here is much being written about the pluses and minuses of citizen journalism and its influence on professional news gathering, but there’s nothing like a report from the trenches. An excellent example is Hartsville Today, a joint effort by the Hartsville Messenger and the University of South Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications, in collaboration with a grant from the Knight Foundation. Over the past year, the website has begun featuring articles posted by the staff of the Messenger, as well as stories and commentary posted by members of the community. The staff learned a lot about recruiting and encouraging citizen journalists; they also learned a lot about adapting to the new dynamics inherent in bottom-up reporting. They’ve taken all that new knowledge and published a “cook book” specifically aimed at small daily and non-daily newspapers. The resulting report, Hartsville Today - The first year of a small-town citizen-journalism site, can be downloaded as a .pdf file. Tips range from soliciting stories to budgeting, ad sales, and technology choices and will be of interest to anyone interested in real-life applications of collaborative reporting.

ver the past few months, I’ve off and on been using Writely, a web-based word processor that is elegant, fast, and free. Google acquired the app and it just relaunched. I’ve been playing with it a bit and here’s what I like best about the newest version:

* full-featured word processor (styles, colors, tables, images, comments),
* files can be accessed from any browser window,
* offsite backup every 10 seconds,
* can save and download docs in a variety of formats (html, pdf, rtf, odt or Word),
* can compare and revert to previous versions,
* collaborative editing in real-time with whomever you choose,
* folksonomic tagging support!

I’m sure there’s more and yet the app doesn’t feel like it’s succumbing to a deadening “feature creep.” The only piece missing (and perhaps I just haven’t discovered it yet) is outlining. I think and write in outline format and have had to tease some of my work on Writely into a fake outline format, but that is fairly simple. You can even post directly to your blog, which is what I’m going to do with this post. If you use Writely, let me know what you think.

eb search engines open up our horizons, but at the same time, they gnaw away at our privacy. To some extent, we’ve learned to live with the fact that any Joe can do a search on our names and turn up facts we never meant to disclose. When search engines willingly turn over search records to government agencies, however, concerns for personal privacy escalate. For those wishing to preserve what little privacy we still have, the Electronic Frontier Foundation just published How To Keep Your Search History Private. Examples of tips include: “Don’t put personally-identifying information in your searches, at least not in a way that can be associated with your other searches.” “Don’t use a search engine operated by your ISP.” “Use a separate browser or browser profile for search and for other activities.”

mong the points I find myself mulling regularly is the problem of discovery. How do we find blog posts, news items, web pages, and philosophical soulmates amidst all this glut?

One of the best thinkers worrying this problem is Nicolas Carr, who yesterday wrote a post called The Great Unread on his Rough Type blog. In it he laments the concentration of links accruing to a few already well-known blogs and the difficulty the rest of us face in finding readers for our own blogs, as well as finding other bloggers who suit our fancies along that ever lengthening Long Tail. I strongly encourage you to read Carr on the topic, but I’m among those who’d like to believe there may be some relief as better recommendation engines and collaborative filtering solutions come down the pike. A post today by an old workmate, Matt McAlister (who’s now at Yahoo), titled My personal blogger hierarchy echoes some of my own thoughts on the topic. Matt writes:

I suspect that the idea of the blogosphere and the blog elite is a temporary one. The blogger hierarchy does not make the substance of a post any more or less valuable. Ultimately, that value is completely up to me, not some shallow power structure.

I’d love to hear from any readers how they think this may all play out and what any of us might do to help with the problem.

he book is all laid out now and just about to head out to the printers. I’m told I’ll have a hard copy in hand by mid-September. It’s great that book publishing is finally allowing authors to contribute to conversations in close to real time, but now that the pages are out of my hands, I’m already feeling that angst that comes with not being able to change or add to what I’ve already submitted. I’ll use the pages of this blog to record ongoing points that seem most pertinent. As always, I welcome comments and encourage any readers to add thoughts to any blog posts new or old. I’ll be adding a feature to these pages that allows me to point to these ongoing dialogues.

abble launched a couple of days ago. Tim Perkis had alerted me to the service some months ago and I’ve been curious to see how CEO Mary Hodder and her crew would tackle the problem of tracking and organizing the vast number of videos being uploaded each day. YouTube is reporting 65,000 new videos coming online daily, with more than 100 million videos viewed a day on that service alone. Finding videos of personal interest amidst all that glut is a challenge but one made much easier now that Dabble is on the streets.

Just as delicious eases the task of keeping track of bookmarks through the use of user-generated tags, Dabble allows visitors to assign freeform descriptive tags to videos that reside anywhere online. Besides aggregating these tags, the site encourages communities of interest to grow up around comments, playlists, and a new Dabble Blog.

Dabble started out with a bang, tracking 100,000 videos from Brewster Kahle’s Moving Image Archive. To assign tags to videos you come across, you can install a handy bookmarklet tool. In addition to collating tags, Dabble allows user to contribute information about who created the video, who’s in it and the like in an editable wiki environment. This looks like a service well worth supporting. I know I will be.

here were days when I doubted that the book would ever be completed, but my publisher not only now has all chapters in hand, most of them are already laid out. Working with Peachpit/New Riders has been a pure pleasure and I’m happy to report that books will be on shelves in early September. I’ll have a link to Amazon here on the blog shortly. Also, I’ll be posting a few more chapters and some select content to the blog over the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.

any thanks to Christian Crumlish for his informed thoughts about blogging and the world fast growing up around the phenomenon. Christian has been blogging since before there were true tools for the task and manages enough blogs that he finds it useful to aggregate the content on his x-pollen site. Happy reading and many thanks to Christian.