Slashdot Mirror
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. "
When are the 'osphere's going to die?
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I hope the project enjoyes higher quality editing than the grassroots journalism project that is slashdot.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
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.
looks more like they needed serious persuading to choose it.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
I agree, drupal is ok, but i use mambo too, and i cant get enough of all those high quality themes, extensions and the ultra easy setup. I run it on several production sites, and ive never had a problem with it. And the default mambo install feels more complete than drupal, last time i checked it out, i was left with a handfull of configs, and a somewhat running site. Mambo is much easier to manage imo.
I am the submitter of the article and here is the correct text. It was fine when I submitted it.
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 "grass roots 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. "
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
I never realized that local california papers had such high readership in Bangalore or Boston or all the many other places /. readers read.
- Speed: the "new" in news.
- Accuracy: avoids all those silly retractions, libel, etc.
- Relevance: Information that is meaningful or interesting or useful to the reader.
- Depth: not popular among the CNN/USAToday set, but much needed.
Does the net help?- Speed: yes! two words: global bandwidth
- Accuracy: Maybe: Distributed information gathering and rapid feedback help jointly edit/discredit stories. But the process can also feed a "tyranny of the majority" group delusion.
- Relevance: Yes: feedback scoring mechanisms (such as
/. moderation system) help good stories bubble-up and bad stories drop to invisibility.
- Depth: Yes: Wiki-like group editing can add depth, although it may be too slow for "news" stories (more appropriate for feature articles and thought pieces).
Overall, I'd say that grassroots journalism could be good journalism if the system can create the self-regulatory structures needed. Something like (but better than)Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I like drupal. I started messing around with it at work in my spare time. Threw it on my home page (http://www.uwcreations.com/ but have yet to do anything meaningful with it. I love how it works though, and it seems infinitely configurable.
I have a drupal site, but have recently messed around with mambo. I would say the former is quicker to get up and running but I would agree with you that the latter is probably better in features and looks.
However for my next project I will probably look for a CMS that uses perl or python or something. PHP is a bit fluffy really for bigger projects.
My little Linux and tech blog
It couldn't be any worse than what the big names in media do already. Newsweek played a major role in spreading a story about a soldier trying to flush part of the Koran down the toilet in gitmo. Just one little problem: 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. They never even read an excerpt of the report to the Newsweek reporter and what did they do? They pounced on this "story" (as in a complete fiction) and now 9 people in Afghanistan are dead because the riot that Newsweek helped start got so out of control that the small fledgling Afghani government had to use a lot of force to stop huge crowds of rioting students and other civilians.
The news media can talk about blogging killing the media, but bloggers haven't contributed to people being killed yet. The mainstream media on the other hand, has. So much for the much vaunted "accountability" that is supposed to separate blogging from "journalism" these days. That's what's always cited by the media as the important difference. While I don't trust bloggers either for objective reporting of the facts, can anyone seriously say that the professional media cares about the truth any more than bloggers do?
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
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.
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 '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.
FYI: poster is referring to my earlier posts against Greasemonkey. See my user page for links. :-)
Anyway, I got a giggle out of this comment...
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Focus can be a good thing. When I look at the Wikinews home page right now, I see an eclectic mix of headlines that look as though they might have been ripped from a combination of Reuters and Slashdot, but really not much of interest to me.
This is intended as a constructive question: what is it that's going to bring readers back to Wikinews day after day? What can they expect to see? If the answer is a fairly random collection of stories on any possible topic, why do you think that's better than sites which do focus more closely on particular regions or topics?
Most of the best real-life examples of journalism are either topic-focused or region focused. It's difficult to be the best at everything.
Drupal is a CMS that is incredibly well architected and flexible. It needs a bit of flash (not Flash) and polish, but for a framework that is modular and customizable, it's great.
It's written in PHP, but it's clean PHP, if there is such a thing.
Yes, Wikinews precedes this, and has a larger scope. There is also a quite large and serious grass-roots news effort, Indymedia, with branches and local reporters in the US, UK, and (I gather) many other countries.
Problem is... how many of them have RSS? Wikinews doesn't seem to, which is why I'd forgotten all about it until you mentioned it. The idea of a web-based news service without RSS is a bit pointless, never mind a news service that aims to be innovative. Hopefully they'll get that sorted soon :)
Outside of the single most established Korean based OhMyNews most, if not all of the citizen reporting web sites I've looked at, including WikiNews, have had a hard time gaining traction. I'm not sure why they're having such trouble, particularly given the popularity of WikiPedia, but it is clear however that the movement is beginning to take off, and here to stay. News will never be the same - and imho that is a VERY good thing!
What I really like about NowPublic, and what imho differentiates it from the other sites, is that the site is NOT trying to be the hub of citizen reporting itself - it's trying to create a toolset to facilitate citizen reporting. Through creative commons licensing and their really nifty 'SmartMedia' technology their goal is to facilitate the spread of newsworthy information created by people like you and I (though admittedly they need to do a MUCH better job of communicating this). Anyone (you don't need to be a member) can use the content posted on NowPublic. So if you have a blog and are writing a story and you need/want pictures or video you can use existing or request new photos/audio/video from NP members.
Being a photographer, I like the fact that through their SmartMedia my photos always show my name, and provide a way to contact me directly (actually had one person offer me a gig through this already!!) - this is all done through the image itself ensuring that anyone who uses my photos attributes it back to me (anyone who has posted a good pic to the web has most likely had it ripped off and should really apperciate this new idea). Additionally, anyone who sees the photo on any site can in turn copy it and put it on their site... it's really a great promotional vehicle for photographers. But my favorite bit is that every story is implicitly a request for citizen coverage - if you want to see a local perspective on a story, simply post it to the site. In effect every story is actually an assignment - you now have an army of people, soon to be larger than any major media organization willing to go out and get coverage of the story for you! As a photog, I'll never be at a loss for photos ideas again!
They are currently running a contest, awarding cash prizes to encourage people to go out and take photographs of newsworthy events. Their Citizen Photojournalism Awards were created to encourage people to go out and cover news stories. Any newsworthy photo uploaded to NowPublic is eligible for weekly $100 cash awards and there is a $500 grand prize. I'm hoping I win something so I can get that fish eye lens I've been drooling over.
Fast-forward to 2004 (or 2005 I guess), and we have an internet news/media that does not have to remain persistant (like paper). Despite the valiant efforts of the Wayback Machine, Google Cache, etc., the vision in Orwell's book can actually happen!
Although slightly off-topic, it is food for thought.....
While I liked what I saw of Drupal, I do not care at all for PHP as a language, and thus for changing, modding, and otherwise editing Drupal's (or any other mainstream CMS, as they are almost all PHP-based) code. Has anyone here tried Pyblosxom, one of the few Python blogs out there? I guess it really isn't a full-fledged CMS, but if you're doing a blog, I think it's decent. Its default look is rather plain, but that's the whole point; you mod it and add "plugins" (there are quite a few available, I think) to add the functionality and flash you desire -- both fairly essential to a popular and quality blog.
>perl or python or something.
zope.org
> PHP is a bit fluffy
zope.org
I've ran a Zope site (Zope which I haven't had to update for the past two years; it did have 2-3 security bugs during that time but none of them affected me). It never crashed (moderate loading, static, but over 200MB of content) and it gave me several years of piece of mind.
Compare that with some PHP-what-have-ya and their constant security disasters (not to mention quarterly Apache security updates).
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.
They might be overkill for a blog, but if you want a python-based CMS you should look at zope and plone. They are both extremely powerful. Unfortunately a lot of people seem to be put off by the steep learning curve and patchy documentation.
Should this be read as "Dan Gillmor was laid off by the Mercury News and is now just another blogger?"
One of the reasons I liked Mambo is because even though it is not required to have "powered by mambo" in the footer, the Mambo team encourages it (no.5) and it does seem well, proper, to do so.
Lane Myer: I have great fear of tools. I once made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee condemned it.
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.
When Al Qaeda members are caught, they'll claim anything to discredit the US. Thanks for playing their game.
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.
Quick! Call a WAAAAMBULANCE! It's so HORRIBLE!!! Someone may have cursed their god!!!
Seriously, you also seem to have a problem understanding the word "allege". Please note that the article you quote doesn't mention at all who's doing the "alleging", now does it?
I'd "allege" you're an idiot, but you've already demonstrated that "beyond a reasonable doubt". You dumbass dhimmi-wanna-be.
From an Al Qaeda training manual:
IF AN INDICTMENT IS ISSUED AND THE TRIAL, BEGINS, THE BROTHER HAS TO PAY ATTENTION TO THE FOLLOWING:
1. At the beginning of the trial, once more the brothers must insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security [investigators] before the judge.
2. Complain [to the court] of mistreatment while in prison.
3. Make arrangements for the brother's defense with the attorney, whether he was retained by the brother's family or court-appointed.
4. The brother has to do his best to know the names of the state security officers, who participated in his torture and mention their names to the judge. [These names may be obtained from brothers who had to deal with those officers in previous cases.]
5. Some brothers may tell and may be lured by the state security investigators to testify against the brothers [i.e. affirmation witness], either by not keeping them together in the same prison during the trials, or by letting them talk to the media. In this case,they have to be treated gently, and should be offered good advice, good treatment, and pray that God may guide them.
6. During the trial, the court has to be notified of any mistreatment of the brothers inside the prison.
see list of site /.ers know. Because the followed a link from /., saw the site, didnt care to read it and posted a comment on slash anyway abut the site.
;-)
At least I have "read" drupal
-- for undocumented cisco commands, take a peek @ dotu
Why add such a comment?
OK, I'll explain the joke to you. Some people feel that PHP, with it's required parentheses, brackets, and somewhat homegrown syntax, is innately unclean; therefore, "clean PHP" for these people is an oxymoron.
All right, architected isn't a word. Drupal is well designed.
And Drupal, in particular, stands out as an exception to PHP-what-have-ya coding.
Drupal has a page for powered by X buttons, but that is about it, no one is considered a bad person or so, if he does not mention Drupal. As it stands, Drupal is alreaady ranked very high in Google; no need for special programs to increase the ranking.
It doesn't matter. Just an ethical question I was wondering and it's OT, sorry about that.
Lane Myer: I have great fear of tools. I once made a birdhouse in woodshop and the fair housing committee condemned it.
Newbie just testing....