That’s Not Allowed

Just Hit Enter. A blog about random acts of journalism by random nonjournalists. Short when it can’t be shorter. Test run of what will become a daily. Influences: Dave, Susan, Ben, Barry, Debbie, Steve, Monk. In collaboration with Jay Rosen and Pressthink. Tapped out by Lisa Williams of H2otown.info.

403 Forbidden

Shocking Fact: What large companies with more money than God implement as a blogging platform for their employees usually has fewer features, is less automated, and more frequently broken than free tools like Blogger.

Free services still make enough money to invest more money and developer hours in making their blog tool great than most companies would be willing to pay to get into blogging. That’s why Typepad, Blogger, and WordPress.com are better than what they’re giving their writers to use.

The reason that some big traditional media companies with teeming hordes of great writers get beat on the web by bloggers isn’t just about authenticity, it’s about a large and growing technology gap. In almost every case, those great writers are being told to blog but at the same time being saddled with technological (and frequently cultural) burdens that almost guarantee that they’ll get their clocks cleaned by independents. Many are in a situation where doing what it would take to succeed at blogging is either impossible or forbidden, or impossible and forbidden.

People, just make it Automattic already. It’s outsourcing, that’s a good buzzword too, almost as good as blog.

All parkinglots in NYC look the same, which gave Madoff and I the chance to talk over this question while we were looking for the one with his car in it. So: is blogging about being heard? Or is it about getting a chance to speak? As a way to get heard, the New York Times beats any single blog. As a way to speak your piece, any single blog beats the New York Times.

(OT: Steven’s wife Pamela is doing something amazing: check out The Artist’s Pension Trust. Wow).

Just Hit Enter

Just Hit Enter. A blog about random acts of journalism by random nonjournalists. Short when it can’t be shorter. Daily. Influences: Dave, Susan, Ben, Barry, Debbie, Steve, Monk. In collaboration with Jay Rosen and Pressthink. Tapped out by Lisa Williams of H2otown.info.

KPaul Mallasch: “Today was a good day in a lot of ways. First, we had a citizen who lives in an apartment building next to the one that caught fire yesterday get ahold of me about photos he took of the fire. I was able to publish 100 photos of the fire on Muncie Free Press w/out having been at the fire.”

Footage on YouTube appears to show graffiti writers tagging Air Force One.Nope, it’s a hoax.

Pick up Cicero off the nightstand. Weird. Turns out he showed up 1944 years too early to rap with Bill Keller:

Bill Keller: “..there seems to be no end to any argument in your world.”

Cicero: “For the force of reason in disputation is to be sought after rather than authority, since the authority of the teacher is often a disadvantage to those who are willing to learn; as they refuse to use their own judgment, and rely implicitly on him whom they make choice of for a preceptor. Nor could I ever approve this custom, of the Pythagoreans, who, when they affirmed anything in disputation, and were asked why it was so, used to give this answer: “He himself has said it”; and this “he himself,” it seems, was Pythagoras. Such was the force of prejudice and opinion that his authority was to prevail even without argument or reason.”

No Babies Were Harmed During Filming of This Marathon:

Videoblogger Steve Garfield wanders backstage into the media area of the Boston Marathon, and shoots video of sportscaster Bob Lobel vainly trying to get a baby to crawl across the finish line — until a banner falls on the baby. Lobel’s the longtime sports anchor for WBZ, Boston’s CBS affiliate.

The 80+ members of Exploit Boston’s Flickr Pool collaborate to document events. They were on the scene for the marathon. They do rock photojournalism, too. Exploit Boston! is the creation of Susan (Sooz) Kaup.

JJ Daley: “In 1846 there were fifty seven (by my count) newspapers in Boston! We’re down to two now.” Now it’s a 57,000 blog town.

Filmmaker Kevin Smith decides to do his own journalism: “Since the gossip sites have seen fit to print only the portion of the Jason Mewes story I told at UPenn (that portion being what said sites seem to feel is the only interesting aspect of Mewes� life), I figured why not put the whole tale of Jason�s battle with drug addiction into print here, where folks can get a better idea of who Jason truly is and maybe why he fell victim to heroin abuse in the first place. “

9/11 Report to be adapted as a graphic novel.

Creativecommons.org does a survey of how many CC licenses are out in the wild, and which type of license creators use: “…change appears to be in the direction of using more liberal licenses. Attribution, Attribution-NonCommercial and Attribution-ShareAlike all gained bigger slices of a (much larger) pie while Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike and Attribution-NoDerivs have smaller shares relative to a year ago.” Share on.

At a table with Dan Gillmor

Twelve people, a table, and Dan Gillmor of We The Media and The Citizens’ Media Institute. Dateline: Cambridge MA. Tuesday. At the Berkman Center for the Internet and Society.

Schwag Index: Soda, chips, some brownies from host Berkman Center for the Internet and Society; a box of candy with a little note that said From Dan Gillmor.

Hanging around: Nathan Woodhall of PRX, Gabriel Mugar of PressPassTV, j of j’s scratchpad, Steve Garfield, Sooz of Exploit Boston! Newsviner Critt Jarvis (Critt’s work); Deb Finn of Civic Source, Erica George, more. (Hit me with some links if you were there).

Dan: “Some of the best reporting on domestic spying, reporting, and Gitmo has been done by an org not famous for journalism, and that’s the ACLU, they’ve been filing FOIA requests by the barrelload, and they’re getting stuff that the media organizations aren’t getting and should be getting, so something is happening that we need to understand.”

On Greensboro101.com: “Getting pretty good and pretty complete. The local paper, the Greensboro News & Record, has announced its intention to become the public square, and in a sense, these guys are the competition.”

On the sale of Bayosphere to Backfence: “I keep that completely separate from what I’m doing now [at the Center for Citizen Media]. I don’t want to use what I’m doing now to promote the old thing, because that’s the wrong thing to do. I’ll still be blogging there sometimes.” I’d love to know more about this. Did it happen over lunch? What did they eat? Were lawyers also fed, and if so, were they on Atkins?