We launched a new, very different FanaticZone site this week. The site was built on top of Drupal 4.7.2 (our first 4.7 install) by two people in under six weeks.

The theory behind FanaticZone is similar to Digg. The site aggregates Sports news from around the web and allows readers to rank stories in a simple voting format.

The site is a test for us, in a number of ways. Primarily because it breaks us free from our traditional publishing businesses. Even more, it marks the first time that we’ve really tried to play nice with the entire Internet. (Steve Yelvington has more to say about this.) Newspaper-run web sites tend to be dead-ends. They want to be the end-all for the audience, and link to other sites begrudgingly.

FanaticZone is all about the links. It’s using XML and RSS to interface with both Flickr and YouTube. It links to hundreds of other sites. And it allows users to add additional links.

While this isn’t groundbreaking news for the Internet, it is new for us. Plus, since we built it on Drupal, we didn’t really build a Sports aggregator site. We built an experimental framework that will allow us to create additional niche sites.

This project, like some others we’re doing now, was helped along by my time at MooseCamp and Northern Voice.

More to come later. But for now, check it out.

I just finished a questionaire for Debbie Shing, who I met in Vancouver at Northern Voice.

Towards the end, I was reminded to go look up the following.

In order that an association among a democratic people should have any power, it must be a numerous body. The persons of whom it is composed are therefore scattered over a wide extent, and each of them is detained in the place of his domicile by the narrowness of his income or by the small unremitting exertions by which he earns it. Means must then be found to converse every day without seeing one another, and to take steps in common without having met. Thus hardly any democratic association can do without newspapers.

‘Replace “newspapers” with “community blogs” and you’ve got something,’ I wrote to Debbie.

I would challenge you to tell me who said it, but I’d rather archive this link instead.

Footnote: Love UVA’s online archive project. Just wish it was underway when I was there.

I went to the Moose Camp wrapup session yesterday. I really wanted to hear what the organizers thought was successful.

I was going to keep my mouth shut, but….

I picked up on a cool concept — teaching people to interview for podcasts — and it triggers an idea:

What if Moose Camp sessions were all task-based. Not boring, work-type tasks. But cool geek tasks.

Here’s how it might work:

Group A is given from 8:30 to 9:15 to record a podcast of an interview with Dave Sifry. During this time, Group A can accomplish three things:

• The interviewer can model how to conduct a good interview to make for an interesting podcast
• The technical people can discuss and demonstrate good recording and sound editing
• Passive audience can hear Dave speak (which is always good)

And at the end, we have a great artifact that says, “Hey, look what we did at Moose Camp.”

(Roland’s short film is the model here.)

[Another variant on this idea would be to have Dave lead a group to accomplish a task. Get the ‘big name’ invitees to lead small groups in a project. Possibly, someone noted, in an area where they are not an expert. This would bring the ’stars’ to a more equal level with other contributors.]

The idea would be to schedule maybe a dozen sessions (or more?) from, say, 8:30 until 12:00. Then break for lunch. Reconvene at 1:30 to fine-tune (of course, people can do this over lunch, too).

Then at 2:30 or 3:00, we all get together and share projects. A good old show-and-tell. After that, probably around 4:30, some volunteers could combine all the work into a single entity. Even better: several groups could make different versions. That would give people an excuse to get together that night and keep working.

Then, when Northern Voice opens, we show the folks our collective memory artifact: What We Did at Moose Camp.

I think it’s just crazy enough to work. I know I would go.

Boy, that Boris Mann sure is persuasive. So here’s a link to the (gasp) PowerPoint that I delivered.

NorthernVoice.ppt (8.9 MB)

Some notes.

- I retitled this “Big Media Strikes Back: Bluffton Today and the Future of Print.” I tried to make it really sound cool because of the schedule (see below).

- Bluffton is an experiment. We don’t have all the answers. But I think we’re asking the right questions.

- It’s just not the same without my marvelous delivery. (See photo below)

- Read Seth Godin on how to avoid really bad PowerPoint. Like Julie Leung, my slides are designed to be evocative, then I talk about them. This PP has some more words in it, because there are some quotes I like to get right.

- Disclosure: I removed 4 slides that contain private company information. Sorry.

- This talk was originally given at the University of South Carolina, to a room of 100+ j-school students.

- There is an audio file towards the end, this is an actual phone message left on reporter Tim Wood’s work answering machine in response to one of his stories. The staff posted it to the web site along with Tim’s rebuttal. (He had criticized parental behavior at a sporting event.) The point to including this is that it shows some commitment to Transparency about what reporters actually do.

- It wasn’t an ‘unconference’ presentation. I delivered it in response to some naive negative accusations being thrown at ‘big media’ earlier in the day. But at least it was open and honest.

- Roland was nice enough to find me a spot on the schedule. He was evil enough to put me opposite Robert Scoble and the Windows Vista demo. Oh well. Those that came seemed to like it. We had about two dozen, I think.

- Someone really did shout ‘get him!‘ during the conference wrap up. But it was funny.

My one second sound-bite takeaway for you to quote: “The newspaper in Bluffton serves to amplify the voices of the community.”

For more, go check out BlufftonToday.com.

Tech note, BT runs on Drupal 4.5.

So, Roland took a ton of photos during MooseCamp, and I get to be in some of them.

This is the best one:

It’s me pointing at the chart of self-interest. Here’s the slide:

The argument point here is that newspapers have been focused at the edges of this ’self-interest map.’ People care about themselves, their familes, their communities.

Mark Schneider, Robert Ouimet and Michael Tippett are presenting. Michael is speaking first. Nothing surprising here. Death of news 1.0, MSM decline; new user networks.

He also riffed on Dan Gilmor without crediting him. What he is really describing is eyewitness reporting, not ‘traditional journalism.’ Talking about how Digg.com gets more traffic than NBC or CBS.

Well, that’s because Digg is a filter, not a broadcast. Broadcast may be dead (at least to people under 30), but filtering is essential. Digg uses human suggestions (like Google News uses) algorythms to filter the vast pool of news.

How does traditional news handle events like the London Bombing, when there is too much information coming in to process? (Michael’s question). “The only way for mainstream news to handle this shift is to co-opt it.”

I like “cooperate” more than “co-opt” and think it is a better description of what we’re trying to do.

The talent to edit and filter (which Nancy White also covered) will be highly prized for the forseeable future; otherwise, we all drown in information.

Ouimet just started, saying (though not so succintly) that capital-J journalism is the Cathedral, the new order is the Bazaar.

He’s never been in a room where people were taking so many notes, photos, during the event. Not even around journalists. Also riffing on media portability and time-shifting. Good talk.

Mark started by calling himself a hack journalist. Referred to himself as rude and arrogant; nearly tossed off the Parliament beat. “The news is sick and it makes us sick.” Toxic, he says. Where is he going?

“This crazy human instinct to want to be frightened.” — he’s attacking scare journalism (like this week’s ABC report on girls kidnapped and pimped out on CraigsList?).

The only difference between journalists and everyone else is that journalists get paid. See journalism.org.

Huge appetite for change. Millenials and new media consuption habits. Media as background to other activites.

How to rehabilitate news to be ‘ennobling’ rather than ‘discouraging’?

Best practices in Journalism: carefulness, open-mindedness, determination, corroboration, integrity.

New ideas: new ways to collaborate (wikis, etc.), more transparency, news certification, share skills and training. An ingredients list for journalism (news certification): here’s what went into the story and here’s what’s left to ask or discover. [Working on this at University of British Columbia.]

CitJ creates disjointed narratives: see Julie Leung’s comments this morning on the problems of people who cannot create narratives. There is a breakdown of understanding. What we need are tools (like the BBCs) that lets people create narratives from the existing information. (I asked this question.)

Ouimet: we need intelligence and creativity. Always have. Always will. (Good answer).

–update–

After this, I took Mark to lunch and we had a great talk about how to foster an engaged community around our newspaper/citizen journalsim hybrid site Bluffton Today.

Nacny White’s list:

Self-Awareness is the #1 talent online (and in life).

Quite different from the list I presented yesterday. Reflects a different sensibility. Nancy’s is more holistic and nurturing, I think.

‘I think intuition shows up online,” she said. Writing is the core competency right now.

More to be posted on Full Circle.

Dave Sifry and Tim Bray are now speaking about blogging. Tim asked if everyone in the audience had a Technorati ‘ego feed.’ Heh. I do now (it’s about 40 minutes old as I write this).

Dave is saying why he founded Technorati: he likes gathering comments, stories, and hated dealing with old mailing list tools. So he built something better.

He got a laugh (3 actually) be saying he’s a Stats Whore. He wanted to know how many people were talking about me.

Much better coverage at Blogaholics. Live blogging is hard, man. Stupid fat fingerz.

For me, it was easily NowPublic, a Drupal-based platform for open journalism. Very OhMyNews. Very nice interface. Great stuff.

The other big takaway of the day would be this: we’ve got to start interacting with the open tools on the web. Dave Sifry’s Technorati, for example. We need to get that on Bluffton ASAP.

There is a great wrapup of Dave’s session about Leadership.

One of the things I went over very quickly in the presentation are what I consider the elements of success for newspaper-run blog efforts. Here’s the list:

• Transparency
• Humility
• Patience
• Resources
• Interactions
• Personalities
• Participation
• Accountability

Of these, I really think Transparency is the biggest right now. Demystifying the news-gathering and editorial process is huge.

I got flickr-ed while giving the ‘15 second recap’ of the talk to the entire conference. I look kinda pompous?