Dan Gillmor Launches Grassroots Journalism

kbahey writes " Most Slashdotters know Dan Gillmor from his San Jose Mercury days, with lots of article on technology over the years, from the dot-com era down to now. As has been rumored before, Dan has left the SJ Mercury to found a 'grassroots journalism' project. Well, it is here, and called the Bayosphere. The site is powered by Drupal, an open source Content Management System. Jay Campbell, Dan's Technologist, writes about why they chose Drupal. "

Comments

What a screwed up link..

[AkaXakA]

So in case you missed it, this is infact TFA: Why Drupal.

Worth noting is the update at the end of the article: Update: killes points out at Drupal.org, "Chris Messina (a.k.a factoryjoe) has spend long hours with Dan to convince him to use Drupal. Thanks Chris." Indeed.

Re:drupals ok, I prefer mambo

[bkessels]

Drupal might be harder to set up, but is better, when used as development platform. The way Drupal is set up is much more interesting for developers, then Mambo is. But it is indeed less friendly to newbies. And if perfomance is an issue, Drupal is most likely the CMS of your choice.

Wikinews needs you

[Eloquence]

For the last 6 months, the community over at Wikinews has been building up a citizen journalism project that does not narrow its focus on a single region, or a single to topic. We have written over 1500 stories in English alone, including more than 60 that are based on original reporting by Wikinews writers from various regions (see this report for some examples). Unlike Bayosphere, Wikinews does not have a big fat copyright notice at the bottom -- our content is in the public domain, and free for anyone to use for any purpose.

If you want to contribute, you can submit a story right away, or you can learn more about writing news stories the wiki way.

Wikinews is run by a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and the Wikimedia Commons, a media repository with almost 100,000 free content images, videos and sounds.

Slashdot isn't journalism, it's shared links.

[FrothyBitter]

Slashdot 'editors' aren't really editors in the traditional sense of journalism editors, not even close really. They are just story approvers, who approve a story if they feel it is of interest to the general Slashdot crowd.

The stories are just headlines and blurbs that link to an actual journalistic piece located on some other site.

Slashdot's motto should be, We don't make the news, we don't report the news, we collect the news.

Re:Corrected Text

[pHatidic]

Also, for those who don't know, this is his blog. It is a very good blog in fact, one of the few that I go out of my way to refresh several times a day.

Re:Most read the SJMerc?

[alienmole]

I never realized that local california papers had such high readership in Bangalore or Boston or all the many other places /. readers read.

You don't know the San Jose Mercury, then. It was very widely read and influential during the dot-com boom in particular, and certainly would have been heavily read in Boston and probably Bangalore too (considering the software tech connection).

Re:To the naysayers:

[0WaitState]

Newsweek's "source" was an anonymous phone call from someone alleging to be a government official who paraphrased what they claimed was a report to be issued.

Newsweek's story was multiply sourced. The retraction by one source is about whether or not the Koran-flushing would appear in a particular government report, not whether the flushing of Koran pages occurred. Some released inmates from Gitmo have in the past (2004) said that their Korans were tossed in the toilet.

Miami Herald, March 9 2005:
Yet recently declassified court documents allege that, as far back as 2002, some of Guantanamo's staff cursed Allah, threw Korans into toilets, mocked prisoners during prayers and deliberately took away prisoners' pants knowing that Muslims can't pray unless covered.

Maybe you should think and research a little before repeating white house talking points? At least try to learn from how this one was spun: a minor backing detail was changed, so they seized on that to try to destroy the messenger and never have to respond to the message. Sorry guys, there are too many other sources describing Koran desecration, and stories from US intelligence officers participating in mock prison camps (as inmates), where the bible was desecrated. Seems to be SOP when trying to break down religious inmates.

The news media can talk about blogging killing the media, but bloggers haven't contributed to people being killed yet.

How many bloggers such as Instapundit fed the lie machine that convinced the US populace to back an unneeded invasion of Iraq, which has resulted in 1600 dead US troops, 50 to 100 thousand Iraqis, and crippled our ability to control the Taliban in Afghanistan?

Other sites running Drupal

[afinn]

The Drupal website has a list of sites running Drupal. The list is dynamically generated by one of the Drupal modules. Any site that enables this module appears almost immediately. Pretty good for improving your search engine ranking.

Re:but Wikis suck when it comes to accuracy

[Eloquence]

I'm curious, have you ever tried reviewing a traditional encyclopedia in the same manner you have reviewed Wikipedia? What was the result? Personally, whenever I compare Wikipedia with, say, Britannica or Encarta on a controversial topic, I find that Wikipedia tends to have a history of edit wars on that topic, a discussion going into the hundreds of kilobytes -- but an article that is vastly more neutral and informative.

For example, the Britannica article on circumcision is heavily biased in favor of the practice and the "hygienic" argument and does not mention with one word that the practice was historically rooted in attempts to combat masturbation; the Wikipedia article has this information, as well as a detailed (and NPOV-tagged, and messy) article about the medical opinion on the matter. If I wanted to learn about the practice, I'd much rather try to get an overall picture by reading the presentation on Wikipedia, following links, and trying to check claims for plausibility, than by taking whatever Britannica says (which, in this case, is very biased and, in my opinion, wrong) as divine truth.

In other words, Wikipedia tends to give you a very good overview of the different opinions on any given subject. It doesn't give you the truth; I believe that, since everyone has different standards of truth, the only way to do this would be to fork the project into subprojects that use specific methodology to determine truth. For example, you could create a Wikipedia fork that is written from a skeptical/scientific/progressive point of view, and which excludes or dismisses most religious and pseudoscientific statements and beliefs. Or you could create a "Catholic Wikipedia" that follows Church doctrine. The free license makes this possible, and such forks are only a question of time -- the free license makes this possible. Some already exist: SourceWatch, dKosopedia, Memory Alpha, Wikinfo, Wikicities all take Wikipedia articles and develop them according to different editorial policies (or include stuff that Wikipedia doesn't).

Because Wikipedia is maximally inclusive of different opinion, as long as the article meets the general criteria for inclusion, it is both a good starting point for your own research, and a good basis to build forks following certain standards of truth. Wikipedia is not, and never will be, the truth; that is not its goal. It is not an encyclopedia following traditional enlightenment views, but rather one taking a more constructivist or libertarian outlook on the concept of truth. I'm personally convinced that this is needed, but that forks are also needed.