Norgdom

I know, technically speaking, a norgy is when news breaks and everyone jumps on the norg to be the first with the story (such as when Steve Irwin died and then Peter Brock). That was a wierd time in Australian history, but I digress.

But I couldn’t help but use the word, when myself and my fellow norg bloggers - Matt(insert mystery surname here), Justin Middleton and Busybee - got together this week.

We’ll call it a norgy gathering. It was great to get together and have a chat about the norg and all our hopes for what it will come to mean to the Perth community. All of them are doing such an excellent job and I really have to thank them for their committment to my own little dream that is the norg.

I even scored a hot tip on where to get the best fruit mince pies in the lead up to Christmas. I thought Matt was just boasting about his mum’s cooking, until Busybee nearly wet her pants in excitement over the fact that Matt’s mother was the one who supplied her own grandmother with the best fruit mince pies ever.

So, if you are in need of some yummy fruit mince pies the place to head is Corrigin. I’ll have to get Matt to pass on the name of his mum’s cafe. The other thing Corrigin is famous for BTW is its dog cemetery, so the trip will be well and truly worth it.

Another food related tip, is that I highly recommend Ria restaurant and in particular the shredded beef dish. I’m having cravings for it daily. It was the perfect restaurant for a small gathering.
There are some photos of the get together, but I think I censored most of them after a truly unflattering photo of me found it’s way on to Flickr  (no I will not direct you there!) But I’ll see if there are any photos that make the grade and post them if there are.

The blogs are something I hope to expand in the future, so if anyone has a blog they think belongs on the norg or a request for a particular kind of blog let me know.

Hope to see you round the norg ….

Firstly, I’m not advocating spam here, especially after the fine dished out to a Perth spammer this week.

But last night my blog received a number of, what I can only call, ‘philosophical spams’. I’ve recieved the generic “this is great 1,2,3″ and “this is interesting point” spams. The difference is that these ones were a little more thoughtful.

Let me give you some examples (my comments are in brackets):

• Too much knowledge makes the head bald (I can think of a few people who would be pleased to hear that).
• Custom is the plague of wise men and the idol of fools (still working on this one, but I think there is a message for new media in here somewhere).
• Between two evils ’tis not worth choosing (I reckon this really depends on what the evil is :)).
• Better to go to bed supperless than rise in debt (wise advise for all of us currently involved in start-ups).
• The scalded dog fears cold water (mmm, very deep)
• An evil chance seldom comes alone (you’re not kidding - I received 12 of these emails in 5 minutes).

Anyway I share them with you to reflect on!

Some bright sparks from Curtin’s Student Journalism Association have invited me to come along and give them a talk on PerthNorg next week.

It will be a panel discussion with Tim Gossage (Channel 10) Joanna Menagh (ABC) Victoria Laurie (The Australian) and myself. So I am vastly outnumbered in representing new media :S.

One of the things that becomes hard as you become so immersed in the concepts of citizen media, web 2.0 and collaborative news is to realise that we still live in an age where most people have not even heard of most of those terms.

I am also aware of the fact that I am talking to a group of students who most likely have a very idealised way of the importance of mainstream media. This will be where most of them will still want a job up after all.

I probably provide a very scary option for their future. If everyone can be a journalist, I’m sure they’ll be wondering what they spent the last three years of their lives doing (other than socialising at the Curtin Tav and eating George’s Kebabs.)

The thing is though, that it is these very students who need the skills to survive in the emerging media landscape. They’ll be the ones for whom those skills are most needed.

The old school way of communicating with the audience does not cut it in this space anymore. People want engaging, interactive, open and authentic voices.

The death of the myth of objectivity could not come sooner in my opinion. The more honest we all are in our influences the more truthful news becomes, as long as all sides to a story can be heard. To me that is when the truth becomes known. It is up to people to decide what they believe.

If anyone out there has some thoughts to contribute on my talk or if you want to throw me any curly questions in preparation - let me know. The last time I spoke in public was at a Year 12 debating competition on whether we have a moral obligation to save endangered animals.

I am taking strength from the fact that we were arguing for the negative and still won:)

On that note, I hope to see you round the norg ….

I found this truly significant story of citizen journalism in China on Howard Rheingold’s blog Smart Mobs.

The story was originally carried on Fox Cable News about a Christian Church that was pulled down by the Chinese Government, but it also appears online here. This is not an uncommon practice in China and nearly every month a story emerges about priests being jailed and disappearing for simply living out their beliefs… and that is literally only the beginning of the story.

It would have gone unwitnessed by the world if it was not for the fact that it was recorded on a a camera phone and played during the Archbishop of Canterbury’s tour to China to highlight the plight of Christians in the country.
The Sky News story points out that:

This is normal practice for Chinese authorities and normally they get away with it unwitnessed by the outside world. But in this case the demolition was filmed on mobile phones and the footage was handed to Sky News.

How long can the Chinese keep control on the news in the age of mobile technology?

This is a great example of the important role citizen journalism has in the world. It has the power to change the way we see the world around us. And we should not underestimate that.

On that note, see you round the norg.

Some many months ago I stumbled across some test pages for The West’s new site. Other than a slightly modernised logo I couldn’t really see much difference between it and what they were doing at at time.

But then came the news that yourworldisabouttochangeonmonday.com.au - don’t bother taking the fifteen minutes to type that in, because The West’s promo URL never appeared to be working in the first place.

I was intrigued. They must have done a lot of work since I last saw the test pages then. But I was wrong.

The fact that they pitched their new site as so groundbreaking is quite perplexing. Do they really think it is that great? Does anyone at The West actually use the internet? For news?

There is no RSS Feed, it’s hard to navigate, it’s full of two to three-day-old AAP news stories and any comments left on the site have to be emailed in, with this disclaimer:

Please provide your name, address and telephone number if you would like your comments to be considered for publication.

I’m not too sure where these comments, sorry, emails go exactly once they have been considered.

Despite the concerned emails people sent me when The West advertised the site, I actually would love a decent on-line news service here in WA. We deserve a decent news site from our only daily paper. I am not worried because I believe the concepts behind PerthNorg and our committment to remaining a user-generated local news community is different and good enough to survive outside of the internet starved Perth news scene. What was The West’s motivation for launching the site in such a mess? Maybe they were getting worried, having been beaten to the market, by the amazingly similar PerthNow.

I know I’m not the only one who thinks little of The West’s attempt at an online presence. I think Hourann summed up things nicely over at his blog The Pencil Guy.

On that note, see you round the Norg…

That’s the value of user-generated content going up.

Google has aquired YouTube for a staggering $1.65 billion.

OK, in light of Telstra’s big announcement that they are rolling out the Next G Network I thought I’d do a bit of an investigation into how this benefits citizen journalism.
At the moment mobile connectivity has been restricted by coverage and speed. Vodaphone and Three have also offered internet access via laptop and mobile up until now, but at slower speeds to Telstra’s newest offering. I’ve been advised, and yes I needed it for this one, that the Telstra’s Next G network is not so much a ‘new’ network as an upgrade – faster and more widely available.
The basics of what this comes down to is that it allows for increased connectivity to the internet with access to 98 per cent of the population. Note that the figure is population and not area, but from what I have read if you are in an area that is not covered then the signal is picked up by an existing network (assuming there is one) but at those reduced speeds.
What interests me about mobile connectivity is the increased opportunities for people to upload their stories ‘on the scene’ to PerthNorg.
It could be from a mobile phone or a laptop, which in effect become mobile news generators.
Of course the new network is still geared towards ‘reading’ data and less about uploading data, as is evident by the differences in downloading and uploading speeds (though I understand that more people download than upload). This is an echo of the old web ideologies that see the web more as a ‘consumer’ driven web and not a read/wrote one, that is a web where the content readers are its creators too.
But I digress. Back to my Next G Network investigation, which I have to say was not as easy as I thought it would be. From what I can tell, this is still an expensive option for most people and despite a good hour poking around the Next G site I still had very little idea about what actual costs were involved.
But in the Things you need to know (which I always read first) it says:

So data fees are added on to that.
From what I can tell the above is for mobile costs, so I expect Next G wireless broadband to be more. That is not on the cheap side!
The only reference to broadband costs I found was on whirlpool, where I read that
To use the service for broadband data access, Telstra is offering a “NEXT G turbo card”. But pricing looks to be extremely expensive, with initial plans offering 1GB for a whopping $109.95/month.
There also would be limitations on the number of people accessing the network, but with costs that high I doubt it will be a problem very soon (but maybe that’s the point.)
So Next G brings with it some great opportunities for frontline reporting and is certainly a step in the right direction. But until costs and decent data capacities are allowed, we’ll have to wait and see exactly how this changes our world.

Disclaimer: I am not a tech geek, so feel free to tell me where I’m wrong!

That’s right folks, citizen journalism sucks, according to James Farmer over at The Age, that is.

James wrote an interesting piece of dribble yesterday in his new blog called Citizen, which I have mentioned before.

It’s hard to decipher exactly what James is saying but the gist of it seems to be that most citizens should stick to their day jobs and leave the real reporting to the journalists, because they are the ones that are good at it.

Of course James’ opinion would be swayed by the fact that The Age must now be paying him a decent salary to maintain its line of thinking. Mainstream media is about old-school elitism - they encourage citizen journalism as long as it fits its business model.

‘Send it in, we’ll see if it’s worthy and then we might choose to run with it,’ is not citizen journalism. It is same old, same old.

As I pointed out to James in the comments on his blog there are not just two Cit Js in Australia, there are now over 190. I found it peculiar that he used the word Cit J and then didn’t mention us. In fact it makes me damn right suspicious that he had us in his sights.

But I’ll take that as a compliment. Kudos to The Age for being concerned.

Another weak spot in his tirade, was his statement that Digg is “simply a more transparent form of editorialising”.

He says it is not new and that theage.com has always done it by tracking reader habits.

Transparent editorialising is new, James. Tracking reader habits is not.

We impliment this ‘transparent form of editorialising’ at the norg with our voting system. That way the top news is chosen by our members. I doubt MSM will be doing this any time soon.
This also means that there is some quality control to the stories and as we get more members joinng this will only get better and better.  Sort of blows James’ theories out of the water, but that is only anecdotal
Read the comments on your blog James, this persistent line of thinking is getting tired. People want their say. When media is opened up to everyone then you have an objective view. Until then let’s face it, it remains the views of established media.

That’s not to say MSM does not have a role. A lot of the stories people add are links to MSM, the difference is they choose the ones they value and they can then comment on and discuss them.  All of them.

Feel free to leave your comments James. I won’t add my bit as I approve it.

I thought I’d just jot down my thoughts on the value of voting, since linking got me thinking …

New media means that people decide for themselves what is credible, worthwhile and what is not.
Voting is our way of implementing that at the Norg, so make sure you do it…

I’ve decided it’s time to update my trusty computer. I have been a Mac user for about five years now and swore I would never go back to using a PC.

I have one of the old classic ‘bowl’ iMacs or lampshade Macs as I’ve also heard them called. My machine is probably about two-and-a-half years old and in that time I have had no complaints, infact I have nothing but praise!

My only real consideration in getting a new computer is that I need a laptop. Clearly, I spend far too many hours sitting in front of my computer and a little bit of mobility will come in handy. It also looks like a bit more travel is on my agenda and that would make things a lot easier work-wise.
But I had a fleeting thought, a small indiscretion you could say, that perhaps I would consider a Windows laptop. You see the only drawback about being a Mac user is that sometimes you are treated like a second-class net citizen.

While Windows users got to play with Google Maps, us Mac users (ironic as generally they are the big adaptors to these sorts of toys) were left waiting a few months before we got to do cool things like zoom in on our home or find floating cars around Perth suburbs.

However, I have since concluded by making a switch back I will only make things worse for me at the end of the day. The more Mac users out there - and we are growing in numbers - the more pressure on companies to make Mac versions of their programs available quicker.

The other big turn-off was viruses. Life as a Mac user has been utopian in that regard and I’m not prepared to give it up.

I am actually not a tech-geek by nature so any suggestions about what I should be looking at are welcome!