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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)

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. 

In his latest article for The New Yorker, Eric Alterman charts the decline of the American newspaper as we know it. He finds some reason for journalistic optimism in the work of the more successful news blogs including The Huffington Post. But, he posits, where would such blogs be without the traditional news outlets to feed them material? Will blogs and other news Web sites step up to fill the gap in serious reporting or will they continue to play off the work of others? Some other interesting ideas here, too. Post your comments by noon, April 7.

In 1945, The Atlantic Monthly published an article by Dr. Vannevar Bush, director of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. Bush called on his fellow scientists to develop new tools to record and organize the wealth of their knowledge.

Bush wrote: ” The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”

What do you think of Bush’s ideas? What technologies did he anticipate with accuracy and which would be useful inventions today? Have we developed adequate tools to access and evaluate new scientific developments? Or is our world closer to what Bush saw in 1945, too much information, poorly organized.

This article is available for student access in Blackboard/Documents/Week One. Please post your comments on this article by noon, Monday, April 7.

In his article, “The History of Online Journalism,” David Carlson traces the roots of digital news from Britain’s “teletext” system of the 1970s through the dawn of Yahoo!, AOL and the rest. What were some of the keys to success for those technologies that survived? Did Carlson leave out any key developments?

Much has happened in the field since 2003 when the article was first published. If you were to continue the history from 2003-2008, what would be the highlights? How do you see online journalism changing in the future?

This article is posted on Blackboard. Post your thoughts here as a comment and aim to play off the ideas of those who post before you.

Harvard Business School professor John Deighton says that consumers are approaching privacy from the wrong angle. Instead of focusing solely on efforts to protect their identity, they should consider their identity a commodity they can sell to companies for better services based on their individual buying habits and preferences. A company that pays for your information will be more inclined to treat your information with care, Deighton reasons, because they’ve established a relationship with you. What do you think of this idea? How might it work in practice? Would you sell your identity in exchange for better services? Do you already?

In these chapters, Edward Samuels reviews the history of copyright in the U.S. How do recent developments in copyright law affect the way you handle audio, video and photos in your work as a journalist? Where do you think things are heading in the near future, toward greater protection for copyright owners or greater freedom for consumers?

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 in this article published last year. “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?