the Constant Observer

I almost died when I saw this auto advert from the 1950's on Flint Expatriates...



You know, I always wondered if there was more to all those guys with huge trucks than simply that some guys need them for off-road...esp. when so many guys keep them incredibly clean (for off-road vehicles, that is.)

Makes me wonder, too, what it says about guys who drive small cars...

Nowadays, could mean they have more money for dates than guys with big trucks!

Think about it....

Today, I absolutely rejoiced when I read Phil Elliott's interview with Club Penguin co-founder Lane Merrifield in gamesindustry.biz. Someone else gets that, when a company creates an online community (and I don't care if it's a virtual world or a message board,) moderation* is necessary to keep the inhabitants of that space safe from stupidity...by moderation, I mean some oversight of the dialogue going on. Doesn't mean every post has to be held, but it does mean the conversation should be humanly screened in some way...

When you keep a place safe through watching the conversation, you are laying the foundation for a civil environment. When you lay the foundation for a civil environment, you do not need to ask participants to disclose sensitive information about themselves.

Now, I can hear y'all bloatedly bluster: "but Merrifield is talking about the kid's virtual world (Club Penguin)! Of course *children* need to be protected online!"

Well, don't all of us need some protection when we enter an online community??? Think about it: If you've ever participated in an online community, you know that if you don't want to get flamed right out of the gate, you have to lurk. Some people never get past the lurking stage to participate, in part because it never feels totally safe. Perhaps they never feel totally safe because they may be asked to disclose more information about themselves than feels comfortable or right.

Oh, yes, I've heard the answers to this one: "Civility is all about disclosure! We have to do away with anonymity or else these users will just continue to behave like cretins!!" says Andrew Keen's echo...

Although, according to Merrifield, one of the ways in which they keep kids safe at Club Penguin is "we encourage kids to not reveal any sort of personal identifiable information. "

Gee, isn't that kind of like that old bugaboo ANONYMITY?? Oh my Lord! He's encouraging kids to be either pseudonymous or anonymous online so that they don't get hurt!

Isn't that what some of us were doing when we had screen names in those oldy-mouldy chat rooms and online communities at the dawn of the Internet? I believe so! Us super-early adopters knew there were risks, and wanted to keep ourselves safe while engaging in conversation. It's like not showing your driver's license to the guy you're chatting with at a bar...

Merrifield adds...."And we have huge filters and over 100 moderators to try and keep the world as safe as possible.

So, if you're going to have an online community where people will have their personal information kept safe, then you will need at least two things: (1) filters and (2)a sufficient number of moderators to make sure that community stays safe.

This seems like a total, logical no-brainer to me--and should be even more of a no-brainer when it comes to communities frequented by grown-ups. Let's face it: some folks might be grown in body, but that's no indication of the growth of their minds...let alone the old Id, the unbridled expression of which has been touted as "free speech" by people who just don't get that with such a big freedom can come equally big responsibility (I mean you Howard Stern, and all the other "shock jocks" out there. Yes, I blame shock jock-yness for the decline in civil public discourse. It started well before the Internet, and so were discussions about that decline...)

Back to online communities: I'd like to point y'all back to Clay Shirky's wonderful essay A Group is its own Worst Enemy" where he defines three persistent patterns in long-lived online communities. These patterns continue ad nauseum within online communities, whether they are hosted by newspapers or by corporations or other concerns. These are weird little quirks of human nature that even occur when we are totally non-anonymous in face to face environments (Shirky cites W.R. Bion's work in the mid 20th century...way before the Internet.)

When it comes to the human condition, online or off, the more things change, the more they stay the same. We behave in weird little ways in groups because we look to preserve the safety of that group (see Shirky.) Sure, a site may be able to get adults to disclose all the pertinent information that the Powers believe is necessary to create "civility." But the direction in which an online community de-volves can't necessarily be controlled by those Powers. People can be forced to surrender their full identities in order for them to participate in a community--but that might simply end up exposing them in ways they may be very uncomfortable and unsafe. By exposure, I do not mean just to malicious folks, but also exposure in search which is becoming more prevalent for information/social profiles we put online. (Google yourself and see what I mean...)

There is another aspect to Merrifield's interview that's of interest: the attitude about technology and community. Perhaps it is because he's working with children that he sees the "irresponsible nature of our industry" (towards children) and the "over-reliance on technology" as obstacles that had to be overcome in order to create a safe community.

I find it sad that this sort of care couldn't be extended to adults as well, and that human moderation is still thrown aside in favor of automated filters (CP has filters as well, but they work in concert with human beings--not as an efficient replacement for human beings.)

"Oh, but if we have all these moderators, won't we be treating the adults like babies??"

No--and here's why: whether you're a kid or an adult, online is a weird place. You can be chatting or exchanging messages with someone who tells you he/she is in one place, when he/she might even be next door. You might interpret someone's message syntax (if you get this far) to be female, when, in fact, you're chatting with a male. Everything about a profile can be faked to look like the person is real (stock photos touched up to make them look real, unverifiable addresses and other things.) There are no guarantees that the info a person submits to a site is their correct personal information. Most of the time the only verification is an active email address.

Bottom line: moderation is key to civility and safety in online communities. It doesn't have to be heavy-handed, and it can be assisted by technology--but it can't be done by one guy for thousands of messages (as I understand it has been at the Hartford Courant...)

If an industry--newspaper or otherwise--is going to skimp on moderation because of cost, or hires moderators who are either very inexperienced or hostile to the mores of online communities (because they've read too much Andrew Keen and think "why can't these idiots give up this anonymity crap!") then perhaps the industry has no business building an online community in the first place.

One addendum: if a site is developed that insists on full disclosure, there should be mechanisms in place that shields certain information from others. However, this is no guarantee that the information entrusted to you won't get into search--unless there is some mechanism to block search. What may end up happening is that the community will consist of only certain kinds of individuals who are comfortable living out in the open online. That may be fine if meeting the goals of your community require disclosure, but remember that your participation levels will be limited to certain kinds of folks. If you gain a good level of participation, then great! You may, however, have to live with a small, yet beautiful, community. Still, don't think some folks aren't going to try to spoof you with pseudonyms. There are no guarantees...

For further reading: Getting Commenters to Play Nice from my friends at Poynter.org. My only criticism: what about when the newspaper's staff doesn't play nice??

Chris Brogan's great On Managing a Community gives a step-by-step strategy for good community management.

and Francois Gossieaux's Understanding the power of communities--even when you do not have a critical mass of users--no matter how small your community, there's still a whole lot you can learn from your participants!

After a lively discussion with my friend Ronni Bennett of Time Goes By on how you just can't rely on Technorati to help you find links anymore (it's pretty much broken for that), I got to wondering if linking to other blogs was all that important anymore in the grander scheme of traffic....

Are links still the *thing* that drives traffic to our blogs the way they did a couple of years ago? I started to wonder more about this, as my traffic blossomed last week while my Technorati rank (and links) took a swan-dive. Over the past few weeks, I'd even noticed that my traffic has a habit of blossoming and staying steady--mostly due to where I'm at in Google. So I was quite intrigued by Darren Rowse's survey of his Problogger.com audience on where their traffic comes from:



Apparently, I'm not the only one who gets a sizable amount of her traffic from Google. Darren was interested to see how many bloggers report links from social networking sites. Being somewhat active in Facebook, and having seen some traffic boosts from Twitter links, as well as how people promote their blogs and blog posts of others, I can understand how social networking links can boost your readership (or at least click-throughs.)

What might this mean for bloggers when it comes to rank and authority? Well, for one thing, while Twitter is searchable, Twitter links do not add to "rank"--which used to be the one way of judging a blog's authority. If we added Twitter links, we'd also have to add Facebook links--which are much harder to aggregate. But if bloggers aren't keeping blogrolls (many aren't) and they aren't linking as widely as they used to, then the idea of blog links as a measure of authority kind of goes by the wayside...

It might be that social networking sites, plus links from other blogs, plus repeat readers, plus links from other sites, plus our Google traffic, is what will give us authority. It might mean that I have to be a bit more shamelessly self-promoting and post links to my new blog posts on Facebook, get a Twitter account and tell everyone about my blog posts (and the posts of others) and then hope that some other bloggers will link to me too...

Does this seem like a lot more work than it used to be to try to figure out what's going on with our blogs? Are we maybe adding more noise to the signal? And is this really giving us authority or just popularity?

Maybe, when it comes down to it, there's no real "authority" in blogs that aren't written by voices of authorities. Maybe we are only authorities--or experts--within our own social spheres, which we carefully cultivate out here in the variety of social networking applications that are out there.

And where does Google come into this? Is, perhaps, Google the channel by which we gain authority and significance on the web?

All I can say is the blogosphere is an ever-morphing, ever-changing place. And how we get traffic--and even authority--might just depend on what our intention is for our blog. Do we want to be linked and loved, or do we want authority from search. Can we do it all? Do we have the bandwidth (or the time of day) to do it all?

Then again, maybe it all depends on our personal priorities for our blogs....

Just my $.02...

How many of us remember the story of the Velveteen Rabbit? I never read the story when I was a kid, but someone gave me a copy some time ago, when I was going through a very hard time....

And a long time ago (or it seems that way) when I first started blogging, I wondered what it was with all these people who said they had made friends with other folks through their blogs....

It was then that I realized that some folks made casual acquaintances through their blogs, while other people made real and close friends through and with their blogs. Usually, the close friendships came from meeting other bloggers face-to-face.

That was the same thing that happened with groups of folks I knew from the NYT Film Forum. Our friendships were better once we met f2f as well....

Lately, I have received a number of "friend" requests on Facebook from people I don't know, but with whom I appear to have some common connections. Many of them I accept--in part because we have common friends, but also because these are interesting people who do not seem to pose any threat.

Although I do wonder about some of them, given how marketers are using Facebook as a "social marketing" tool. Individuals have businesses that they think I might be interested in hearing about, or they have books coming out and they think I might want to be part of their circle for promoting their books, or for any other reason that has nothing to do with knowing who I am as a person...

Basically, I am wondering if some of these people who are asking me to "friend" them are really interested in me in that capacity at some point--or am I only just someone for whom they believe should hear their "message" or get their book, or for some other reason that is connected mostly to marketing and less to knowing something about me...

Are some of us, then, just targets for "social" marketing on Facebook?

Now, I don't find social marketing all that annoying when someone invites me into a group, or even when an organization tries to "friend" me. In the case of organizations or products "friending" me, I know that this happens because, in Facebook, friend pages have better features than group pages, allow for more apps, and constitute another channel for people to find them.

But if someone's just asking to be my "friend" because they want to pitch me--well, I think of all those home-sales programs (you know the ones I'm talking about) where the reps always seem to want to be your friend, but only if you'll buy something from them. It's as if the friendship is conditional on the sale--which, outside of a retail establishment, this seems kind of strange. Retail gives that friend-sale thing something of a context: I see these people at "x" retailer because I like the product. We shoot the breeze because not only do I like the product, but they are people with whom I feel comfortable shooting the breeze. But if I am not in the retail atmosphere, and you're shooting the breeze with me because you want me to buy your product, and if I don't, then you turn away from me, I'm going to think you're a right phony....

So, here's an interesting little experiment: can I make someone who's a Facebook friend into a real friend? or at least someone who it might be nice to have a casual conversation with....and not because either of us wants something, or because it's some kind of professional thing...but just as two people...

Is this possible? or is it just another Internet illusion?

We'll see....

Update Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post on the ambient intimacy of Facebook and Twitter. I have to agree with Jeff that these two apps can help us keep in touch with people we don't see often, and even help us renew friendships with those that we might have lost for good if it weren't for them. But when someone out of the blue sends a "friend" request, can that new person become an actual friend? or is there another reason for the friending?

Because a girl has to just let go sometimes.....




Thought I'd adopt a new feature to this blog--friday music, featuring something to just get my mind *off* of all that heavy thinking.

And to let you know what I'm thinking before the weekend sets in...

Recently, a number of folks have come to this blog on this post in an attempt to get some info on whether or not one can find out who's googling you to find out stuff on your identity. This post is meant to be a better answer to the original post, taking apart first what people will find when they search you, and if there is any way you can find out who they are....

Did you know how much info about you is Public Info that *anybody* can find with search?

I'm totally serious here. Give yourself a minute and just google yourself. Chances are that you'll find a lot of things you may not want other people to see. Believe it or not, information on the Internet is Public information, and anything you put on the following types of sites will more than likely show up in search:

Any social network where you have a profile and the privacy settings aren't configured to hide you. That includes Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, and any other place you can think of that's got some sort of "social" component to it. Keep track of them and take advantage of the privacy settings!

Any blogs where you have written something under your name as a contributor to the blog

Any online newsgroups, forums, or message boards where you have used your name. Yes, it can be from the Olden Days of the web (read: USENET) and it might still come up in search. And not the whole conversation either. Just enough to incriminate you. ;-)

Photos on Flickr that are tagged with your name or your Flickr account. The same probably goes for YouTube and other sites where you can tag your pics. Here's a slightly incriminating pic of me on Flickr:

Some sites where you have a screen name that is associated with your real name in its system. Not all sites hide or real name separate from your screen name

Any comments you've left on sites that use Disqus. (IMO, this is wicked annoying!)

Anything you put on Twitter. Yes, your "tweets" are part of your Permanent Record out here

If someone searches you on Amazon (that was kinda funny!)Although it won't tell you who was searching

....

And don't forget the variety of search engines that are out there, including BlogDigger and Icerocket and even Technorati that, esp. if you blog anywhere, you just might show up....

So, then, is there *any* way to find out who's googling/searching your identity on the web? Honestly, right now, to get results on who's doing a general search on you on any search engine, the answer is No (not to my knowledge anyway.) But, if you own a blog, you should have a stats tracking package. You can find out lots from reviewing your stats. Here's some info on someone who visited this blog today



From this, you can see it was someone in Holyoke, the ISP they used, part of this person's IP address, when the person came in and then left. Now, if this were someone who was stalking me or leaving nastygrams, I could contact the ISP and I may be able to get info on this this person's IP addy. From the IP addy I could then track who/where the person is. But if that person's nastygram was connected to an identity, and then to a site of some kind, then I could even find out who owns the site by going to Whois.net and researching the domain....

But if you don't have any of this info, there's really no way to know who's searching your name regularly.

There's no way even to know if your employer is searching your name. Frankly, I'd be *more* concerned about an employer searching info on public search than I would the Government, who's got a whole bunch o'info on you anyway (although if your employer is the government, you should be *really* careful what you put online.)

There's not even a way to know if potential employers, folks you've just filled out applications for or set resumes to, are searching you. There are currently no laws banning them-as there are laws to govern what can or can't be asked in an interview. Then again, whatever you put online is, basically, public information and if they can find it, there's nothing that says they can't look at it.

And there's no law that says they can't discriminate against you for it either (there haven't been any test cases yet.) You can bet, though, that what you do and say that gets put online just might impact whether or not you get hired by certain employers. Even your credit report can be screened, and companies that offer credit report screening as a service....also see this article in IT Manger's Journal on a survey of H.R. professionals on what they search...

So what if an employer can't ask you whether or not you have kids, or how old you are? They can find out lots of other information that we perceive as being private--yet isn't.

So, I wonder about things like Spokeo and the latest darling FriendFeed that allow your "friends" to follow you much easier. Makes me think: if my friends are following me, who else could be following me?

What about online reputation management stuff? I went in recently and looked at Rapleaf recently, and they appear to have upgraded a number of features. Rapleaf lets you know about social profiles that are out there --it reminded me of a Plaxo profile that doesn't come up in regular search. This was nice to know! So, it may be good for tracking your social networks.

Another is Spock where you put in info about yourself and then ask for "trust" from others. I'm not too sure how useful Spock might be for me--so it's possible that it will become one more thing I've registered for that I don't use.

Now, this still does not solve the problem of knowing who might be looking *you* up in Google or any other search tool out there.

The only advice I can offer is: remember when you're teachers used to threaten you that what you were doing would go on your permanent record?

Congratulations! With all that information you've voluntarily put on the Internet (sometimes in a quest to be social), you have created your own a permanent record!

owch!

For more info: Who's Googling You? from PCMag
and this interesting forum thread from the Chronicle of Higher Education
and this transcript from channel 5 in Boston.

Update After reading this from CBS46 Atlanta, I've decided to take a look at Ziggs.com which boasts the ability to tell you that your information was searched--just not whom was searching you (for "privacy" of the searcher.) It seems, though, that to use Ziggs, you have to put in a profile *and* pay $4.95 per month. Ziggs also says that if you put up a profile on Ziggs, that profile will get fairly high in search.

LinkedIn profiles also get up pretty high in search--and they're free.

Another "reputation management" service is Naymz--which, I believe, you have to be invited to get into, and requires putting up another profile...

These "reputation" services are proprietary and require that you put up another profile on their service. But these will not stop Google from shooting out all that other stuff that you put out there on *other* social networking sites. And none of them will tell you *who* it is who's looking at you--only the basic information comes to you from Zigg. So, it still boils down to watching where you go and being careful of what you put online. Whether or not you have a Zigg profile, or a LinkedIn profile won't make a difference if you have a MySpace page or a Facebook page that has information you don't want others to find (see this on Arlington, OR former mayor Carmen Kontor-Gronquist, who lost her position due to her MySpace photos.)

This past week I came across two conversations in the realm of tech that had me sort of wondering how some journalists miss out on conversations about what's going on within their own profession. The one that caught my attention today was Marshall Kirkpatrick's How We Use Twitter for Journalism"--which seems to focus just on what's being said among the tech folks about the uses of Twitter....who seem to be just a little removed from some of the conversations going on within their own profession on the use of Twitter....

Conversations about Twitter's application in journalism happen often in Poynter's E-Media Tidbits column. At E-MT we've been discussing not just the use of Twitter--incl. its use by the U.K. govt--but also of other tools like Zemata and CoverItLive with regularity. We Tidbits folks enjoy finding new apps and "test driving" them on a regular basis.

So, it's really a no-brainer (to those of us at E-MT anyway) that journalists might use Twitter. The questions for Twitter's use arise when it comes to local journalism, and whether or not Twitter's infrastructure can be updated fast enough so that it can keep up when there are big emergencies. Not to mention whether or not the adults in the local community have the "bandwidth" to be bothered with Twitter. (Note: yours truly often plays "devil's advocate" and is rarely one to be all rah-rah. Heck, *somebody's* got to be the slow-adopter's advocate ;-) )

The other out-of-the-loop piece came from Jim Kersteller at CNet in his praise for "citizen journalism" outing suspected Mac cloner Psyster--which then degenerated into one of those "why don't newsrooms try open-sourcing?" conversations...

Thing is, the Psyster story was broken by longtime journalist Charles Arthur in the Guardian.

Yes, it was nice that a couple of Gizmodo readers who live in Miami went to check it out, and it was very nice that CNet got 117 comments to their story on it--but the story wasn't broken by "citizen journalists"....and I'd daresay that a bunch of comments with loads of kibitzing among the crowd on their own community issues doesn't necessarily qualify as "citizen journalism"...

The thing that got me was that Kersteller seemed not to know that the journalism community's been experimenting with "open source" reporting for the past year, with Assignment Zero (which I worked on) and now with Off the Bus and Beatblogging.org among other projects that are taking place all across the country....

So, it's not like we haven't heard of "open source journalism" and it's not like it hasn't been tried--it's just that the tech journo community seems to be a little out of touch with what's going on in other parts of the wider world of journalism...

Honestly, from my vantage point--where I'm traversing journalism and tech and marketing regularly--I see where the conversations about tools are fractured and disjointed. It leaves me a sense of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing--when the right should be helping the left. How can we have any rate of adoption on tools (as well as ethics) if the disparate parts of the universe within the Internet aren't fully aware of what's going on outside of their own little bell jars? It seems, to me anyway, that we have to open the doors up on these conversations--stop just bringing in the pundits who theorize to conferences and bring in the people who are building and working with the tools. And, perhaps, we need to dampen down so much of the noise in this space and try to help folks turn up the signal. I have no idea how that could be accomplished. Noise is attractive. Noise gets pageviews. Noise gets attention. But noise doesn't always give any new information.

Noise is sometimes just shameless self-promotion...

When what's needed are better conversations outside of the bell jars...

Note: Perhaps Kirkpatrick is aware of other conversations but has to couch them in the manner acceptable to his "crowd"--yet it makes me wonder if it may be necessary for journalists to think outside their community-box in order to highlight what's happening in the wider world. Esp. as worlds converge....

For some of us, creativity springs from a very dark place. People tend to think we're "weird" or that we're overly dramatic. Not so. The thing is, inside, there's this place where we know there is something special--and to get to it, we have to walk through terrible darkness. It is not a pose nor a gothic affectation. Ian Curtis was one of us. This a.m., while hanging out online, I found out about Control--the U.K. biopic on Curtis by Anton Corbjin.

And I am reminded of my own dark places where my creativity dwells. They haven't gone away--those places--as I've gotten older. I've just chosen not to open those doors as often. And sometimes I misplace the directions for how to get to them. I hope that I haven't permanently misplaced those directions.

Music, though, sometimes provides the sound-map to those destinations.

Here's the trailer for Control:

After watching this recent NewsHour report on the changes at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a friend and I got talking about "newsroom convergence"...which got me thinking that there's more going on when it comes to "newsroom convergence" than turning one's online newspaper into a multi-media news outlet. The convergence has to involve every aspect down to the way business is done in small papers as well as huge ones that beat the FCC's cross-ownership rules. Check these out:

Lee Abrams: Tribune Will Be an 'Oasis of Creativity': So, it's not just Sam Zell offending the sensibilities of some employees that's going to change things--it's also the appointment of Lee Abrams to Chief Innovation Officer.(although I am sort of scared that one of Abrams' credentials is said to be giving Howard Stern his first major market job.) In this interview, Abrams has an idea about convergence of Tribune companies:

This company owns TV stations, newspapers and Web sites -- and they're all operating separately. There should be some way in which the television station offers the real quick story, the newspaper gets in more detail, and then the Web site really gets into the story in tremendous depth. But now they're working independently with each other. These could be our super news brands, if we put them all together somehow.

Gee, that *kinda* makes sense, doesn't it? Not to mention that it's something I see going on with local TV stations that offer text versions of news stories--although not adding anything new--and what goes on with many of the NYTimes little videos. I'm thinking specifically of the David Pogue stuff which seems to be mostly entertainment, while the articles are far more in-depth.

Newspapers Confront the Enemy Within and would you believe that "enemy" is, yes, THE ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT!! The newsroom fears loss of objectivity and independence, the advertisers grumble that the newsroom doesn't get how to make money. They're both right--which means they need to bridge the cultural divide and start working together (as Louis Hau's piece points out):

Many editors tend to believe that page views are the most important driver of revenue: more clicks, more bucks. But, Brownrout [former ad exec at the LATimes and others]argues, it's the utility of the content being offered that presents the greatest opportunities...

Not to mention that today Senators debate the future of the web in hearings today....where folks like Justine Bateman and Patric Verrone (president of the Writer's Guild)testified....

Want to know what Justine and some other indy filmmakers think of the Internet:

Don't you just *love* (to death!) that guy who says everything on the Internet's like "writing on a bathroom wall"?

(hat tip to Tech Daily Dose for that one)

Disappointingly, though, is Steve Outing's How to Create Killer Niche Websites Without Hiring which, again, forwards an idea that the people have to get involved in the production of news--on the newspaper's site--in order for the newspaper (esp. local) to survive. While Outing showcases two unique examples, I'm really rather horrified by most of it. To me, it's the same old "how can we monitize UGC?" and "how can we make people into responsible journalists?" thing that, IMO, isn't necessarily what the people want nor expect from their newspaper. (actually, we'd just like reporters to get the story right--not have to write it ourselves.) Outing's article also brings up the potential of paying contributors on what they make from advertising. Um...see above...and talk to some of the Gawker folks on that one...

Frankly, monetizing UGC probably won't make big bucks in the long run--for the folks contributing nor for the paper. Perhaps better solutions to the problems in and with newspapers have to come from converging the formerly separated parts of a corporation. Whether those parts are the editorial and ad departments or if it's the newspaper/tv/radio parts of a huge media corporation, the news industry as a profit-making business should look to how other businesses converge internally to make profits happen without trying to get freebies from the people (or is it "content" from the "user generators"?)

Just my $.02

Apparenlty, over last week there was something of a tech watcher brouhaha over what CNet claimed to be a Mac clone maker, Psystar. Lots of people got on their keyboards and started looking up Pystar. CNet's article got 117 comments relating to the Psystar story. Others who weighed in were Charles Arthur at the Guardian and bunch of folks at Gizmodo

This lead CNet's Jim Kersteller to declare all this hubbub a victory for citizen journalism:

But there's one thing we know for sure: Citizen journalism has played a major role in ferreting out the Psystar story. And with that involvement, we're getting a better understanding of how mainstream newspapers can work with folks who aren't trying to make a living off gathering the news but are interested in telling the world what they know.

Uh....earth to Jim....

Let's take a closer look at what happened with the 117 comments on Tom Krazit's original story: it appears that a lot of people were really interested in hearing about this and did their own quick Google searches on the company name. Along with constructive comments are a number of the usual CNet kibitzing with wonderfully humorous headlines like "Is Pystar pronounced shyster?" and "Let's all stop hyperventilating, shall we?"

These great little comments can be seen as a kind of crowdsourcing. But hardly "citizen journalism"--

And then a couple of Gizmodo readers decided to check out a few things, just to see if Psystar had the Miami location claimed in the info the Guardian found...(btw, the Guardian article was written by a professional journalist-see the comments...)

Well, I can definitely say "Cool!" Some Gizmodo readers were available and wanted to check out what was what. Maybe, as a stretch, this is a kind of "citizen journalism" but...

Is it maybe even a form of consumer advocacy--where the potential consumers of the product went to ferret out a potential fraud?

So, this whole thing could be a good case for the power of crowdsourcing--perhaps crowdsourced consumer advocacy. But is it "citizen journalism"??

IMO, I'm getting very, very weary of folks like Kersteller, who obviously hasn't kept up with what's been going on regarding journalism and citizen involvement in journalistic projects like Assignment Zero or Off the Bus or kept up with Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing blog before thinking that they're seeing the future and that only if newspapers would just take a look at what the Gizmodo folks did...

Further, there are some paradigms going on right now for people adding to stuff through comments (like on CNet)--it goes on to some degree over at the Daily Hampshire Gazette, albeit behind a paid wall, so don't bother to look. And it goes on to some degree over at Masslive.com in their Forums...

But is this "citizen journalism"--or is it folks conversing and sharing information, in a crowdsourcing model, to uncover more about something....

And then is *any* online uncovering of some issue (consumer fraud, etc.) automatically qualify the kibbitzing and commenting and actions of a few a form of "citizen journalism"??

I took a further bit of umbrage at Kersteller's suggestion that newspapers just ought to rely on the citizens to do their reporting for them. Argh! It's one thing when a bunch of computer geeks (who follow Gizmodo) have the time to get their knickers out of a bunch by investigating something like a potential Mac clone shop--or when local folks want to add what they're observing about, perhaps, an accident or fire. It is a completely different animal to advocate that all local reporting should take this model as Kersteller advocates.

It's one thing to channel the enthusiasm of tech geeks--another to say to the citizenry "sorry, we can't do the local reporting, it's your job now." One is specific and directed--the other is expecting free labor to keep a failing business model afloat with potentially free or drastically underpaid labor.

Then again, given recent articles in local papers about two friends' local businesses, which got everything wrong, one might be lead to believe the citizenry might do a better job...

But maybe it's not that we want the citizenry to do the reporters' jobs. Maybe it's more that we want the reporters to get the story right.

And if they're not--then fire the editors who are perhaps becoming those one too many cooks in the broth....

Just my $.02