I just watched Hong Eun-taek,  Editor-In-Chief of the of South Korea based citizen journalism project OhMyNews speak at the NetSquared conference (disclosure: I work for Net Squared).  Amongst the interesting details of  Eun-taek's talk was a statement that the organization aims to become a global news wire similar to the AP and Reuters.  One of the most recent steps towards that end is a partnership begun in recent weeks to swap headlines between the prestigious International Herald Tribune.

I think there is an important difference between the recent high-profile partnerships between the AP and Technorati and between Sphere and Time Magazine and this partnership.  Specifically, while it is meaningful for a mainstream media organization to include links indicating "what the blogosphere is saying about this topic" - I would contend that it is meaningful in a different way for prominent parties in the citizen journalism camp and in the traditional media camp to permanently display each others' headlines in a box on their sites.  It's an interesting form of mutual recognition that goes beyond the relatively casual link list to the medium in general.

The IHT/OhMyNews partnership is also clearly important because it involves two parties that are not based in the United States.  Ethan Zuckerman from Global Voices Online is speaking now about the huge explosion of content producers from China, Africa, Brazil and the Middle East/North Africa that is on its way.  This partnership is liable to be remembered as a key development in the relationship between old media and new media on the global stage.

The international blog aggregation community Global Voices Online has released its first edition of the Global Voices Podcast, a compilation of clips from podcasts around the world.  The first episode manages to fit in satire from South Africa about the visibility of queer people, coverage of bloggers' take on an upcoming election in Mexico (in Spanish) and clips from Jamaica, Israel/Palestine, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore.  Set to music from Creative Commons label Magnatune, the whole thing fits in 17 fast paced minutes!  It's hosted by the very charming Georgia Popplewell, from the Carribian Free Radio podcast (an Adam Curry favorite).

The show reminds me in of a more grass-roots, web 2.0 version of the Global Shortwave Report, a fantastic, long running weekly 30 minute compilation of international shortwave news in English. 

Global Voices recently received funding from Reuters.  Its primary function is to aggregate content from bloggers all around the world.  The project has long published interesting interviews with people from around the world, but this newest foray into the news and culture serialized audio space wil be interesting to watch.  Many Global Voices participants are aspiring mass audience journalists as well, so whether new mainstream media stars emerge from this space or whether it thrives as a niche media project will help make the history of Web 2.0's impact on media.

Found via David Weinberger.

Mark Glaser at PBS has posted a long, detailed story on the case of arrested Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah.   Alaa is someone Glaser interviewed for a previous story and today's coverage follows up after the man's arrest earlier this month. It's a great discussion of various tools being used in a no-cost, rapid-response human rights campaign.  Some very interesting insights from Egyptians on online vs. off-line activities, democracy campaigns and more.  Worth a look for sure.  It's important that all these exciting technological developments impact more than the shopping habits of people of privilege.  Glaser's write up is a great source of detail and thought on one key case study - and a real human being's trip to prison in an autocratic society.

The Berkman Center's John Palfrey has an interesting post proposing a theory on how digital natives, those who have grown up with the web central to our lives, read the news.  No more daily papers, broadcast TV or big anchors acting as the central source of information, but instead following a path of graze, dive deeper and a feedback loop like blogging.  That sounds like as good an explanation as any to me, though I wonder how many of us skip the dive deeper step?  If that step isn't taken it would seem a major flaw in the quality of the discourse.

 Much attention has been paid to the blogosphere's alleged lack of fact checking as is supposedly key to traditional media - but how many of us take the time to check other online information regarding our topic of interest before blogging?  How do we know when we've dove deep enough?  I know that before I write about a particular URL I at least search for other links to it.  Sometimes I'll do a Sphere search for related blogosphere resources, or look in del.icio.us popular under related tags.  If we don't have a formal structure for fact checking, research and editorial oversight - what do we have?

David Wienberger isn't just ClueTrain smart and cool, he's also a really good liveblogger!  Check out his text of PR powerman Richard Edelman's conversation at the Syndicate conference.  Edelman knows the story on quality communications in a world shaken by blogs and other social media.  Edelman's company does PR for Walmart and employs Steve Rubel. 

In the above linked talk he provides succinct thoughts on the future of marketing, the pace of corporate adoption of Web 2.0 tools, the Walmart bloggers debacle and more.  Worth a read or listen for sure.

Via Heather Green at BusinessWeek, YouTube has announced that users can now upload video from their mobile devices.   This sounds like a very good move.  We'll see if it turns into a citizen journalism type thing, documentation like Peter Gabriel's Witness or just more trash like so much of YouTube.  The technology has a lot of potential though.  Imagine how fast video can spread now: shoot and upload from your phone, supporters grab the code snippet to display your video on their website and it goes from there.  A lot of potential.

Another interesting niche in the blogosphere can be found over at the Carnival of True Crime Blogs.  Some of these are just breathless "no one knows why he did it..." type coverage, but the medium certainly seems to have potential.  Crime reporting can always benefit from added context, history, analysis and voices.  The downside might be that crime victims might not appreciate random bloggers putting their stories up all over the web.  Found via the always interesting Carnival of Blogs directory.

After a number of bloggers went after kidnapped journalist Jill Carroll for saying nice things about people while they held her life in their hands, veteran columnist Ellen Goodman says this was one of the worst episodes of blogosphere ugliness so far.

"These attacks raise the question of what bloggery is going to be when it grows up," she asks, "An Internet op-ed page? Or a polarized, talk-radio food fight?"

Add this to the growing list of recent blog blunders:  the Huffington post's George Clooney debacle, the pro-Walmart bloggers' failure to disclose their reposting of company PR, and any number of others.  It's enough to make me give up blogging myself.  Not!  It would certainly be nice if we all behaved a little better so as to not reflect so poorly on the medium as a whole.  But this is one of the lessons that the public has to learn about distributed communication:  it's only as high-quality as the people who are using it.  Why is blogging getting a black eye instead of the pea-brained people who are responsible for these particular posts in question?  Would it be better for the vast majority of us to be silenced, for the public to only hear from well groomed professionals and thus to sustain some sort of delusion that the populace is made up of well reasoned thinkers?  I don't think so.  Dealing with low quality free speech is the price we pay for getting the good stuff.  Let's not let snobs tell us that those of us associated (via blogging) with the most unsavory don't deserve any credibility ourselves.  Those of us who earn credibility deserve it and obviously those of us who don't - don't.

Found via Morph

Fascinating sounding project unveiled yesterday by the folks at the Committee to Protect Bloggers.  The project is called Blogswana and the idea is that they will train 20 university students from Botswana in journalism and blogging, then those students will go into the field once a month and interview some one who does not have access to the web or blogging. 

The interview will be turned into a blog post for the interviewee's blog, the interviewer will have a blog of their own as well, and the most recent posts from the blogs written by the 20 students will be aggregated onto a central site.  Comments left by users will be delivered to the interviewee next month and their answers will be posted back on the blog.

The AIDS angle is that all the parties involved will be people who have been impacted by AIDS in one way or the other, though that won't be the central topic of the interviews. 

The instigators of this project hope that it will be a pilot for many others based on the principal of overcoming the digital divide and doing citizen journalism by actually visiting and talking to people who are not online.  This particular area was chosen because one of the US instigators lived in Botswana for some time.  I think this sounds like a great project.  If you're interested, you should read their write up on it.  The project is currently looking for a variety of forms of support, so stop on by if you'd like to be of assistance, too.

Wow, I can't believe they didn't do better than this: Media Emerging, eJournal USA.  That's the US State Department's attempt to cover the space at issue.  Some of the contributions and contributors seem pretty good, but talk about a publication that remains behind the times despite its best efforts!

There's no RSS feed, for one thing.  There certainly aren't any comments enabled, though blogging and user generated content is a huge part of what it's all about.  The site's editors seem enthralled with online video and the safest forms of user generated content.  Unsurprising, I suppose.  Plus the site design is as ugly as anything I've seen in awhile - I imagine it's an attempt to follow the pared down aesthetic of many blogs.  Whatever.  Found via The Media Center's blog Morph, which is way cooler. 

Jeff Jarvis has a long summary with many comments following about Norg, an unconference aimed at helping newspapers turn into news organizations.  Looks like it was great, and the write up is a good place to read more about the old media/new media nexus.  Thanks to Alex at Podcast on the Floor for the link.

The above is a cell phone call I made to the new podcasting system Evoca.  Reviewed today by both TechCrunch and Mashable, I found this service via eHub.  There's browser based recording, phone-in recording, descriptions, tags, RSS feeds, groups, albums and oh so much more.  You can also charge a fee for listeners to be able to listen - but the first one here is on me, ok?

Update:  I've tried two more times to make recording through Firefox on a Mac.  Both times I got choppy recordings that were lost when I tried to save them.  I saw an error screen about browser difficulties and am now frustrated enough that I will be darned if I try the browser record again.

The service is free for pretty basic use but for $5 per month you can do lots more, including recording Skype phone calls!  Very nice for those of us on a Mac.

Problems:

Per a story on ZDNet, new elections regulations concerning internet communications have been released by the US Federal Elections Commission.  The regulations needed to be approved at a meeting today and reports are now in that the regulations were passed by a 6-0 vote.  Analysts say the 96 page document was rewritten in response to concerns from bloggers of all political stripes and a number of advocates in congress. 

Paid advertising, including banner ads and sponsored links on search engines, will be regulated like political advertising in other types of media.  One strange omission is that disclosure that a blogger has been paid for by a candidate or committee to take a position in an election is explicitly mentioned as not required, according to one law prof quoted by ZDNet.  If ethics are to be regulated on any level that would make sense to me to be a requirement.

There's quite a number of anemic Digg clones out there, a real testimony to the community building skills of the original.  But an interesting new service I found this morning is CrispyNews, a site that lets you create your own topic specific subdomains for Digg-style newswires voted up and down by users.  Adsense all around and site creators share revenue after a certain point. 

This is probably too much like Newsvine to really take off, but who would have guessed that Digg style services would hit utility status so quickly?  What exactly is the word for them even?  It only makes sense that some day soon we'll all be clicking up and down on FeedFlare type links after each item in many of our RSS feeds and have top 10 or 20 lists reflected accordingly on our dashboards.  Or some combination of RSS and Digg-style up and down for our community of interest or work.  Anybody else read the recent Harper's excerpt (in print) on Chinese media gaining or losing points and thus pay according to who in the government praised their stories?  Hmmm....