Via Jeff Howe at Crowdsourcing.com.

As you may know, I’m writing a book about crowdsourcing and also operate the blog, Crowdsourcing.com. I’ve been publishing the lion’s share of this book on the Website with the goal of eliciting critical comments that can be collected together and published in an appendix to the book proper. The idea, obviously, is that a book on crowdsourcing would also embody some degree of crowdsourcing. But further, I’m hoping to help pioneer a model of book publishing in which the book can serve as a dialogue as much as a monologue. The comments from readers in the appendix will be used to show that crowdsourcing touches on many issues that can be viewed from multiple perspectives.

I’ve been very happy with the quality of comments, but unfortunately the quantity and diversity among commenters is lacking. In other words, too few people are taking the time to read my work and disagree with me! So I’m appealing to all of you to stop by crowdsourcing.com in the next three weeks and contribute your insights, your experience and your wit. I’d really like to make this little experiment work, but naturally, I can’t do it without the crowd.

I’ve been Jeff’s research assistant for a reason - I’ve studied and talked about Crowdsourcing on this blog as well, which means perhaps some of you are interested in the topic as well. If so - check out Jeff’s blog and see if you have a critique. You just might end up in the footnote to his book.

The media might have a fantastic citizen journalism tool in Twitter - if they don’t botch it up.

Read Reuter’s post today on Twitter: Breaking news, Twitter style.

There are vast amounts of data in the twitter community that is being lost. Such as.

1. Links. What is happening to all those links? Is google recognizing them?

2. keywords. Imagine if there was an algorithem that could detect a sudden emergence of keywords like “earthquake” within the confines of a region. With such a tool Reuters could break news faster than anyone else.

Obviously Twitter would still be the source of the breaking news - but there is too much information being shared on Twitter at any one time to make sense of it. News organizations could come in and help make sense of that noise to increase the signal of events like an earthquake.

Via Reportr.net

The citizen journalism beat has a new kid on the block in the shape of VancouverIAM.

As you might have guessed from the name, it is a citmedia site about Vancouver, based in Vancouver. The site describes itself as:

The destination for people who want to know what’s going on in Vancouver. It gives you the tools and support to become a video journalist, internet TV and film producer and an active commentator on local politics and everyday issues about life in Vancouver.

Read more

Environmental journalist/professor Dave Poulson and a group of students at Michigan State University took on an ambitious task with no real guidelines, no compass and no idea how to get where they were going. However for those who had a hand in creating the greatlakeswiki.org, they were anything but lost.

“I don’t know if (people on) the eastern edge of Ontario feel much sense of community with people on the other side,” says Poulson, who was gracious enough to chat with me about the project he founded in 2006 with the help of several others in the community.

The site is an early experiment in creating a viable community knowledge base with the wiki-software for anyone and anything connected to the world’s largest source of fresh water, the North American Great Lakes.

“The best thing for me [about greatlakeswiki.org] is that it gives us a chance to do some experimental journalism,” he says.

That community is not just made up of journalists, according to Poulson. The great lakes wiki has over 1,500 members with backgrounds in science, politics and general interests in the area. Categories, or “ports” as they are appropriately dubbed, include things you’d expect to find such as Areas of Concern, Ecology, Geography, etc. but there are also some you may not expect.

Commerce, culture, and recreation also appear as categories in the wiki as a way to bridge a gap between the information and why people feel strongly about it.

“I’m trying to concentrate doses of information about the environment. When we started, we spent a lot of time discussing ‘Where do we draw the line?’” Something Poulson says never really happened.

“It’s a community. It should define itself,” he says, which is exactly what happened. Extensive portions of the site were carved out for wind energy, courtesy of a local government official, and lots of information from the Michigan Mountain Bikers.

A few things worked against the project Poulson listed, like the several organizations and pre-established Web sites in the Great Lakes area with their own enthusiastic community. He also noted wiki technology is somewhat difficult for the average person to grasp. The site is currently still alive and kicking—- even attracting longtime editor from the main wikipedia page Lar*.

Check out the site, sign up, and add a few entries if you search for something that isn’t added yet.

All of us need to do our bit to free up information. And you can start by emailing your local council.

Read More via the Gaurdian.

Online Journalism Review wants to hear from you: read more

whereIstand.com is a new, user-driven Web 2.0 community and opinion aggregator that discovers, organizes and presents a wide variety of news, opinions, debates and issues discussed all over the Web using proprietary search technologies and a user-generated content model.

From a community journalism perspective, whereIstand.com takes a hybrid approach. When an issue is submitted, it is reviewed by editors on staff and by members of the community for accuracy. The news process on the site becomes collaborative — members become bloggers, editors and researchers who work together with site editors to present content and debate it.

In this respects WhereIStand will remain on my radar just as others, including Debatopedia and others (come back to this post for updates).

From Mindy McAdams: Who are you calling a journalist?

Many people have commented on the actions of Mayhill Fowler, who went to a fund-raising dinner for Barack Obama and later wrote about remarks Obama made there. (Today Jeff Jarvis commented on Michael Tomasky commenting about Jay Rosen commenting on the matter.) Much of the fuss revolves around questions about who is a journalist, when is someone a journalist and when is she not, and whether national political figures should have an expectation of privacy at a small private dinner (snort).

Read more from Mindy

Read more from Jeff Jarvis

Read more from Michael Tomsky

Note: I will be interviewing Amanda Michel from OffTheBus.net sometime this week to get her side of the story.

From Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review

Let’s just get this on the record — there is no such thing as “off the record” anymore.

Should anyone online have doubted this fact, let this week’s tempest over U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama’s recent comments eliminate that doubt.

A writer for the Huffington Post’s “Off the Bus” project, edited by my USC colleague Marc Cooper, reported comments by Sen. Obama at a gathering with supporter where journalists supposedly were not allowed.

…. Read more

Via Yahoo News with a hat tip to Andrew Fowler from Newsvetter

Newspaper readers agree with editors on the basics of what makes good journalism, but they are more apt to want looser rules for online conversations, a new study on news credibility has found.
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Newspapers highly discourage anonymous remarks, for instance, and editors are more likely than readers to want that principle applied to reader comments online, according to the Online Journalism Credibility Study released Tuesday by the Associated Press Managing Editors group and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri.

Some 70 percent of editors surveyed said requiring commenters to disclose their identities would support good journalism, while only 45 percent of the public did. Similarly, 58 percent of editors said letting journalists join online conversations and give personal views would harm journalism, but only 36 percent of the public agreed.

Expressions of personal views seem to help boost readers’ interest and trust in Web sites, said John `Bart” Bartosek, editor of The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., and chairman of the credibility committee for the AP managing editors group.

“That’s contrary to most of the traditions we’ve all grown up with, to keep our opinions, viewpoints and personal lives out of our story,” Bartosek said. “There’s some indication that readers are looking for something more online. Whether it’s information about our expertise, our knowledge, our background, I’m not really sure.”

The study was designed to help gauge the priorities and practices newspapers should be establishing as they increasingly blend their print and Web operations. It produced few answers on how editors can meet reader expectations online without compromising credibility. The study’s sponsors said the results should lead to further research and newsroom discussions.

The study did find widespread agreement on basic practices such as the need to ensure accuracy and correct mistakes. Both editors and readers overwhelmingly supported fairness in news coverage and the labeling of commentary.

Editors and readers also agreed on the desirability of depth, such as links to content published elsewhere and databases or other information visitors can explore on their own.

“Many of us have come to recognize that the age of `We report it, and you read it and view it’ is over,” said Howard Finberg, director of interactive learning and NewsU at the Poynter Institute, a Florida think tank on journalism. “The audience has demanded much more.”

But what that “much more” should look like and how newspapers can stimulate conversations in their communities while maintaining the trust they have established remain unclear, Finberg said.

In other findings, both editors and readers said any online news items produced by readers should use the same standards journalists follow when reporting and writing news stories. Editors were more likely to say it is important to include varied viewpoints in news articles and create content to attract a diversity of readers.

The telephone study of 500 members of the public and 1,251 print and online editors from U.S. daily newspapers was conducted Aug. 23 to Oct. 12. The study had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 5 percentage points for the readers’ sample and 3 percentage points for the editors.