Atlanta Media Bloggers

Mark Your Calendars for the September Meeting

September 21, 7:00-9:00 PM - Leonard Witt, Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University will lead the discussion on:

Reinventing Journalism * A Do It Yourself Guide For Independents or for Mainstream Media.
See his paper at First Monday:
http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_6/witt/index.html

Also, WE WILL BE MEETING AT A NEW LOCATION!!!!

Big thank you to Armchair Media for offering their space.

Directions are here.

Is There a Place For Bloggers in Local TV?

Maybe I should add to that title... "And would you even want to be there?" Trust me, local news stations are insane asylums! But sometimes it's the inmates who are having all the fun. This article is fascinating, and I'm going to try to contact WKRN (Nashville) about what they're doing.

By placing the tools of the personal media revolution in the hands of professionals, the station is opening the door to uses of the material that go far beyond what's seen on-the-air. Many of the VJs also have blogs, and those will evolve to include their video. The idea is to turn each beat into an on-line franchise, and the options after that are pretty significant, especially as the audience/readers get involved.

Nashville has a remarkably cohesive and growing blogosphere, and Sechrist has announced plans to work towards a citizens-media-generated daily news program through them, and again, the flexibility offered by the VJ concept — and the eye-opening revelation that local amateur journalists can be very good and knowledgeable storytellers — make this a real possibility moving forward. What will this do for the people who don't watch local news anymore? Stay tuned.

Full article here.

A delightful parable by Nick Carr

This whole topic has generated much kerfuffle in the blogosphere, but it's the kind of kerfuffle I like, because it forces introspection, forces one to examine unquestioned assumptions about whether online interfaces are as democratizing as the spin often claims, whether there could be political/social biases embedded in deep structure interfaces.

The folks who have roundly spanked Carr for claiming things that they say the open "Home on the Range" of the Internet makes impossible have a point, but still, Carr's humorous parable rings true more often than not, particularly in the opening bit, and the epilogue.

Link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The Great Unread.

The Great Unread

Prelude

Once upon a time there was an island named Blogosphere, and at the very center of that island stood a great castle built of stone, and spreading out from that castle for miles in every direction was a vast settlement of peasants who lived in shacks fashioned of tin and cardboard and straw.

Part one:
On the nature of innocent fraud

I've been reading a short book - an essay, really - by John Kenneth Galbraith called The Economics of Innocent Fraud. It's his last work, written while he was in his nineties, not long before he died. In it, he explains how we, as a society, have come to use the term "market economy" in place of the term "capitalism." The new term is a kinder and gentler one, with its implication that economic power lies with consumers rather than with the owners of capital or with the managers who have taken over the work of the owners. It's a fine example, says Galbraith, of innocent fraud.

An innocent fraud is a lie, but it's a lie that's more white than black. It's a lie that makes most everyone happy. It suits the purposes of the powerful because it masks the full extent of their power, and it suits the purposes of the powerless because it masks the full extent of their powerlessness.

What we tell ourselves about the blogosphere - that it's open and democratic and egalitarian, that it stands in contrast and in opposition to the controlled and controlling mass media - is an innocent fraud.

Part two:
The loneliness of the long-tail blogger

The thing about an innocent fraud, though, is that it's not that hard to see through. Often, in fact, you have to make an effort not to see through it, and at some point, for some people, the effort no longer seems worth it. A few days back, the blogger Kent Newsome asked, "Who are the readers of our blogs?" His answer had a melancholy tone:

The number of bloggers competing for attention makes it seem like the blogosphere is a huge, chaotic place. But it only seems that way because we have all ended up in a small room at the end of the hall. When people refuse to converse with me or go out of their way to link around me, it hurts a little. Until I remember that while they aren't listening to me, no one in the real world is listening to them either ...

[...]

The best way, by far, to get a link from an A List blogger is to provide a link to the A List blogger. As the blogophere has become more rigidly hierarchical, not by design but as a natural consequence of hyperlinking patterns, filtering algorithms, aggregation engines, and subscription and syndication technologies, not to mention human nature, it has turned into a grand system of patronage operated - with the best of intentions, mind you - by a tiny, self-perpetuating elite. A blog-peasant, one of the Great Unread, comes to the wall of the castle to offer a tribute to a royal, and the royal drops a couple of coins of attention into the peasant's little purse. The peasant is happy, and the royal's hold over his position in the castle is a little bit stronger.

[...]

Epilogue

One day, a blog-peasant boy found buried in the dust beside his shack a sphere of flawless crystal. When he looked into the ball he was astounded see a moving picture. It was an image of a fleet of merchant ships sailing into the harbor of the island of Blogosphere. The ships bore names that had long been hated throughout the island, names like Time-Warner and News Corp and Pearson and New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Conde Nast and McGraw-Hill. The blog-peasants gathered along the shore, jeering at the ships and telling the invaders that they would soon be vanquished by the brave royals in the great castle. But when the captains of the merchant ships made their way to the gates of the castle, bearing crates of gold, they were not repelled by the royals with cannons but rather welcomed with fanfares. And all through the night the blog-peasants could hear the sounds of a great feast inside the castle walls.

   

New day for Atlanta Media Bloggers Group

Great meeting on Thursday! Big thank you to Dan Greenfield from Earthlink for leading the discussion.

Personally, there were some eye opening ideas for me of why corporations are still hestitant to consider blogging and what obstacles they are facing and need to work out. I actually was able to integrate some of what we discussed at client meetings the next day!

We took a loose vote and decided that the third Thursday of each month works best for everyone. So go ahead and mark your calendars for Sept 21 at 7:00. Also please email me if you would like to be on the evite reminder list - sherryheyl[@]gmail.com

We may also have a new location for the meetings so stay tuned.

Meeting Notes 8/17/2006

Show notes to the Atlanta Media Blogger's Group Meeting at "Da Loop" in Atlanta.

Roll call:

Dan Greenfield Corp Communications for Earthlink
http://bernaisesource.blog.com

Leslie Nealson AEA
Alan Urech Stoney River Capital Partners
Kevin Howarth
Chris Boese www.serendipit-e.com/blog
Andrew Lunde what.isviable.org
Jim Straud http://www.jimstroud.com/
Sherry Heil http://www.mindblogging.typepad.com/
Marshall Shumaker Game & Business
CJ Poolah social entertainment
Mark Bee
Grayson Daughters http://spaceygreview.blogspot.com
Peter Fasano

Things mentioned:

http://www.kenradio.com/

Tim Moenk http://aoide.net/

Naked Converastions Scoble http://redcouch.typepad.com/

BlogHer Speaks with Arianna Huffington

http://blog.listenshare.com/

sitepals.com

Internet Marketing Voodoo

I recently attended the Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing Executive Summit in Boston, Massachusetts and I had the opportunity to meet an amazing individual by the name of Ted Murphy. Ted was leading a panel discussion on the Rise of Social Media Branding Campaigns. The panel discussion focused on social media's invasion across the Internet connecting networks of millions from influencers and decision makers to early adopters playing active roles in the success of online branding and viral marketing campaigns.

Ted also is the founder of different companies such as MindComet which focuses on consumer generated media (CGM), Internet Strategy, & Traffic Generation. Visit www.internetmarketingvoodoo.com and check out Ted's site and interesting podcasts. You find your's truly ranting about one of my favorite topics Customer Relationship Management.

Art

What's been going on with me...

Hey y'all,

I been kinda quiet this week, because something both awful and tremendous has been happening to me, and it has to do with blogging, so I decided I should share it with you folks here.

I just launched a new blog Tuesday night, into Wednesday 3 A.M., and within its first 24 hours of existence, it got more than 1,800 hits, from all over the world, starting in Australia and New Zealand, within hours of the site going live. (2,500+ hits in 48 hours)

I'm still pretty new to this group, so you probably haven't gotten a good bead on my hobby horses yet, but a REAL big one for me is studying online cybercultures and communities, and working out ways to understand how online communities work.

This makes me somewhat of a hardass when it comes to certain marketing assumptions about passive audiences, because I insist on user-centered design, and also user-co-constructed design, or ideally, entire cultures or communities collaboratively authoring their own virtual landscapes, grassroots, bottom up.

You can see why the recent attempts to commodify and commercialize the blogosphere tend to give me the heebie jeebies. These appear to me to be overt attempts to co-opt true bottom-up communities with subtle market forces, to sell soap instead of making communities the true center of interactions.

I didn't study the force and empowerment of real online communities just to be able to better think up ways to co-opt them. Working in new media causes me all kinds of moral dilemmas when the prevailing winds favor commercial forces over community, content, and communications.

Sometimes I feel like these things are another variation of an experiment Ragu did during the 1990s with "Mama's Kitchen," trying to coalesce an online community around talking about all things Ragu, all the time. I mean, there's only so many spaghetti recipes you can share, you know? And the commercial agenda was just so overt.

That's why, when I went to do my dissertation research into cybercultures and communities, and how interfaces shape and are shaped by communities, it was important to me to find something REAL, vital, something amazing. And I did. It was pure luck. That's all it was, pure luck. I stumbled upon the most amazing dissertation topic in the world.

So like Margaret Mead, I did a cyber-ethnography as a participant-observer over a two-year period in that particular online community. I captured texts, charted online personas, analyzed chat room interactions, studied flame wars on bulletin boards, listservs, diagrammed web sites, and collected the creative and communicative output of a community that was tightly-knit, more and more empowered to greater social action and activism, AND a community that both competed with and interacted with the mass media providers which gave the community its center and reason for authoring its own virtual landscape.

I entered the community, became immersed in it, and along the way, it also changed me. I made life-long friends. That was important, because the point of ethnography is to become an insider, and to establish reciprocity with the groups you interact with, so that you are not only TAKING from them, but that you also give something back, so the relationship is balanced, and not colonizing.

Many of you know by now, the community I studied was the Xenaverse, the online fans of the show "Xena: Warrior Princess." This was actually a precursor of the academic "Buffy" studies that came later (heh, I did it first, but I also owe my work to the face-to-face Star Trek community researchers who went before me). I started my formal data-gathering in early 1996, and completed the dissertation in 1998.

The terrible, terrible thing that happened was over last weekend, but I didn't find out until late Monday night, after getting home from the Steely Dan/Michael McDonald concert at Chastain.

A dear friend of mine from the Xenaverse, an active, important, dynamic member of this community and a person I've known both online and in person for more than ten years took her own life in a small trailer in Haines, Alaska, a little town where she was the doctor and director of the small medical clinic, living the dream she'd had for as long as I'd known her.

I'd known her in New York; I'd known her in California when she was going to medical school, and I'd watched her take Xena as her model for living and insist on taking her medical training to the Alaska Bush, a place she'd dreamt of for years, to try to make a difference.

What happened to lead to this tragic event is a long story that I won't go into here. The truth is, an online discussion group I manage had just gotten one of her normal emails on July 31, and there was no sign anything was remiss, although we did know she was going through a tough time, health-wise.

By the time I got off work Tuesday, I knew I had to do a memorial blog site for my friend, and I finished at 3 A.M. (I don't know if you're familiar with the genre, but I've done two others in 2003, one for my uncle, because I couldn't make it to his funeral, and one for a dear professor who passed away a month later--you can see that one here).

In some ways, I built the site as much for me as for the community that had given me so much. It was a way to deal with my grief, to honor and give expression to all the different aspects of her life, and to give the virtual communities which were so much a part of her life a place, a focal point to express their feelings as well.

My heart is still so full at the incredible response to this site, and people are still subscribing, still leaving guestbook entries. Someone contacted me about the memorial service in Haines on Sunday, wondering if I could in some way host an open chat space for a virtual memorial service at the same time, maybe in Second Life, something we had done in the Xena Palace back in the day, when "Xena" was still on the air. It was an amazing thing I documented in my dissertation, online funerals and weddings, other parties.

But this is 10 years later. Theorists write about the "strength of weak ties," but what I'm finding right now is that these ties are not weak at all, were never weak. I saw it in the way the news swept around the globe, swept across cyberspace, within hours, within days.

This is something corporate interests can never duplicate, bottle, or harness. That is the sheer beauty of it. It is something true, real, and moving. It is dynamic, empowering, and bottom-up.

I made this blog because my friend will never have a gravestone, and because she has no other family but us, so this site is her gravestone in cyberspace, a place where her people, her tribe, can find her, can remember her and tell tales of her great deeds like they were stories told around the campfire, to be passed on.

I did not create the site. I just gave it a platform, and like any memorial service, the people who come to speak about the person we've lost are authoring the space into existence with the shape of their words, their feelings, their memories.

I know I'm getting sentimental here, but I'm just in awe of what is happening, and I have no one else outside of that group to tell about it, to share the story with.

Chris

How seriously do you take citizen journalism?

Blogger Jailed After Defying Court Orders

By JESSE McKINLEY
New York Times
Published: August 2, 2006

A freelance journalist and blogger was jailed on Tuesday after refusing to turn over video he took at an anticapitalist protest here last summer and after refusing to testify before a grand jury looking into accusations that crimes were committed at the protest.

The freelancer, Josh Wolf, 24, was taken into custody just before noon after a hearing in front of Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court. Found in contempt, Mr. Wolf was later moved to a federal prison in Dublin, Calif., and could be imprisoned until next summer, when the grand jury term expires, said his lawyer, Jose Luis Fuentes.

Earlier this year, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Mr. Wolf to testify before a grand jury and turn over video from the demonstration, held in the Mission District on July 8, 2005. The protest, tied to a Group of 8 meeting of world economic leaders in Scotland, ended in a clash between demonstrators and the San Francisco police, with one officer sustaining a fractured skull.

A smoke bomb or a firework was also put under a police car, and investigators are looking into whether arson was attempted on a government-financed vehicle.

Mr. Wolf, who posted some of the edited video on his Web site, www.joshwolf.net, and sold some of it to local television stations, met with investigators, who wanted to see the raw video. But Mr. Wolf refused to hand over the tapes, arguing that he had the right as a journalist to shield his sources.

On Tuesday, Judge Alsup disagreed, ruling that the grand jury “has a legitimate need” to see what Mr. Wolf filmed.

READ: NYTimes: Blogger Jailed After Defying Court Orders

Meeting Announcements and a New Blog

Hi Everyone,

Reminder that the Atlanta Media Blogger's Group will be meeting this THURSDAY, August 17 at 7:00 PM at The Loop Pizza Grill and not on Wednesday. Dan Greenfield of Earthlink will be leading the discussion. I will get there earlier in the day to try put a fan in the loft in the attempt to ensure that it is usable.

Also, please mark your calendars for the Atlanta Electronic Commerce Forum lunch meeting at the Cobb Galeria. The discussion is on Intellectual Property Rights on an Open Web. Steve Wigmore, an Attorney from King & Spalding will be presenting. We could use some enlightened questions from this group.

Finally, I just launched the Atlanta Electronic Commerce Forum blog. The online forum for Fortune 1000 companies and other organizations to discuss best practices for electronically conducting business with their customers, suppliers and distributors. Check it out and please help me in building this community. Thanks

Attacking Citizen Journalism

Hey Jim Stroud, Didn't you recently find an article that stated that bloggers had the same rights as Journalist?

http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2006/08/03/feds_jail_blogger/

Feds Jail Blogger

In the first known case of a blogger being jailed by federal authorities, freelance journalist and blogger Josh Wolf was jailed Tuesday after refusing to turn over video he took at an anti-capitalist protest in San Francisco and for not testifying before a grand jury examining whether crimes took place at the protest, writes the New York Times.

...But he refused to hand over the tapes to investigators, arguing that he had the right as a journalist to shield his sources