm sure) I have a better idea of what's going on here--and quite frankly Jay's done a great deal to put together a model that *isn't* the "wikization" of journalism. Rather, there is an attempt here to give voice to citizens and to hear them (you can give voice and tune out, as what often happens to commenters on msm publications) while maintaining a level of journalitic standard by having editors who are active in journalism. The project has an edge--but also a conservative side. It's not a free-for-all in the manner that O'Hara paints it.

And we can't really anticipate the impact it's going to have. It's too soon to tell...

For that matter, no one knows what any of the myriad of experiments going on now (including all those great cit j sites ref'd in Schaffer's report) will have in the long run.

All we have now are these great experiments. Quit kvetching and kibbitzing from the sidelines and get involved.

Things have changed very much since I first started interacting online--lots faster, more places to go, people to meet. At times, Too Much Information. But sometimes when I compare notes about some of the stuff I did years ago online, that had no name, with some of the stuff going on now, like "crowdsourcing," I begin to wonder if any of this is really all that new....or if it's just been buzzworded....

So, when Lauren and I sat down this afternoon to talk about a few things, and started to talk about the ideas behind "crowdsourcing," I told her about when I was in college (not too long ago in human years, in Internet years, that's another story--'98-'01) and how I got all involved with the New York Times Film Forum....

and how a whole bunch of those folks really helped me with my honors thesis on Jesus films of the 20th century.

We'd sit for hours on that board, late at night, going back and forth, discussing various cheezeball epic films from the 1950's and '60--all the merits and all the problems with them. We covered art perspectives, story problems, general filmmaking conventions that had gone totally out the window in the 70's and '80's....and what was up with Jeff Hunter being totally hairless in 1961's King of Kings? And wasn't The Last Temptation of Christ the best of them all?

I was able to test out some my ideas, discuss the stuff I'd read, get book recommendations, and get great feedback from a wonderful variety of people--some who were filmmakers and scriptwriters, others who were such longtime movie enthusiasts that to call them anything but experts would have been disrespectful. I was in Massachusetts--they were in Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Toronto, Minneapolis. Eventually we exchanged email and found out each other's real names. Some remained anonymous, but through their constant participation and never flaming or behaving in other trollish ways, were respected members of our community.

While Lauren and I talked about it, we realized that all of this was a kind of crowdsourcing--back in the days of dial-up and Windows '95.

Whenever I reflect on experiences like this, I begin to wonder, too, if what some of what we're doing online is simply a translation of processes we've done all along, in different places, across different formats, with different tools and constricted by geographic boundaries or confined in particular professions according to career choice. Now, our communities are not restricted by physical boundaries--and our professions not restricted by where we have our office. We have high-speed instruments of communication, which help us socialize in communities of affinity and "telecommute." We get input from our experts-friends whereever they happen to be, and can feed that back to our workmates whereever they happen to be.

New words like "crowdsourcing" then perhaps just buzz the process we figured out, years ago, all by ourselves.

just a thought...

One of the many things I picked up in my tenures as blog editor at Corante's Media Hub and for the We Media Miami conference blog, is that sometimes you have to go out and listen to what the greater blogosphere is saying about your project....

And as a blogger, I'm used to doing copious vanity searches. That's how I found out I was linked on Techmeme even before I had any hits from the site...

So today, I thought I'd go down to Technorati and do a search on "Assignment Zero" just to listen who's saying what about AZ....

Contributor on the Crowdsourcing Creative Commons project, David Pick, wrote on one of his blogs about his work so far. David's found some good source material and posted it in the Reporter's Notebook over in the Creative Commons Legal Cases section. Thanks, David!

On PJNet Today Leonard Witt has the transcript of his IM interview with Jay about what we're going to do now that we have 700-plus folks signed up for AZ. A quick snip:

Witt: You have always framed this is as experiment. So success or failure, lots will be learned. What have you learned so far?

Rosen: There are people who want to play. They include people from many parts of the world. If you can figure out the right size thing to ask of them, and post it, then this model may work. Also, going back to an earlier question, about what I anticipated. I anticipated that if we got a wave of participants, we would also have to grapple with a wave of "interaction costs" generated by those participants. Simple expression of it is a full in-box, and hundreds of emails to return from the very people you asked "in." This happens in every open source project with significant volunteer action. It forces you to innovate and find volunteers who can help organize other volunteers. We are right in the middle of this riddle now, and there will be some big learning there if we can solve it because that is what allows the project "to scale," as we say in Web. 2.0

(tip to Jeff Howe for this one.)

But it's not just AZ that's in the blogosphere. Jay spoke on Tuesday, 3/27 at the Social Media Club in NYC. nextNY posted a full transcript of the interview. A question asked after Jay's talk:

Q: how do you accommodate for standards of journalism, from writing to vetting stories.

A: we are trying to practice open platform, capture the benefits of openness but we know there are cots. the tricks are to have benefits and reduce costs. one of costs is about knowing the credibility of the participants. we are not going to prevent people joining, but have strict controls on what we will print. exercise controls at the final gateway. if we can’t reach you by phone, then unlikely to give you stuff essential to do. there’s no single solution to it. you have overlapping measures that add up to a workable solutions

After the SMC talk: Definitive Ink adds some commentary and Savvy Musings ponders credibility in a info-saturated world.

That's today's links...wonder what tomorrow will bring...