Journalists, make way for the…average citizen?

When I first heard about Assignment Zero, I was a little skeptical (despite the fact that I think Jay Rosen, the founder of Assignment Zero, is one of the most intelligent, forward-thinking individuals when it comes to journalism and the Web 2.0 world).  Professional journalists collaborating with citizen journalists?  Sure, you might get a good story or two out of it, but is this really a sustainable model for producing quality news?

Apparently it is.  And passive consumers of news are increasingly becoming engaged participants, wanting to contribute to the news landscape in some way.  (Rosen actually has a wonderful post about this shift on his blog, PressThink, entitled “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.”)  In the Assignment Zero article “News the Crowd Can Use”, Patrick Crawford writes something similar about social news sites like and Digg:  

“…the very existence of social editing indicates that a fundamental shift is occurring in [the] way people think about news.  Users of social editing sites are no longer passive media consumers.  Instead they see media as a live discussion in which the public deserves a voice equal to that of an editor.”

Because of this fundamental shift, many people have asserted that social media will one day overtake traditional journalism.  I don’t subscribe to the idea that social news sites or blogs will ever cause traditional journalism to disappear into oblivion.  The Assignment Zero team interviewed Michael Tippett, the co-founder of NowPublic.com, “one of the largest aggregators of crowdsourced news in the world.”  During the interview, Tippett was asked if the news media industry thinks of outlets like NowPublic.com as competition.  He responded by saying that, “…the news organizations are looking at this and thinking, we’ve got to embrace this or it’s going to take over the industry.” 

Although social news sites might present a slight threat to traditional news media, the two really complement one another.  Citizens need professional journalists to do the legwork for a story (after all, that’s what these journalists get paid to do) and professional journalists need citizens to challenge them, provide feedback or expert knowledge, and ultimately help these journalists create a better product that’s more aligned with the needs of the public.  But there are too many people out there – especially in the older generations – that aren’t part of the social news site or citizen journalist phenomenon.  This is why we’ll always have the New York Times and 60 Minutes. 

The media landscape is shifting, though, and professional journalism is not the “be all, end all” it once was.  There are new forces at play here – bloggers, sites like Digg, and so on – and traditional journalism has no choice but to make room for them.  It will be interesting, though, to see how all these media sources interact with one another in years to come.  Keep watching.

The world of “Wikinomics” (aka collaboration)

The first four chapters of Dan Tapscott and Anthony Williams’ Wikinomics can essentially be summed up with one sentence that appears on page 37: “Whether people are creating, sharing, or socializing, the new Web is principally about participating rather than about passively receiving information.”

The numerous examples used in the book demonstrate not only the fact that anyone can create content, but that individuals can now collaborate across platforms that were once thought to be barriers, such as regions and corporations. Participation is, for the most part, simple. Whether it’s the Goldcorp Challenge that turned a $100 million company into a $9 billion one or the tale of Linux, IBM, and the beginnings of open-source software, Tapscott and Williams’ stories illustrate that the opportunities for participation on the Web are constantly increasing because of the variety of Web-based tools available. (For more great examples of collaboration, check out the Web site for Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs. His book – which I think does a better job of explaining the phenomenon of how technology eases collaboration than Wikinomics – is a must read too.)

I think there are three big reasons people like participating in the online space and will continue to do so:

• The technical side of things, for the most part, is pretty easy. You don’t have to be an HTML expert to have a MySpace page or post your photos on Flickr. A lot of the technology is such that anyone – whether you’re incredibly tech-savvy or don’t have the slightest clue how to do anything on a computer besides type – can create material online.

• It’s inexpensive. There are numerous sites, such as Blogger and WordPress, that will host your blog for free. There’s no membership fee to be part of social networks like Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Sites like YouTube and Flickr don’t charge for posting multimedia, either. (Well, unless you have a pro account on Flickr, but the free accounts are more than sufficient.)

• Information is updated constantly. Instead of waiting for the 2008 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica to be released, visit Wikipedia. (Granted, the information in Wikipedia is not always guaranteed to be accurate – take this story about Kenneth Lay’s Wikipedia entry, for example – but it’s often corrected pretty quickly.) If you want to read the latest news stories, read a blog or an online news source instead of waiting for tomorrow’s Washington Post.

There are so many ways that people can, as Tapscott and Williams put it, “enhance the Web.” And the biggest advantage to all these social media and collaboration tools is that anyone can use them.

Search: Algorithms and tagging and linking, oh my

The concept of search is something that’s always been a little mysterious (for lack of a better term) to me.  Sure, I understand the basic idea of it, but how does search really work?  Search Engine Watch describes how crawler-based search engines “spider” Web pages, index pages, and then rank them in the order that the search engine software thinks is most relevant.  The third part of this equation is what intrigues me the most. 

How are ranking algorithms written that they can determine what site is more popular or relevant to a user versus another?  GoogleGuide explains this a little bit, noting that Google uses over 100 factors in determining a site’s PageRank, such as the position and size of the search terms on a given page.  This recent New York Times article that a colleague sent me does an even better job of explaining how Google constantly tweaks its PageRank algorithms to ensure users are quickly and easily finding what they want.  (Really, this article is a must-read if you’re even remotely interested in search.)  But for the most part, the intricacies of ranking algorithms will remain a mystery to most of us.  Like the NYT article says, employees at places like Google are barely allowed to discuss it…because these innerworkings are what give search engines their competitive edge.

For those of us in the social media world, though, it’s a good thing for us that some people do discuss what it takes to optimize a blog or social media site so that it’s highly visible in a search.  Rohit Bhargava’s “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)” and Guy Kawasaki’s interview with Technorati founder David Sifry both discuss similar ways to try and increase a blog’s ranking.  They mention a variety of ways to make a blog more visible: make tagging and bookmarking easy for users, link to other blogs, put a full-text RSS feed on your blog, post frequently, submit your content to other sites, and so on.

These are great recommendations for bloggers who are looking to optimize their blog in terms of its rank in different search engines…but I’m still a little skeptical.  With millions of blogs out there, simply following Sifry’s and Bhargava’s advice is not an automatic recipe for making it into the Technorati Top 100.  These strategies will absolutely help bloggers make themselves more visible, but putting these SMO tips into practice isn’t a surefire way to enjoy a ranking spot near DailyKos or Gawker. Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University, conducted a study that offers some insight as to why certain blogs are popular and listed as top search results while the rest are not.  For you celeb gossip junkies out there, it’s kind of like Hollywood: there are the A-listers….and then there’s everyone else whose names we barely know.

This piece in New York Magazine, “Blogs to Riches: The Haves and the Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom”, is a favorite of mine.  Shirky did several experiments to examine the “disparities in the blogosphere.”  He started by counting inbound links to a sample of 433 blogs.  He found that the A-list – a very small number of blogs – had hundreds of inbound links.  Yet almost all the others had only a few sites linking to them.

“Economists and network scientists have a name for Shirky’s curve: a “power-law distribution.” Power laws are not limited to the Web; in fact, they’re common to many social systems. If you chart the world’s wealth, it forms a power-law curve: A tiny number of rich people possess most of the world’s capital, while almost everyone else has little or none.”

I’m assuming that these 433 bloggers in Shirky’s experiment certainly employed strategies to help them get noticed.  But based on these results of Shirky’s experiment, it’s an uphill battle for bloggers to increase their ranking even if they’re following the tips from Bhargava and Siftry.  Perhaps it can be done but….who can actually “make it big” in the blogosphere? 

Why citizen marketing (and social media) works

Marketing and public relations are no longer just about blasting out a press release or buying advertising space. In the Web 2.0 world, citizen marketers – a term used by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba in their book “Citizen Marketers: Where the People are the Message” – are playing an increasing role in shaping how brands are portrayed by the public. Steve makes a great point in his blog post: corporations are not in control of the message anymore, and are being held accountable for their actions by their various publics, often through these citizen marketers.

McConnell and Huba mentioned four types of citizen marketers in the first chapter of the book:

1. Filters: the “human wire services” who collect blog posts, podcasts, and other types of media
2. Fanatics: those who love to analyze brands, organizations, and the like
3. Facilitators: creators of Web-based communities
4. Firecrackers: the “one-hit wonders of citizen marketers” who create videos, songs, or other media that quickly generate interest

The most important aspect of citizen marketing, in my mind – and the thing that all four types of citizen marketers have in common – is the fact that what they say and do is both authentic and transparent. This is why citizen marketing is credible and influential. Like McConnell and Huba said, “The world of citizen content creators is largely governed by a universal law of authenticity . . . Faking authenticity is a difficult art.” Those citizen marketers whose actions aren’t genuine will, through the wisdom of the crowds, be exposed.

That’s the great thing about citizen marketing (and social media, for that matter): if something is incorrect or not authentic, the public will make it known. Robert Scoble touts this fact on his blog when he talks about social media:

“A newspaper can’t magically change its stories, even if society decides something in them is incorrect. My blog can be updated for all readers nearly instantly if someone demonstrates that I was wrong on a post.”

Of course, there will always be some who doubt the credibility of citizen marketing. Douglas Adams wrote that people can’t trust what they find on the Internet “any more than you can trust what people tell you on megaphones, postcards, or in restaurants.” Although the concept of Web 2.0 is still evolving, the fact that new media is changeable and is also shaped by the collective knowledge of the crowds increases the credibility of those publishing and interacting via the Web.

The authenticity of citizen marketing efforts, though, is hurt by things like Jason Calacanis’s experiment to pay the top 12 social bookmarkers for contributing to sites like Digg, Reddit, and Newsvine. Like McConnell and Huba wrote, “the 1 percenters contribute” to social networking sites because they enjoy it. When someone is under pressure to contribute or post a comment, it becomes work. One of Digg’s contributors said it best in the e-mail he wrote to decline Calacanis’s offer:

“I don’t need to be paid [for] what I do now. I will commit my time to Digg whenever possible, that’s how much I enjoy Digg. It’s not about the money, it’s what you enjoy, and this is what I like.”

Again, the whole reason citizen marketing works is because it’s organic and genuine and generated by someone just like you and me. And for citizen marketing to remain credible, we have to ensure it stays that way.