BlogBridge, the aggregator I’ve been using for a few months in beta, has gone to 1.0. There are a few things to like about it, not least of which is that it’s a free, open source project done by someone I know well and trust 100%, Pito Salas.

Blogbridge is a client, but it stores your info on a server so you can use it on multiple machines. It tries to help you discover new weblogs by noting links in your feeds. You can rate your feeds and this somehow magically gets fed into a community rating system. (I’m not finding the rating system very helpful to me.) You can set keywords and ask to see only posts that contain them.

In short, BlogBridge has been doing the job for me.

[Disclosure: I’m an uncompensated member of its board of advisors.] [Technorati tags: rss blogbridge aggregator]

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Dan Bricklin points to Chris Daly’s Are Bloggers Journalists? Let’s Ask Thomas Jeffeson. Here’s a snippet that Dan pulls out of the article:

Common Sense and other pamphlets like it were precisely the kind of political journalism that Jefferson had in mind when he insisted on a constitutional amendment in 1790 to protect press freedom — anonymous, highly opinionated writing from diverse, independent sources. In historical terms, today’s bloggers are much closer in spirit to the Revolutionary-era pamphleteers than today’s giant, conglomerate mainstream media.

Both Chris’ piece and Dan’s discussion of it are well worth reading… [Technorati tags: blogs bricklin ChrisDaly journalism]

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SFist is running Irina Slutsky‘s interview with Mark Jen who was fired for putting information about Google on line. The lesson he learned?

I wasn’t sensitive to the media at the time. My experience with blogs has been a personal experience, as in you read the blogs of your friends or your family, and that’s about the circulation. I didn’t actually know that blogging was becoming a huge movement and there was a huge community coming around it. But now I know.

He’s now at Plaxo. Plaxo’s attitude towards blogging:

Plaxo recognizes the value of the value of employees connecting with the community. There are rules—you can’t talk about sensitive or confidential information. But as far as personal feelings on things, that’s ok.

So, he’s learned not only where to draw the line, but that there are lines. That’s a tough lesson for people brought up in the blurry, open world of blogging, and a big part of me is sorry that anyone has to learn it.

Here’s “Nurse’s Song” by William Blake because, well, why not?

When the voices of children are heard on the green
And laughing is heard on the hill,
My heart is at rest within my breast
  And everything else is still.

“Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down
And the dews of night arise;
Come, come, leave off play, and let us away
Till the morning appears in the skies.”

“No, no, let us play, for it is yet day
And we cannot go to sleep;
Besides, in the sky the little birds fly
And the hills are all cover’d with sheep.”

“Well, well, go & play till the light fades away
And then go home to bed.”
The little ones leaped & shouted & laugh’d
  And all the hills echoed

I love this poem because the poem is itself so innocent. Yet the nurse is so complex: An adult who mediates the darkness that looms over the scene. How do you know what is un-see-able over the horizon? At best you have a nurse and not, say, a regulatory agency. (Sorry, I’m just back from Isenberg‘s Freedom to Connect and it’s still, well, looming over me. In a good way.)[Technorati tags: google blogs f2c WilliamBlake]

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Berkman’s Henrick Schneider at the Tuesday morning informal get-together talks about some quick research he’s done using General Inquirer, “A computer-assisted approach for content analyses of textual data” by Philip Stone. It’s a dictionary-based approach with over 10,000 words and 180 categories. (GI has a blog.) E.g., it found a strong correlation between the optimism in the first speech given by presidential candidates and the outcome of the elections. Also, the pessimism in popular songs and newsmagazzins predicted decreased consumer optimism and economic recession.

Henrik did a quick study feeding in blogs about the Eason Jordan case, using just six blogs (or other statements) and only one text from each source, so this is more of a test of whether there’s a reason to go ahead with a statistically significant study. The content came from Eason Jordan, Rebecca MacKinnon, LaShawn Barber, Rony Abovitz, Richard Sambrook, Brian Ericksen.

Ethan points out that GI is sometimes used to note rhetorical signatures. Henrik’s mini-study shows, for example, that Jordan and Sambrook use the most “negative” terms, Abovitz is distinctively positive, and Ericksen (an Army guy) uses the most political terms.

Applied more broadly — Ethan suggests looking at the top 100 technorati-ranked bloggers — this could be quite interesting. We kicked around other ideas, e.g., looking at the deviation among US MSM, foreign media and bloggers on a particular topic. [Technorati tags: blogs berkman]

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Further evidence of the penetration of blogs into mainstream culture:

Blog Sticky Notes

Courtesy of my lovely daughter Leah.

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Joi Ito has a fascinating, heart-felt post about the way he — and almost all of us — accommodate our positions to the context in which we’re speaking. He was at the Doors of Perception conference in India conference:

Later, an elderly man stood up and said that all knowledge should be available to everyone and that he didn’t think we should compromise on the copyright issues. He then said that the people are ready to fight and march in the streets and turn over the monopolies and we didn’t need to sit around and wait for government. It turns out he used to live with Mahatma Gandhi’s at his Ashram.

I felt a sudden pain. I realized that I was compromising and in fact evening softening my words assuming that the video of my presentation might end up on the Internet…

It sent a shiver down my spine. And then it stiffened my spine. I heartily recommend the post… [Technorati tag: joi]

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ABC’s Nightline has been working on a piece about blogging. Rumor had it that it was going to be shown this Thursday. The new rumor is that it will be shown this Tuesday.

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After you spend a year at the Nieman Foundation, says Jay Rosen, no one at your paper even asks what you learned. If you were Microsoft, sent an employee away for a year to learn, and didn’t even ask what they learned, you’d be fired. “This profession doesn’t value intellectual capital,” Jay says. “It doesn’t even really respect learning.” New media has forced traditional media to have to learn quickly. “It has not happened,” he says. “There’s this huge gap between what most journalists know about the Web and what’s actually happening on the Web.” If the traditions are going to survive, professional journalists will have to jump in and learn.

For example, Jay says, journalists often believe that people on the Web have no neutrality. But Wikipedia shows otherwise. Journalists think what’s on the Web is unedited. But the Web has its own way of editing: Readers edit.

The people who started online companies are moving towards journalism. When Yahoo! started, it didn’t think it would move toward journalism. Likewise for CraigsList [Craig is here. Yay Craig!]. If professional journalism is going to survive, it’s going to have move toward the ways of the Web.

Journalism has protected itself by separating itself from politics, economics, the public… That’s how you had integrity. Now the question is how you create connections. “That’s very much the ethos that professional journalists absorb.”

He is worried about this “learning deficiency.”

[Great. I love Jay]

Craig: During any serious change, jobs are lost. There’s a need for some sort of self-help. I’d be willing to put links — ones sent to me — about what these changes are about.

Rob Enderle: Big corporations, not just media, don’t take advantage of people’s learning. It should be up to the individual to drive through the organization what they’ve learned.

Len Apcar, Editor in chief of NY Times Digital says that there is a 150-year-old culture at The Times. If the website organization of The Times had found room in the newspaper’s building, it would have been crushed because of the culture. After ten years, the culture of the website and the newspaper have to come closer together. We’ve learned that “success breeds success,” e.g., Andrew Revkin‘s blogging a trip through Greenland. I don’t need money so much as a willingness to try. If Nick Kristoff wins a Pulitzer for his travel reports, Len wants the web person who went with him to be in the photo. That would be a huge step, he says. [I find it depressing that that would be considered a huge step.] Conclusion: We need a change in culture, not just more money.

Matt Thompson says that we need to talk about what “survive” means.

Dan Froomkin: It’s not that the new media branches are up on what’s going on and the old media branches aren’t listening. The new media branches generally aren’t up on what’s happening. It comes back to fear. We need boldness and time is running out. “Yahoo harvested online aggregation of breaking news before we even knew what it was.” The same thing is happening with hyperlocal reporting. “At least we still have tremendous value in our enterprise reporting and opinions.” He ends by saying, “It’s very depressing.”

Danny Schechter shows a bit of his film, Weapons of Mass Deception. [I don’t know why we’re watching this.]

Rebecca says it’s not the question whether mainstream journalism survives. It’s whether journalism survives. the MSM are doing more audience-pleasing content and are less concerned about doing the work that would advance the public good. We need to look at the business model issues, she says. If you’re working for a corporation that is most concerned about short-term business interests, can you do good journalism? [Yay, Rebecca!]

Len: I’ll go out on a limb and state four square that there are bedrock values: Judgment and editing counts for something. Some people need editors to get their ideas across. There are sometimes no right answers about what the lead should be, but there should be a discussion. He also favors fact-based reporting and true curiosity-based reporting. A good reporter does what happens at Wikipedia: aggregating the views and ideas of experts. That’s a useful thing. People don’t have time to do it themselves. We need independent media to uncover certain sorts of stories. [He actually gives an example of a story about accidents at railroad crossings. My question is exactly what types of stories are best done by media institutions.]

Jay: Exactly what limb did you go out on? The media system gained power at the expense of other actors such as political parties and old boss systems. During this period, journalists didn’t come up with new ways of explaining their value and the grounds of their judgment. Journalists have relied on the most innocent explanations of their work.

Dan: So how do we explain ourselves?

Jay: I talk about citizen journalism.

Rebecca reports on the webcred conference. We should stop talking about the conflict between MSM and blogging. Instead we should be talking about what we can do to keep citizens well informed and how can we help make the citizenry better able to understand what it reads. We’re all in this together and need to figure out how to improve the ecosystem. She asks if we really have the tools we need (a point Halley brought up earlier)? And what are the commercial incentives? Do we have the right business model for creating responsible credible media?

Craig: People are frustrated at what isn’t covered, at how stories get raised and dropped. [What’s most interesting to me is how we’re “taking back” not only content but metadata and even what constitutes a story.]

After lunch, we’re going to spend time building a list of what should change and what should be preserved.

[Technorati tags: whosenews media jayrosen]

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Halley‘s got a new blog: GamerMom. It’s about being a mom of a kid who plays video games.

My two cents: I’m about two hours into Half Life 2 and am ready to declare it the Greatest Game in History.

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Pito talks about the way the blog aggregator he’s building, BlogBridge, has some tagging and social software capabilities. (BlogBridge, even in its current state of development – alpha – has become my regular aggregator. Disclosure: I’m on its board of advisors.)

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