"The tools of citizen journalism allow anyone to be a publisher at next-to-no cost. ...we will soon see a slew of standalone, online, B2B publications being run by recently retired journalists. Those folks who have been working in your newsroom for 10, 20 or 30 years will no longer have to surrender a lifetime of industry knowledge when they walk out your door. "
--Blogger and trade journalist Paul Conley

Maybe one of my favorite posts ever from the lovely Steve Rubel on Dell and the Jarvis thing and the BizWeek piece in the bloghouse.
Steve says:
To my friends at Dell, here's some free advice that can help you turn this around. You are now passed the point of no return. Dell needs to act now. Here are just three of the steps you might want to take to re-build your credibility with bloggers ...more at Micropersuasion.

Times Online (UK) covers Craigslist and Craig and says the site is worth more than $60MM and that it brings in $10MM+ a year.

Best graph is the quote from Craig: "Sometimes I wince about the amount of money I have walked away from. I guess it's many, many millions. I'm not being pious about this, but I do have an idea about what's important. Once you are financially comfortable, what's the point of more money?"

P.S. Craig's foundation is sponsoring a bootcamp for nonprofits in San Francisco on October 8th--if you are around, why not volunteer to help? I am.

Paul Graham: How to start a company--the right way.
NYTimes: Cooking Light has supper club meet ups based on published recipes.
TheColumbiaRecord.com: Knight Ridder paper launches new site, community publishing push (Via E&P).
Terry Teachout: Live from katerina--Arts blogger becomes storm media resource--and explains how it happened.

Tom Coates has a fascinating post on an "experimental internal-BBC-only project designed to allow users to bookmark, tag and rate songs they hear on the radio using their mobile phone." I heard Coates and company present at eTech on some nifty user-driven programs they ran on the radio station, and this is more like that.
Coates is dead on when he writes:
"The next push is the archive - decades of programming coming online, lost films recovered, libraries being digitised. But the scale of even this content is dwarfed by the third push into the world of the amateurised content-creator, where potentially billions of people are putting information and media out into the world as a matter of course.
The most substantial challenge to technology creators, media creators and distributors is - then - to find ways of making this enormous and every-growing repository navigable and sensible to real people."
and
"There's also one more major challenge. Current media distributors and large-scale media creators are going to find themselves suddenly operating in a market of peer creators, where hundreds of people can create and interact and respond to the media around them."

The money shot--tagging allows music to surface. --One last quote:
"he peer benefit is in music discovery and navigation. There's an incredible amount of new music being produced all the time. Our increased access to it means - in principle - that we should be able to find music that we felt more appropriately suited us, but the sheer volume makes it hard to explore. With a service like phonetags, an individual can start exploring music by axes of quality, or by keywords or by discovering people with similar tastes to themselves. And it gets updated in pretty much real-time."

Nice work, Tom.

The new Bakotopia's just gone into beta release and developer Dan Pacheo has the scoop.
I've played with it a bit and love the identity/profile features.
Dan writes:
"This next version is even more about persona. It has several types of user profile ratings (including the ability to rate bands based on how many beers they're worth to you), profile guestbooks, and a liberal sprinkling of user profiles throughout the site. In addition, if you have a profile photo and you sign on, your profile pic shows up right on the home page, as well as right alongside anything you post and in sidebars."

How cool is that?
When it comes to community publishing, the Bakersfield folks continue to delight.

Editors' Weblog: "According to the latest Annual Euro RSCG Magnet and Columbia University Survey of the Media, 51% of journalists, combared to 11% of all US internet users (according to eWeek), are using weblogs regularly and 28% rely on them for their daily reporting. By contrast, only 1% of journalists believe in their credibility."

Susan sez: This says something to me about why main stream media is disconnected and screwed up. We know not all 5 million bloggers are trying to be accurate--we know they're not--so doesn't that make the journos behavior and belief rather conflicted?

Or maybe it just proves all these studies are ridiculous.

Chris Waddle, Anniston Star, Choose one future for citizen journalism: "Bloggers can be as outrageous as they want to be and amass readers with similar viewpoints or jettison opponents without the economic consequences a newspaper endures....Why do they blog? Eighty percent say information they want is not available anywhere else."

Samantha Henig, Columbia Journalism Review: "Just because citizens have a new way of recording and transmitting that fodder hardly means that it's time to call them journalists." (Susan says: Huh, does anyone besides CJR still want to call bloggers journos? --Nah.)

Jim Moore's Journal: Reporting on systems evolving : "There is a new, global DIY do-it-yourself revolution happening. My new favorite magazine is Make, which is a wonderfully screwball journal of hacks...We are planting and cultivating a new open ecology of web superservices. Or perhaps we are joining together to build a Metaverse in Stephenson's sense. In any case, expanding participation is rule number one of our new world."

My cousin Bill has been blogging and has a delicious story about a 6,000 mile trip to meet a woman happening over at Living the Romantic Comedy.
A snippet:
"...But I realize now that in addition to my bag, I''ve brought a companion, who sniffs at the air like an eager dog, gazes rapturously at the bright sunlight beckoning from beyond the terminal doors. Like it or not, it's really the two of us that have come to Amsterdam: there's me, and My Romance. I''m a little buzzed but yawning, while My Romance is on pins and needles, primed for surprise and passion. I''m merely hoping Michelle shows up, after all. But My Romance is praying she's not too tall for me, that she might fit, you know, just right…"

More, Billy, more!

Paid Content: "While the unique audience of AOL News is about 29% smaller than Yahoo News, AOL News is more than 2.4 times larger than Google News and almost 6.8 times larger than Topix.net." Story here.

Greg Jarboe says this moves AOL news into the top ranks--but AOL News has always been huge--now it's getting bigger.

Check out this highly evocative pic

A partial list of some cool stuff happening--
Sept 6th, Emeryville, CA, eBIG -- Mary Hodder leads a discussion on measuring the blogosphere
Sept. 20, UC Berkeley, CA, MGM vs. Grokster: Denise Howell, Hank Barry Greg Beattie debate
Sept 24-25, SF, CA, Webzine --this is going to be fun
October 4-5 NY, NY, , We Media: Behold the power of us, great conference!
October 17-18, NY., NY BlogOn-- Chris Shipley and team make it happen again--I am moderating a panel--more tk.

Also thinking about Web2.0--my friend Richard MacManus is coming in from NZ, which will be great, but it means flying back fast from NYC.

Saturday night, my friends Jill, Gab and I cooked up a feast. Here's what we made ourselves--

Grilled fresh corn with chili-lime butter

Chopped heirloom tomato salad with scallion and fresh mint

Barbequed soft shell crabs

Grilled bockwurst

We drank a nice South American red wine called Malbeck (?) and finished off the meal with chilled red flame grapes, home-made brownies, and Dreyer's mint chocolate chip ice cream

The beach was a pleasure, taking real vacation felt great, and now I am back and feeling renewed. Grrr.

Yep ,I am taking a vacation.
Going to be at the beach for the next 3 days and blissfully offline.
Have a wonderful time--talk to you later.

Amazon sells sex toys!
Who knew?
(If I click around, this is going to have a stimulating effect on my recommendations list..hhmmnn)

(Via herdesires)

This post about how one blogger reads--and discovers--news --caught my attention:
"...My browsing pattern could be characterised as 'bimodal': graze mode and discover mode. You could think of this as 'I don't know what I want' and 'I know what I want' modes.
(snip)
I rarely start any such grazing journey at traditional big media news sites. I use the blogosphere as my filter. If it hasn't been linked to, it probably isn't that interesting.."

Richard MacManus: A through round-up on how the web's evolving into a platform--and why it matters.
eMarketer: Online newspapers ad revenue rises--but still lags behind the portals.

Kottke switches: Bye bye Technorati, hello PubSub.
Chris Pirillo: Ten reasons why all top ten lists suck.
Blogbridge ships their new release--one key feature is building feeds via Flickr, del.icio.us, Findory, Feedster, etc.

5ive has a client who's looking to put up a Wordpress blog ASAP--and we're interested in hearing from Bay area and West coast developers who could help make this happen fairly quickly.
We'd like to hear from some experienced folks--the blog will need to synch/integrate with some existing systems.
If you are interested, please email me with info, previous work, rates, recommendations etc.
Be fault-tolerant and experienced, please.

Flying to NY today..light posting till the insomnia kicks in tonight.
Best quote of the morning from Mary Hodder, who got an IM that said:
Bad time - @ wedding drunk

"During the past five years...we have seen a gradual shift of time spent away from advertising-based to consumer-supported media, as well as a steady transfer of spending away from traditional to new media advertising. We expect the underlying trends driving this industry-wide transformation, such as consumer empowerment, accelerating audience fragmentation and the increasing need for stronger ROI measurements, to continue and drive accelerated growth in all four industry sectors as more sophisticated purchasing plans, which utilize a variety of conventional and alternative media outlets, become necessary."
-- James P. Rutherfurd, Executive Vice President of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, 19th annual Communications Industry Forecast

Feedster's launched a new monthly list of the top 500 blogs, based on "a ranking of the blogs with the most inbound links over time, " blogs with posts in the last seven days" and the removal of feed-driven aggregator sites.
No blogspot or live journal blogs. Waahh.
Some surprises--their top 5 range from Engadget to deviantART.com, to BoingBoing to Albino Blacksheep, DailyKos and Now Public.

The list is surprising-but should make for interesting reading. In light of all the current discussions about lists, it's amusing to get this new one--but refreshing that it seems to have a (slightly) different squew.

Jay Rosen's writing about how the passion's gone out of J-school for lots of the students--students who no longer want to be journalists. His post is amazing and powerful and eloquent, but I wonder of J-schools running out of gas is such a bad thing--
If the mantra is grow or die, and J-schools are dying, does that mean they are not growing?

Jay writes: "What I have lately been trying to say to my colleagues in J-school is clearer to me now, after the panel in San Antonio. Here is what I believe. The official religion has run out of gas. The tribes that are out there chasing Pulitzers and Duponts (plus market share, advertisers and ratings) do not know what to believe about themselves, their future, or their present value in the world."

Maybe this is the moment that a new journalism can find its way, one driven as much by search results and link laws as by craft.
Maybe craft is something more of us can learn to own.
Maybe we need to admit the world is pressing re-start and that's going to be okay.

Update: Thoughtful comments from Mark on Media.

Michael Parekh's got a tremendous post on how vendors of business intelligence, analytical reports, investment analyses, etc. might create a better user experience--and sell more product--by adopting some of the ways of Web 2.0. Specifically, Parekh suggests vendors:

• Allow users to rate studies offered for sale if they've been paying customers.
• Allow comments on the various reports from all users.
• Sort all the reports at least by some of the variables mentioned above.
• Allow users to tag the reports.

And so on--Parekh says "These steps and others, would be a major differentiation from how premium content has been sold online to date, mostly through "closed" systems. Let users get a sense of what they might be buying, especially when they might be paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars for it."

Me like.

Journalism UK has a story about a leaked AOL UK memo on employee morale--not only are people leaving, but those in residence are dissatisfied. Furthermore, the news articles says that the results of the survey for the UK content team were "worse than any other department at AOL."
Some data points:

• 62 per cent of staff said they do not trust management.
• 40 per cent of staff in the content department said they would not recommend AOL as an employer.
• 33 per cent would recommend AOL's own services as an internet service provider. The results were worse than any other department at AOL.
• 1 in 5 staff said they believed pay matched performance.
• Less than 25% felt managers were helping staff to improve their performance.
• 40 per cent of staff in the content department said they would not recommend AOL as an employer.

Journalism UK reports that nearly half of those surveyed in the content department said that they did not believe management would act on the findings.

Ben Hammersley: "Podcast", the word that I first coined, has just been entered into the OED.
Creative Commons: 53 million pages licensed.
Adaptive Path: Interview with Eric Costello on how flickr got to look so cool.

Amazon: Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl on her new book, Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise. (Via Megnut)
Richard MacManus: If you'd like to hire a smart, focused, analytical Web 2.0/RSS/Social Media dude for your blog network - send me an email.
Anil Dash: I left NY a year ago--and I've been blogging here for six years. Congrats.