Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

Early Start...We've now started the last day of the conference proper here in Helsinki - with a session on open source cultures that also contains my own paper. I'll blog most of this but of course not my paper itself - I'll upload this to this site soon. Not a bad turnout for a 9.30 start on a Saturday morning, either!

Mark Tribe has now made a start on his panel, beginning with a brief history of free and open source software (FOSS) and its ideology. But Mark's own interest is in open source as a broader cultural phenomenon, which also occurs in the domain of art (and he quotes Stravinsky as saying that "a good composer doesn't imitate, he steals"). This of course is a key development of the last century - the conscious building of new art on existing material, be it ideas or actual found material (as also in the emergence of collage as a new art form - take the dada movement for example).

Finally worked my way through the very useful report We Media by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis at the Media Center at the American Press Institute. A good overview of what they term participatory journalism, with many connections to my own research. From this report, several further references also need investigation:

A new Wired about the rise of blogging approaches to news reporting: The News, One Entry at a Time. Might be time to pull together all of these individual reports into a greater whole...

Always interesting to read the meta-discussions about Kuro5hin at Kuro5hin. As a site which seems to have been developed in good part in response to perceived shortcomings at Slashdot, there's still a fair bit of debate about what this site is or should be...
Not quite sure about the title ">We are sheep, though.

Looks like I need to work this one into my book as well - probably in the chapter on syndication and RDFs. Not especially news-related, but I feel that many of these technologies will be increasingly interconnected as they mature... From Slashdot: PeopleAggregator - An Open Source Social Network - a story about the latest open source p2p social network engine.

Interesting article on Redefining Online News in the Online Journalism review...

Slashdot points to this article about open source and its implications: "Open Source Spreads beyond Software". Nothing much new, but a nice introduction which may make a useful undergraduate reading on the topic. I must remember to check out OhMyNews at some point, too - anyone read Korean ?