Resources: Blogging and Participatory Journalism
A good overview article of the history of blogging and the different types of blogs.
Blogging Journalism and Credibility
A conference held January 2005 by The Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard Law School) and The Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics & Public Policy (Harvard Kennedy School of Government). The final report has a wealth of links to the talks and comment on the conference from the blogsphere.
Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over
Jay Rosen's Essay for the Blogging Journalism and Credibility conference: The question now isn’t whether blogs can be journalism. They can be, sometimes. It isn’t whether bloggers "are" journalists. They apparently are, sometimes. We have to ask different questions now because events have moved the story forward. Rosen's site Press Think has many other relevant articles.
Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents
Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure. Only they provide independent news, at the risk of displeasing the government and sometimes courting arrest. Reporters Without Borders has produced this handbook to help them, with handy tips and technical advice on how to to remain anonymous and to get round censorship, by choosing the most suitable method for each situation. It also explains how to set up and make the most of a blog, to publicise it (getting it picked up efficiently by search-engines) and to establish its credibility through observing basic ethical and journalistic principles.
One of the leading lights in the citizen journalism movement and author of We the Media.
A report from the Media Center of the American Press Institute on participatory journalism.
State of the Blogsphere, October 2005
A presentation on the growth of the blogsphere. Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs, and the total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months. This trend has been consistent for at least the last 36 months. In other words, the blogosphere has doubled at least 5 times in the last 3 years.
How big is the blogosphere? What is its shape, color, true nature? Blogcount catalogs efforts to answer these questions. We collect and organize the best reports and analyses on this subject.
There are two sets of figures: based on major blog using countries the figure would be around 75 million, which is a patchy figure because its difficult to count blogs based on the country of origin due to the worldwide phenomenon of people using US companies. Based on blogs created at major hosts (a more accurate measure) the figure is actually 134-144 million. So I’m taking a round 100 million + blogs figure.
