Here’s a new project started in Philadelphia called the Media Mobilizing Project. Philly has become an interesting center for participatory media. In addition to the Media Mobilizing Project, the city is also home to the Prometheus Radio Project and Media Tank.

Here’s an interesting new twist on Wikipedia: Not only is it partially responsible for the decline in academic research skills it is also apparently undermining military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

A Canadian general says that Wikipedia is among the most dangerous public-access websites because of the speed and ease with which it can be updated. People (we’re not quite sure who) are uploading information on casualties and damage from battles and insurgents are using this information to assess their success. Presumably much of this information is coming from soldiers themselves.

The story goes on to say that this ease of making sensitive information public is the reason behind an increased secretiveness by the Canadian military, which includes the unwillingness to release details on prisoners of war captured during battles.

The rhetoric makes sense if you simply take it at face value: soldiers shouldn’t be giving out secrets. My fear is, however, that basically they just want people to have fully sanitized version of what is going on there.

Jeff Jarvis has a little test drive of Google’s new forms app. His survey is asking what parts of newspapers - sports section, critics, foreign news, etc. - you think should be eliminated. This could get interesting and is a no-brainer for media outlets looking to get a little closer to their audience. Of course, surveys, particularly online, are fraught with validity problems etc. But it could be a good conversation starter.

Tomorrow in my media and society class we are going to pull apart the digital-Internet-online-new media revolution in a segment of the class I am calling “evolution vs. revolution.” We will spend three classes in total talking about, among other things, the evolution of “delivery technologies” and how that history may inform us (or disinform us) about the current changes in the media landscape.

We’ll start tomorrow by talking about the book as a form of media and as a delivery technology and where it may be headed. The reading is “Books are Dead. Long Live Books” by Priscilla Coit Murphy. I will also show the lengthy ad for Amazon’s kindle, which I have included below and a clip from a November, 2007 episode of On the Media which is about our affinity for paper.

The key at least inititally is for students to understand that delivery technologies have always come and gone, but the media - the printed word - has stayed. Talking about paper helps them I think see the connection between media and culture. We like paper for lots of reason, one of which is that it holds ink nicely. The On The Media piece compares it to the door hinge. Doors in the future were never supposed to have hinges, but we still use them. There’s more to it than technology. One of the reasons is that hinges make doors slammable. Sometimes we like to slam doors.

A great new site is up and running with the goal of linking up a wide range of people associated with journalism. Wired Journalists is kind of like a Facebook for industry. It includes a bunch of groups, such as “Social Bookmarking for Journalists” and “Audio Techniques,” many of which are aimed at beginners.

This to me is the most exciting part of this site - there is little pretense as far as I can tell. Lots of people on the site are taking their first tentative steps into the wired journalism world. One smarmy quip about inexperience with technology is liable to send them running back to the newsroom or the classroom, defeating the whole purpose of the site. But so far it seems incredibly welcoming. Lets hope it continues.

The Johnson County Library near Kansas City has taken a bold step that more educators, particularly at the university level, should take. The library is sponsoring a class on Wikipedia, a valuable step toward media literacy. According to an article in the Kansas City Star, the class will discuss the pros and cons of Wikipedia as well as examine how information is generated in a networked environment.

Universities should offer a similar first-year class rather than taking the drastic step of banning the use of resources like Wikipedia.

Relatedly, Educause has posted a podcast of a Henry Jenkins speech that uses Wikipedia as a case study of how media literacy should work.

Veteran news reporter Daniel Schorr talked with a McClatchy reporter recently about the present and past state of journalism. Not much out of Schorr that wouldn’t expect from someone who has lived through so many iterations of journalism. He is cantankerous about the Internet and blogging. I don’ blame him - it can all be a little overwhelming.

Wikipedia has entered into a deal with United Nations University to conduct a long-awaited survey of its members. I hope this works but Wikipedia’s anonymous nature may make any results questionable.

We were very lucky to have Dan Gillmor join us in class today through Ichat from Arizona State.

Dan’s brief talk fit in well with the participatory culture/media issues we have been discussing so far this semester. I thought his best comments were direct advice he gave to the students, some of whom are very nervous about entering such a turbulent job market. Be bold. You can literally change the world in this field right now.

A couple of hours after I had finished a discussion with students in my media and society class I noticed on Twitter that Heath Ledger had died in New York.

We had been talking in class about, among other things, the idea of “viral” as it applies to the spread of information online. We had talked about a lot of concepts during class, some pretty tough like “semiotic democracy,” and some easier, like collaboration online.

The Ledger story, as Daniel Sieberg points out, was one of those “new media moments” (as I heard one professor refer to them as) that are no longer just a moment but clearly the way people in their 20s operate. TMZ posted what they claimed was he scoop on Ledger’s death about an hour after his maid found his body. About 20 minutes later his biography had been changed on Wikipedia to include his death. People changed their Facebook pages to indicate they knew about it. Twitter starting tweeting. News spread quick.

I though students might struggle with the idea of “viral journalism” (or perhaps I thought I might have trouble explaining it to them). Although it seems like a fairly simple idea - that news works almost like gossip now because of our connectedness - it’s not exactly a you-know-it-when-you-see-it idea. I once again underestimated the students. They immediately got it. It’s absolutely intuitive to them. Second nature. When they hear news they pass it along - immediately.