Doc Searls: Toward a new ecology of journalism.

I attended a great Web 2.0 University bootcamp in San Francisco today put on by Jeff Kelly (at the projection screen, above) of Hinchcliffe & Co. They have another one coming up in New York on Oct. 2. Very effective presentation -- highly recommended, especially for companies looking to get oriented about the shifting social media landscape.

NY Times: New Social Sites Cater to People of a Certain Age

Older people are sticky.

That is the latest view from Silicon Valley. Technology investors and entrepreneurs, long obsessed with connecting to teenagers and 20-somethings, are starting a host of new social networking sites aimed at baby boomers and graying computer users.

The sites have names like Eons, Rezoom, Multiply, Maya’s Mom, Boomj, and Boomertown. They look like Facebook  — with wrinkles.

And they are seeking to capitalize on what investors say may be a profitable characteristic of older Internet users: they are less likely than youngsters to flit from one trendy site to the next. ...

Honor their memory by going after the real perpetrators. (NY Times photo)

I'm not going to be able to get up to the University of California, Davis, for the first GoingGreen conference put on by Tony Perkins and his AlwaysOn team. A number of environmental-minded tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are discussing innovations in green technology. I'm told there's a live webcast but as always, alas, it's nearly impossible to find. (OK, it's here.)

I mentioned Quechup here the other day, so I'm reblogging this from Dan Gillmor at the Center for Citizen Media:

Infoworld’s “Cringely” observes, regarding the nototious Quechup:

When you sign up for the site it prompts you to share your address book so you can find out which of your 10,000 close personal friends is also trolling for dates on Quechup. But instead of presenting you with a list of friends, Quechup sends an invite from you to everyone in your book — making you look like a nasty purveyor of pork.

I’ve received several dozen of these spams, and have let the people who didn’t realize they were sending them know that they need to rethink their choices of social networks. Quechup is a great example of how to ruin social media.

More from Dan Gillmor: Journalists shouldn't underestimate the impact of Apple’s new iPod with touch capability.

News-folk: You should be aiming at least some of what you produce at the screen on this WiFi enabled audio/video/Web machine. This is breakthrough territory, way beyond what the iPhone even suggests.

And Chris Brogan at VON magazine: What the New iPods Signify for Internet Video.

San Jose Mercury News: Momentum gains for MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook. Finding the right one depends on your needs.

And it's often not a right one. I'm on Facebook and LinkedIn, not MySpace. Excerpt:

LinkedIn takes a completely different approach from the other two. With its 14 million members, it is a great way to broaden your professional network. It started in the Bay Area, where the majority of its members are, but is spreading worldwide.

With LinkedIn, you can find contacts inside companies at places like Microsoft or Intel easily. That's why many people pay $20 a month to get more privileges (such as being able to invite more people simultaneously) that go well beyond the free version.

LinkedIn is proving itself useful beyond just providing connections to my 312 friends. As with Facebook, I can ask questions for research purposes and get answers from my own network or the broader community. I got 47 responses from people with strong opinions about the differences among the social networks. ...

From ebiquity, a citizen media/citizen journalism timeiine:

• 2007, September: Google News recently announced partnerships with Reuters and AP to host stories directly on Google.
• 2007, September: English version of Wikinews reaches 10,000 articles according to Wikipedia.
• 2007, August: Google News to include comments from people in news.
• 2007, August: NY Times Select Content to be free.
• 2007, April: News stories ranging from earthquake reports to heroic rescue efforts are breaking news on Twitter. IMHO, this is an exciting development.
• 2007, July: NowPublic, a social media news site is named as one of the 50 best websites by Time.
• 2007, March: AssignmenZero meets Wired to connect journalists with citizens.
• 2006, December: Yahoo and Reuters launch YouWitnessNews.
• 2005, November: Alive in Baghdad, a weekly video blog posts the first video.
• 2005, July: Pictures of London Bombing from Flickr were being used on several news sites.
• 2004, November: WikiNews launched as a project by Wikimedia foundation.

Good partial list, though too slanted toward major media and it needs to extend further back to capture the launch of Wikipedia, Slashdot, Metafilter and KenRadio.com. And certainly the launch of Ourmedia (the first video hosting and sharing site) in March 2005 and YouTube on Dec. 15, 2005 (it was in private beta starting in May 2005) were significant milestones, but perhaps this is a difference in defining citizen media vs. citizen journalism.

The Washington Post has a fascinating interview with author William Gibson about the future. His new book is Spook Country. (Washington Post photo)

Gotta love Bugroff Bugrof, the antisocial networking site for people who would really prefer to be on their own. ("Because enough is enough.")

You can't sign up because you're not invited. But if you were, here's what you could do:

- Post no pictures of yourself or friends
- Invite no one else to join
- Switch status between 'unavailable, 'hiding' and 'dead'
- Keep what you're doing now private
- Receive no communications of any sort
- Generally hide away

At WorldChanging, Emily Gertz live-blogged the Society of Environmental Journalists conference late last week.

Author and Stanford Prof. Lawrence Lessig has a new cause: understanding and fighting corruption. Sunday's San Jose Mercury News has a Q&A with him. Excerpts:

Lessig wants to tackle something far more elemental - the very nature of corruption. Why do some people subvert or short-change their ideals for money or some other inducement? Lessig sees this in politicians, in doctors, in lawyers, in academics, and yes, in journalists. And once he understands corruption, he wants to build a movement to stop it. ...

Lessig: We've all gotten use to money buying influence in the context of politics. But I was intrigued by my fellow academics who were allowing themselves to get in situations where it's hard to believe that money wasn't influencing them. When you go to Harvard Law School and you say to a professor that we'll give you money to do research in certain areas, or on certain subjects, it's sure pretty hard to not see how that affects how people do their jobs.

So it sounds like this effort will encompass influence peddling, conflict of interest and ethical issues as well as corruption.

Pagefactor is a tool that provides a simple interface to find web pages that have moved. It also displays the cached copies of the web page captured by Google or the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

We're still running Ourmedia on a shoestring -- we were the first video hosting site when we launched nearly 2 1/2 years ago -- but we're still getting a lot of love.

Website Magazine just came out with its list of the Top 50 Video Hostings Sites, and Ourmedia is on it. (They list them alphabetically rather than by ranking.)

Wetpaint, one of the better wiki services, just announced a new site template feature and enhanced profile management capabilities.

Here's what SiliconBeat had to say about them last year: Wetpaint: wikis for regular people. They're up to 500,000 wikis created now.

New York Times (NYT photo of Janine Hawkins with her Second Life avatar Iris Ophelia): Even in a Virtual World, ‘Stuff’ Matters. Excerpt:

It's payday for Janine Hawkins. Not in the real world, where she is a student at Nipissing University in Ontario, but in the online world of Second Life, where she is managing editor of the fashion magazine Second Style.

Ms. Hawkins, who in Second Life takes on the persona of Iris Ophelia, a beauty with flowing hair and flawless skin, keeps a list of things she wants to buy: the latest outfits from the virtual fashion mecca Last Call, a new hairstyle from a Japanese designer, slouchy boots. When she receives her monthly salary in Linden dollars, the currency of Second Life, she spends up to four hours shopping, clicking and buying. After a year and a half, she owns 31,540 items.

Living it up in Second Life is a break from Ms. Hawkins’s part-time job as a French translator, but she works just as hard in the virtual world.

Last month, she earned 40,000 Linden dollars ($150), for interviewing designers, arranging fashion shoots and writing about trends in Second Life, called SL by frequent users. “I usually spend what I earn,” Ms. Hawkins said. “It’s entertaining.”

It also says a lot about the real world, especially when it comes to earning and spending money.

When people are given the opportunity to create a fantasy world, they can and do defy the laws of gravity (you can fly in Second Life), but not of economics or human nature. Players in this digital, global game don’t have to work, but many do. They don’t need to change clothes, fix their hair, or buy and furnish a home, but many do. They don’t need to have drinks in their hands at the virtual bar, but they buy cocktails anyway, just to look right, to feel comfortable.

PC Advisor: How to maintain your privacy in Facebook. Keep your valuable data safe. Excerpt:

A statement on the About pages of Facebook this week reads: "Starting today, we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook… The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right away after signing up anyway, so we're not exposing any new information and you have complete control over your public search listing."

BusinessWeek Online: O.K. (Sigh), I'll Join Facebook. But its mashup of friends and business is unnerving.

Daily Journal: The grownups are coming.

PC Advisor: Facebook: The most dangerous site on the Web? Social-networking users relinquish their ID for free. 

Danah Boyd is confused by facebook. Excerpt:

I'm utterly fascinated by how people talk about Facebook as being more private, more secure than MySpace. By default, people's FB profiles are only available to their network. Join a City network and your profile is far more open than you realize. Accept the default search listings and you're findable on Google. The default is far beyond friends-only and locking a FB profile down to friends-only takes dozens of clicks in numerous different locations. Plus, you never can really tell because if you join a new network, everything is by-default open to that network (including your IM and phone number). To make matters weirder, if you install an App, you give the creator access to all of your profile data (no one reads those checkboxes anyhow). Most people never touch the defaults, meaning that they are far more exposed on Facebook than they realize. ... MySpace on the other hand is rather simple: public or friends-only. Friends-only is far more secure than the defaults on Facebook. And public is well-understood to mean anyone could access it (and often this is the goal). But I know all too well that privacy has nothing to do with reality - it's all about perception. And Facebook *feels* more secure than MySpace, even if it's not.

Baratunde Thurston: Facebook follies. 

Scoble answers Danah. Excerpt:

I want per-content privacy. Flickr gets this right by letting me click a button on photos and setting the privacy for that photo.

Good conversation. Facebook's exec team needs to get on top of this or risk losing buy-in from a lot of people who matter.

Meantime, here's another boneheaded decision by the powers that be at Facebook:

Channel 4: Facebook battles moms over ban of breastfeeding photos. As a former editor of BabyCenter.com, I've see the mainstream media trip up on this over and over again. It's upsetting to see Facebook make the same mistake.

Woke up early this morning and brought Bobby to downtown Pleasanton at daybreak for the annual parade for younger members of the Rage and Ballistic soccer teams. Here are 55 photos on Flickr.

At Office 2.0 yesterday I heard about this significant announcement: A Bill of Rights for users of the Social Web put out by four Web 2.0 pioneers: Marc Canter (who co-founded Ourmedia with me); uber-blogger Robert Scoble; Joseph Marc, the head tech guy at social networking company Plaxo; and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington.

It's short and sweet:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
  • their own profile data
  • the list of people they are connected to
  • the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

• Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
• Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
• Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
• Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

These are familiar principles, and a well-trod rallying cry, for many of us in the social media movement. It's good to see it laid out this plainly.

Now we have to pressure companies to live up to these common-sense standards.

80 comments on the Open Social Web site. More from Marc, Scoble, Smarr and  LwEES.