David Geller, John Battelle, Dan Gillmor on Today’s Citizen Media

Debate by what chris meant by Citizen Media

battelele – a media guy, speaks for the authors
value with voice and pov
enjoy media – his space, Wired Magazine, BigPub, BoingBoing

His new project – search book, shows how his blog is an example of writing a book and blogging the process, thought he would only have a few people watching – ended up with a passionate audience that can aid in things you are doing – mentions how Dan Gilmore saw the same thing with his book.

Things Battelle has done recently:
boingboing – bring ads into site w/o destroying it
havent had to sell one ad – part of the conversation, endemic – the advertisers came to him

Citizen Media –
content owned by the people making it

federated media (Battelle’s new company, which includes boinboing I think) – puts this into practice

Dave
sharing info between people groups and systems within an organization
how do we make a company communicate?
area waiting to explode
easiest way to communicate within an organization
replace internet toold

Dan Gilmore
epiphany 1

anyone who does anything in media, your audience knows more than you do collectively
take adv of that = better work and better information from the ground up

epiphiany 2

dave winer showing gilmore EDIT THIS PAGE (90s?)
web has become as writable and it is readable
media and citizens to do what you understand, the ability to be creators/pubs is a major transformation

grassroots media – bayosphere (Dan’s new company) – about tech economy and SF Bay Area
Citizens start tell each other what they know
vibrant sharing of what we know amongst each other

We are only at the beginning of this transformation
a lot to solve before we get anywhere with it

how do we find the good stuff????? – we will have to creat biz models around it – not entirely clear what those things are (thats half the fun)

Joh Battelle – what is the def of citizen media?

undervalued – things being created in this room and without
high quality conversations
how are the marketers involved (not interrupted)
how to do this as a full time passion – figure out that model

Dave

representing the business side – the tools to help customers merge email and synd models effectively
easier to use pub tools and models throughout
everyone was building their own tools
steep learnign curve

What we are familiar with is enabling – spreading thru the masses

Dan Gilmore-
vast majority of blogs, 90+%, and particularly written for the family and close friends, the value per reader must be higher than the val/reader of boingboing
(Value is relative to the person consuming – and I hate that word – the content)
doesnt like the word amateur in this context – its about personal passion
bizmodel for stuff in the middle like community theater – there is no business model except for the tool makers

new media dev – still hazy in how it shakes out from biz and journalizm
listen to us (the crowd, the citizens) as much as everythign else
citizen journalism pledge and the imp of being balanced

Crowd asks Dan Gilmore about the standards pledge for Bayosphere – he goes on to discuss how they put up an idea for the ‘rules’ – and the users took it, ripped it , remixed it, added their own thru a wiki

pledge asks that people who sign must confirm they will do their best to be balanced
people agreed to be honorable
sean bonner – ona wiki – not telling us what to do
we live in a world with a limit to time – cant read every post on slashdot
role for synthesis –

Big takeaway – in this new world the aritcle isnt the end of the conversation – its the middle

Joh Battelle
2002 – course with 2000 students – how to do journalism in a blog setting
if you can describe community morays and doc them you can make something
comes to concensus around these topics
liberating info (sharing) is a driving force in life

people in local communities have a lot to tell each other whats going on, but papers cant do the in-depth job
ability to tell each other what they know is important – still not that easy
we are early in helping people do these things – first amendment is for everyone not just the designated press

Joh Battelle – press has that railroad disease of forgetting what biz they are in

we created these vehicles where we thought we knew what we were doing
debate having in this community – attaching a biz model to the content
if you are going to get these people to liberate information – need to fig a way to pay the bills
(my whole argument of value for value)

Keep believing some point this will change

Critical mass is what we need – create a show without network deals, or a contract or a service (only a matter of time)

whats the value of an open conversation?
model can change culture – starts with creatives changing the culture first
commonsense copyright and patent law (this is an evolution)
permission from them to quote from what they do

Steve Gillmor, Dave Sifry, Scott Gatz on Tomorrow’s Syndication

Scott Gatz

Responsible for Yahoo!’s content syndication / RSS initiatives, Scott leads the team that redesigned My Yahoo! around RSS and integrated RSS into Yahoo! Mobile, Yahoo! News and the My Yahoo! Ticker. Gatz’s early career was diverse, ranging from television production at the Lifetime channel and NBC to product development and management for major information providers. In the early 1990’s, he spent two years managing a team at Reuters. Scott may be able to show us:

* How small changes can help big companies
* Where today’s emerging technologies might converge
* Why user friendliness is just as important as developer friendliness

Scott Gatz is wearing a tshirt that say “ONE HOT PIECE OF RSS”
Need to approach this with a broad perspective
consumer experience with yahoo is key
hope is that rss – we (people at this conference) can we take this tech and bring to mainstream

keeping it optimistic
millions of users using rss today
publishers, bloggers, can reach the audience right now

alot of people dont know rss or xml – and they shouldnt have to
how do we make it eash for these users
a lot of people doing more and more with rss than before
yahoo – working on media rss – photos, audio video – its beyond the post (blg post)

if you sub to flikr feed its presented like posts –
how do we make aggs that make content more sense?
how do we make tech that easy/convenient/integrated
where the user wants it

optimistic about consumers demadng the whowhatwhenwhere
where are the experiences where people are getting content?
playing in the living room as well as the desktop

no matter where – you can get your content
not in a reader – but in context
syndicated content alongside professionally produced content

dont limit me to one device/website/app
give it to me how i want
yahoo bought blo.gs
relays pings – moving ot the real time web
moment somehtign changes you can know about it
United States Geological survey has an rss feed
they ping – you can know when it is happening (so know you can get a message on your mobile phone letting you know your building isnt collapsing, there is an earthquake – big laugh from the crowd)

content (no matter what type) on what they want – however they want it

Dave Sifry (technorati)
bowled over by MS announcement
we are sitting on top of it – not consumers/producers
This is a sesmic shift (giggle from the crowd – re: earthquake)

fundamentally different way to look at the web and internet as a whole – moving from thinking of the worlds biggest library (we think in pages, documentss, directories)

There is no deep understanding of how new things come into play

Sifry believes it is all about user gen content this decade – as the tools have gotten easier for average people to create podcasts and blogs and content and easier to consume (MS commentary) regular folks can now get all this stuff – on their terms

We still think of the web like a library, but there is a humungous river/event stream/ of state changes at any given moment. We need to be able to tap in a track all that stuff

not just about being timely or uptodate or always-on, , but also understand the concept of time in relation to the web

what can be done when we go from the library model (tons of docs to find and read) to people having conversations over time

Sifry wants the web as realtime as IM

tip of the iceberg – symptomatic of some of the changes over 3-5 years

how do we add more structure? metadata or microfromats (microformats.org)
how can we more effectively express this semistructure data format
whats a calendar even look like
what is you representation of ical as valid html – (hcal)

human oriented metadata formats, but KISS (Keep it Simple…)

just the start – thinking of the web as a realtime place

Steve Gilmore
Dare Abesanjo (the guy who created RSS Bandit and MS employee)- is one of his heroes – verbal and yet supportive of existing standards
no time to wait for any more stuff
get it working into our hands, get on with it
Steve then asks why Dare switched from Bloglines API to Newsgator “Dare – junking the useless proprietary synch standard from bloglines – will adopt another useless proprietary standard from newsgator”

Dare: To set a standard, you need to have other people follow it, newsgator and bloglines have no interest in listening/following Dare (which sux)

Sifry – gretest way for Yahoo to work is to take an open attitude – lets stand on each others shoulders and not on each others toes

Scott – we do what our users ask for

building a strong ecosystem of mobile (ubicomp anyone?) aggregation

help manage attention which is the 15 minute problem

DWiner – why are we selling another format? back end, interface – dave is nailing sifry, why cant yahoo operate a central service and store subs list ?

Yahoo guy – making it easy for mass consumption adoption, myyahoo – ind is built in
users need to be there

dwiner – why not do it before they do it – need someone with fin resources and central server and get operations

rsynch

SGilmore – when are we gonna agree to do someothing and what will it take

25 mil people will wake up one morning with a persisitent download – how do we reduce the pile to the info we are looking for? Out prob, ours to fix. (Steve is the main proponent of attention.xml and this was sorta his broadsides)

adam bosworth a month ago – conv didnt go well, pushed xml down gates throat- important guy, but right now is unable to make a committment (which was in private a long time) how to solve this problem – good reasons why major vendors dont want to play ball – think proporietary cloud of metadata is supervaluable and cant afford to share

Steve Gilmore – we will all rise together or fall seperately – every roach motel (where you check in, but closed standards wont let you back out) will be excluded from the larger pie in the future.

channel9 wikiw will be the comment/community process

Some in the audience are wondering if MS is trying to set standards and lockin
IETF and other format orgs in this area, why is MS going outside of them?
if we want to discuss these formats why arent they going to the standards groups

A couple of guys in the audience point out the standards groups arent very effective and darwinism (strong code survives) is a better test

RSS is seen as a transport of intelligent content

Others think this is embrace and extend lite – crowd claps…

why its diff than what we have seen before from MS???
(note – the MS guys are giving as good as they get and this really isnt that contentious (in the room).

MS defense –
we are here at gnomedex – looking talking, posting before we ship
extensions / standard – specifications for tags
under CC license (not being evil)

MS has new ideas for RSS and wants to see Devs really push it

Dean – “no one says you have to support the extensions”

2 new elements in this name space – see new specs at, I think Channel9

” A lot of Bits were sacrificed” in this debate

Will there be an updated winmedia player that is rss aware (like iTunes 4.9 coming out tomorrow – Dean is reticent to say yes, b/c that is a diff team)

Crowd – “how is security in place and are we opening new doors for attack (new vectors)?”

MS – couple ways they looked at it – team sat with (SDL – secure development lifecycle)

Big round of applause for the MS guys as they left the stage.