Pew shows that the Net is second only to tv as our source for election news. It’s 72%, 33%, 29% for tv, Net, and newspapers.

This can be slightly misleading, though. For me — and I am confident that I am 100% typical of people who are like me — the only election news I get directly through TV comes through The Daily Show and Colbert. Otherwise, the ecology of news works like this: Someone posts a bit of news on some site. That snippet may well come from a mainstream source, or it may not. But like a greasy crumb dropped on the sidewalk, it’s instantly swarmed by ants. The ants — that’s you and me, sister — point at it, link to it, explain it, deny it, make fun of it, connect it with something else, and send it or what we’ve made of it around the world. The morsel is gone, digested, appropriate. The ants are the media.

The mainstream are only noticed if they’re doing as good a job at being a news ant as the rest of us.

[Tags: politics news media ]

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Initiated and managed by three Swedes with a background in advertising and PR, Noko Jeans is our attempt to approach and get closer to North Korea, and it is our attempt to answer the question: is it possible to do what no one has ever done before? Is it possible to design, produce and import jeans from North Korea? [link]

The NoKo blog is here. It gives a peak at North Korea from a Swedish, jeans-making perspective.

[Tags: north_korea noko_jeans ]

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When I read something like today’s news that only 10% of American newspaper editors consider foreign news to be “very essential” to their coverage, I instinctively turn to the bloggers who I know will have something enlightening, thoughtful and sometimes profound to say. And that by itself says a lot about how news is changing.

Of course, I did read that particular news in a newspaper, although I was referred there by a blog aggregator. So, I’m not saying that professional news media are unnecessary or add nothing. Not at all. But the news ecology in just a few years has become 100% mixed.

Tags: news media participatory_media ethan_zuckerman

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The Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project has a site that’s rich with information, written in non-legalese, about your rights and liabilities as a blogger (and general citizen media person) in the U.S. There’s lots to browse there, and it’s all quite concise and helpful.

For example, the section on whether it’s legal to record a phone call you’re having with someone else says, in part:

Federal law permits recording telephone calls and in-person conversations with the consent of at least one of the parties. See 18 U.S.C. 2511(2)(d). This is called a “one-party consent” law. Under a one-party consent law, you can record a phone call or conversation so long as you are a party to the conversation. Furthermore, if you are not a party to the conversation, a “one-party consent” law will allow you to record the conversation or phone call so long as your source consents and has full knowledge that the communication will be recorded.

In addition to federal law, thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have adopted “one-party consent” laws…

This is an excellent resource.

[Tags: citizen_media law cmlp journalism ]

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The Media Re:Public group at Berkmanhas announced a breakthrough technology that promises to take the “conference” out of “un-conference.”

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Well, sort of. It’s started a “delete-o-meter” that lists the number of deleted comments, but not their content. This post explains why comments are deleted.

The TSA blog seems to be shaping up admirably. Some of it is pretty fluffy (e.g., a post on the canine squad), but some are pretty feisty (e.g., rebutting a media exposé) and some are just interesting (e.g., why MacBook Airs may have had trouble making it through the X-ray inspection). This blog is — surprisingly, frankly — turning into a posterchild for how government can be transparent and not even boring about it. [Tags: tsa blogging government edemocracy]

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Given Wal-Mart’s size and its heavy-handed approach to so much of life, the fact that it’s letting its buyers blog freely is welcome news. (Disclosure: I consult to Edelman PR, which has Wal-Mart as a client. But all I know about this is what I read in the linked article; I assume but don’t know that Edelman was involved. And, yes, this disclosure is now longer than the post.)

[Tags: wal-mart blogs cluetrain ]

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Don’t miss Ethan Zuckerman’s live blogging of TED. Ethan makes live-blogging read like edited blogging.

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I really dislike my live blogging. I do it partly out of laziness and partly because I have a touch of the ol’ OCD. (Laziness because doing drafts is harder than spewing.)

But since I seem to do a fair bit of live blogging, next time I may try Cover It Live, which lets you embed a live coverage tool in your blog. Looks interesting. [Tags: blogging ]

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Howard Rheingold explains why he’s hooked on Twitter. Nice list.

To it I’d only add:

Entertaining: Some people are pretty consistently funny, insightful, two degrees left of comprehensible…

Revelatory: There’s this guy who in the real world is boring enough that people make up excuses to avoid sitting next to him at dinners. But on Twitter he is sharp-edged, pithy and delightful. It’s odd that people can reveal in 140 characters what is hidden at greater length.

Intimate: I’m keeping up with some people I otherwise wouldn’t even get the annual Christmas newsletter from. Hearing the details creates an intimacy that wasn’t there before.

[Tags: howard_rheingold twitter social_networking_software ]

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