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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.

Hola,

I wanted to share a pretty cool site with you all.  It’s called Global Voices Online.  It’s a daily collection of blogs from around the world put together by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

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. 

Here are a few traffic-building tips that are worth reiterating. We’ve mentioned these things before, but if you’re not doing them, now’s the time.

1. Promote the heck out of that audio interview.
It’s fresh content and a different type of post than your run-of-the-mill news story reaction posts. Tell your potential readers about it in any way that you can! Engage with your community, since you have exclusive content that they might be interested in. Search Facebook and other social networking sites for groups that pertain to your topic. Don’t forget to check out Ning. There are more than 2,000 people in Ning’s social networking site for coffeehouse baristas. Your topic probably has a group, too.

2. Market your site in all your online endeavors.
Chances are you have accounts for lots of sites and Web services. Make sure each of those accounts is plugging your blog! Link everywhere: G-chat status, Facebook status and profile, Twitter profile and tweets, LinkedIn profile and–most importantly–your Medill Reports Author Profile Page. There are lots of other possibilities. Make your online identity work for you!

3. Comment, Comment, Comment, Link, Link, Comment, Comment
To paraphrase the Beatles, the comments you give are equal to the comments you take. If you leave comments on a lot of blogs, viewers of those blogs will check out your site and the owners of those blogs will definitely want to know who you are. If they like what they see, visitors will become comment-leavers who will become subscribers. Also, charity starts at home. Read and comment on each other’s blogs! Usually if someone sees that there is a comment on a post, they will read that post more closely, read the comment and be more inclined to join the conversation.

4. Sexy Titles
The power of a keyword in your post’s title cannot be understated. That keyword appears in your URL, which gets indexed by Google, which leads people to your site via search. Also, repeat customers would much rather read a post with an intriguing title than a dull one. Wouldn’t you?

5. Get More Tips
If you truly are obsessed with your page views and absolute unique visitor rates, there are lots of online resources with tips about improving traffic. I’ve been subscribed to ProBlogger for a few months now and I’ve read a lot of useful tips and tricks there. Check it out!

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.”

Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry

The fundamental goal of findability is to persistently connect your audience with the stuff you write, design, and build. When you create relevant and valuable content, present it in a machine readable format, and provide tools that facilitate content exchange and portability, you’ll help ensure that the folks you’re trying to reach get your message.

A website that ignores findability is whispering into the wind, hoping that someone passing by might catch a hint of its message. To further complicate the chances of reaching your target audience, a cacophony of other websites are vying for the same commodity—attention.