A Partnership to Figure Things Out

We heard a lot about blogs yesterday and why they can't or shouldn't be fully trusted. Blogs are popularly characterized -- mostly by traditional news organizations -- as unreliable commentary or opinion that has not been fact-checked or subjected to the tradtional processes of standards and practices that news organizations use.

True, but missing the point. Most of the criticism, as well as the fear, stems from misunderstanding how blogs work -- and how they are edited and filtered.

The difference between respected blogs and respected news stories is in this process: Participatory journalism uses a "publish, then filter" model instead of the traditional "filter, then publish" model. The process is transparent, editing occurs in the open and self-correcting. Truth emerges through participation in the discourse. And rules about truth and accuracy can be rigid among A List bloggers.

Weblogs rely on audience feedback, through weblog commenting forms, email or remarks made on other weblogs, as a method of correction. Typically, webloggers are reliable about correcting their mistakes, and a great many frequently link to dissenting viewpoints on the Web.

Weblogs are easy to set up, operate and maintain. The technology is relatively inexpensive, sometimes even free. This allows just about anyone to simultaneously become a publisher, creator and distributor of content.

The weakness is that this type of publishing requires a higher level of commitment and time from the creator than other forms. Also, it is difficult for weblogs to attract readers, other than through word of mouth and weblog aggregation and search engines. Weblogs have also been judged as being too self-referential, with critics likening them more to the "Daily Me" than the "Daily We."

A collaborative publishing environment is an attractive option for community foundations and groups. It is designed to enable a group of participants (large or small) to play multiple roles: content creators, moderators, editors, advertisers and readers. While the environment may be owned by an individual creator or host organization, the goal of these systems is distributed ownership and deep involvement from its community of users.

Many truths, not just one, emerge from the collaborative information model. Editing occurs at the edges, not the core -- a different way to look at the open flow of information.

"This is tomorrow's journalism," says blogger and journalist Dan Gillmor, now founding director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, "a partnership of sorts between professionals and the legions of gifted amateurs out there who can help us — all of us — figure things out. It's a positive development, and we're still figuring out how it works."