Citizen-Generated Media (CGM)

All Things Felonious

CrimeSpot.net is a portal for all the crime writers and wannabes in the country.  It’s really a site about writing, but as crime is one of the most commercial of all genres, the bulk of articles and advice are aimed at the budding Edgar Allen Poes, Ed McBains, and Agatha Christies of the world.

New Research Reveals How Blogs Revolutionize The Way Human Beings Connect

I decided to go ahead and post my boring press release...

New Book demonstrates the influence and power of Citizen-Generated Media.

New York, NY (PRWEB) August 17, 2006 -- With tens of thousands of blogs being created every day, the communications landscape is changing faster than ever before. In response to the emerging significance of blogging, R. Scott Hall, author of The Blog Ahead: How Citizen-Generated Media Is Radically Tilting The Communications Balance, sheds light on the art of blogging. Hall’s book teaches people how to use blogging as a tool to make their businesses, no matter the size, into a more consumer-friendly, customer-satisfying corporate outreach. The book demonstrates how progressive business owners can use blogs to emotionally connect with their clients resulting in a deeper relationship.

“Bloggers are at the forefront of the greatest change in communication since the Gutenberg press,” states Scott Hall. “Individuals with no establishment connections can connect with millions worldwide, relying solely on the power of their ideas and their prose to connect with and influence an audience that print journalists and authors could only dream of.”

“The blogging phenomenon has remarkable adaptability to everything from corporate communications to kids’ interactive diaries on MySpace.com.” says Hall. Hall shows not only why Blogging transcends more traditional communication forms but also how it works in a variety of settings. Hall’s book features a wealth of humorous and inspiring specific examples of what blogging makes possible that traditional media can’t.

For instance, readers will learn about various web conferencing sites such as Squidoo, a site created by Marketing Expert Seth Godin. Squidoo allows users to create a lens that will focus attention back to their particular blog or web page. Hall’s book goes on to list various strategies that enable individuals and companies to utilize blogs effectively.

Hall’s inspiration to share his knowledge of blogging began as he realized the huge impact that the Internet would have on communications. While working at CompuServe as a sales person, Hall witnessed how a company with 4 million subscribers could be beat at their own game by a rival company, AOL, with class act marketing.

After listening to a talk given by Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist.org, a famous free classified advertising and social networking web destination, Hall realized that new media was going to revolutionize communications, allowing everyone to have their opinion heard. In his talk, Newmark of Craigslist.org proclaimed that, “The internet was everyone’s printing press.”

As Hall began to shape his book he realized that one of the great benefits of blogging is allowing people of diverse backgrounds and interests to find and connect with like-minded colleagues despite geographical barriers. Hall’s book will teach you specifically how to use blogging as a tool to connect with like-minded thinkers and even those with divergent ideas on any given subject. Blogging is literally shrinking our world and Hall’s book shares the ways you can influence people on any issue anywhere in the world.

Information workers of all kind are calling The Blog Ahead a must read as it outlines a global meta-view of the very complex transmogrification that the media is undergoing and the implications that come because of an ever shrinking globe.

The Blog Ahead Launches...Finally!

Here is a little book descriptor I stumbled upon that I had written this spring and I thought it worthy of posting as opposed to a boring old Press Release...

The Blog Ahead is written to discuss the advancement of higher level discovery and communication taking place due to the global blogging phenomenon.  A discussion of both historical communication and theories on communication, both recent and distant, are brought together to give context to the existing tipping point occurring on the web.

I keynote excerpts and analysis of conversations (blogs) primarily in the political, legal, media and business realms.  Interjecting keen, well-supported and sometimes humorous content, one of the key themes - the idea of an entirely new prototype for global communication virtually being responsible for a new tangibility of the human mind – is explored.

The Permanence of Blogging

Writing became the pipeline that allowed precise messages to be passed on to subsequent generations.  From inscriptions carved on hardened stone to mass-produced copies of books, the words of ancestors long gone remained to haunt or instruct, in a manner that made our species quite unique.  No longer did distortions caused by word of mouth dilution threaten to wipe out the meaning of the original message.

The last decade has seen a democratization of the ongoing human dialogue, driven by new technologies and the realization that cooperation among tribes makes more survival sense in a world of plenty than a state of permanent warfare.  But there is a growing feeling that words in the ether lack the gravitas that words printed on paper possess. Blogging has an immediacy about it and has become a preferred path for rumor and instantaneous comment.  But will the blogposts of today be around tomorrow like all the great books are?

In the past, libraries were funded because leaders saw the value of safeguarding the ebb and flow of creativity, but the blogosphere and its cyber-father, the Internet, have bloomed into great cultural institutions without the parallel sense that their content is precious and should be saved and archived in a Cyber-Library of Congress. 

It's probably safe to predict that the behemoths of the blogosphere like Slashdot and Boing Boing will exist in some archival form for years to come, but what about the millions of less important blogs created by teenagers and others for their own edification?  These may be as important for future generations as the Drudge Report and Huffington Post seem to be for ours, but for reasons yet to be articulated. 

It is not difficult to imagine a future historian mining thousands of these typical online diaries to track the evolution of language or to define the evolution of social trends, much as present-day historians pour over sales records and crop diaries of the Civil War period to paint a more complete portrait of slavery or of technological development. 

There are already attempts being made to archive all the early, and now defunct, history of the Internet, but the sheer mass of blogging verbiage and its mostly ephemeral nature suggest that blogs might not be treated with the same degree of curator love as the iconic early web.  It would take a government or a corporation with extraordinary foresight and the guts to stick to a long-range vision to implement a kind of Cyber Repository open to all.  Are there any takers out there? 

Digital Rights Management and Hackers

The Krupp steel manufacturing facility in Germany played a deadly game during the late 19^th and early 20^th Centuries.  They would manufacture cannons that would penetrate the best armor, then develop better armor that would resist the new cannons.  Krupp did this many times, actually contributing to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.  This is all documented in William Manchester’s magisterial book, The Arms of Krupp. I see a parallel between that and the history of Digital Rights Management software, which seeks to control the uses to which digital recordings can be put.  Every time a new rootkit is introduced, intrepid members of the hacker community devise stronger armor (software) to resist it.  This has been going on as long as digital media has been an economic force, and Ars Technica has published a good introductory history entitled “Hacking Digital Rights Management” by Nate Anderson.

Blog-Tracking

The National Journal has an ongoing feature that tracks the buzz in the political blogosphere.  The Blogometer is a good place to find new blogs you had never heard of before, as is the blog directory Blogarama.  Blogarama also has a page that archives articles on how to blog and who should, and yet another page that lists the 165 books (as of today) that have been published on the blog phenomenon.

And She Said...

Remember the study that claimed that Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica had roughly the same error rates, and the detailed refutation that Britannica published in response?  Well, Nature has decided to fight back.  That science journal published the original study, and has now revealed that it was a blinded study – reviewers did not know which entries came from Britannica and which from Wikipedia.  Perhaps Britannica’s wisest response might have been none at all.

Blogging For Suds

Glenn Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee who runs one of the most popular blogs around, Instapundit.  He has just published a book, An Army of Davids, in which he makes the following intriguing analogy.  The practice of journalism has much in common with the art of beer making.  With inexpensive equipment and little formal training, almost anyone can do either. 

Just as the micro-breweries can actually produce a beer that has taste and is not addressed to the bland requirements of the mass market; so too can bloggers provide depth or perspective on stories that the MSM either miss altogether or treat superficially.  A well-deserved tip o’ the hat (and glass) to The Economist for alerting me to this book.

Red States Plagiarism

It took all of one day for 24-year-old Ben Domenech to resign his new position as conservative “Red America” blogger for the Washington Post after examples of earlier plagiarism were posted by Daily Kos and others.   Domenech, who had taken Michael Moore to task for plagiarism in 2002, was found to have appropriated large chunks of P. J. O’Rourke’s book Modern Manners while a student journalist at the College of William and Mary.  It probably did not help his cause that he had recently written that President Bush should not have attended Coretta Scott King’s funeral because she was a Communist, which moved Media Matters watchdog David Brock to send a letter to Post officials demanding the sacking of this “bigoted blogger.” A compendium of additional outrageous statements by the not-so-Gentle Ben can be found at the Poor Man Institute website.  Domenech takes on his critics on his Red State blog, and the reader can judge if these justifications hold water, or leak like a sieve.  In one of those delicious synergies that sometimes occur in the blog world, the music critic for the New Yorker, Alex Ross, reports an instance of Domenech plagiarizing a classical music review written for the National Review, by lifting an Amazon review of a Chopin CD by Vladimir Horowitz’s last student, Edwardus Halim.  Mind your keystrokes, would-be journalists.  They will come back to haunt you if you’re not careful.  In a related post, Press Think’s Jay Rosen suggests that the Washington Post conduct a blog-off competition to replace the disgraced Domenech.  It’s a great idea, but ultimately too subversive for the meek Posties to adopt.  What of someone with actual literary talent and deep political sophistication came to the fore? It would expose all the other working journalists at the Beltway Daily Blatt for the poseurs they frequently are, masters of re-writing press releases and embellishing government spokesperson spin instead of probing investigators.

Blogger wins Journalism Award

Hunter College established its James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism in 1990, and this year, established a special category for bloggers.  The first blog winner is Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan who has been writing on Iraq ever since the war began.  Many people think Informed Comment is more accurate on matters Iraqi than any other source, be it newspaper, television program, or blog.