I would like to announce the start of a new website called "One Key Press". I have set up this website to encourage people who live in the Region of Waterloo and surrounding areas to discover, inform and participate in their communities. It will feature news and views on local happenings from myself and other local authors.

If you're interested in helping out, let me know at michael@onekeypress.ca.

I will also chronicle my efforts on the Editor's Blog hosted on the One Key Press site, so check it out if you're interested in the trials and tribulations of setting up a site like this.

Update: On June 8, 2008, the "lights went out" at One Key Press. Actually... I let the domain and hosting contracts expire. I didn't get the activity/interest I was hoping for, but that shouldn't stop anyone else from reporting the news in their own way! I may revisit the idea in a new form at some point, but not right away.

Thanks for everyone that did read and contribute!

If you've ever had the urge to do some birdwatching, keep an eye on this one. From the creators of Winamp and the Yahoo! Music store comes Songbird, an open source project that I'm sure will be big.

It's a music player, organizer, mixer and what have you that looks a bit like iTunes from the screenshots. But where Winamp and iTunes support video playback, from what I it looks like so far there are no plans to do so in Songbird. It appears the coders are trying to it do one thing and do one thing well... making the best free and cross-platform music player possible.

If I were a betting man, I'd bet this project will go far and make a big impact.

Oh ya... I shouldn't forget to mention that I first read about Songbird on the MAKE: blog.

Over on BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis recently wrote a post titled Everybody's a network. In it, he details how traditional media networks (i.e. television and newspapers) are realizing that their playing field is changing... they are no longer in total control of the content or the distribution. More and more independents are beginning to self publish and the Internet allows anyone to get programming when they want it and where they want it. He states:

The old networks are hosed and they are finally realizing that. Suddenly, the dominoes are tumbling, all at once.

As a result of the changes happening around them, the "old school" networks need to change course to fend off the impending financial losses as their once mass market is becoming fragmented. The solution that Mr. Jarvis suggest? Networks will need to aggregate content from as many places as possible, sell ads through as many channels as possible, create good content and point people to good content on other networks, and they will need to share the ad revenue with all people involved.

I'm sure that I'm either trivializing his points or getting them wrong, so go and read the post (and comments) in their entirety.

Venture Voice is a great podcast. Gregory Galant does a great job of interviewing the high-rollers of the technology world. A recent session with David Sifry of Technorati dives into how the high-traffic, blog-tracking site Technorati started, and what David does to keep it going. Some of the lines that David comes out with are bound to be quoted and repeated. It was inspiring 45 minutes to say the least.

Read more here or if you see the button below, you can click play listen right now thanks to Odeo.

Some notables:
"Far more important than the technology you have is the team that you build."
"I firmly reject the notion that the primary reason for companies to exist is to make a profit."
"I can’t believe they actually pay me for this."

Tod Maffin reports that CBC Radio is now making some of their programming available as podcasts... audio programs that you can subscribe to and listen to on your computer or portable audio player. I'll be glad to get the best of Ideas, Quirks & Quarks, DNTO, The Current and other great programs.

Nat over at O'Reilly Radar found some interesting job postings at Google, all relating to television technologies. Google has been dabbling with video and video search for awhile, and you can even purchase videos from them now, but this is a new turn. The product manager positions involves "projects that enable using Google’s search and advertising technologies to enhance users’ Television viewing experience" as noted on one posting.

Google already purchased a radio advertising company named dMarc. Television seems like a reasonable next step for content relevant ads.

Newsvine.com, a new website that combines newswire feeds, user-submitted pointers to news and personal columns is now open for the public. I've been beta-testing the site for awhile and find it stable, easy to use and not bad to look at. While I'm not dumping all my other news sources for newsvine, I'll keep a close eye on it.

To read about the features and the journey to the public launch, here's the official launch notice on the Newvine blog.

You can read my own column at: http://onecog2many.newsvine.com/

Note: They don't have a region setup for Kitchener/Waterloo or any place in this area yet. For now I've been flagging local stories with the tag "region-of-waterloo"... it would be great if others did this as well. Then you could read local news by visiting the URL:

http://www.newsvine.com/region-of-waterloo

This from CyberJournalist.net:

Gregg McLachlan, the Associate Managing Editor of the Simcoe Reformer, has launched a new site with lots of journalism tips called NewsCollege.

For years he has published the newsroom newsletter The Write Way, which has been circulated to journalists in Canada, the United States, Caribbean, Malaysia, Europe, South Africa and South America.

NewsCollege is a new site that includes many of the tipsheets previously published in The Write Way, some of which have been updated and revised for NewsCollege.

Check out NewsCollege at http://newscollege.ca/. It looks like a great place to start if you are interested in improving the coverage of your own local paper, or if you are starting a citizen-based project of your own. I particularly like the "50 Places to Shop for Stories" page under the "Story Hunting" menu item.

As Larry recently pointed out, our local daily paper The Record is now offering open access to the day's current news stories. I love this move, as I'm a local news "junkie" and I missed it when the turned off access on their site a few years ago.

A couple things to note though... copyright issues are the same with the paper edition as the on-line edition, and the open access to a story only last for one day. That is, you won't be able to link to a story and then expect your blog readers to be able to do the same a day later. For details on how to get the most out of this on-line information, check out the "Using the site" section of their FAQ.

With the limited time access to stories, it's too bad that The Record won't be able to take advantage of search engines drawing people to the site. But, then again their customer base is local and likely to be checking it often anyway.

It's also good to note that the Waterloo Chronicle (a local, and free weekly paper) has had open access to their stories for some time.

This past weekend there was a house fire a few streets away from our home. My first reaction after finding out that no people were harmed, was to wonder if the family needed anything? I've heard through the grape-vine that at least one business in town is accepting donations, and that's great (but also five days after the fact).

With all of my rambling blog posts on citizen journalism and "the new media", a lightbulb turned on and I realized that we are lacking a central way to spread information like this in our Region of Waterloo. The flow of information in our communities could be greatly improved. There is all kinds of information that we can share with each other. Just what is citizen journalism you might ask? The Wikipedia's entry on the topic starts off with this:

Citizen journalism, also known as "participatory journalism," is the act of citizens "playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information," according to the seminal report We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. They say, "The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires."

I'm seriously considering setting up, maintaining and editing a site that would allow anyone from the community to submit stories, new business announcements, photos, events (maybe even videos) and other newsworthy bits of information. Check out this list for examples of different sites and see what you like. I'd like to include all of the towns in our little area of Ontario such as Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, New Hamburg, Elmira, Wellesley, St. Jacobs, Breslau, Conestogo, Ayr and every place inbetween.

Here's what I need everyone to do. Brainstorm a bit, talk to your family, friends and co-workers. Point everyone you know to this posting. Leave your input as a comment and we'll get a conversation going. Here's a few questions/ideas to get us started:

What would you like to see? What information is important to you? What would you like to contribute? New to the area... what do you need to know? Got a beef with local government? Want to advertise a local event? Worried about big-box stores in your small community? Does land development or usage concern you? Environmental issues on your mind? Discover a great new cafe? Can't get that pothole on your street fixed? Concerned about daycare? Sports?

Google Video has an episode of WGBH's "Thinking Big" from October 2005 titled "News in the Digital Age". Rebecca MacKinnon, formerly CNN's top person in north Asia, provides a good overview of how blogs are improving (but not replacing) the news as we know it. The show details the benefits that a personal point of view brings to news stories, but it is clear that not all bloggers stand up to the same journalistic rigors as most professional journalists hold themselves to.

It touches a bit on government censorship as well.

Read the transcript here.

Grab the video here in .mov format or here on Google Video.

New York Magazine has a story titled "The Rise of Craigslist and How It's Killing Your Newspaper" describing some of the history behind the makings of Craigslist.org and some insight into its creator Craig Newmark. It's an interesting piece and a good read for anyone that wants to understand more about the site and the motivations that lead to its creation back in 1995.

The piece also hints at Craig's future endeavors in the area of citizen journalism. Should be interesting to see what he comes out with, or more importantly what the world does with what he comes out with.

Amy Gahran discusses how blogs might actually hinder conversations in Blogs as a Barrier to Conversation. She writes:

Not everyone has the technical abilities, equipment, and access to use the internet much (or well). Not to mention that using the internet at all requires literacy and available time.

... and later:

Although weblogs get a lot of attention currently, I think it's important to recognize -- and respect -- the spectrum of options and tastes.

I'd propose that it might be conversation through written word (as opposed to in person, voice or video) that might be at fault here, aside from the technological issues that blogs present. There's a reason why smilies are used in e-mail and IM messages... it's near impossible to add inflection in plain text. There's a reason why some novelists are successful and many are not... crafting effective meaning through written word takes time and talent. Add to this the fact that technology makes it all too easy (or even encourages) users to fire off text without giving ideas the full thought they deserve, exasperating miscommunication even more.

I'm not saying that we all need to be novelists to carry on a conversations on-line, but the problem of the many-to-many conversation might never be possible to solve due to our own physical limitations rather than technology's limitations. For example, try getting your message across during a crowded family gathering or at a town hall meeting where you're fighting with others to be heard and everyone has their own agenda.

With the audience so large, and as Amy points out, with many people stretched for time or constrained by literacy issues, on-line conversations might only ever be effective for a small part of the population. We'll see how things pan out over the next decade. Maybe I should add some new features to the conversational-media system I was envisioning... features that would allow everyone to participate regardless of their literacy or financial standings and technology skill levels.

The Hypergene MediaBlog reports on the beta release of a new news site in Heard it on the Newsvine: First impressions

Newsvine offers a refreshing philosophy that has been missing in online news sites: Let the story not be an end in itself but a starting point for conversation and aggregation of content and different perspectives.

Near the end, they also point to a another review over at Solution Watch.

My first attempts at using Newsvine will be at: http://onecog2many.newsvine.com/ where I noted Gary Will's post breaking the recent news of Reqwireless being bought by Google.

Earlier in the week I posted my take on Amy Gahran's "I Wish Blog Comments Were Easier to Follow. After reading some of the comments and her follow-up posts I've done a little brainstorming. Here's what features I'm guessing people might like to see in next-generation "conversational media" software:

1) Each posting begins a conversation. If you want to take an existing conversation in a different direction or you want to start a new conversation, then you would start a new post (let's call it a node). Otherwise, you would add to an exiting node.

2) Additional data/information can be added to a node. Maybe a node requires some photos or graphics to explain it better? What about a map? Here's a good place to include citations and/or links to items outside your blog that inspired you to start the conversation.

3) Comments are handled in a threaded forum. Each node gets its own forum or discussion group. Automatically. With moderation capabilities (ala Slashdot).

4) The top-level node of the conversation becomes a summary page. Many feed readers only look at initial blog posts, ignoring the comments. But, many feed readers will (or can be configured to) re-read posts that are updated. Amy setup a separate feed for comments, but not everyone will subscribe, and comments are not closely tied to the original conversation. Having the node actually be a summary of the conversation, including (all or selected) comments, would cause feed readers to see the updated content. I've seen a few bloggers do this manually... editing their post with selected comments and updates as they learn more about the original topic from the comments flowing in. This would fix Amy's second concern... and maybe the first one too.

Amy Gahran, in her new blog Amy Gahran: The Right Conversation writes Weblogs are currently one of the most lively and provocative types of conversational media, all because of one simple feature: Comments. Blogs that allow comments are transformed from mere publishing to a facet of the public conversation. The problem is, though, that's right now it's just not as easy as it should be to follow that part of the conversation.

She goes on to mention the three basic problems for following conversations in the world of blogs and within blog comments specifically. Here's my own wording of the problems as I see it:

1) Finding conversations
Due to the sporadic nature of comments being added to a blog entry, search engines spidering your site will pick up the available comments at the moment in time when they are visiting your site, and may not get around to indexing any new comments for weeks. Not all blog systems include comments in their feeds either, so blog-specific search engines may never see comments added to your site.

2) Staying current
Most people reading blogs are familiar with feeds and sites like Bloglines make it easy to follow the latest posts to a blog. Comments are all to easy to ignore, and following a conversations there requires the extra effort of checking the blog's site on a regular basis for updates.

3) Keeping it altogether
Even though someone else may have started a conversation, many bloggers post comments and commentary to their own blog (this post is a case in point). Trackbacks are a system that was supposed to handle linking posts across blog sites and software, but as Amy mentions trackback spam is a terrible problem. I turned this feature off on my site because I could find no way to prevent the spammers from abusing it (unlike other types of spam). If there were a way to connect the dots and show a visual or threaded view of comments across blogs, that would be beneficial.

I've just added a new section to my website that aggregates stories, news and blog entries regarding new media, citizen journalism and the like. Partly because the topics are of interest to me, partly to try out the aggregator function of my website's software, and partly to serve the needs of anyone wishing to keep informed on these topics.

You can read the headlines here.

By the way, a good place to start learning about citizen journalism is from Dan Gillmor.

Jeff Jarvis recently revealed that his point/counterpoint to the "print is dead" mantra is now on-line after first appearing in print in the magazine Fast Company. Jeff spars with John Griffin, president of the National Geographic Society's magazine group. Jeff's closing point was "Find ways to aggregate people and capture the wisdom of that crowd." John's closing counterpoint on how marketers will approach the future media with their advertising dollars was "... in the final analysis, quality, performance, and passion will overcome most barriers."

Jeff's blog at www.BuzzMachine.com consistently evangelizes the idea that the new media of blogging and the wisdom of the crowd will change the way the print media business is run. The two agree on the point that in the race to gain readership, "... the winners will be the ones who aggregate audiences in interesting ways." So I guess the question for newspapers, magazines and bloggers alike is, "How do I effectively produce content that attracts and keeps readers coming back?" Does the media matter anymore?

Tod Maffin is offering his website to help support Canadian Storytellers in efforts to put their literary work into the Internet audio stream. From his site:

Are you a Canadian writer? If so, you qualify to have your story featured here and produced for you for free as a podcast — no strings whatsoever!

Tod's anticipating your question before you ask... what's in it for him, what's the catch?

There is none! I don’t charge anything for this, and listeners of your produced story don’t pay anything to subscribe to the podcast feed or hear your story. I just passionately believe in helping talented undiscovered Canadian writers find a place in audio storytelling. That’s it. Really.

Amy Gahran wrote a quick piece exploring motivating ideas for citizen journalists "to get your butt out of your house..." and into the community. To summarize, they are:

1. Cover a public talk or lecture
2. Build a "beat"
3. Meet interesting people
4. Review concerts, plays, films, and dance performances
5. Comparison quest

Be sure read the piece for full explanation of each point. Each of our communities have their own unique flavours, and as a citizen journalist you can get involved and sample that uniqueness. Reporting on what you discover can be play a part in "building up" the community and making it even more interesting.