From PressThink: The Importance of Being Permanent:
Without permanence you slip off the search engines. Without permanence, bold ideas like ‘news as conversation’ fall away, because you’re shutting down the conversation before it has barely started. Without permanence, you might be on the web, but you’re certainly not part of it.
Naming is important. Would you satisfy with this one?
Citizen journalism, also known as “participatory journalism” is the act of citizens “playing an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and disseminating news and information,” according to the seminal report, We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information, by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. They say, “The intent of this participation is to provide independent, reliable, accurate, wide-ranging and relevant information that a democracy requires.”
“Public journalism” can refer to this journalism work by ordinary people, or it can mean certain work or aspects or work by professional journalists. The latter meaning is also often called “civic journalism”.
From What is The Message?:
If you would like a rare view of someone experiencing the McLuhan Vortex – McLuhan, of course, having been strongly influenced by the “Vorticists,” Eliot, Yeats, Joyce – you simply must see the course weblog for this semester’s Mind, Media and Society II. On the blog so far, class members are asked to reflect, react and respond to both selected readings and the class seminars. “Bad” Bruce has certainly been caught in the McLuhan vortex, as you can tell from his response to this passage from Understanding Media:
CNET News: Can Internet volunteers improve journalism? Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales is out to find out.
Wikipedia is a very successful online encyclopedia written and edited by thousands of volunteers. Now they are trying the collaborative wiki process on news.
The project, called Wikinews, is in its early stages and faces clear challenges, from the difficulty of doing original reporting to delivering news quickly in a peer review model.
Then why do it? Wales and others think that the mainstream media have let slip their pledges of objectivity and commitments to high-quality journalism. The goal of Wikinews is to give the straight story, neutral and unbiased. And to get the facts right–an area where mainstream media has lost some credibility.
From A Theory of Power, Jeff Vail’s Critique of Hierarchy & Empire: Swarming, Open-Source Warfare and the Black Block
Swarming is an ancient military tactic—in fact, Alexander the Great pioneered the first effective counter-swarming maneuver over 2,000 years ago. However, it is also one of the most contemporary of military topics: how to defeat asymmetrical swarming tactics in counter-insurgency operations, how to effectively employ swarming in a modern military, etc. In the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, the anarchist “Black Block” pioneered a new form of swarming technique by using text-messaging and cell phones. Swarming has been at the cutting edge of military theory of millennia, but what is it? I hope to answer that question, and explain why it is the most compatible tactic for rhizome and open-source warfare. I will also examine how swarming works, what factors are critical to its success, and how it may be employed in the future by non-hierarchal forces to effectively confront the modern, hierarchal military.
