BuzzMachine

O’Reilly has a GoogleMaps Hacks book. Can’t have a web site without one these days.

Next week, Rocketboom is going to auction off its advertising on eBay and force the winning advertisers to let Rocketboom make the ads. 99.999 percent of media buyers won’t get this. But somebody will be cool enough to try.

Travis caught a guy who couldn’t stop after the bumper sticker.

I was damned busy today running a session on blogging, RSS, blogsearch, tags, and more for the faculty of the new Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. No brain left. One odd moment: I tried to have everyone create a WordPress blog at once and we hit a wall; the software stopped most from continuing. Finally, I realized the problem: WordPress saw 25 blogs being created from the same IP at the same time and thought we were splogs, so it made us wait. Damned spammers.

If you’re seeing an ad taking up the top screen, I apologize; I messed up the coding. It’s not a new ad unit.

Well, I’m glad that Oprah has been brought down a few notches… by Oprah. I don’t know who annointed Oprah the arbiter of culture, ethics, and behavior in America. Well, actually, I do know who did that: Oprah. So now she had to confess her mistake annointing James Frey. But in typical Oprah fashion, she didn’t really take the fall herself. She pilloried Frey in the process. We already knew he was a liar of Glassian/Blairian proportion. But what this was about was really whether we can trust Oprah. That’s what her empire is built upon.

But we forget it was Oprah who trashed up daytime TV. She took the Donahue format and threw in shouting, screaming lowlifes, which made her a ratings hit and which everyone else — including Donahue — then copied. Then, and only then, did she get religion. She did a show about how wonderful she was to recant and become, overnight, the queen of quality TV. Her bookers tried to get me on that show — as a TV critic at the time — to praise her. To the consternation of my company’s flacks, I refused.

So Oprah is taken down a notch because one of her creations turned out to be a fake. I can only hope that the next one to fall is Dr. Phil.

: By the way, I’m scheduled to be on Howie Kurtz’ Reliable Sources Sun day to talk about this and other stuff.

The problem with media’s definition of interactivity is that’s all about controlled reaction to media’s agenda: Come talk about our stuff. It is designed like a children’s museum, with buttons you can push to keep you busy and happy. That may not be the intent, but it is the result and message of forums and chats and blogs that are about what the newspaper publishes. And it misses the point.

Interactivity is about more than reaction. It is about creation. It is not about controlled authority. It is about sharing authority.

That is a lesson newspapers and media companies need to learn. And that need is evident in the kerfuffle over interactivity and invective at WashingtonPost.com. In my earlier post, I addressed two fundamental misunderstandings of interactivity that this incident exposes: that people are concentrating on the negatives (the misuse of interactivity by a few blinds them to the value of the whole) and that they think we need someone to tell us who the bozos are (aka, enforcing civility).

But it struck me after writing that that I was missing the forest for the kudzu. The real value of interactivity is that it empowers. The real potential of interactivity is that it extends news and journalism and news organizations and communities to create. It’s fine to have forums to argue over ombudspeople, if that floats your boat.

Among the ways that interactivity can be used to empower the public and create value:

* Hyperlocal reporting: You know the drill — NashvilleIsTalking, Baristanet, NorthwestVoice, and my wish that somebody will podcast my local school board meetings so I can listen since I can’t attend. Newspapers can’t be everywhere, but readers are.

* Collaborative reporting: The community can join together to throw their information into the crockpot. Maybe everybody shares their horror stories with dealing with town hall and building inspectors to throw the bums out or they create a data base of health care hassles to build a case for change.

* Problem solving: The crowd is wise and our crowd is wiser, every media brand should believe. So why not throw problems out to the people when the experts we go to all the time fail: What should we do to fix that health care mess? Define a school that works.

* Aggregated smarts: Why not have our audiences Digg our stories — and others — to create the front page of the people? Doesn’t mean the editors can’t have one, too. But why can’t and why shouldn’t the people? See also Flickr interestingness for the aggregated taste of the crowd. The crowd is smart if you know how to count them.

* What’s missing: Rather than making interactivity about what we’ve already written about, wouldn’t it be better to find out what we’re not covering? Ask and listen.

* Shared knowledge: See an earlier post about turning the newsroom into a classroom. Why not create the means for people who know what they’re talking about to teach what they know?

* Social moments: Any friend of mine is a friend of yours, eh? So shouldn’t news and media be hosting Meetups so folks can meet each other? In the old days, we didn’t want to meet our readers. Now, we want our readers to meet each other. And who knows what wonders will ensue?

I know that’s amorphous, but I’m trying to assign buckets. What have I missed? What examples can you throw in? What should interactivity really mean?

: SHAME ON ME: In my standard lists of interaction locally I should always include Phillyfuture, which Karl Martino start and which is even endeavoring to help save a paper.

I never ended up watching Daniel; it’s sitting on the TiVo waiting for me, and I will get to it. But I won’t be able to watch on the air because NBC canceled it and if that were just a matter of quality and ratings, I’d have no beef. But, of course, the religious right nutjobs who attacked the show before it was even on will crow victory. And advertisers will cower, glad to be avoiding another controversy. And that is the real reason the show went off; advertisers were scared off.

So here’s the real moral to this story: Old, mass media is doomed do dullness.

There continues to be robust debate over the fate of David Lee Roth in the comments on these posts. I’ve tried to listen again and again and he remains an incredible bore. As one of the commenters said, even his sister can’t cut through the fake persona he has created that’s so impenetrable even he believes that’s his personality. The death pool continues….

I’m going to hang out with the Howard 100 News staff this morning. Now this expands the definition of news. I’ll report later.

Hoder, the pioneering Iranian blogger, is in Israel to report and learn and share. Go read his post about why he’s going and his reports from Israel and while you’re there, support his trip. I will.

I’ll be on a WashingtonPost.com chat at 1pm about the blog-comment kerfuffle. Auditorium chat is such an odd form: Why should anyone be on the stage (he asked with egalitarianism)? Their software doesn’t let you see names (you talk to towns). Deborah Howell, the one who should be there, isn’t. But anway, I hope it will be fun. And because I’m interacting there, that’s why I haven’t been interacting here. Later….