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Friday, June 23, 2006

The Neverending Story

Terry Heaton's BloggerCon notes:
"I think we're in a period of great transition in our culture and that journalism is one of the core components.

Tom Maddox of Opinity noted that calling this 'open-source journalism' is a bit like calling cars 'horseless carriages.' This is a new thing and very different from advertiser-supported journalism. It's like massive parallel processing. It needs a new name, and I think it would help get us away from the fruitless bickering between mainstream media and us.'

I think this is right on the money, because what this session was attempting to define or quantify is largely unidentifiable or unquantifiable, at least in modern terms. This session was really about defining postmodern news, and that's extremely difficult when you use terms like 'story,' as in 'how do we all collaborate on a story?' I'm one of those people who thinks we need new terms and new structures that are both open and flexible.

It was either Doc or Dave who used the term 'river' to describe it, always open, always flowing. That's postmodern 'news.'"