Democracy at it’s finest - TwitterVoteReport.com
November 4, 2008
(Reposted from the Harbrooke Group Blog).
This post is party-neutral, but 100% American. Here is an example that DeTocqueville would have been happy to report on, had he lived several hundred years. 
Twitter Vote Report has enabled people to directly report on their voting experience, including if they had issues with machines, polling places, how long the line is.
Look at the Americans, from all over the country, letting people know that they have voted, and more importantly, pointing out the flaws so they can be quickly fixed to ensure fair elections. I’ll be Twittering my vote report today.
Twitter Vote Report » Spread the word
On November 4th 2008, millions of Americans will go to over 200,000 distinct voting locations and using different systems and machinery to vote. Some voters will have a terrific experiences, and others will experience the same problems we have been hearing about for years - long lines, broken machines, inaccurate voting rolls, and others will experience problems that we haven’t heard about before. That’s why a new citizen-driven election monitoring system called Twitter Vote Report (www.twittervotereport.com) was just launched. Using either Twitter.com, iPhone, direct SMS, or our telephone hotlines, voters will have a new way to share their experiences with one another and ensure that the media and watchdog groups are aware of any problems.And YOU can help! Be a citizen journalist! Submit a report about conditions at your polling place.
Clients sometimes ask what value Social Media brings to our society. This is a great example of collective, mostly de-centralized action for a cause. Imagine what your company could do for its customers if some percentage of them had a reason to care this much about something.
The Bigger Tent
September 23, 2008
Wednesday, 9/24 in NYC, Social Media Club is going to welcome Dan Patterson, a blogger, podcaster, and professional journalist, and Ann Cooper, who teaches at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. Ann has worked as a reporter for newspapers, magazines, and National Public Radio, and was the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Recently, Ann published this article at the Columbia Journalism Review:
And so it went for a few years, bloggers versus journalists; a fight over much more than semantics, a fight to see whether the big tent of American journalism would become a bigger tent to accommodate the newcomers and their new ideas. Who belongs in that tent, and who gets to decide who’s in it? Put another way: Who is a journalist? It’s a tantalizing question, but it’s hardly worth asking anymore.
This is the subject of our meeting tomorrow night. There are journalistic acts happening everywhere online, by bloggers and journalists alike. How do we know the difference, when is the difference important, and who decides?
On a side note, I’ve been blogging for 10 years, but not until I got picked up by a mainstream business publication did I start getting offers of “press passes.” So it seems the lines are still pretty blurry.
UPDATE: More food for thought from Max Gladwell:BlogWorld 2008: The Line Between Blogging and Journalism
This is an important question, and I hope you’ll attend if you’re in NYC, and support our chapter there.
Join us Today for Social Media Club Hour - a Show on Blog Talk Radio
August 31, 2007
After speaking with Lisa Padilla from Blog Talk Radio and Mike McGrath from Tacit Partners (also one of of the Silicon Valley chapter leaders) at last week’s Silicon Valley gathering, we decided to move forward with a new show for Social Media Club on Blog Talk Radio. In a short while, at 10am PST today on Friday August 31, we will be doing the first episode, with Robert Scoble as our special guest.
This show’s focus is Authenticity, Credibility and Authority in Social Media. From my personal perspective, I was thinking that the blessings of our tool’s capabilities for instant publishing have the potential to be a curse. Of course, I experienced a somewhat funnier (and slightly different) version of this double edged sword last week, showing up on Valleywag for a short video interview I did which was dubbed “Geeks Gone Wild“. In agreeing to do an on camera interview for a topic I was not prepared to really discuss, I ended up looking a bit silly, requiring me to do several hours of research and writing to clearly illuminate what I was trying to say. Of course video is completely different from writing, but it is an interesting parallel in some ways, especially in light of the need to do so much research in forming a coherent explanation of my point.
In the early days of the Web, when email was just going mainstream, we used to talk about the need to walk away for a bit after writing something important to consider what was written and come back to it with fresh eyes. I don’t hear that discussion all that often around Blogging - whether it is reporting, opinion or deeper thought pieces. While everyone is different, there are clearly many who think that the key to success in Blogging is publishing first and fast to “just get it out there”. I have had several discussions with Robert Scoble about this over the last couple years and I think this is going to be a great talk today, delving into the deeper issues surrounding the importance of “how we approach our use of social media tools”.
While we still need to figure things out with regards to the show’s format, I think this is going to be a great experiment and ongoing effort of the club. It begins to move forward one of my original visions for the club - finding ways for those of us who care about Social Media to collaborate globally in an effort to share best practices and learn from one another. We are approaching this show differently than others you may have seen out there - each episode will be hosted by a different person from one of our many Social Media Club chapters around the world… So in essence, the members of the club will be creating this show together!
So join us today for the Social Media Club Hour on Blog Talk Radio, and call in even to share your thoughts, we would love to hear from you!
Bloggers Wanted Here - Important Survey
June 18, 2007
Good morning! Back from Las Vegas in one piece, without a hangover and ready to get to work.
The Social Media Workshop and the FAST Track Future of Media events I helped facilitate last week were filled with excellent conversations that touched upon trust as crucial to the success of Social Media and the need for social media and traditional media to work together. From my perspective, it is very important to understand these essential aspects of our new world better. Which is why I was excited to learn from my friend Sally Falkow about a new survey from our organization partner (and good friends) at the Society for New Communications Research. Its’ goal is to better understand “How Bloggers Source and Use News Content.”
If you blog, I strongly encourage you to complete this survey, to help us all gain more respect and understand where we can improve in our educational efforts.
Social Media Club New York, 5/31
June 1, 2007
Last night’s Social Media Club meeting in New York hosted Craig Newmark of Craig’s List. The 65 or so attendees saw Craig speak of the list, building online community, and his other interests in philanthropy (see Craigslist Foundation) and journalism that takes on powerful interests. He mentioned politics several times, and specifically called out Tech President as one of the things he had an interest in supporting. (disclosure: I know the folks who run that site for years.) Since I was moderating I did not take good notes so here is a roundup from others:
Donna Bogatin of ZDNet wrote up her take on the meeting.
Attendee Allen Stern of Center Networks blogged the discussion and also has an audio recording of the Social Media Club meeting (MP3, about 1 hr, 20MB) for those who missed the meeting.
Over on PRBlog News, Mark Rose has his take on the meeting including a poor photo of yours truly and some cynical takes on Craig and some of the discussion.
Jeffrey Keefer also blogged it.
Send more blog posts or links to me, or leave them in the comments.
One item that came up was organizing the NY chapter and volunteers. See the NY Wiki Page for more on that. Those interested in the NY mailing list can find a link here.
Thanks to Craig for attending. A special note of thanks to Steve Eisenberg of the Client Service Network, who went above and beyond the call of duty to get food and drink to the meeting. Thanks to Laurence Koret of Starlight Media for helping out and thanks to David Bradfield and Fleishman-Hillard for hosting. UPDATE: Also, thanks to Laura Allen from 15 Second pitch for being our ‘check in person’ and to Frank Casale from the Outsourcing Institute for answering the door over and over again!
Reflections on SMC Atlanta Event
May 31, 2007
Last night’s Social Media Club meeting focused on the the changing face of media, and a phrase ending with “…the people formerly known as the audience.” The setup was a little different than usual, because we had a set topic and a slate of specific presenters (Steve Riley from WSB-TV and Marlon Manuel from the AJC) rather than the usual and flatter setup of all “participants” who might also be presenters as part of the meeting. The objective was to look at how those organizations view the current media space, and that’s why we had them set up as panelists. That did serve to change things up…
To read more of the story, please visit the Earthlink blog.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
April 24, 2007
Saw a Tweet from Jeremiah Owyang giving a nod to his boss John Furrier for standing up for his team, and then saw Robert Scoble’s post at the heart of it all, telling people he was going to hang out in the hallway at Microsoft’s Mix 07 Conference since he did not have a conference pass. Apparently, Alfred Thompson thinks that conferences like Mix 07 should only be attended by and reported on, by “people inside the trenches”, “whose business it is to not only understand but use this technology?” He sees little value to the media, and thinks Robert “is a writer for the popular press no real different from some reporter from Wired magazine.” (he also thinks Robert is a nice guy, so don’t go jumping on him for expressing his opinion)
You can think whatever you want about Robert, even insist that he has no real influence in the mainstream portions of society and that he is only important within the Blogosphere’s echo chamber, but that is missing the real point. You can’t marginalize anyone based on the role they are serving in society, especially when that someone has proven themselves to be a good person, worthy and deserving of the trust placed in them by others to shape their opinions of the world. Einstein was famously a patent clerk. Hundreds of important contributors to the advancement of society have held mundane, or even ‘dirty’ jobs.
This is not about Robert and Alfred though, this is about the need to respect other people and not be dismissive of the potential value they can contribute out of hand, for the title they hold or role they serve. For too long we have easily dismissed ‘the media’, ‘the marketing people’, ‘the geeks’ and, as Mary Hodder talked about on her panel at Podcast Hotel the other day, ‘the others’ because they are not like us.
Now, from reading the conversation (via the comments), it seems that Alfred is a pretty decent guy, honest and genuine - but when I read statements such as “Don’t you really want to hear from someone like you?”, it makes me cringe. This is, of course, ok because we like hanging out with people like us, they are our friends, our tribes and our families generally, but we should really find a better way to include more diverse perspectives within the context of conferences such as Mix, Web 2.0 and others. To be clear, I don’t feel the same way about conferences on the latest advances in neuroscience, or white-hat hacking or other very focused professional topics. This is not to say that programming is not a professional topic, it is, but the profession of programming includes many levels of skills and areas of expertise that are important for everyone’s success. (DBA, SYSADMIN, CODE, ARCHITECT, UI, QA and ACTIVE USER to name a few)
Over the past several years, one of the things I have been talking to people about is how much economic value (and hard cash) has been wasted as a result of the marketing people and the technical people not getting along. Trillions of dollars have probably been lost as a result of the fact that these two roles are filled by different types of people - people who are not like each other in many ways (not all the time, I know plenty of people who successfully translate between the two groups or who serve both roles). As I have constantly stated, in the knowledge economy the most important aspect of creating value is the ability of smart people to collaborate with one another. The value of cultural diversity is widely known and lauded, but many people often insist on only hearing and participating in monocultural discussions.
BTW - This is not to say that there can be some really silly things that come from people who don’t understand what we are talking about, which is what I believe Alfred is trying to protect against - along with preventing media from misreporting the story. Indeed, we should create contexts in which experts can gather and explore their expertise, going deeper and advancing their industry/market - this is in fact, a part of our vision with Social Media Club as well. The real issue though is that we should work to create contexts for all of these types of conversations to take place and create good signals about them (via tags and syndicated distribution) so that the right sort of people, with similar expectations participate.
From my perspective, Alfred’s point about Blogs (and direct reporting from ‘experts in the trenches’) replacing the need for mainstream media, actually supports the inclusion of people like Robert and other’s who are ‘not like him’ (Alfred). By this I mean to say, that Blogging is transforming the very nature in which we interact with news and knowledge and each other. It is no longer the one way communications of a static newspaper article, but it is a conversation, with ebb and flow, moving the participants to a deeper understanding through the back and forth exchange and thereby correcting mistakes in early reporting and resolving misinterpretations for the benefit of all.
What is it going to take to open up our discussions and our perspectives, to include more divergent observations, insights and points of view?
Social Media Now: MSM Co-opts CitJ
April 17, 2007
Coverage of yesterday’s horrific massacre at Virginia Tech was hardly a showpiece for semi-pro and citizen journalist.
Contrary to the reports of boosters, like Amy Gahran at Poynter Online who called it “Another Sad but Seminal Day for CitJ,” those who would denigrate the whole idea of citizen journalism got plenty of ammo from bloggers who raced to mistakenly identify the shooter.
Another blog, by a self-identified assistant physics professor in Massachusetts got closer with outlines of the story vaguely correct, but again with the wrong person named.
The semi-pros did a better job particularly given how prepared Blacksburg is. (Tom Watson and I first covered Blacksburg’s groundbreaking municipal Internet initiative, the Blacksburg Electronic Village, for The New York Times in 1996.) The Virginia Tech student newspaper, Collegiate Times, posted minute by minute updates throughout the day, even though the paper’s own servers were down. But for a news operation on the scene, staffed by peers of the victims AND the shooter, the CT coverage was remarkably thin–few photos, little comment from students, and NO investigation. Hard to believe that at the very least the paper’s editors didn’t start tugging at the thread of the earlier murders, looking for witnesses and others, given that they were sitting on top of the biggest news story ever to hit Blacksburg.
Planet Blacksburg–a pioneering, student run Web-based newspaper–was slower and more considered in its updates, but failed to advance the story beyond what was being reported by the much maligned “MSM” and didn’t deliver any deeper, inside sense of the events or mood on campus.
The most successful social coverage of the event was Wikipedia’s which was updated and edited in real time much in the way traditional news coverage is called in by stringers, edited and published. But this was entirely collaborative. If this is the future of citizen journalism, then the future is bright indeed!
Blog attempts to record and respond to events–first and second person accounts were interesting but not more informative than what was available on CNN or MSNBC, in part because those broadcast outlets were busy soliciting Internet contributions from amateurs with almost distasteful aggressiveness. CNN was calling for submissions the way traffic reporters ask for drivers to call in from cell phones. But they had plenty of accidental material on air, including cellphone video whose audio track captured the massacre.
It seems to me that citizen journalism, at least of breaking news events, works by sheer dumb luck–someone is in the right place at the right time with a camera like Virginia Tech engineering grad student Jamal Albarghouti whose cell phone video which capture the sound of gunshots became the cornerstone of CNN’s coverage. MSM is well on the way to fully co-opting citizen coverage of breaking events.
Facebook was flooded by members creating greif groups–the cyber equivalent of leaving flowers at the scene of a tragedy–and the social network served to connect friends across campuses where once telephone calls did the trick.
I don’t want to lose perspective. The important thing to remember is that 33 people lost their lives to the senseless mayhem of a psychotic killer. But despite all the blather, citizen journalism didn’t get much of a boost yesterday.
UPDATE: Citizen journalism, and blogging in particular, is proving to be better at investigative journalism than it is at breaking news. Students in the shooter’s playwriting class offered memories of creepy, violent plays to the Collegiate Times, and a former classmate Ian Macfarlane, now an AOL employee, acutally posted two of the plays, as well as this chilling memory:
When we read Cho’s plays, it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence that used weapons I wouldn’t have even thought of. Before Cho got to class that day, we students were talking to each other with serious worry about whether he could be a school shooter. I was even thinking of scenarios of what I would do in case he did come in with a gun, I was that freaked out about him. When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap. Even the professor didn’t pressure him to give closing comments.
Social Media Now: Think Locally, Surf Regionally
April 2, 2007
Maybe it’s because I started my career in the community newspaper business, but for whatever reason I love local news. When I travel I make a point of seeking out small papers in tiny communities across the world and voraciously devour all the details of local land use battles, trash schedules and school sports. Working in community journalism also was fabulous preparation for Internet journalism. Unlike journalists at major metro institutions like The New York Times (for whom I also worked), community journalists work in a world where sources, advertisers and readers come from the same small universe and where readers regularly walk into the office to shout in your face.
But for some reason the 10 year old effort to drag community journalism onto the Net has largely failed and not for a lack of effort by companies both big and small. (The first effort to harness citizen journalism that I recall was a 1992 print effort by Jedd Gould in Connecticut that lasted a decade before going the of many community newspapers.)
The era of citizen journalism has inspired a new round of local online news efforts–including the recently launched outside.in, founded by my old Silicon Alley colleague Steven Johnson. The latest effort comes from Topix. The company, which is majority owned by three major newspaper companies and which previously organized search results according to local parameters, announced over the weekend the launch of Topix.com–a revamp of its local news business built around community-edited blogs.
Topix CEO Rich Skrenta has a great blog post explaining the process by which Topix came to the decision to revamp. The post should serve as a model for corporate communications and transparency and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in the Internet publishing business. The most interesting part of Skrenta’s discussion revolves around creating an instantly identifiable visual metaphor for the new site, allowing users to enter without effort. Mission accomplished. The Topix.com local pages look great and the blog-style layout is effortless to enter. But there’s little yet in the way of community contributed news (almost all the news on my local site came from a nearby Gannet paper–Gannet is an investor in Topix).
A lot of links to the story this morning–from Techcrunch to paidContent to Mashable–but nothing really in the way of analysis although Frank Gruber has a nice description of the new feature set. Even if it were just a matter of reorganizing its offerings to make them more accessible the Topix revamp would be a good one, but will it be enough to awaken local news online? Is local news the sleeping giant of the Internet in the era of citizen journalism?
Maybe. Certainly local information is as at home on the Net as any other kind of information. Already a generation of people use the Internet to look up movie times, peruse local restaurant menus, check the dates of recycling pick ups, and buy and sell used stuff. These things once formed the lifeblood of newspapers and their online migration goes a long way towards explaining the continuing economic demise of that business.
And in large cities like New York there are enough people in any given neighborhood for one or two people to emerge who are engaged enough to contribute and participate in local issues online. But as the focus of a local site narrows, finding those individuals becomes increasingly difficult, and of course the audience of interested parties becomes smaller. In addition, the smaller the community the more likely it is that those who care about, say, school board meetings or village trustee meetings are the people who actually attend those meetings in the first place (I wonder how the ratings for public access airings of town board meetings compare with the attendance that those meetings). Certainly major issues can stimulate community involvement online, but you can’t build a predictable business on the hope of a steady stream of major issues effecting small communities.
If I were in the local online business today I would be less concerned with citizen journalism and more concerned with socially enabled regional directories, but that’s just me.
BTW….it’s off topic but kudos to EMI for offering DRM-free music compressed at higher sampling rates. Now if the industry would just embrace flac we’d really be on to something.
Link love:
Ballhype - Social Media Sports Done Right
Social Media Club, NYC, 3/27/07
March 28, 2007
A fascinating Social Media Club meeting in NYC last night, covered well by Jason who led the discussion after Jay Rosen’s discussion of NewAssignment.net. Thanks to Jay for coming and for sharing what’s going on in this groundbreaking experiment.
I don’t have much time to do a full recap, but thanks to posts by