Citizen’s Media Summit report

The Institute for Interactive Journalism, which co-sponsored the Citizen’s Media Summit I attend at the University of Maryland in October, recently published a good overview of the summit’s sessions. The notes from my panel with Steve Yelvington and Adrian Holovaty can be found here: http://www.j-lab.org/postcmspanel3.html

Technorati Tags: citizen media, citizen journalism

User Profiles are Sizzling!

Fellow online media veteran Steve Yelvington has a post on his blog today about how Bakotopia profiles are taking off. Sounds like he needs no convincing from me that profiles and social networking aren’t just a flash in the pan.

It’s true that we’re seeing a tripling of traffic to Bakotopia, and much of it can be attributed to user profiles. In the past two months, profiles have jumped from number 13 to number 3 on the list of most popular features. I see this as a reflection of the core value proposition of Bakotopia — meeting and connecting with people who have similar interests and goals.

Even more fascinating is the fact that user profiles now get more traffic than content — which includes things like furniture for sale, musicians wanted ads, rants, reviews and the like. I don’t even know what to think about this yet, but I believe it’s very telling and could hold some important clues for the future of media. It may be more effective to build some types of audiences (like youth) by focusing primarily on individual self expression than posting content.

Some of you reading this may think “that’s great, but it has nothing to do with journalism.” My answer to that is — yes and no. It’s not directly relevant to the traditional practice of journalism — namely interviewing people and filing stories. But I think it’s very helpful with finding sources, and profoundly relevant to the core value proposition that gets people to use news and information products.

To explain this, I have to go back in time. My first gig out of college was as a feature writer at The Denver Post, and I used to write about weird things like people who believed they were abducted by aliens and John Wilkes Booth conspiracy theorists. I found myself using online communities more and more to find people who matched my particular interest for that story. Ultimately I learned that the best way to get interviewees was to join e-mail listservs about a particular interest. This is what ultimately lead me into a career in online community.

Now there’s a better way. I can click through blogger profiles or Technorati tags to find others who have identified an interest in “alien abduction” or “john wilkes booth”. I hope that reporters can use our “Are You Into” and features like it to identify emerging trends earlier than they do now.

The same thing that helps us tap into the cultural zeitgeist can also help people form new relationships at a local level. And I think that’s the real lesson of user profiles on Bakotopia. Increasingly, I find that people are using this site to socialize and connect with each other. I have a feeling that some people read local newspapers for the same reason — they want to stay in tune with the tastes and fashions of their local communities. There’s a strong people-watching element too.

Technorati Tags: Bakotopia, Bakomatic, Social Networking, Community, Classifieds, Profiles, Web 2.0

Are You Into … (fill in the blank)?

It’s been a week since we launched band radio and interests on Bakotopia. I hinted that we had more in store, and you can see the latest here in a feature we’re calling “Are You Into …?” (And this is just one set of many more to come!)

Here’s how it works. If you click an interest on someone’s profile, you’ll now see a button labeled “I’m into that!” Click on it, and if you’re signed in the interest then shows up on your profile, too.

We show the most popular interests on a page called “Are You Into …?” that’s a combination of new and most popular interests as defined by users. The more “interesting” something is to people, the bigger its font size. This type of page should be familiar to many bloggers, as you can find something similar in Technorati, del.iciou.us, and my personal favorite 43things. The technical term for it is “tagging,” but to average person it’s just a way to see what everyone else is into and find people you have something in common with.

So why are we doing this? Well, for the last 10 years I’ve worked on many community products, and I always cringe when the dreaded question comes up: “what do we want our categories to be?” Someone — usually me — then has to spend days peering into a crystal ball trying to imagine what people really want to talk about. And not only do I have to create topics, but I have to organize them into a hierarchical taxonomy. This is about as enjoyable as reorganizing my filing cabinet.

Over the years I’ve observed that you get some parts of the taxonomy right, but you often get many parts wrong. And even worse, you miss important stuff because few of us are psychic. I still think there’s a role for the media in setting the stage for discussions of top-of-mind issues, but it is simply impossible to predict everything. This means that we often miss out on developing trends until it’s too late. As they say, by the time something shows up in Time magazine it’s no longer cool. This is one way to predict the future by letting our community identify new trends.

We’re looking forward to seeing peoples’ interests bubble up organically on this page over time, as opposed to us sitting in an ivory tower pretending to know what people are into (which is what most sites and newspapers have to do today because they have no choice.

Technorati Tags: Bakotopia, Community, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Bakomatic

Band Radio, Bakotopia and The Northwest Voice

Big news this week in Bakersfield!

Late last week we quietly relaunched The Northwest Voice — the first U.S. newspaper-run “citizen journalism” initiative — on the same home-grown platform that runs Bakotopia.com and Masbakersfield.com.

All three are essentially now the same site running on one community-optimized database. Their look and feel, categories and content are focused on the audiences that use them. To the untrained eye, they’re three different sites, but it’s easy to see their similarities. Only we know that they’re unified, and we can now track usage across them holistically.

We’re seeing very good reception to all three, with traffic to Bakotopia.com now tripling as user profiles start to become slightly more popular than user-contributed content. I find this extremely interesting given that we only launched profiles late this summer! Perhaps Rupert Murdoch was onto something with buying Myspace.

In the content arena, I’m really happy to see that post volume to the Voice remains steady, and the editors are getting no negative user feedback. Meanwhile, we’re having fun watching longtime Voice users start to create user profiles.

We also finally launched what we call “Band Radio” on Bakotopia. It allows bands to post their own MP3s, which we can easily review and approve before it’s available to the public at large. We’re proud to see Mento Buru using band radio. This band has been in Bakersfield for a long time and everyone here knows them. Lead singer Matt Munoz is one of the most amazing grass-roots promoters I have ever met. When people of this caliber use our new features, we’re really beside ourselves and we get all giddy.

We also have some experiments underway with social networking (both topical interest and friends/family). And we greatly improved the editor by allowing multiple photos with captions, photo credits and the like. But we have much work to do in that most important area, so I’ll wait until we’ve cracked the code before making a big deal about it.

All of this is a major next step for The Bakersfield Californian, and just the beginning of many more great things to come. I’m very proud of our development team for making all of this happen. Here are the URLs to the home pages if you want to check out the sites on your own:

http://www.northwestvoice.com
http://www.bakotopia.com
http://www.masbakersfield.com

Technorati Tags: Bakotopia, The Northwest Voice, Masbakersfield.com, Community, Citizen Journalism, Citizen Media, Participatory Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Bakersfield