BuzzMachine

Bertrand Pecquerie of the World Editors Forum, went after citizens’ media, Dan Gillmor, and me at CBSNews.com. I responded here. Now Dan responds to the second of two attacks on us citizens at CBSNews:

In both cases, representatives of the traditional Fourth Estate are doubting the usefulness of the Fifth Estate of bloggers and others who don’t fit into the neat boundaries of the professional class of journalists. In both cases, they raise interesting questions that devolve into straw-men attacks.

Bertrand’s equation … — more blogging=less democracy — is laughably spurious. I mean, the old East Germany had 99.999 percent turnout and not an ounce of officially permitted independent thinking: Now there was a democracy, right?

Professional journalism does not gain credibility by casting stones at the bottom-up media, which definitely can use some improvement as it veers into journalism but is not trying — at least not in my view of things — to replace the traditional media.

Pecquerie suggests that citizen media is just another bubble. By what standard?

I’d say that the bubble here is mass media. It was a long-lasting, super-duper, bubblegum bubble, but it’s deflating now.

The Pulitzer committee finally will allow online submissions in breaking news and breaking-news photography; in other categories, online has be go hand-in-hand with print. It’s a wimpy step but at least it’s a step. And I wonder whether the Times-Picayune’s blogs could win the Pulitzer. Rex Hammock and I said they should.

The Times has a good summary of the Stupid Sony Rootkit Scandal and how bloggers brought them down. I watched this from afar because I haven’t bought a CD in more than a year. CD? What’s a CD? They’re working so hard to protect a dead medium. It’s as if they posted a militia around a graveyard.

About 45 good people came to our Recovery 2.0 meeting in San Francisco, called there by nothing more than a few blog posts and a desire to find ways to improve the internet’s response to the next disaster. I didn’t know what, if anything, we could accomplish in an hour and a half. At best, I hoped for a simple list of simple starting points and that’s what we got:

* We need a place online to gather and share information, needs, and solutions. That could be the Recovery2.0rg wiki — and the recovery2 tag.

* We need to work on standards and APIs for the tools and data bases people create to help in disasters. The peoplefinder standard is already underway and some of the folks from Yahoo at the meeting — who had experience on the ground in Houston and also at the Red Cross network operations center — are working on improvements. At a minimum, we need to do a better job harnessing the internet to help people find each other.

* We need to meet face-to-face with government, NGOs, and business to offer help and coordinate. There is a meeting in Washington on Oct. 17 about just that. Folks from this meeting will be there. Details on the wiki.

The meeting began with introductions, during which I stood there in awe of the internet and its ability to bring together such a group. Brian Oberkirch, who’d just started a weblog business, fled his home in Slidell and, sitting in Dallas, was desperate for news so he started his blog to bring the news to him and his community. He wanted us to make sure we don’t think this disaster is over as we try to prepare for the next one. One man started one of the first missing boards and when he was overloaded and Yahoo contacted him to serve it. The Yahoo people were there and so were people from Google. One man works in the Bay Area — which he called God’s theme park for natural disasters — to prepare for rescuing special-needs people in a disaster. Others came from charities that help in disasters. I finally got to meet Evelyn Rodriguez, the marketing blogger who happened to survive the tsunami and shared her experience so compellingly on her blog. I was glad that former FCC Chairman Michael Powell came (and, no, I didn’t make Howard Stern jokes, to answer the question some of you already asked) and talked about lessons learned reestablishing communications after 9/11. Scott Anderson, a Tribune Company online exec and blogger, said he wants to make sure that media companies are prepared as well (and learn from the amazing experiences of Nola.com, WWL, and WDSU in New Orleans); he plans to get this added to the Online News Association’s agenda and I’ll join in there. And on and on.

Then we spent some time listing key needs and characteristics of recovery 2.0: how we need to be even more concerned about preparedness than recovery; how systems need to be open; how we need to find ways to connect to the unconnected (e.g., the Skype virtual phone room idea); how it needs to connect with authorities; other characteristics: searchable, fluid, matchable, swarmable, transparent, trustworthy, discoverable, accountable, tested… and more. We ended up with many words describing what it needs to be.

But, of course, there is no “it.” There is no one system or authority or organization. This is the distributed internet, where people’s best efforts will pop up everywhere. The real goal is, as I described here, to get us to communicate and swarm better around needs, around the best replies, and around making the best better.

Thanks again to John Battelle and company for providing the space at Web 2.0. And thanks to Greg Burton for creating and managing the wiki and to Ross Mayfield for contributing it. And thanks to everyone who came — passing up the siren calls of Web 2.0 cocktail parties — and who blogged about it.

Jason Shellen of Blogger/Google announces something new at Web 2.0: Google Reader, a fast way to get through items you’re interested in. He says it is an attempt to answer the questions: How do I find the good blogs (blog search is the start of an answer) and how do I keep up with them? The reader lets you browse items easily with a smooth scroll and preview on one screen; it lets you subscribe to feeds and tag them; it includes support for multimedia; you can share via mail or blog; you can import and export subscriptions.

: UPDATE: An important critic likes it.

Fred Wilson on Web 2.0 and all that:

Last year at this time we were talking about interesting companies like Skype, Flickr, MySpace, etc.

Many of them are gone, gobbled up by the web 1.0 giants or the mainstream media companies.

In their places we are seeing second derivatives. I heard one business described as Google Maps meets delicious, and another described as Skype meets MySpace. When the first derivative hasn’t fully figured its long term business model (other than getting bought), the second derivates are pretty scary.

I am a contrarian at heart. This situation bothers me.

It doesn’t mean we are going to stop investing. But it does mean we are going to be more careful.

We have to raise our hurdles when others are lowering them.

Dave Sifry of Technorati does his numbers dance: Technorati is tracking 18.9 million blogs. The pattern remains: a doubling every five months. A new blog is born every second. 55 percent are posting three months later; 13-15 percent update weekly or more. About 8 percent are spam blogs. There are recent spikes from the creation of Chinese blogs…. Tags are exploding. Almost a third of blog posts use tags or categories, he says…. He’s announcing deals to provide blog links to the Washington Post, IHT, Atlantic, and Der Spigel, on top of Newsweek and Salon…. He’s also announcing a refinement of search to look within given tags (e.g., Bush within only political blogs).

Jeremy Allaire just revealed his new video company, Bright Cove, also featured in today’s NY Times. I met Jeremy and saw the company many months ago and loved it then, for it enables the explosion of TV: People can use his Flash-based player and system to serve video under various business models: ad-supported, pay-to-view, pay-to-serve. He’ s making it easy and big. (Disclosure: I liked what I saw so much that I’m likely to join his advisory board.)

Tim O’Reilly asks Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz about being probably the highest ranking corporate blogger. Says Schwartz: “Transparency is a competitive weapon.” He says that competitors spend a fortune on marketing and spend time on one-on-one interviews with the press; he prefers the blog. O’Reilly asks whether Sun’s attorneys read the blog before he posts; he says they wish they did but they don’t. O’Reilly confesses that he sometimes worries when he blogs that he’ll be telling his competitors too much, so he meters himself.

: Neglected to put up a link to Schwartz’s blog; it’s atop the list of Sun bloggers here.

Red Herring covers my ad panel yesterday. I’ll be writing up reflections later.

Yahoo head Terry Semel, being interviewed by John Battelle, says: “Is this a technology company or a media company? You must be great at both.” Interesting echo of what media execs said at the MT&R event last week: They need engineers and technologists as much as they need

: Yahoo “is all about content,” he says. He sees three ways to generate content: user-generated content via Flicr, 360, local; licensed, aggregated and partnered content where Yahoo is a distribution platform; and “designing the future of content… in this broadband world.” He says media companies should look to Yahoo as a distribution platform. That is very much Semel’s strategy: He’s trying to build Time Warner without the shackles of its heritage and deals.

So Yahoo is very much a Media 1.0 company: It’s all about content and distribution. I say it’s not.

: Battelle asks Semel about Yahoo’s behavior in China: “How do align your idea being in the news business and being a service provider?”

Semel prevaricates enough to make his media trainer proud: “Ninety-nine percent if not a hundred percent of what we do is aggregate other people’s news….” He’s trying to say he’s not in the news business and paints the hiring of Kevin Sites as an experiment more than an entry into the news business. And then he says that any international company that operates in China “you’re going to have to unfortunately observe the laws of those countries and they’re stated, they’re not secret.”

: Asked about Google, Semel says that its No. 1 in search but now that it is expanding into news and shopping and services — as Yahoo did — it’s a portal and as a portal “it’s probably No. 4.”

: Asked whether he’ll give a feed of HotJobs to a Google job service, Semel says, “we’ll always be more open than they are.”

: “We think the big change is not just getting more and more unique users to things…. As we go forward, it’s all about deeper engagement, more time spent, more satisfacory experience for users and advertisers.” That’s exactly the buzzlanguage in the ad industry and Semel’s if nothing else cagey about that. It’s a 1.0 media empire. That’s not a bad thing. It will make big money. The question is whether it is built for the future, any more than Time Warner or Disney is.

: He’s asked whether, in five years, he’ll make more money off of user-generated content than media-generated content. He sings the praises of user-generated content (what we know as sharing). Then he says that content will get more and more important on the internet with the spread of broadband. He says that doesn’t mean we’ll spend time on old media in the new medium. But the man loves content. And then he prevaricates and doesn’t answer the question.

: Here’s the funny thing about Yahoo building this gigantic castle of content: I never go there.

13 companies in 90 minutes.

Zimbra: An open-source collaboration suite. Lots of Ajax. Everything is Ajax. He’s getting lots of awws from the crowd for allowing you to see where an appointment is or what you have on a date without having to leave the email. Ajax and Google map mashup and Skype mashup. Can’t lose, eh?

Nevermind my ajax gags. This really looks wonderful: very smart use of interface to let you get around your data (show me just the emails from the guy between these dates that have this kind of attachment; show me a FedEx tracking number and go ahead and get the status dynamically, and so on). In six minutes, it looks like a winner. Best of the bunch. Everybody in the audience wanted it.

Flock: A social browser. The web is not just content or shopping but a stream of events among people, they say. So they built a browser opensource on top of Mozilla; the first, alpha release comes in a few weeks.

It combines favorites and RSS feeds: you click a star on the address bar and it’s a bookmark and you’ve subscribed if there’s a feed. With a story on the page, you can take content and drag it onto a “shelf” (the demo devil is bedeviling them). There’s also a “blogging top bar” within the browser — important for bloggers — that allows you to open a blogging editor and drag content from a page onto your post. Very nice.

Zvents: “Takes the search approach to events.” It’s live for the Bay Area. They’re trying to do deals with old-style local publishers, which is smart, since local sites tend to suck at this. They have what-where-when searches that deliver into maps, lists, and calendars. And the lists are exportable to your blog; it’s distributed.

Socialtext: Ross Mayfield says that Socialtext, the first wiki company, will go open-source. It’s coming full-circle: Wikis came from open-source and now a wiki company goes open-source. He says that wikis are happening inside companies at larger scales than before; organizations are sharing information. “Now we’re giving it all away.” Marc Canter screams: Awwright.”

Wikiwyg.net, the wysiwyg open-source for wikis, is the first step (I think it’s quite neat). Then they add SyncroEdit.com: real-time synchronous editing for the web. Now add in Atom and microformats for offline editing.

Rollyo: Dave Pell, big blogger: “This is going to be the shortest nonsexual performance of my life.”

He shows Rollyo: roll your own search engine. I’m on the beta list: you add a list of the sites you want to search on a regular basis. You can also get people to come to your personal search engines. And you can explore others’ search rolls.

Orb: Shows you all your content from home on any web-connected device anywhere. Works only on PC now; Mac by the end of the year. Very nice.

Wink: Combines search with user interactivity: “people-powered search.” (Well, in a sense, Google is just that, eh?) You can tag search and add that into tags on Delicious et al. They say this means it’s spam free (if tags don’t get spammed, I suppose).
Joyent: A network suite of applications with email, calendar, contacts, files and binders. The data is tagged and smart filtered and can be turned into RSS feeds. The data is open and transportable. It’s focused on small groups of 2-20 people. So, for example, you can overlay other people’s calendars onto your own. So far, I shrug.

Bunchball: It tries to solve the “social application gap” and the “replication of reality.” Didn’t know I had those problems. He’s saying that entering into new social applications is hard because there’s an investment. It’s a platform for starting social applications. I suspect this is a bad-timing award against the announcement this week of Mark Andreesen’s Ninq.

RealTravel: “Real travel. Real advice. Real experiences.” It enables people to put up travel journals and ratings. Not sure what’s different from TripAdvisor, which is already huge.

Knownow: It’s a Kleiner-funded company that’s about dynamic distribution of content. I don’t know what that means yet. It’s a notification service using RSS. I frankly don’t get it.

AllPeers: A web development platform based on Firefox.

Structured Blogging: From the PubSub guys comes a plug-in to Word Press that gets people to publish structured data. It basically adds prepopulated tags — not loose-form — to get people to add the fact that this is a restaurant review, for example. Wish it would work; we’ll see whether it does. I think the key is that people will do this if it helps their stuff be discovered — e.g., to get a restaurant review on your blog aggregated with all your neighbors’ restaurant reviews.

: A slicker version of this report over at Lifehacker, where I’m flattered to be reporting.