Dan Gillmor, author, blogger, and Berkman Fellow, convened Part III of his Citizen Media Series this evening at the Berkman Center. Below are my notes from the event. Thanks to Steve Garfield for the pics.

“Dan Gillmor Citizen Media Part III
2006-04-18″

Tonight, Dan wanted to have a discussion about truly bottom up stuff that’s going on. During the last part of the evening, we discussed what the rest of us non-news media people are doing. Dan started off by saying, “Let’s go through some sites and talk about them, sometimes briefly, sometimes in-depth”.

Here are a number of points that we’re covered at the event:

DG: “Not everything that we’re doing here is going to qualify as journalism.”

“Do we get something of value out of something people are doing on the web, whether it’s journalism or not, The point is, are we getting something of value?”

“Can we find the signal on the web, where there is a tremendous amount of noise.”

Dan often asked of the different social networking sites we visited (see list below), “Is what they are doing journalism?”

“My own view is that if people are finding out what they need to know, then at some level that is journalism. In the same way that you might go to a bar and check it against some gossip. And then check it to see that there is some validity.”

He brought up the site, Priuschat.com. Dan owns a Prius. He’s found some useful things here.

DG: “There is news [on the site] about the California Solar Incentives, but there are also forums about maintenance, troubleshooting, etc.”

He mentioned the forum for modifications, where dan said he goes to learn how to hack his Prius.

DG: “There is a hack that lets you turn off the annoying beep,” that goes off with the cars.

That seems useful.

DG: “This is, owners telling each other what’s going on and what works. It’s also about the news that you might want to know. As far as I am concerned, there is some journalism that’s going on here, but I welcome people that tell me that I am wrong.”

“When you are talking to a friend, I wouldn’t call that journalism One of the important things is that the line [between journalism and what may not be journalism] is difficult to discern sometimes.”

Dan mentioned the example of someone who happened to be on a train one day in Madrid, Spain and had a cell phone with a camera. “That photo is the most famous picture from that day.”

The BBC got hundreds of photos from people after an explosion in London. The photos were up on discussion boards with people saying different things, useful things. Dan says this can be “useful and noteworthy”.

Some of the other sites & blogs discussed during the evening, included:

1. Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) – DG: “At some point he provides a world view, people do send him things to point out, but he does not allow comments. We can talk about whether or not that is good or bad for blogs. Glenn is plainly serving a journalistic role at some point, but it is a quintessential weblog.”

2. Micro Persuasion – (from the site) “Steve Rubel explores how social software is transforming marketing, media and public relations.”

3. Boing Boing (of course). DG: “It’s the blog I use for serendipity.”

* Dan brought up something he is often asked, “What’s the business model for blogging? One thing is to make it part of your career.”

4. In looking at Wikipedia, Dan says “Everyone knows Wikipedia”. In the news category, one of the things that happens frequently (when there is some breaking news event) is that you can go there to get some good news background. There is a page on the Italian General Election. The level of detail that goes into a site like this is amazing.”

5. ChicagoCrime.org – (see left) DG: “This isn’t journalism is anyway that I know it, if I want to know something about a community. It’s almost live and interactive in ways that it never has been before.”

6. NowPublic.com (Dan’s on the advisory board) – DG: “It’s an in progress kind of site, at what point will in break into the category of news?”

7. Ourmedia.org – DG: “Ourmedia is a place to publish the things that you do. Along with the internet archive, the idea is for people to create things and then post them — to create a global media community of anything people want it to be. It varies from audio to video to music to text and many other things. At the very least, if you are creating videos at any level, if you put them under a Creative Commons license, that’s a license that explicity allows sharing. Then, Archive.org will host it at no charge. It’s good. [because] If you create a good video and put it on your personal website, you can get a large fee for all the downloads.”

8. iBrattleboro.com – DG: “These guys are putting together a pretty good place they are beating the local daily newspapers for local stories. The daily isn’t published on the weekends, but meanwhile these guys are covering it.”

9. The Northwest Voice – DG: “This one is done by the local newspaper, delivered every other Thursday, written largely by people in the community.”

10. Greensboro101.com – DG: “It has become a town square. When I read this, I think I get a pretty good idea of what’s going on.”

11. OhMyNews – DG: “It is probably the greatest success in the citizen media world, but there are also pro journalists involved, as well. This has been a huge success in korea. They do have an english language site.”

12. Gotham Gazette (NYC) – DG: “There are 51 sections of NYC that they are doing local news about and it is really quite good”. Something we are going to find out about in the next few years is just how hyper-local can we go?

13. Rocketboom – Dan asked Steve Garfield to talk about Rocketboom:

SG: “It is based out of NY. . . it started a little over a year ago. They report on local news that is important to them. Now it has viewership of over 300,000 a day.”It was mentioned that Steve Jobs debuted the video iPod, showed an episode of Rocketboom. You can get it through iTunes, BitTorrent, etc.

SG: “Everyday when there is a new show that comes out it will be automatically delivered to your computer, to your iPod . . .”

DG: “What’s the goal here?”

SG: “I don’t think it’s the next big thing, I think it’s to tell stories that aren’t being told by big media. There are people who report stories from around the world . . I do a report and send it in to Rockeboom.”

On Steve’s video for Rocketboom(during Monday’s Boston Marathon), which we checked out:

SG: “I’ve always been interested in TV and how it is made. I am giving people a look behind the scenes . . . This is what’s interesting to me.”

Now, back to the list . . .

14. YouTube – DG: “Here is one of the fastest growing sites on the web.”

15. Flickr (steve got me to sign up) – DG: “During every big event, you see tons and tons of pictures related to the event. The first example I found about this, is the bombing in jakarta, someone had it up on flickr before the news media got to the scene.”

DG: “Whoever took it at that moment was the media.”

We then switched gears to check out some of the attendees’ blogs & sites where some of the people who were there participate:

1. Exploit Boston – using movable type to publish an event calendar.

2. Newsvine – Critt said this is where he participates.

Discussion came up about making some sense of it all:

Q: All that stuff and all these people doing things separately. How do make create some order out of things?

A: (Dan) “Digg.com is an example of this, where people are leading the way voting on content.”

3. Press Pass TV (one of my personal favs) – An after school program that works with students to teaches them about journalism. They learn how to set up interviews and other interviewing skills. Students learn how to use Final Cut Pro, how to frame up a shot, and all of the skills needed to be video journalists. When they have enough video they air it on local cable access (that’s the ticket!).

They have the local site and are working with a national after school program called Citizen Schools. They have a local speaker series that brings in local journalists that come in a speak with students.

A great way to end the evening (or rather this post, because there was a lot more discussion). Look forward to Part IV next month at the Berkman Center.

I (pictured here, looking very tired, on the left) will be making the audio (that was webstreamed) from the event this evening available tomorrow or Friday at AudioBerkman (at the Berkman Center where I work during the day and sometimes at night).

To webstream and record the event this evening, I used an MBox with two microphones (one for Dan and one for the audience) and a Mac Mini with Quicktime Broadcaster.