GroundReport just got a great opportunity through Talk To US: bring the voices and faces of global citizen journalists to national television program Worldfocus.

Every month we ask a question on news perspectives, and the most compelling video response is aired on TV for hundreds of thousands. It’s a big deal for us, but a bigger deal for citizen journalism— and a tall order. We need to find the best video from across the globe. This is why I would like to ask for your help.

Our first question is ‘What’s your advice for President Barack Obama?’

Please share this email with your networks of citizen journalists, activists, video producers and brilliant, engaged citizens. Or even better— post a video response yourself. This is an amazing way to bring attention to your cause, issue or mission. If you are part of a citizen journalism entity, we can feature your logo as well.

To respond, log in to http://GroundReport.com and upload your video of advice for Obama— all videos on GroundReport are automatically entered.

Or, if you’d prefer, visit the video page on YouTube, log in, and upload your video directly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlVSQ8zzHsE

The deadline is next week, so time is of the essence.

If 2007 was the year citizen journalism proved its staying power, 2008 will be the year it evolves. The landscape now is promising, but homogeneous. From Newsvine and NowPublic to Orato and Digital Journal, one finds much of the same: proprietary content submission tools, community ratings, and some revenue share here and there. How these players break out of the pack in the coming year will determine everything.

Below, predictions on what to expect from citizen journalism in 2008, and the industry precedents behind them.

(Disclosure: I founded citizen journalism platform GroundReport.com)

What citizen journalism can learn from Open Source: Get organized.

Open Source software development and citizen journalism have a lot in common: both rely on people working for free, motivated by a sense of collective accomplishment and personal recognition. In Open Source, the product is a little more fragile, the process more linear: make a mistake in code and you inconvenience thousands and potentially destroy a tool. The solution? Build in a hierarchical accountability system with focused groups, oversight and administration.

It’s time for citizen journalism to do the same and stop relying on isolated reporters. It may not be easy to build a multilevel system of editorial and administrative controls, but the result will have greater value. NewAssignment has put a lot of thought into the concept already, dubbing it ‘networked reporting’, and GroundReport.com recently launched Groups, a collaborative publishing tool that lets people report news in a more dynamic, social format.

What citizen journalism can learn from traditional media: Look at developing markets.

At the Media & Money conference sponsored by Nielson and Dow Jones last year, investors and media leaders espoused the benefits of expanding their traditional media into emerging markets in Eastern Europe. Likewise, it’s a massive mistake to assume citizen journalism’s stronghold is the US & Europe. As I mentioned in my 2007 recap, it’s much bigger than us. Case in point: India, quickly gaining in internet penetration, already has a citizen journalism-themed award competition and reality TV series.

Developing markets often have more controlled media—sometimes even state-controlled—and the internet offers a welcome bounty of freely flowing information and thought.

What citizen journalism can learn from Web 2.0: Video, video, video.

This is a no-brainer, but it’s important not to oversimplify. Internet traffic in the US is rapidly turning to video—Hitwise states that media & news took a hit in 2006 as people flocked to video and multimedia content. As of yet, no one has emerged as the leader in citizen journalism video—this will change in 2008. Going with the semantic web theme, citizen journalism video can’t be a big content dumping ground like YouTube. It will need to be focused, filtered and presented in a useful, accessible format if it’s to have any value.

What citizen journalism can learn from the blogosphere: It’s lonely at the top (in a good way).

New York magazine lit the blogosphere a flame in 2006 with the thesis that online there are just a handful of massively successful kingmaker-caliber blogs—see Gawker, DrudgeReport and Huffington Post. The remaining blogs grovel at the feet of these giants, scrounging for links that can make or break their numbers. The same bifurcation is happening in citizen journalism platforms, and will only become more intense. At the top of the heap are Newsvine and NowPublic, with respectable efforts by Orato, Digital Journal and Broowaha at the opposite end of the spectrum. Incidentally, the quality and consistency of content from these smaller outfits are much better—perhaps they can band together through a content share to take on the big guys.

What citizen journalism can learn from Google: separate the wheat from the chaff.

Citizen journalism helps information flow more freely—an exciting idea, but a useless one if that information isn’t categorized, tagged, filtered, rated or organized in a way that makes it valuable and compelling. This challenge plagues all of the internet, not just Google, but the search behemoth has been the most successful in solving the problem. Citizen journalism knows that you can find great stuff when you help people share their stories, images and videos with an audience—now we need to find a better way to recognize the best work and present it front-and-center to the skeptical masses.

Let the evolution begin!

2008 is upon us—what better time for a progress report on citizen journalism? Over the past twelve months, investors shelled out, mainstream media perked up and thousands mobilized to share their news with the world. In short, 2007 marked citizen journalism’s coming out. (And—in the interest of disclosure—I launched international platform GroundReport.com.)

So—a quick look back. Here are a few things we learned about citizen journalism in 2007:

1. It has value

The hefty NowPublic, with aims of becoming a ‘crowd-powered’ wire service, landed $10.6 million in investment despite a single dollar of revenue. MSNBC.com acquired advertising-supported startup Newsvine for an undisclosed sum. And Associated Content, though more a portal for ‘evergreen’ lifestyle content than news, brought in $10 million. Worth noting that both Newsvine and Associated Content share revenues with contributors, a content model explored across the landscape.

2. It plays nicely with mainstream

Every major outlet now has its own avenue for accepting public news submissions, from I-Report (CNN) to uReport (FOX). And big media is not afraid of the independents. Beyond MSNBC.com’s purchase of Newsvine, NowPublic struck a content deal with Associated Press, though terms remain unknown.

3. It changes politics

The Iowa primary upsets weren’t a shock to everyone. While mainstream media sticks to a horserace mentality for the 2008 presidential elections, participatory media empowers outliers by giving equal attention to their campaigns. Independent outlets cropped up all over in 2007, from Huffington Post / Jay Rosen (NewAssignment.Net) collaboration Off The Bus (led by Amanda Michel and Neil Nagraj), to DoubleSpeak.com (Matt and Peter Slutsky) and noontime pundits Political Lunch (Robert Willis and Will Coghlan). Brian Williams relinquished the spotlight to YouTube interviewers at the debates. And candidates Ron Paul and Mike Gravel broadcast live on Mogulus and Justin.TV when the networks snub them. Everywhere you look, people are pulling back the curtains on the political machine.

4. It’s the Anti-Snark

Time was, irreverent media had to be mean. Nick Denton’s media blog Gawker launched in 2002, epitomizing “snark,” something at the intersection of cynicism, sarcasm and wit. But recently editors Choire Sicha and Emily Gould quit their ‘soul-killing’ posts, and the winds may be changing. Citizen journalism heralds a different, more earnest kind of news from those who aren’t in the club. Check community comments on most citizen journalism platforms and you will find a supportive, constructive tone. Some ventures even believe they can change the world—human rights advocates WITNESS launched The Hub to help nonprofits share their news, YouTube has its Nonprofit Program, and OLPC, UNICEF and Google are partnering to help children report on their lives through a project called Our Stories.

5. It goes far beyond America

Surprise: the epicenter of citizen journalism is not the US. Nor is it Canada, the UK or anywhere in the Western world. Some of citizen journalism’s most enthusiastic proponents reside in the India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, where discussing politics is a national pastime and millions are web-savvy and fluent in English, the web’s dominant language. Plus the buying power of the dollar on the Subcontinent amplifies the draw of revenue share—an extra $10 USD a month has much longer legs in New Delhi than in New York. More evidence? See the growing GroundReport roll, confirmation by other platform creators, MeriNews (headed by former leaders in traditional Indian media), and citizen journalism competition and TV series by CNN-IBN.

And of course, beyond India, citizen journalism is crucial when a country like Pakistan or Burma puts its media on lockdown.

All for now. Look forward to hearing your objections and additions. Next up: predictions for where citizen journalism is headed in 2008.

That post coming soon.

The launch of news site Daylife almost two weeks ago was met by a flurry of feedback from thoughtful types across the Web.

So what happened?

Bloggers alternately fawned over Daylife’s “engagingly pretty” interface and decried its lack of interactivity. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, a Daylife investor, was disappointed at the absence of commenting and RSS feeds. David Weinberger at Joho the Blog made a convincing case that Daylife’s navigation was built inside-out. And Nick Denton’s gossipy Valleywag focused on the entrepreneurial inbreeding and conflicts, unavoidable in such a sprawling investor list.

Daylife reacted with humility and calm. RSS is coming soon, Daylife’s blog assures us. Some features inevitably miss the boat in site launches and must follow later, wrote Daylife Consulting Editor (and NAN advisor) Jeff Jarvis.

As the smoke clears, it appears there is more to Daylife than meets the eye. As Jarvis is quick to point out, Daylife is much more than a site. He focuses on its API, which will give site tools to analyze and organize the news.

Daylife may get compared to news aggregators, but with such an emphasis on its API, it’s equal parts aggregator and distributor. GigaOM suggested Daylife is “the closest thing we’ve seen to a webified newspaper”—might the newspaper of the future exist across hundreds or thousands of sites, defined more by its tools than unique content?

We’ll let Jeff Jarvis explain in his own words.

Q: Founder Upendra Shardanand once described Daylife’s addictive format as “ImdB for news.” How would you explain what Daylife does?

Jarvis: Daylife does a few things. Keep in mind that it is a platform for news, not just a site, so it empowers other sites, large and small, to bring more relevant news content to their readers.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales just announced the launch of Openserving, a site that offers free web hosting and wiki software. The big move that has guys like Reuters declaring, “Wikipedia founder remakes Web-publishing economics” is Openserving’s seeming encouragement of user-implemented advertisements.

Right now Wikia, in which NAN advisor Dan Gillmor is an investor, provides freely hosted collaboration sites built using MediaWiki. But users are not allowed to implement any ad that “has not been approved by the owner of Wikia.”

Openserving throws the doors wide open.

Acknowledging that “citizen journalism has forced news organizations to change the way they do business,” news site OnMilwaukee.com announced last month it would invite readers to launch their own blogs on all things Milwaukeean.

So how are they faring? Ironically, publisher Andy Tarnoff predicted the news site’s biggest problem in his inaugural article: “There’s only one problem: with millions of random blogs floating around out there, how do you fight through the clutter?”

Despite its forward-thinking aims, OnMilwaukee.com has yet to solve the problem.

About 50 million Americans have added their original content to the Internet’s bounty. Most haven’t seen a dime.

Five of the ten fastest growing brands on the Web rely on users for content. Most, like MySpace, Flickr and Heavy.com, do not pay their contributors. But the tide may be changing towards systems of compensation. Interestingly, citizen journalism sites are leading the paradigm shift and main-stream media organizations are taking these as small cues.

With the notable exception of video marketplace Revver, citizen or ‘open journalism’ ventures are showing the greatest innovation in business models that compensate contributors.

It makes sense—they’ve ‘opened’ up every other aspect of journalism, from researching to editing and writing, why not the revenue too?

(Disclosure: This very question compelled me to found GroundReport, an open news site with revenue sharing, in June 2006.)

If a multitude of sites offer effective tools for uploading and sharing content, a distinguishing factor may soon be the rewards they offer back to their lifeblood: contributing users.

One way to categorize the different systems is to divide them into fixed and fluid models.

Yesterday America ventured out in what election-activist say was “the most heavily watched election in history,” with volunteer lawyer battalions and an arsenal of media contacts, corruption databases and documentation systems at the ready.

As voter watchdog groups stood guard, the Sunlight Foundation and its contributors determined exactly how Congress members dipped into their war chests. If nothing else, this was the most open source election in our nation’s history.

Sunlight, a funder of NewAssignment, and its citizen researchers are looking into how Congressional candidates pay their spouses directly or indirectly using campaign money. As Jay Rosen stated, “the practice is not illegal”—but it is “questionable.” Since Jay’s post the Sunlight Foundation has picked up even more momentum—with mentions in the San Francisco Chronicle and Austin American-Statesman.

As of two days ago, all Congress members had been investigated and Sunlight’s Bill Allison was about to start combing through the “raw results”—which asserted that 19 spouses were paid a total of $636,876 since January 1, 2005.