Choice

The social bookmarking site of del.icio.us announced on their blog earlier this week that they are now automatically detecting media files and adding invisible "system:filetype:" tags to the post.

Bookmarked items in del.icio.us that end in one of a number of filetypes will now automatically get some system tags added. You can use these just like normal tags. RSS feeds that have one of those system tags added will automatically become a rss-with-enclosures file.

What the does this mean in English?

Let's start from the beginning to show how this latest development is going to further democratize the media by giving people more and more choices for how they consume their information and media diet...

Steve Rubel points to a Reuters article that Microsoft will be switching over to XML as their default file format. This seems to be more evidence for what the technologists have been saying about 2005 being "The year of RSS." RSS being based upon XML.

I see XML is a metaphor for consumer choice. Consumers can choose how they consume web content by having it delivered directly to their RSS readers -- the pretty web design and other superficial graphical supplements are irrelevant when the "Content Will be More Important than its Container."

XML is also a metaphor for giving up centralized power and hierarchy. The fact that software giants are incorporating XML into their programs means that it'll make it easier for consumers to chose to take their content and use other third-party programs to manipulate their data...

Using the tagging technique in Final Cut Pro described here, I was able to come up with a number of major themes from the interviews that I conducted with 13 leaders of the new media movement at the Personal Democracy Forum.

* Internet revolution was in the Demand Side and not just the Supply Side.
* Audience are not just consumers, they're now producers
* Audiences can now supply their own demand.
* Audience wants more choice and control
* Markets are conversations
* Journalism is becoming more of a conversation than a lecture.

The same folks who said that 2004 would be the "Year of the Blog" are saying that 2005 will be the "Year of RSS" (Really Simple Syndication). [UPDATE: This is something I've probably heard at the Berkman Conference on Journalism, but I don't have a citation. Here's one]

RSS basically allows the user to have more control over the content, as Tim Yang demonstrates in his buzzing post 15 things you can do with RSS (it was supposed to be 10, but I got carried away).

I was invited to a gathering of Activists & Technologists on March 16th at the Ventana del Soul Internet Cafe in Austin after the last day of the SXSW Interactive Conference.

There seemed to some potential overlap with what I intend to do with The Echo Chamber Project and with what others are planning on doing with the same CivicSpace/Drupal platform.

I'm in the process of going over my lessons learned and planning my next steps for this project. I'm starting to solidify where I want to be in a year from now and what I need in order to get there. Hopefully I'll be able to form some symbiotic relationships with some of the participants of this Activist Technology group.

The concept of Integral Filmmaking combined with the principles of Open Source could introduce new methods for how meaning is created.

Traditionally, the Mainstream Media or documentary filmmakers had the most power in determining what meaning was created through their editing judgments.

But combining the Internet, Blogging and documentary filmmaking mediums could allow the audience to create their own meaning from information instead of relying upon the "objective" mainstream media, partisan press or closed-source documentary films.

The Open Source tactics of the The Echo Chamber documentary and website could create up to four distinct phases of meaning creation that could provide a unique economic competitive advantage.

EXISTING PROCESS OF MEANING CREATION
INFLUENCE OF CONFIRMATION BIAS
INTEGRAL PROCESS OF MEANING CREATION
FOUR PHASES OF MEANING CREATION

I have been noticing that there are a number of articles questioning the relevance of network news since tonight is Tom Brokaw’s last broadcast as the NBC Nightly News anchor.

The Echo Chamber documentary focuses on the network news because of the influence that the media logic of the electronic medium of news has on the national political discourse...