Atlanta Media Bloggers

My five

I was recently slammed, so now I must comply. Here goes...

1. I used to play the trumpet in grade school.
2. I love comics and have several boxes of comics collecting dust in my attic. 
3. I was once a prolific screenwriter.
4. I used to publish an ezine of bizarre crime fiction.
5. I have directed several music videos.

Okay, so now I have to tag 5 more bloggers. Let me see, hmmm...

Amybeth Hale
Sherry Heyl
Cheezhead
The Chad
Gretchen Ledgard

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

Lucasfilm "gets" the new media (obviously)

Lucasfilm has been informed that YouTube recently removed from its site several fan-made Star Wars spoofs and parodies. We would like the fan film community to know that this was not done at our request.

Apparently the action was taken by YouTube as a result of a misunderstanding of a request to remove an item containing material taken from starwars.com without our permission. We have asked YouTube to restore any works that they inadvertently removed.

 

SOURCE: YouTube and fan-made Star Wars videos

VIDEO - The Day of The Long Tail

Movie Trailer: In celebration of the publication of Chris Anderson's book, "The Long Tail," The old world of media faces an invasion from another planet. The horror. The horror. (By Michael Markman, Peter Hirshberg, Bob Kalsey; Produced for The Computer History Museum)

Funny... and oh, so true!

Will Digg for money

Netscape boss Jason Calacanis is showing the money to the top users on Digg, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit for $1000.00 per month. Check out this lil' snippet from his blog...

..snip-snip..

Before launching the new Netscape I realized that Reddit, NewsVine, Delicious, and DIGG were all driven by a small number of highly-active users. I wrote a blog post about what drives these folks to do an hour to three hours a day of work for these sites which are not paying them for their time. In other words, they are volunteering their services. The response most of these folks gave back to me were that they enjoyed sharing the links they found and that they got satisfaction out of being an "expert" or "leader" in their communities.

Excellent... excellent (say that in a Darth Vadar/Darth Calacanis voice for extra impact).

That is exactly what bloggers told Brian and I three years ago when we started. Given that, I have an offer to the top 50 users on any of the major social news/bookmarking sites:

We will pay you $1,000 a month for your "social bookmarking" rights. Put in at least 150 stories a month and we'll give you $12,000 a year. (note: most of these folks put in 250-400 stories a month, so that 150 baseline is just that--a baseline).

Read: Paying the top DIGG/REDDIT/Flickr/Newsvine users (or "$1,000 a month for doing what you're already doing.")

Woman fired for blogging (Keep an eye on this one)

A 33-year-old British secretary has launched a test case before a French employment tribunal after bring sacked from her company for writing a blog about her day-to-day life in Paris.

The blog - written under the pseudonym "La Petite Anglaise" - has built up a sizeable international following over the last two years, with up to 3000 people a day reading diary-style accounts about work, relationships and the travails of single-motherhood.

But in April Catherine - she refuses to give her family name - was called in by superiors at the Paris office of British accounting firm Dixon Wilson and told she was being dismissed for gross misconduct.

After working out her notice, Catherine today posted news of her dismissal and impending legal case for the first time on her blog - http://www.petiteanglaise.com - prompting a flood of sympathetic comments from readers.

"In the dismissal letter they told me I had brought the company into disrepute, but I never once referred to it or the people there by name," Catherine told AFP.

Managers had also discovered from reading the blog that on two occasions she had lied about having nanny problems to take the afternoon off, Catherine said. And they objected to her using the computer in office hours to write the blog.

"I can understand why they might have felt a little aggrieved, but I cannot accept that it is a sackable offence. It was a gross over-reaction. Only a few days before I'd been told how good my work was," she said.

The case - one of the first of its kind in France - will be brought before the "prud'hommes" or labour tribunals later this year, and Catherine's lawyer is pressing for an award of two years' salary.

READ: Secretary sacked for blogging

The Rule of 1%

After our discussions on user-generated conent, I thought my fellow Atlanta Media Bloggers would find this interesting. (I wonder how many will interact with this post?)

***

It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it.

It's a meme that emerges strongly in statistics from YouTube, which in just 18 months has gone from zero to 60% of all online video viewing.

The numbers are revealing: each day there are 100 million downloads and 65,000 uploads - which as Antony Mayfield (at http://open.typepad.com/open) points out, is 1,538 downloads per upload - and 20m unique users per month.

That puts the "creator to consumer" ratio at just 0.5%, but it's early days yet; not everyone has discovered YouTube (and it does make downloading much easier than uploading, because any web page can host a YouTube link).

Consider, too, some statistics from that other community content generation project, Wikipedia: 50% of all Wikipedia article edits are done by 0.7% of users, and more than 70% of all articles have been written by just 1.8% of all users, according to the Church of the Customer blog (http://customerevangelists.typepad.com/blog/).

Earlier metrics garnered from community sites suggested that about 80% of content was produced by 20% of the users, but the growing number of data points is creating a clearer picture of how Web 2.0 groups need to think. For instance, a site that demands too much interaction and content generation from users will see nine out of 10 people just pass by.

***

READ: What is the 1% rule?

COMIC: Blogging For Dollars #4

Blogging For Dollars by: Jim Stroud and Gnomz

The Air Force is studying blogs

Had to share this one!

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The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has begun funding a new research area that includes a study of blogs.

Blog research may provide information analysts and warfighters with invaluable help in fighting the war on terrorism.

Drs. Brian Ulicny, senior scientist, and Mieczyslaw Kokar, president, Versatile Information Systems Inc., Framingham, Mass., will receive approximately $450,000 in funding for the three-year project titled, "Automated Ontologically-Based Link Analysis of International Web Logs for the Timely Discovery of Relevant and Credible Information."

"It can be challenging (for information analysts) to tell what's important in blogs unless you analyze patterns," Dr. Ulicny said.

Patterns include the content of the blogs as well as what hyperlinks are contained within the blog. Within blogs, hyperlinks act like reference citations in research papers, allowing someone to discover the most important events bloggers are writing about. This is the same way a person can find the most important papers in a field by finding which ones are cited most often in research papers. This type of analysis can help information analysts' searches be as productive as possible.

The blog study is part of AFOSR's new Information Forensics and Process Integration research program at Syracuse University in New York. The new portfolio of projects consists of three areas of research emphasis: incomplete information and metrics; search, interactive design and active querying; and cognitive processing.

READ: Blogs study may net credible information

Blogging For Dollars #3

Blogging For Dollars by: Jim Stroud and Gnomz