PR

I posted my sitemeter icon directly onto this domain last week and was surprised to see just how many people were browsing this site. It turns out that I'm getting around 40-50 hits a day now that I'm on Drupal, where I was just getting 9-12 back when I was on Movable Type.

Why? It appears that Drupal is much more optimized for search engine crawlers as echoed by this post on the Drupal site: Search engines love Drupal.

It's also attributable to the content about the media and Iraq I've written is still very relavant to what people are looking for on the Internet, and my blog posts seem to have compelling enough titles for people to click on them. Jay Rosen admitted at Blogercon III that most of his traffic comes from Google, and I'm adopting his type of deep thinking blogging strategy rather than a more AP-like Instapundit or Atrios...

(UPDATE 6/7/05 6:08p.m. -- John Hart has posted a public reply on his website, and I'm a bit speechless. It is certainly not a very rational response to the whole situation. Below were my thoughts on what I saw developing with the project independent of any outside influence or input from Chuck Olsen.)

There could be a bit of a PR nightmare brewing for the 59 Bloggers documentary in pre-production that I mentioned a few days ago. Independent filmmaker Chuck Olsen titled his film Blogumentary and expressed concern to the 59 Bloggers director John Hart that there might be some confusion over loosely throwing around the "Blogumentary" meme on his site.

Hart sent back a curt e-mail telling Olsen, "Please don't bother me with this bullshit nonsense." Then Olsen published an excerpt from Hart's e-mail on his blog. Hart apparently threatened Olsen with some type of legal action for publishing the e-mail.

Then David Weinberger -- one of the potential interviewees for the 59 Bloggers film -- responded to the controversy by saying, "I've seen how this new guy responds to a civil inquiry, I have asked him to drop me from his list of interviewees."

Hart then backtracked and removed all references to "Blogumentary" on his website -- along with a lot of other background information. Here's Olsen's archival screenshot.

At this point, we're only hearing Olsen's side of the story because Hart is not keeping a production blog (Bad PR on Hart's part).

So I see four lessons for citizen journalism from this little episode:

1.) There's a difference between social capital and normative standards and institutional capital and legal standards
2.) There are ethical and legal issues with publishing e-mail correspondence
3. ) This may have implications for establishing credibility and building trust with potential interviewees for citizen journalists
4.) It's bad to write something in an e-mail correspondence that you wouldn't want published in The New York Times.

More details below...

One of the concerns that I have with a Drupal site is getting overwhelmed with traffic without the proper configuration. A link from Slashdot.com -- a tech discussion community website & "News for nerds" -- can bring a site down from so much traffic.

OurMedia.org got slashdotted on the same day it launched back on March 21, 2005.

It didn't take long for Ourmedia to be slashdotted.

Just what we needed with our servers already getting slammed.

Another reason why I'm cutting together a short video featuring many leaders of the new media movement is because my film advisor Brian Newman suggested that I reach out to the film world with what I'm doing.

I don't think the film industry understands folksonomy, Drupal, wikis, open source & non-hierarchical grassroots collaboration. Brian informs me that they understand short videos or audio pieces that are incorporated into the site. It's hard for film folks to digest a lot of the other stuff that I've been writing about.

So I'm working on a short film that can provide some metaphors for what I'm trying to accomplish with this site that can appeal to a broader audience. I've had a number of people tell me, "I read your blog, but I can't understand what you're talking about." Having other people say what I've been writing about should provide some useful metaphors.

Now that I have this site Drupalized, I can now start treating it as a cafe and not just a window into the project. Blogger Hossein Derakhashan talks about blogs being a window into a community, a bridge between communities, and a cafe where people can chat about different topics.

Up until now, EchoChamberProject.com has served as a window for the production of this film for transparency's stake. It can now take it to the next level by treating it more like a cafe where conversations can happen within the internal blogs. It can also now serve more as a community of practice where this virtual space can be used more for collaboration.

I'm posting in the following code to try and claim this blog on Technorati:
Technorati Profile

In switching over from Movable Type to Drupal, I'm trying to get Technorati to claim my new blog URL of http://www.echochamberproject.com/kentbye.

Drupal is supposed to ping Ping-O-Matic whenever I post an entry -- Ping-O-Matic is supposed to then ping Technorati.

But by going directly to Ping-O-Matic, the user can choose which sites to ping (Technorati is but just one of many). And so far I haven't found the internal Drupal configuration that would tell Ping-O-Matic which specific sites to ping.

I pitched my project to Brian Reich, the official Personal Democracy Forum podcaster, and we sat down for a quick 11-minute chat about the state of the Press and how I plan on applying emerging new media trends to the production of The Echo Chamber documentary.

They're technically unsyndicated MP3s as opposed to RSS-embedded podcasts, but here are links to the interview & MP3 files:

http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/610
Kent Bye.mp3 (10.29 MB)

I'm going to the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC next week, and the more that I look at the line-up of A-List bloggers and other movers and shakers, the more I'm thinking that it would be a good idea to take along my GL-1 miniDV camera and shotgun & lapel microphones to some conduct some impromptu interviews with the panelists and conference participants.

So my networking strategy could be to interview some of the A-listers for my film and produce a short video piece to display my sensibility for videography and content. I've donned the photojournalist hat at a number of film festivals like Sundance and SXSW in order to network with the indy film world's big wigs, and it seems the fashionable thing to do these days.

I've been getting a lot of great insights from http://del.icio.us/popular -- It's almost like a community weblog that tracks the attention stream of the pioneering technologists. This site essentially documents the collective consciousness of the tech savvy geeks and nerds. It's a way of tracking the buzz of innovation before it hits the mainstream media.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where people keep interesting URL's in a filing cabinets of card catalog-like keywords -- aka tags. It's a metadata brain dump filled with subjective context.

I went through my first big blogging dryspell throughout the month of April. I have been writing all of these really long and intellectually dense blog entries in the name of planning out the theories for a new paradigm of journalism.

The lesson? People want to see a proof of concept -- Theory is too abstract and -- well, theoretical. I've had a ton of people say to me, "You know, I try to read you blog, but it's just too confusing. I don't know what you're talking about."

I would usually discard these criticisms by saying, "Well, I'm trying to reach a specialized audience of the movers and shakers of the New Media movement." And then when I actually got to talk face-to-face with a lot of these technologists at SXSW I realized that they understand me when I talk to them face-to-face, but that they still aren't gleaning some of the major ideas from my writing.