Spent Thursday at the first New Communications Forum in Palo Alto, Calif., put on by the Society for New Communications Research, a nonprofit think tank. (Day two will be Friday.) Here are 12 photos I took today.
The conference has a blogzine that’s reporting on panels here. Plus, a couple of people are blogging it.
I spoke on a panel with Dan Farber of ZDNet, Tom Abate of the San Francisco Chronicle and Tom Foremski of Silicon Valley Watcher, and I kicked things off with a short presentation on citizens media, a term I’m not entirely comfortable with, so I came up with a new name du jour: Media 2.0. Some friendly jousting back and forth, but I really like all these guys. Not sure if our remarks were recorded for later podcasting.
I was running around and took few notes, but some things worth highlighting:
– Marcus Chan of the San Francisco Chronicle told the story of how his podcasting team was initially turned down in their request to create podcasts for the paper. They went ahead and secretly did it anyway, came back to upper management a few months later revealing what they’d done (the program was a success by then) — and were told to expand the program. Bravo!
– Dan Gillmor pointed to a site that every citizen journalist should know: SourceWatch.org, a project of the Center for Media & Democracy.
– Dan said he wasn’t that impressed with Digg. “If Digg let me identify 10 sources to weight recommendations, I’d be more impressed.”
– The panel on Law and the First Amendment proved instructive on a number of levels. I asked about whether bloggers could get in trouble for taking photos of clearly identifiable people in public places and posting them online on a noncommercial site, and whether the publisher could face liability. The answer — as always with attorneys — was: It depends. Context is important. If they’re harmless snapshots of public scenes, that’s been protected for a long time. Revealing closeups are more problematic. Right of publicity laws may apply, state by state. Different, more restrictive standards apply in Australia and many European countries. U.S. publishers seem to be protected, though, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, said Denise Howell.
– More Denise: “Freedom of speech is not freedom to remain employed.” You don’t have the right to blog about your boss and not get fired for doing so.
– Podzinger, a service that provides text transcripts of podcasts.
Technorati tags: NewCommForum, journalism, 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.
Leave a Reply