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This week, we read a chapter by Howard Rheingold, an early online community pioneer and another by Yochai Benkler, an observer of more contemporary online communities.

Despite early fears that the Internet would be a force for alienation, allowing people to pursue individual interests to the exclusion of shared interests and their primary relationships, it seems that the Internet has instead offered ways to collaborate and communicate unimaginable in 1993 when Rheingold published his book.

With the evolution of virtual communities from The Well to Ning and beyond, what problems remain today? What keeps some communities from being more effective or have they evolved as far as they can go? (Please post your comments by 12 pm, June 2).

Related:
The Well: A Timeline
The Wealth of Networks, Benkler (full text, via CC share-alike license)

The venerable Society of Professional Journalists is  offering a series of workshops for non-professional journalists who want to hone their news reporting and writing skills,  according to Steve Johnson’s Hypertext.

“There are quite a few bloggers, particularly in larger cities, who do work on a par with any journalist,” SPJ president Clint Brewer told Johnson who attended a recent workshop at DePaul. “We’re trying to sort of hang our shingle out in their world with this first step and let them know we welcome them as well.”

Through The Citizen Journalism Academy, SPJ says it ” seeks to help everyone wanting to practice journalism to do so accurately, ethically and fairly. The Society aims to help participants understand how responsible practices could increase their reach and help them have strong journalistic reputations within their communities and around the world.”

What do you think? Can such an effort improve the quality of work by novice reporters or does it undermine the very idea of citizen journalism?

For additional reading, the more recent Media Predictions 2008 report from Deloitte is available here. Thanks, Brian, for sending the link. Highlights include:

1. Obstacles ahead for online advertising—one barrier may be the growing antipathy to the online advertisement itself.
2. e-Reference to replace ebook—while there is significant benefit from digitizing the world, not all texts become more useful or more valuable when digitized.
3. The living room may become Public Enemy Number One—the media and consumer electronics industries should consider how the carbon footprint of the living room can be reduced without the need to revert to antiquated technology, such as CTR tubes and analog transmission.
4. Traditional lives on thanks to Internet TV—the global traditional television sector, despite the occasional shock, should remain in good health throughout the year, and there is a good chance that Internet television will have contributed to traditional television’s fortunes.
5. Overcoming online piracy may not mean the end to counterfeit content—while 2008 may be the year in which the media industry manages to start to control one form of piracy – the overall campaign against piracy needs to be sustained.
6. The movie theater becomes more than just movies—the movie theater’s run of strong performance provides the ideal backdrop for change, with the move to digital implying considerable investment, which is likely best accommodated while revenues are still strong.
7. Time for music to be tangible again—the industry could evolve from offering digital downloads for transfer to a device, to selling pre-recorded MP3 players.
8. Online is moving (slowly) to the front page—2008 may be the year in which it becomes increasingly commonplace for traditional media to acknowledge the existence of the online world.
9. Offshoring gets bigger and more creative—2007 saw one of the first media offshoring contracts worth in excess of $1 billion, covering “end-to-end” full services including IT, operations, finance and accounting, HR and research. 2008 may see further deals of this scale.
10. Converging technology and media – don’t forget the business plan—for the combination of media and technology to be worth more than the sum of its parts, a number of factors need to be aligned, particularly a robust business plan.

In a preview report for 2007, Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications group anticipates the commercialization of social networks and user-generated content, the rise of real economies in virtual worlds and the need for a more sophisticated approach to “long tail” marketing. “The challenge for media companies in 2007 is to second-guess how the public’s perception of value may change …” the authors write. What do you think? Which online trends are likely to be most profitable for media companies, and what, if anything, have the authors failed to anticipate?

In “The Future of Advertising is Now,” a report from strategy+business magazine, consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton heralds a new era of consumer-centered marketing to replace outdated print and broadcast advertising models. Even so, the report estimates that major marketers are allocating only 4-10 percent of “measured media spending” to online advertising.   As this changes, what opportunities does it create for news web sites large and small? What are the risks?

Please comment on the readings by 12 p.m., Monday, May 19. 

Tracking traffic on the Web is tricky business with serious implications for those that rely on accurate traffic numbers for their revenue. Which of the methods presented in the readings on Blackboard seem most reliable and where do you see the effort to bring uniformity to the numbers heading? Note: The articles are posted in Blackboard/Course Docs/Week Seven/Readings. Please post comments by class time May 12. 

Rich Gordon sends this along to us: “The 25 basic styles of blogging … and when to use each one.”  The blogs you are building for this class employ several of these styles, some of which can be very effective in drawing readers. See the “Buzz Index” for each. The list does not aim to be comprehensive, no sooner is this posted than another type of blog will emerge, perhaps defined by you.

Congratulations to all of you who work on The Windy Citizen, which received a well deserved tip of the hat yesterday from Steve Johnson at the Tribune. Johnson’s review was then picked up by Romenesko at Poynter Online. See also Romenesko’s link to Tim McGuire’s profile of Windy Citizen founder Brad Flora which includes good advice for all:

“Smart entrepreneurs (or, gasp, traditional media companies) are going to gather hundreds of these bright thinkers, give them that $100 grand and take half the profits. That’s the real future of news unless newspapers hire the Brad Floras out there and let them run. Their innovation and experimentation needs to be encouraged and nurtured, not stapled, spindled and mutilated to the point that they think like everyone else in a newsroom.”

This week you reviewed copyright guidelines and watched Stanford’s Lawrence Lessig discuss new ways of understanding copyright law. How is copyright changing and how much should it change?

Is the fragmentation or segmenting of audiences on the Web an opportunity to report deeply on a topic to a narrow audience? Or does it spell the decline of general-interest publications? Other thoughts on the article?

Please comment here on this article by noon, April 14.

Gillmor calls the advent of non-professional journalism “one of the healthiest media developments in a long time.”  Do you agree?   Gillmor cites examples of independent journalists being able to support their efforts through advertising or direct support from readers.  Do you expect this business model to grow? What does this mean for traditional media outlets?

Please comment here on this reading by noon, April 14.