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Dave Cohn, I am about to open my big mouth. I hope you do not mind. I was re-reading Steve Gillmor's Friday TechCrunch article, "Our Home Town", and go reminded again why I applied for Tech Lead of Spot Us. This will probably the longest blog post I have competed in awhile so grab something to drink and eat before you move on to the next paragraph.
Friday was a sad day with Tim Russert's passing. While it was a mixture of sadness we also saw new tools in media taking hold, most of us with twitter open found out about Tim's passing within 15 minutes of the event occurring. To give you an idea Franklin's call to revolution(join or die) during the 1770s in the American Colonies took several days by horseback to be spread even with the help of the printing press. With large discourse by press and postal mail being held before great events such as the Boston Massacre.
We would not have gotten to The E Pluribus Unum without the tools of the press participating in public discourse at the time through both press and postal mail. In today's real world we are faced with new terrors of abuse by the cloaking labels of preventing terrorism and other vile labels among efforts to decrease discourse and debate among intelligent and thinking humans.
From the indirect profit seeking efforts of Cisco and other others to enable great walls of electronic censorship to firms such as Google and Yahoo censoring what we should read on internet. This situation cannot in long term stand the test of time as we are social animals and we abhor a social vacuum.
In the old media world we see destruction of old business models that used print advertising to pay the costs of producing that media. but at the same time we see emergence of new internet tools such as twitter and friendfeed that allow crowd sourcing of events and stories. What is crowd sourcing?
Crowd sourcing as its simplest definition is enabling crowd discourse and its effects can be quite large such as the nomination of a US presidential candidate by a political party without PAC contributions. In this modern social media age of internet we have such tools for this as Twitter, FriendFeed, Instant messaging, and other tools.
The whole set of reasons why Steve Gillmor devotes enormous amounts of time to discussion of social media and tools such as twitter on both GillmorGang and NewsGang is because our freedom to use internet in ways we want is so entangled into such concepts as freedom, media freedoms, social , crowd sourcing, and etc. The terms of freedom and etc are not easily divided from freedoms and innovations of internet.
But tools by themselves do not bring about movements of change. For years Microsoft had the A-part of Ajax as part of their Browser line-up , it was not until non MS groups started using it did AJAX become an integral part of Web 2.0 and our internet experience. There has to be a platform for that change.
In the case of old-media and social-media why not use crowd sourcing and combine web 2.0 tools and techniques into one social journalism platform. you could use crowd sourcing via the way of monetary donations and etc to have a business model that rewards journalistic overage of stories. One could integrate the web 2.0 tools of wikis, IM platforms such as twitter, video platforms such as Kyte.tv and etc into a collaboration platform for journalists that would ease the reporting efforts.
It would not be enough to just have the platform up and the public along with journalists using it but it also would have to integrate with discus comment system, seesmic video commenting, and etc to enable that web 2.0 way of social media conversation about the stories the journalists have been crowd funded to write about. The power of the platform is two-fold both in the collaboration tools and the powerful social media conversation tool integration to enable a full and diverse discourse in web 2.0 way.
For me, the act of applying for the Technical Lead Architect of Spot.us to implement such a platform is not just about the technical challenges but a fight or movement to stem the tide of internet censorship in a community meaningful way that empowers those communities. Not just a physical community such as a city, but also those communities formed by affinities in actions, professions, and etc and those affinities show up in forms of acceptance that is just as rewarding as stock options.
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