I'll be at the Editor & Publisher conference in Las Vegas for the next couple of days, in support of the Knight Foundation announcement of the 2008 Knight News Challenge winners.

If you're not aware of this Knight program, it's a multi-year grant program that supports innovative ideas that use digital media and technology (mobile, platforms, etc.) to transform local and regional community news and support discourse in the commons. Knight has funded both very location specific projects and much more platform-driven efforts and these efforts have jump-started platform and tool development around local, community, news and even some social justice and accessibility issues,because of how well-distributed the funding has been.

Last year's News Challenge (2007) winners iwent to 25 individuals, and to private and public entitiesthat ranged from individual developers to  MIT to MTV. This year's list of winner's is equally cool, and the announcement of the winners is tomorrow.

I'm still waking up, but this is a great post by one Hank Williams, whydoeseveryhingsuck?:

"It is entirely possible that before Twitter makes its first penny, it will become too important to exist in its current form, and the community will feel it has to be replaced by an open source distributed framework. This should strike fear into the hearts of anyone who decides open their API. While the Open API strategy has clearly worked in terms of adoption, it may have worked too well. In fact it may have worked so well that Twitter may be killed before it has even really made it out of the womb, by people that find it so important that they can't afford to really have it be a company."

I don't think this is going to happen to twitter, but like the concept of Open API perhaps not being enough as a big worrier for any developer.

Also think this is a good articulation of a higher-order problem.

So, I'm starting to engage in some very specific shifts in behavior, which I want to talk about, both as a means to better share my thoughts and output, and as a way to kick off some talk about how information sharing and discovery is shifting.  Here's the deal:

1) The best place to see what I am writing/talking/thinking about right now is friendfeed. You need to ask to follow me, but if you're not a bot, a link farmer or a spammer, I will approve you.

Why friendfeed? A couple of reasons:
a) FF is an aggregator. This means that since I am doing alot of clipping and commenting and throwing it into  delicious where I can save the info and get it again later, you can see all that there pretty easily. Since my delicious use means  I am not posting as many interesting links on my blog, if you care FF is the place to go.
b) You can comment on items there that you can't comment on on delicious as easily--in other works, the ff interface supports us having a conversation, which is one of the critical points, right?


2) Twitter is a way to escape the echo chamber and  sample voices/people.

I pruned my twitter stream a day ago. to make room for some new voices. I just went and got a bunch, mostly tied to an area I am going to spend time in over the summer. It was amazing how much I learned about the area--and about some interesting people to follow--by using the twitter location search- good way to suss out digerati in a new place.

3) Blogs are longer form and my  virtual ADD is getting worse (but I still love blogging).
I still love blogging, but so much of what I am doing right now is boiling down to snippets, and ff and twitter are good tools for that.

On the other hand, I could never write this post in either medium.

So, question for you all: How are social media tools shifting your discourse?