John Palfrey

Definition of heroism: the millions of Iraqi citizens who, at the risk of death, went to the polls today.

Jay Rosen collected, in three easy blog
posts, the collective thoughts post-web-cred of many of the
participants and company.  As usual from Prof. Rosen, quite an
accomplishment and enormously helpful.

Calling it like we see it.

“The revolution is in the mini-disk,” says Daoud Kuttab.  Fresh
after web-cred, we’ve got the enormous pleasure of Kuttab, a
Palenstinian journalist and founder of Ammannet
(Jordan), as our Berkman luncheon series speaker today.  He is
talking about running a web- and terrestrial radio operation from
Jordan.  It’s an extraordinary story.  His news operation
covers the Jordanian parliament as well as a range of topics relevant
to Amman, and makes the broadcast available over the radio (possibly FM
soon) as well as internet.

The annual cost of being in business with an FM presence starts with $42,000 for a license, plus
$8,000 to the communications ministry, plus other fees.  He’s got
a full staff of about 15 or 16 people.  The total cost of running
the enterprise is only a few hundred thousand dollars per year.

He’s considering an ammannet blogs server for listeners.  It
sounds as though they are tapping into a tremendous, growing Jordanian
community of internet users.

ZDNet’s David Berlind has a whole series of excellent posts inspired by what he thought about during the web-cred conference.  Here, here, here, here.  Plus a few photos on flickr.

He points to one shortcoming (of many, no doubt):

“In hindsight, I realized that the conference may not have spent a
sufficient amount of time discussing photojournalism. Not only are the
consumer tools for creating great imagery in place, so too are the
tools (eg: Photoshop) for sullying photojournalism’s credibility.
Nevertheless, consumer photojournalists’ access to both the tools and
the channel might present an even bigger threat to big media than the
blogosphere in its very text-driven state ever will. Ironically, in
serving as a channel for that consumer generated content today, Big
Media is legitimizing the credibility of its main competition tomorrow.”

There’s trouble brewing in the DRM world, as many of the big DRM
offerings for music and other forms of digital content are not, on
various levels, interoperable with one another.  The Coral
Consortium is making a CE DRM play,
along one axis, to combine the efforts of several leading providers and
to offer an all-in licensing package.  Moves toward more open,
more interoperable standards in this space are generally good.

1.0 What have we learned at the Blogging, Journalism and Credibility gathering?

We started this event — and an associated little firestorm — by broaching the topic of credibility on the web.  It was something, we thought, that both journalists and bloggers ought to have a role in working on.  Over the past two days (January 21 and 22, 2005), we made some progress in that direction.  But not frankly all that much progress.  We’re certainly a long way from a shared set of principles, or a code of ethics, or even an understanding of how they could come about.  (Personally, I think that there are already norms in the blogosphere that result in credibility, that such norms will continue to come from the bottom up, that those norms will be undergirded by accountability to one another, and that that will work, but I might be wrong.  And this notion did not come up at the event.)  

We made other kinds of progress, though.  I think that a group of journalists and a group of bloggers and a bunch of other people came to share a new vocabulary.  David Weinberger calls it “useful psychological work” such that “we are misunderstanding ourselves in subtler ways.”  “Good,” David says, “now we can begin.”  (Credit Portnoy’s Complaint.)  I agree.  

I also learned a bunch of things, from lots of different people — mostly about the future of information online and the role that each of us has to play in making that future come about.

2.0 What kind of a future, or even present, are we talking about?

We’re here because of a disruptive technology — or, more accurately, a cluster of technologies that are being deployed in a disruptive manner.  I think that everyone at this event had a sense that these technologies might be deployed in an incredibly constructive manner, in the public interest — for the good of truth and civic engagement and small-d democracy and global connectedness and other good things.  

In some ways, all we know is that it is also a neutral technology in its purest form. Every technologically deterministic view turns out to be wrong, unless by chance it happens to come true. David Weinberger said during his dinner speech that things are messy right now.  He suggested that things might well be messy for a long time to come.  We see this future –or at least our own personally-envisioned variant of a possible future — and we have a chance to build out into it, to shape it by how we interact with it.

Here are some elements of that future and relevant factors that cropped up in discussion:

* The shift from analog to digital is on. The weight of influence is shifting away from print, TV, cable, radio and toward the web.

* Business models matter.  A lot.  New models have to be stable, one way or another, as an economic matter, to survive — whatever form of the incentive might be.  Compensation doesn’t necessarily mean money.  But for some people it does mean money.

* The specific technologies and tools involved continue to evolve.  Obviously, we’ve got text blogs, with links and trackbacks, etc.  Then we explored podcasting, mobcasting, vlogging — losts of extensions beyond text.  Wikipedia is its own story — an extraordinary model.  Technorati, blogdex, popdex.  The use of mobile devices, like cell-phones and PDAs, as in South Korea and Japan.

* We didn’t even get to talk about RSS, which I personally think is, in some ways, the most explosive force of all, with its force to be felt a long while from now.

* The people using the tools are continuing to expand and to change.  Citizen journalism, of the Dan Gillmor, Oh My News variety, as distinct, or as a variant, from the “pure bloggers.”  The long tail — the civilian bloggers who are not on the map in terms of readers — what’s their role?  (Maybe there’s just value in the fact that they do it — are engaging in the public debate.)

* In any event: there’s the possibility of more sources, closer to the facts, ideally in a manner that is good for authors and readers and subjects alike, collected and rendered and discussed and spat back and re-created using tools that don’t yet exist.  There’s the possibility of all manner of new creativity.

3.0 What’s a desirable future?

I think the question is what sort of a future — of news, of information, of democracy, all around the world — that we want to bring about it still very unclear. But we’re making progress by sharing our problems and our excitement about the opportunities before us.

Let’s presume that Jay Rosen is right: the old “blogging v. journalism” thing is dead. But it might not just be “convergence” between two communities — or, “no blendo” as Chris Lydon said. This event underscored the differences, that the languages and modes are still divergent.

It seems likely that the future is blogging *and* journalism *and* […] where each universe, with a continuum in between, contributes to one another and learns from each other about comparative advantages each community has.  I think it’s plain that there are multiple roles to be played between those who are bloggers, those who are both, and those who are journalists.

We need at some point to resolve where the bottom line lies — what the most important things to protect and to achieve are, in the midst of this messy transition.

We need also to realize all this is happening in an environment where it’s unclear that the broad public really wants to spend more time engaging with news, with information, with public life.  What do we make of the 15 minutes a day that we — those who seek attention, or have something to offer, or whatever defines the “us” — get?

4.0 Leaders and Leadership

Some of the leadership may well come from people who participated, one way or another, in this conference. Some of the leaders are people lucky enough to have power today. But the leaders of this changing environment are most likely not people who are yet empowered, or well-known, or conference-goers. The leaders are most likely clacking away on laptops somewhere, editing a wikinews post or launching a blog in the long tail or carrying around a tape recorder somewhere remote, whether paid by the NYT or paid by no one.

I left with a major question: how do we, whomever we are, use our respective positions of privilege in a way as to provide some leadership, to help shape the future in these media?  How can we be, as Jonathan Zittrain puts it, participants in creating platforms that function in a generative way — that launch new and wonderful and creative things?  As JZ puts the question: “How do we create organizations that help to organize people around tasks — to improve upon the news, to make it available to as many people as possible?”

A variety of futures are possible.  I have no better idea than anyone else does.  I am sure only that we ought to try to do something about how it comes out.  And that both traditional journalists, bloggers, podcasters, and players to be determined later have big and lasting roles to play in realizing a brighter future.

Bill Mitchell kicks off the afternoon with questions (copied out of the IRC transcript; thanks SJ):

* Is there something we can do collectively to enable us to achieve better representations of reality?

* If journalism is becoming a conversation and not a lecture, it
becomes more a relationship and less a contract.  What does it
take for such a relationship to survive?

* There need to be some articulated terms beyond simple disclosure, and
respect for that agreement in the day-to-day relationship.  What
kind of promises do parties in this relationship care most about? 
What are the coolest tools that can help on this relationship score?

The WebCred conference this morning was lively and fun, but/and very
civilized.  Not much red meat out there.  I’d say that
bloggers and the cross-over types, talked way more than
journalists.  Most of the discussion focused on what’s great about
blogs and citizen journalism and the opportunity of the technologists;
second-most, I’d say was about the crisis facing journalism; and not
all that much about journalists defending their profession or taking on
the perceived or real shorcomings of the blogosphere.  I suspect
that there’ll be something of a shift of emphasis as we move on to new
topics and as the Shorenstein team picks up the moderating duties.  (Great live-blogging in many places; see esp. BuzzMachine.)

Judith Donath, prof at MIT, is talking about signaling and reputation.  Join the
IRC channel and/or the audio webcast.  We’re endeavoring to bring
in comments from the IRC where we can, as we did in the morning session
with a few comments from Hoder.  What are the repercussions
online, with respect to links and other elements of the web, of not
being credible?

From the most ethical, and perhaps funniest (does that make sense, that
those traits would go together?), blogger I know, David Weinberger, a
piece on a failure of disclosure and Richard Edelman’s new blog.  Jay Rosen has more on a related theme.