BuzzFeed figures out, through a combination of trend analysis and sweaty editors, what the buzz is on the Net. It says it “distinguishes what is actually interesting from what is merely hyped.” And you know it must work because the #1 topic there right now is “nip slips” of the rich and famous.

Kottke‘s got more on it… [Tags: buzzfeed everything_is_miscellaneous news]

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On an election day that will determine America’s course, CNN just sent out a news alert under the title “Breaking News” to let me know that Britney is divorcing K-Fed. [Tags: journalism media]

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Lisa Williams is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch talk. The room is packed. Dan Gillmor introduces her. (She generously credits the Berkman Center with supporting her and helping her develop her ideas.) [As always, I’m paraphrasing. It sounds choppy only because of the way I’m taking these notes.]

Dan says that he’s proud to be associated with Lisa’s PlaceBlogger.com project. (Lisa runs H20Town.info, a place-blog for Watertown, MA.) PlaceBlogger began with Lisa betting Jay Rosen that she could find 1,000 placeblogs. So far, she’s found 700. A placeblog “is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time.” It’s about the “lived experience” of a site. “It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism.” (She says there are almost 20,000 incorporated locations, so 1,000 would be 5%.)

PlaceBlogger.com (designed by Bryght) helps people discover sites that talk about their area. It’ll let you download an OPML llist of sites so you don’t have to come back. Among the goals, in addition to the helping people find placeblogs: Help drive a geotagging standard and encourage Drupal development. Also, it will provide data for answering the Big Questions about the role of citizen journalism.

Lisa says her biggest obstacle is “personal doubt.” She sometimes thinks it’s the “stupidest idea” she’s ever had. But, she says, she forces herself to get over it. [It is not a stupid idea, Lisa.] She shows a pre-alpha aggregation of local stories about election day.

Future developments: Live mapping. Aggregating tagged material from the larger Web. Letting users have personal views.

Early on while doing H20Town she had the insight that almost all “small towns are cities are comic operas with property taxes.”

PlaceBlogger only gives headlines and the first 200 characters of the post in order to move readers out of PlaceBlogger and to the placeblogs. (The headlines and characters come from the blogs’ RSS feeds.)

Most of the placeblogs, she says, are on the borders of cities, communities of 25-70K, perhaps because they’re in a media “shadow.” She’s done some analysis and projection that shows that if placeblogs increase at the current rate, by 2010, they’d cover 102M people, some percentage of which would be readers. She believes you need consistent contributions by a small group of dedicated people to make more casual contributions possible. (Baristanet is an exception; it has lots of consistent contributors, she says.) That’s good because you can do a lot with a little.

She says people should beware the Wizard of Oz syndrome, in which one is awed by what turns out to be just a little man behind a curtain.

Next steps, she says, include getting placeblogs on newspaper sites, going through Petersen Guide to colleges because college towns tend to have lots of placeblogs, sweeping the counties for blogs, and hoping that people will identify their placeblogs. [Real estate sites also should be interested in pointing people at PlaceBlogs.]

Challenges to placeblogs: Lots of placeblogs have relatively small readerships because they’re local, which means they don’t do well with advertisers.

Q: When will PlaceBlogger be visitable?
A: Later on this evening you’ll be able to apply to see the alpha. I’m particularly interested in people using RSS aggregators to read it to see if it breaks.

Q: (Ethanz) In my community, there’s a large set of placeblogs that are hateful and useless. How are you going to put context around such posts?
A: The left column on the home page is my blog where I can provide context. In the center, the “recent popular content” provides a different type of filtering.

Q: Do you do any filtering? Do you accept all placeblogs?
A: I don’t want to aggregate political blogs that talk about national issues because they’re too easy to find. I haven’t found any porn placeblogs or any KKK placeblogs. I’d take it on a case by case basis.

Q: What’s your vision for this? That people will find local blogs or that people will browse blogs around the nation? Or both? Or neither?
A: I’m a terrible predictor of what people will want.

[Tags: lisa_williams citizen_journalism journalism media berkman placeblogger watertown]

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Dan Kennedy’s written a terrific story about Dan Gillmor and the Center for Citizen Media… [Tags: dan_gillmor media blogging newspapers journalism]

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Reddit, one of my favorite social front pages, has been acquired by CondeNet, the CondéNast online group. Good news for the Reddit folks. And maybe a very very smart move by CondeNet…if they let the Reddit folks heavily influence how the service is developed. [Tags: reddit news condenet media everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Yesterday, the Berkman Center hosted a small party for local political bloggers. John Palfrey had us pause for a moment so the attendees could introduce themselves. A sampling: Betsy Devine has tracked the NH phone bank scandal. A professor from Northeastern blogs as a media watchdog. Rick Burnes of FaneuilMedia is plotting political donations on Google maps. Several folks from BlueMassGroup, a Democratic blog that’s also a community, were there. Matt Margolis, founder of Blogs for Bush, a site that’s kept its flame alive two years after the election, was there; he runs a Massachusetts site to rally the state’s overwhelmed conservatives. Steve Garfield told how he posted fantastic footage he’d shot of Deval Patrick at a rally, while the conventional news media all missed the moment. And many more; I didn’t do a systematic job of writing down names and blogs.

My point isn’t that there was a cloud of luminaries at the Berkman last night, well la-di-da. I don’t think there was an “A-list” blogger among us. And that’s my point. As we went around the room, I got chills realizing how far we’ve come. Capturing remarkable moments, tracking scandals — every issue has her blogger — monitoring the media, rallying supporters, mashing up financial info…we’re doing it all. We take it for granted. But it’s changed how the world works. And we’re only at the beginning.

The Boston Globe’s circulation is down 7% this year, falling from 414,000 to 386,000. Boston’s other daily paper (well, not counting the Metro), fell 12% to 203,000. The Globe’s Sunday circulation fell 10% to 587,000.

The Globe was already in financial trouble. The path it’s currently on predictably leads to scaling back in coverage and running more syndicated articles. If the current decline continues it’s hard to see how the Globe can survive. And that would be a disaster. A newspaper is greater than the sum of the knowledge, talent and experience it aggregates.

Another reminder of how much things have changed: The discontent about the use of electronic voting machines has become an issue almost entirely because of the Web. The people who have made it an issue are not reporters but scientists and researchers who have published directly to readers. That’s how they’ve gotten traction. And that’s new. [Tags: media politics blogging berkman]

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The audience formerly known as the audience is now meeting up and having parties. This YouTube explains the basic idea. Four Internet activists—Zack Exley (who ran the Kerry Internet campaign), Josh Hendler, Mave Gibson and Madeline Stanionis—created FrakParty.com where fans of BattleStar Galactica could organize parties for watching the season premiere. (“Frak” is an expletive used in the show.) Strangers got together in over 100 parties, in part because the series’ producer noticed the blogging about it and promoted it in his blog.

So, one of the surprising twists of the digital world is that it’s turning abstractions such as markets and audiences into real phenomena. [Tags: frakparties media zack_exley]

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I did a phone-in (well, Skype-in) interview/conversation about journalism ‘n’ stuff with Steve Sloan’s class at San Jose State University. Steve captured it and has posted it. It’s 33:28 minutes long.

And Arjo van der Gaag has posted four short (3 mins or less) videos of my talk about marketing at the MarktPlein conference in Maastricht (1 2 3 4).

Thanks to Steve and Arjo. (And thanks for the ride, Arjo.) [Tags: marketing]

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The Green Media Toolshed Media Contact Database is a directory of journalists built by a distributed base of 20,000 volunteers and designed for use by non-profit groups. At PDF Micah Sifry interviews the founder, Martin Kearns. [Tags: media politcs everything_is_miscellaneous journalism citizen_journalism everything_is_miscellaneous]

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Ethanz’s got an important post that says (roughly) those touting citizen journalism have spent too much time talking about the utility of having citizen reporters in spots where professionals reporters may not be and not enough time talking about citizen journalists as an enormous pool of expertise on topics regardless of geographic position.

Bingo and baddabing! Ethanz’s example is of the lost opportunity to call on people around the world with mathematical expertise to explain the substance of Grigoi Perelman’s proof of Poincaire’s conjecture.

The miscellaneous world is reorganizing itself largely around topics because that’s a—the?—fundamental unit of interest. [Tags: ethan_zuckerman citizen_journalism journalism everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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