I’m attending BloggerCon 3 at Stanford University today.
I won’t be blogging each session today — there are dozens of people doing that, like Doc Searls (whom I just had lunch with) and Susan Mernit. Instead, I’m taking a stab at trying something new: shooting video of two of the sessions, Podcasting with Adam Curry (this morning) and Making Money with Blogs, moderated by Doc Searls, later today. Jay Dedman may help a bit with that.
Robert Kaye of IT Conversations is producing a webcast of many of the sessions.
A few random notes from today:
• Bloggers I’ve finally got to meet in person: Jay Rosen, Ed Cone, Jay Dedman, Michael Butler, Susan Kitchens, Rebecca MacKinnon, Cameron Barrett. Amazing crowd here.
• A podcast site I need to check out immediately: dawnanddrew.com; I met Drew Domkus and Dawn Miceli after the session.
• New site launched today: the Media Bloggers Association at Mediabloggers.com. Robert Cox did a great job pulling together an umbrella site for disparate small-j journalism sites, like Spinsanity, RatherBiased, Tim Porter’s First Draft, Lying in Ponds — see the full list here.
Politics session
Ed Cone is showing off Thigpen for Deeds, a weblog for a candidate for registrar of deeds with a nice personal weblog, including photos of his young child.
Cone: "If you want to use a blog in the next campaign, start now."
Cam Barrett: It’s important to have a voice for hte campaign, but if the voice becomes more important then the campaign, it’s a distraction and a problem. Open it up to everyone rather than have one personality shine, if the candidate isn’t going to be blogging on a daily basis.
Buzz: "We, the Democrats, lost the branding war."
Jay Rosen told a story about Barak Obama coming to the blog gathering before the Democratic convention and asking for advice. Begin blogging and do it yourself, Jay told him. Obama replied that when he finds another 4-5 hours a day, he might. Jay thinks that’s wrong — that blogging will draw a new audience and new donations. "We haven’t persuaded Barak Obama to blog himself. … We need to get the highest-ranking candidate to begin a blog."
Later:
During the Journalism session, I had this to say: I don’t think bloggers need to become professional journalists to be validated. But I would like to see the blogosphere have a greening effect on big media, just as it’s beginning to have a liberating effect on democratic institutions. Currently, bloggers and big-j journalists operated under two sets of assumptions or terms:
Big J believes in objectivity. Bloggers believe in honest disclosure of their opinions and biases.
Big J believes in he said/she said balance, with an end result of noise and confusion. Bloggers in telling it like it is, arriving at their own version of the truth.
Big J believes in a homogenized, institutional voice. Bloggers believe in a million idiosyncratic independent voices.
Big J believes in insularity, rarely linking to outside sources, much less to individual weblogs. Bloggers believe that the interconnected fabric of the Web is what gives the Internet its power.
Big J believes in keeping the internal operations of the newsroom secret. Bloggers believe in transparency.
Big J believes in insinuating itself among the elites. Bloggers believe
the grassroots — the long tail — is as important as the A list.
Big J believes in standing apart from the community. Bloggers believe they are intrinsically tied to the community.
It’s this standing apart, more than anything, that has alienated journalists from the public. We’re no longer seen as on their side.
None of this is to say bloggers should be pitted against traditional journalists in an us vs. them contest. It is to say that the mass media could benefit from a healthy dose of the blogosphere’s intrinsic values.
During the Law session, a participant asked Larry Lessig: What if I captured a few seconds of The Daily Show, or Jessica Simpson’s snafu on Saturday Night Live, or a press conference by President Bush on NBC? Could I upload those video shorts to my blog? Would that be fair use?
Lessig replied: "Lessig thinks it is, but NBC does not, and NBC has many more lawyers."
Lessig also riffed on the morning session’s celebration of podcasting as a new media form, emphasizing that we need to make sure everything is done with open standards so no one with a proprietary format could come in later and lock us out. He said the "virtuous cycle" of podcasts held out the promise of balancing the "monopoly power" of big media.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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