Just a Gwai Lo awkward flow, to some it's even unorthodox [?]

Jan has the recap, and Raul liveblogged it: on Wednesday I attended the Vancouver Blogger meetup and met with some people who actually read this blog. Jan, among others, encouraged me to keep writing this thing, not to worry about quality too much. There are times when I'm in "flow", and I finally realized that one of those times is after having read offline materials for about an hour. Yet again, the solution is to read more books!

At the meetup, I continued to work through what I thought about citizen journalism. NowPublic has a great concept for a site, but I've been following the 'vancouver' tag for over a year and have yet to find a story they've broken or led with in reporting. The overwhelming majority of stories are conspiracy theories or re-posts of stories from established media. For one very recent story I had hopes for (happening on a college campus, so you know there's going to be lots of intelligent, web savvy energetic young folk with cell phones and cameras), a NowPublic user kept me up to date with the lockdown of a building at the University of British Columbia. I heard about it first from Phillip Jeffrey's Twitter stream. The NowPublic story fueled rumours that the police were responding to someone with a gun. Any confirmation on that, two days later? There's also the usual social media triumphalism in the comments, but don't we hate it when CBC and CTV and CKNW claim they had the "exclusive"?

I met lots of people I had only heard about, and some I hadn't.

I'm speaking in a few weeks at the Northern Voice blogging conference, 2008 edition. About blogging. Yes, the very subject I once declared I had lost enthusiasm for. You'll see me at 10:45 AM on the Friday, during the Internet Boot Camp. That's later in the day than I thought it would be, happily so. I'm looking very much forward to Dave Olson's "Fuck Stats Make Art" presentation and Stephanie Vacher's "Apparatus for the Future" talk. Otherwise I will try the conference lobby provocateur role this year, talking with as many people that I've only heard about as possible.

http://justagwailo.com/shared/feed is the link to my "shared items" feed. It will never change (the one to my Google Reader account might). It reflects only what I find interesting, without comment, and includes not only my Google Reader shared items, but also my YouTube 'favorite' videos, my Flickr 'favorite' photos, and my Digg "diggs". There are individual feeds for each (there is no official RSS feed for my MetaFilter 'favorites' sadly: if there was, I'd include those too), so I feed them through the Drupal aggregator here on justagwailo.com. To track how many subscribers there are to it, I then use FeedBurner. http://justagwailo.com/shared is the "HTML" version of this, but I don't like the idea of syndicating other people's content on my site, so it just looks like they're big links. There's something to be said about aggregating decentralized low-threshold sharing mechanisms. I'm not the person to say it, at least not yet.

This is part 1 of the wrap-up for the Online News Association workshop on Citizen Media I spoke at last week in Toronto. See the introductory post for more information and links.

This will necessarily be a combination of what I said at the workshop and what I wanted to say. The principle lesson learned over the three years plus at Urban Vancouver is that we found it hard to convince people to post to Urban Vancouver if they already have their own blog. Some do it, like Dave Olson, Stewart Marshall, Roland, myself, and others (yes, I'm aware of the poetry and real estate posts), but for the most part, people figure if they already have a blog, then there's no point in publishing it elsewhere. We syndicate most Vancouver-based blogs anyway using their RSS feeds, so it doesn't matter too much. The other lesson from Urban Vancouver is that editing is a full-time job for at least one person done currently by 4 people who already have full-time jobs. The duties of Urban Vancouver include moderating comments and posts according to the terms of service; gardening the aggregator (adding, removing, updating feeds), responding to the emails we get, mostly mistakenly; and encouraging people to participate on the site. We've been happy with the high search engine ranking Urban Vancouver enjoys, and discussed SEO briefly during my session at the workshop. I suggested that writing for people, enabling comments, and having an RSS feed will get people to link to you (or even syndicate you) and therefore drive up your ranking.

An audience member suggested headlines as a determining factor: it's one thing to have a savvy and witty headline, but being briefly descriptive instead helps people get an immediate sense for the individual story's topic and helps people who are looking for such a thing in Google. I could have, but didn't, mention tags. At my session and as a follow-up to a comment in someone else's session, I tried to work in Urban Vancouver's aggregtor effectively being a new type of newswire (at least one blogger uses Urban Vancouver's RSS feed to end all RSS feeds as fodder for a regular column), but couldn't fit it in. I mentioned that it was okay to promote your wares (or others') on Urban Vancouver as long as it wasn't press release style, i.e. more conversational and less like a pitch. Also, copyright owned by the original author both encourages people to post their stuff and limits the work we have to do: since we can't sublicense any of the works, we don't.

Along with Lisa, I don't think Urban Vancouver competes with sites like Metroblogging Vancouver, Beyond Robson, and neighbourhood-specific blogs like Kitsilano and Carrall Street, since we syndicate and directly link to their sites often. An audience member suggested that we don't "compete" because Urban Vancouver doesn't sell advertising—at least not yet—and therefore doesn't compete for the pool of ad dollars.

See also: "What If You Created A Community Site and Nobody Came?", my November 2006 article in which I talk about Urban Vancouver and community sites in general.

Last week, at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto, I spoke for a few minutes on at the Online News Association's pre-conference workshop on citizen media. With Lisa Williams, proprietor of H2otown.info, a community site for residents of Watertown, Massachusetts, we were scheduled to talk about what's missing from local news coverage, but both chose to talk about the lessons we learned as outsiders in developing sites designed to get people talking about their respective cities in conversational ways that big press outlets can't seem to be able to. I will discuss, in future posts, the lessons I talked about for Urban Vancouver, a community site run by myself and three others (Roland Tanglao, Kris Krug, and Boris Mann, whose name came up later in the workshop); the lessons the workshop had for citizen/participatory journalism in general, if such a thing exists; and finally what I learned about my presenting.

Before I do tackle Urban Vancouver, I want to point out some bloggers who took notes and posted them to the web, some instantaneously. Omar took brief notes of each session; Barbara Iverson added more detail, continued covering Lisa's portion of the talk, and then when I talked about Drupal. Most of the websites presented at the Citizen Media workshop are powered by Drupal, which I pointed out during my portion of the talk. Although I didn't see him at the workshop, Travis Smith's thoughts on the ONA conference and citizen/participatory journalism are a must-read.

I found those two from Google Alerts for my full name. If you have notes, commentary, photos, etc., please point them out in the comments and I'll link to them here.