Government / Citizen Journalism

If you look in the dictionary for the definition of 'citizen journalism', you should see a picture of Dan Gillmore. Gillmore wrote the first blog at a newspaper website. He also wrote the book 'We the Media' on the subject of grassroots media and now he runs the Center for Citizen Media, a joint project of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkely and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The Idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others.

Although these acts don't go beyond simple observation at the scene of an important event, they might be considered acts of journalism. The average citizen can now make news and distribute it globally, thanks to the wide spreading of so many tools for capturing live events. An act that was once reserved for established journalists and media companies.

According to Jay Rosen, citizen journalists are "the people formerly known as the audience," who "were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the population listened in isolation from

one another— and who today are not in a situation like that at all. ... The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable."[source]

Corporations / Marketing

Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a funding platform for creative projects.

Every project creator sets their project's funding goal and deadline. If the project succeeds in reaching its funding goal all backers' credit cards are charged when time expires. If the project falls short no one is charged.

Since our launch in April 2009, more than 24,000 creative projects have been successfully funded by awesome people from around the world.

In this blogpost I want to introduce you to two of them.



The first one would be: Goblins Drool, Fairies Rules! It is a card game of rhyme and reason for kids of all ages. It got 1,186 backers and 'earned $27,127 -> funding successful.



The second one would be: Mythomania, Season 2.
Mythomania is a show about cartoonist by cartoonists.

I've always been frustrated with the, well, cartoony way cartoonists have been portrayed in television and film. Outside of "Crumb" and "American Splendor," it's rare to encounter a depiction of someone obsessed with the comic artform that has any semblance of verisimilitude. The main problem, of course, is that most of those films and shows were not created by cartoonists. Mythomania is a show about cartoonists by a cartoonist.

Teaching and Learning

Salman Khan is talking about a revolutionary new education system. The basic idea is: students inform themselves about their new subject at home, via podcasts. In the actual lecture students will be encouraged to either ask questions or do some exercises.

Social Gaming

Does World of Warcraft ring any bells? Hell yeah, sure it does, right?! It's one of the most played massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG) with roughly about 10 million subscribers!

Personally, I must admit I'm not such a big fan of WoW. I tried it, it kind of sucked and got boring much to fast (Quests like "Kill 10 pigs." or "Kill 40 thieves." always makes me want to hit the ESC-Button asap!).

But some months ago I stumbled upon a game called Star Wars: The Old Republic, and I was (and still am) positively surprised. I mean...sure it also got monotone quests like: "Kill 10 jedi.", but these tasks got wrapped into such nice cut-scenes....makes it all more bearable :)
Not to forget the story you experience as you level up your character, superb!

Social Networks

The Small-World Phenomenon.

A social network exhibits the small-world phenomenon if, roughly speaking, any two individuals in the network are likely to be connected through a short sequence of intermediate acquaintances. 

This has long been the subject of anecdotal observation and folklore; often we meet a stranger and discover that we have an acquaintance in common. 

It has since grown into a signicant area of study in the social sciences, in large part through a series of striking experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and his co-workers in the 1960's. Recent work has suggested that the phenomenon is pervasive in networks arising in nature and technology, and a fundamental ingredient in the structural evolution of the World Wide Web.

Milgram's basic small-world experiment remains one of the most compelling ways to think about the problem. The goal of the experiment was to nd short chains of acquaintances linking pairs of people in the United States who did not know one another. 

In a typical instance of the experiment, a source person in Nebraska would be given a letter to deliver to

a target person in Massachusetts. The source would initially be told basic information about the target, including his address and occupation; the source would then be instructed to send the letter to someone she knew on a rst-name basis in an eort to transmit the letter to the target as ecaciously as possible. 

Anyone subsequently receiving the letter would be given the same instructions, and the chain of communication would continue until the target was reached. 

Over many trials, the average number of intermediate steps in a successful chain was found to lie between ve and six, a quantity that has since entered popular culture as the "six degrees of separation" principle.