So I went on my first photo-walk the other night.  As I mentioned earlier, it was fun.  Now that I’m back on my computer where I can actually get Live Writer to work (and thus avoid having to write posts via the Blogger interface), here are a few more impressions.  As mentioned, everyone was nice and very willing to give me photography advice, which, having seen some of the photos taken by other participants, I clearly need.

Dave Sifry is a cool guy, much as I would have expected.  I enjoyed hanging out with him.  He’s also a heck of a photographer.  I was right beside him when he took this photo.  Suffice it to say that the ones I took don’t look anything like that.

I don’t think Thomas Hawk had the slightest idea who I was, even though I thought we knew each other a little from cross blogging, etc.  I thought I might get a little run for coming all the way from Texas and all.  He did give me some good night photography tips, and he did a great job of leading us to interesting shooting opportunities and to a good dinner.  His wife is very nice, and I enjoyed talking with her at dinner.

Robert Scoble was also cool, and did remember me from last year’s Web 2.0 deal, blogging, etc.  His producer, Rocky, was probably the most interesting guy in attendance.  I really enjoyed talking with him.  He told me some great stories, but he left out that he is a guitar player.

Fresh from my photo-walk, I went down to Mountain View Tuesday night to see Guy Kawasaki interview Dan Lyons, the fake Steve Jobs.  Dan comes across as a humble, thoughtful and funny guy.  I didn’t read his blog previously, but I have subscribed now.  I briefly met Guy, who didn’t seem to know who I was either, even though he has sparred with me on this blog a few times.  He didn’t seem too interested in chatting, so I just shook his hand and moved on.

Brad Stone, who outed Dan as the man behind the fake Steve Jobs blog, was also in attendance and described the process that led him to conclude Dan was the fake Steve Jobs.  All in all, it was an interesting conversation.

They took questions, both good and bad, from the audience and answered a few that were submitted via email.  Some of the questions were interesting.  Some of them painful.  Most were somewhere in between.

It is a very expensive cab ride from downtown San Francisco to Mountain View, so I don’t know if I’d make the trip again.  I did get to meet a few blogging pals in person, so that was an added bonus.

It was sheer coincidence that I was speaking at a conference in San Francisco on the day in between these two events.  I’m glad I took the time to attend them both.

Even if I’m not certain I’d do it again.

It’s been six months, hasn’t it?
In some circles that is half a year.
The Countess – Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

The topic cycle in the blogosphere has spun back around to comments, and whether you ought to have them, not have them, moderate them yourselves, let users self-moderate, splice a blog and a message board together, or hire Scoble as your personal Vanna White.

The process begins when one egghead or another either gets too much comment spam or intellectual pushback (depending on the egghead’s frame of mind) and declares that comments are either a pain in the ass or unnecessary.  Then some other eggheads (me in this case) mount a nerdy defense of comments.  After a day or so a third group of eggheads start saying some other ridiculous stuff and the nerd herd moves on.

Nerdily, I say unto thee…

Anyone who knows the first thing about blogging knows that to be successful a blog needs to create and nurture a sense of community.  Comments are by far the best way to do that.  Even those who naively view their blogs as a path to riches need comments because advertisers covet stickiness- the ability to keep readers onsite. Again, interactivity is the best way to achieve that.

This is why even newspapers have comments.

Recently when David Ritcheson tragically leapt to his death from a cruise ship, it was a commenter who first identified him (the victim of an earlier horrific attack that had been in the news), at the bottom of an early report that a then unidentified person had jumped or fallen off a cruise ship.  Take a look at the online edition of your newspaper, I bet you’ll see an effort to develop a community of commenters.  Newspapers know how to sell ads, and they know the goal is to have a crowd of people interacting at your site.  Why do some bloggers ignore the need for interactivity by either not having or not nurturing comments?

I can think of four reasons, only the first of which is makes any sense.

First, if your blog is largely a vehicle used to market some larger product.  In my opinion, Seth Godin is an example of this.  Seth is, among other things, an author, speaker and a marketing guy.  His blog is a way to showcase his expertise in a way that gives the reader value while marketing his books and speaking services.  Seth believes that having comments changes his blog (and more importantly his writing) in a way that detracts from his vision and purpose for his blog.  I don’t really agree with his approach, but it works for him.  Not coincidentially, Seth has a very high profile both in and out of the blogosphere.  Don’t get me wrong, Seth seems like a cool guy and the fact that I, who am all about conversation, read his blog every day tells you all you need to know about my opinion of his value and writing skills.  But what works for Seth won’t work for most bloggers.

Second, if you’re not willing to spend the time to manage, nurture and moderate your comments.  Comments are mini-message boards and having developed a number of very popular message board sites, I can tell you that unchecked interaction performed in a remote and semi-anonymous way will descend into chaos 100% of the time.  Comments have a shorter half-life than message board threads, so the chaos takes longer to develop.  But between the spammers and the disrupters, chaos will eventually reign in comments left unchecked.  There are lots of ways to address the comment problem: pre-approval of commenters (too restrictive for me), holding comments for approval (not real time enough for me), using a captcha (my current approach), manually deleting spam and disruptive comments (my original approach, abandoned long ago in the midst of a spam flood), etc.  It takes a little work, but if you’re trying to grow a blog without comments, you are making your job much harder than it has to be.  For 95% of the bloggers out there, I would say if you aren’t willing to have comments, why are you blogging?  It would be much better to write 50% less posts and devote half your blogging time to moderating and participating in your comments threads.  Don’t forget the participating part.  Lots of bloggers do.

Third, you start believing your own BS and forget that it takes luck and timing in addition to brains and hard work to be hugely successful- regardless of how success is measured.  These folks aren’t interested in community building because to them they are the community.  And, of course, in our celebrity-driven culture, a number of tourists will eagerly line up at the door, hoping for a glimpse.  The tourists may get a souvenir or two, but that’s a by-product of the greater purpose: for the celebrity-cum-blogger to remain in the anaconda-like grip of the self-congratulatory hug.  Some of these folks actually have comments, but they are generally intended for tributes as opposed to conversation and discussion.  I don’t put any of the participants I have read in this latest discussion in that group, but there are a lot of them out there.

Fourth, of course, is to generate a response and get people talking.  Sort of like I’m doing now, which reminds me of a quote from Spaceballs (that under-appreciated classic).

“The Ring! I can’t believe you fell for the oldest trick in the book! What a fool, what’s with you man, c’mon?”

In addition to the predictability of the blogosphere, there are a couple of other points to be made here.

As Mathew Ingram points out, there are a few people who read blogs who, um, don’t have a blog (I think the number is small, but existent).  And then there’s the fact that the very large majority of the people who think they don’t need comments would rather drive an American made car than respond to cross-blog conversation from some blogger outside their circle.

Comments are integral to the blogging experience.  Sure, they take some work.

But for almost all of us, they are worth it.

Rafat Ali reports that Backfence, once the poster child for aggregated citizen journalism, is shuttering all 13 of its local-news based web sites.

You remember Backfence.  It is/was, to quote the American Journalism Review, “a series of hyperlocal, news-oriented web sites whose tone and content – news, commentary, blogs, photos, calendar listings – would be supplied primarily by the people who knew each community best, its residents.”  It was one of 6 citizen journalism ventures that were mentioned in a December 9, 2004 article in the Washington Post that said:

Several notable ventures have launched or raised money this year to create local news sites online in which readers contribute all or most of the news. The big idea is that citizen-generated content lowers costs and creates more loyal audiences.

Of the 6 notable ventures mentioned in that article, here’s how they fared in the ensuing two and a half years:

Three of them: iBrattleboro.com, NorthwestVoice and Wikinews are still in business.  The first two have overcome My-Space-like design problems and are still accepting submissions.  Wikinews doesn’t seem all that local to me, unless North America is local, but is still going strong.

Advance Internet seems to have evolved into merely a directory of NJ-related blogs.  I can’t tell if there is a more formal relationship between the blogs, thanks to a most unhelpful About page.

GoSkokie seems to have joined Backfence in the deadpool.

Which translates to a 50% survival rate.  That’s probably better than the survival rates for a lot of other businesses over the same two and a half year period.  And, unlike Backfence, many of those businesses didn’t have $3M in venture capital funding to work with.  That fact being the epitome of both a blessing and a curse.

More significantly, I don’t believe the failure of Backfence or the survival of iBrattleboro.com and NorthwestVoice says anything one way or the other about the future or viability of citizen journalism- at least not the way I view true citizen journalism.  All of those web sites, as well as more than a few others that have attached themselves to the citizen media movement, have the very distinct look and feel of old media- old media that is still not entirely comfortable with the whole online thing.  Sure, accepting submissions for publication is a neat idea (and no doubt helps lower expenses), but lots of old media offline publications do that.  True citizen journalism the way I view it is journalism by citizens, for citizens, published by citizens and controlled by citizens.

Not so much people writing and submitting articles to the online editions of a dying newspaper industry.  Or to web sites that look more like a newspaper than a blog.  Everybody always blows right past this point, but the citizens who create the journalism should demand the right to serve and control that content from their own platform and for their own benefit.  Not from some online quasi-paper, not behind the walls of some ad-happy social network and not for the pecuniary benefit of third parties.  A story submission button and a comments section does not equate to citizen journalism.

It’s the combination of content creation and aggregation that mucks everything up.  Just like musicians don’t need the record labels any more, journalists don’t need the newspaper platform- or a semi-collaborative photocopy of one.  The aggregation of content is better left to the Diggs, Techmemes and blog comments.  Or even better, to feed lists tailored to the interest of the reader.

Let me say it again.  If you are are a citizen (as opposed to a member of traditional media) working your tail off to create content to then turn around and give that content to others who control its distribution and/or make all or most of the money off of it, you are neither citizen nor journalist.  You are at best an employee and, more likely, an indentured scribe.  You are an ant in another’s farm.  Why do people not get this?  Someone queue that Apple commercial.

Rather, the true citizen journalism is occurring simultaneously on distributed blogs of thousands of learned bloggers out there.  Bloggers like Scott Karp, Phil Sim, the guys and gals at Mashable, Nick Carr, Donna Bogatin, Mathew Ingram,  TDavid, Tony Hung, Twangville, Don Dodge, J.P. Rangaswami, Jeff Pulver, Stereogum, Rex Hammock and Rafat’s PaidContent.Org.  And those are just a few that I noticed when glancing at my feeds list.  There are easily a hundred more on that list.  Maybe two hundred.

The future of citizen journalism is in the hands of people writing the blogs about the events that are happening around them.  The path of citizen journalism will be mapped starting from the citizen/blogger side of the phrase, not from the journalism/old media side.  At its core, citizen journalism is about learning how to distribute reliable information without being chained to a platform or gateway.  It’s equal access reporting where the readership picks the winners.

Maybe Backfence was a pioneer and, as the AJR article says, destined to be the one with arrows in their backs. And maybe Backfence led the way for a segment of the trip.  But the journey has just begun and citizen journalism as it looks today is merely a working sketch of what citizen journalism will become.

Duncan Riley has a post entitled Joost vs Babelgum, in which he compares Joost and Babelgum, two stupidly named applications that allow you to watch TV-like programs (and other lame content) on your computer.  As you might imagine, I have a couple of questions.

First, why would I want to watch TV on my computer when I have an HD television connected to an HD DVR right here in this room?  A TV that has hundreds of channels, as opposed to the crappy selection at Joost?  I haven’t tried Babelgum, but if it’s the “poor man’s Joost,” I can’t imagine how bad it must be.  Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.  See the recent video blogging rage where people upload home movies that even their moms would find horrifyingly boring.

Joost’s slogan is “a new way of watching TV.”  That’s factually true, I suppose.  But walking backwards could be branded as a new way of walking too.  New doesn’t equal better.  Or necessary.

And a couple of follow up questions.  If I really wanted to watch TV-like programs on my computer, why wouldn’t I do it at YouTube, where the interface is logical and the selection epic?  Or in the case of actual TV shows, at the network web sites?

And if I were going to waste hours making some video that no one wants to watch, why wouldn’t I simply upload it to YouTube and serve it from my web site, where I get the juice instead of Joost?  More importantly, why would the content producers of content we actually want to watch donate all that juice to Joost when they could serve the content themselves?  Let’s not forget, DirecTV was TIVO’s best friend until DVRs became mainstream.  Then it kicked TIVO to the curb and did its own box.  Joost and Babelgum, like TIVO, are too far downstream from the content producers to keep a grip on the content that matters.  Once you get past that, you’re a homeless man’s YouTube.

People have been trying to push the rock up the convergence hill for years.  Anyone remember the Yamaha RP U-100?  I still use one, but the product line died on the vine (and store shelves) because people didn’t see the need to merge an audio receiver and a computer.

In sum, I just don’t get it.  Do you?

Doc Searls likes his news the old fashioned way.  He says:

So here’s a challenge to the daily papers: stop giving away the franchise. Make daily editorial available online only for subscribers. Charge for the fresh stuff, online as well as off.

In a perfect old media world, that’s exactly how it would work.  But this ain’t a perfect old media world, and if the papers start walling their fresh content off, a hundred online-only publications will happily take their place.  Everyone- bloggers, new media, advertisers- would benefit from the trickle down news effect, except the papers.

I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in almost 10 years.  By the time I see it in the paper, I already know it.  I don’t watch the local news on TV anymore for the same reason.

We live in an accelerated world and news via old media is in slow motion.