Chapter 6

Tools and Tactics for Trusted Creators The tools of digital media creation are becoming ubiquitous, certainly in the developed world and increasingly on a global scale as well. They encompass such a wide variety of technologies and methods that I could spend this entire volume just talking about the ones you can use right now—and by the time you finished reading, there would be new ones. So, in this chapter we’ll look in a high-level way at how to make your own media. As always, we’ll extend and amplify at mediactive.com. It’s especially useful to know the most widely used tools and techniques and to understand why people are so excited about some of the emerging ones. Our teenagers are using most of these tools already, especially social networks and mobile texting, and in many families younger children are being immersed in electronic gadgets of all kinds. (Like all tools, digital ones can be used for good or bad purposes, and with positive and negative consequences for the user; I’ll address that in another chapter.) And if you’re reading this book, chances are you’re using at least some media creation tools. I’ve arranged this chapter’s sections in order from the most basic to the more complex—that is, starting with the ones you’re most likely to be using already and moving along a path to the tools and techniques that demand more expertise. There’s no way to list, much less discuss, all of the available technologies and services. I’m focusing here on a few that strike me as the main ones where people are already participating and contributing in trusted ways, including several that require a more serious commitment of your time. None of these is all that difficult, but I recognize that everyone has a personal limit. So when you reach yours, as you read on, it’s fine to stop there and continue to the next chapter. If you do that, I hope you’ll come back sometime and read what you’ve skipped. 78 Mediactive Simple Text: Mail Lists and Discussion Groups In this day of video, audio, mashups and all kinds of advanced media forms, we sometimes forget the value of plain old text. That can be a mistake, because text is easy to take in and, for most people, easier to create than linear media like videos. You don’t even have to be a blogger to use text to great effect in communities of all kinds. Even a simple email list can be a great way to keep people in touch, and to pass around valuable information. If you can pull people to your blog, it’s great for disseminating ideas, but often you’ll get more attention by posting a brief message to an appropriate mailing list already frequented by the people you want to reach. There are thousands and thousands of mail lists, message boards and other kinds of systems of this sort. They exist for conversation and to provide information, and they can be amazingly valuable. They’re designed for easy participation. Some allow anonymous posting; others require a sign-up with a valid email address in order to deter bad behavior. Although some go even further and require each mail to be checked by a moderator, this kind of gatekeeping is rarely used anymore because it holds up discussion. Of course, it’s fine to lurk in the background, reading without posting; in fact, a general rule on forums is that you should read for at least a couple of days before you add your voice, to get a sense of the culture and what’s acceptable to post. Ultimately, you’ll get the most out of these forums by joining in. The more you know about a topic, the more you can help others understand it, too. No matter who you are, you know more than enough about something to be a valuable participant. Forums and mail lists are also simple to create yourself. It’s especially easy at big Internet sites like Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups. If you don’t already have an account, just create one. Then create a group, and you’re off to the races. The limits of running a group or mail list via Google or Yahoo! become fairly obvious once you’ve spent enough time there. You can move up to more sophisticated forum software—there are literally dozens of products and services to choose from—but going this route does add several layers of complexity. I’ve been on mail lists and forums of various kinds for years. Some are just entertaining, but others have serious value as community information providers. For example, our former neighborhood in a northern-California city—a few square blocks with several hundred homes—was served by a community website that offered basic Dan Gillmor 79 information about the area. But the more valuable online information source was a Yahoo! Groups message board where residents discussed local news. One day, someone posted a message saying that the tap water had gotten cloudy. Someone else noticed the same thing. Not too many hours later, we found out the scoop: According to a resident who called the city utilities department, repairs to the system were causing the cloudiness, but it was not at all dangerous to anyone’s health; the poster of this message also linked to a page on the city’s website explaining the situation. This incident was not nearly important enough to have been of interest to the (formerly) big daily newspaper in Silicon Valley, my old employer. As far as I know it didn’t even make the weekly serving our town. But it was real, serious news in our neighborhood, as were other messages over the years letting folks know about local break-ins and vandalism.* Social Networks: Facebook and More In mid-2010, Facebook announced it had reached an amazing milestone: 500 million signups worldwide. You may well be one of them. Almost without exception, my students are. So am I. I should say at the outset that while I have immense respect for the brilliance of the Facebook founder and team, I’m not a huge fan of Facebook itself, for reasons I’ll explain in more detail later in the book; suffice it to say, for now, that I don’t like Facebook’s ever-morphing privacy policies and I especially worry that it’s creating a walled garden that diminishes the rest of the online world. But it’s hugely popular, in part because it does what it does so seamlessly and, for users, in a helpful way. Whatever I think of the service, it’s the preeminent social network—MySpace and LinkedIn are a considerable distance behind in sheer numbers—and it’s developed into an impressive ecosystem that clearly has staying power. To create an ecosystem, Facebook encouraged third parties to use its software platform to create other products and services within the Facebook service itself: everything from posting pictures to sharing travel

Information created at the “hyper-local” level, as some call the geography, takes a contrarian twist from the old adage, “It’s not news when dog bites man, but it is news when man bites dog.” That’s true enough if the news provider is a big-city paper or TV station. But “dog bites man” is definitely news if it happens on your street, more so if the dog bit your next-door neighbor—and especially if it was your dog. 80 Mediactive plans to playing online games, and on and on. You can spend a lot of time inside Facebook and get a lot out of the experiences. The updating mechanism at services of this kind, called a “wall” at Facebook, is in its own way a news service, where the news and observations come from people you know or have “friended” there. The value of what you read (and see in photos and videos) depends, of course, on how useful or entertaining you find what others post. But purely for social interaction, there’s a lot to be said for using social networks as a way to stay in touch. Should you “friend” everyone who asks? That is, should you agree to share your private information with other people more or less indiscriminately? Definitely not. Most people online, as in the physical world, are good. But enough are not that you should be at least somewhat cautious in how you approach social networks. We need to take privacy issues extremely seriously. After Facebook made what I considered a dramatic change in its policies, I decided to quit and start over, as I’ll explain in Chapter 9. And as I’ll also discuss in the same chapter, privacy is at the core of what I hope will be changing customs in an always-connected age. Again, while the rise of Facebook has been meteoric, and wellearned, it’s hardly the only social network. MySpace has a huge number of users, and while it no longer has its former cachet it remains highly popular, especially when used for its primary purpose: music discovery and promotion. I don’t visit it much, but researcher danah boyd has observed that MySpace still is one of the most widely used networks, second only to Facebook. I use LinkedIn for much of my social-networking interaction. It’s aimed at the business community, but it’s a terrific network for finding people who share your vocational or professional interests. I tell my students, nearly all of whom have Facebook accounts, that they should have LinkedIn accounts when they head out into the job market. (I and many others have had great success using LinkedIn to recruit new colleagues.) You can create your own social network without all that much difficulty, too. Ning.com does this brilliantly, with many of the best features of the big networks available out of the virtual box. I’ve used Ning for university classes, to keep students informed of events in class, and found one of its best features to be the ability to make the network entirely private among its members, invisible to the outside world. (As we’ll discuss later, though, it’s always best to assume that anything you create online for someone else—anyone else—to look at may someday Dan Gillmor 81 escape out to the rest of the world.) Ning started off as a free service. It now charges, but I still recommend it highly. Even blogging platforms, discussed in the next section, are becoming more like social networks. For example, the people behind WordPress have created BuddyPress, an add-on that brings social networking capabilities to the blogging system. It’s what I’m using now for classes, and while it doesn’t offer all the bells and whistles (yet) of other social networks, it works just fine for our purposes, even allowing us to keep things private. Blogging A blog is a series of updates in reverse chronological order, with the newest material at the top. That’s it. Simple, no? Yet blogging is a term that encompasses any number of forms; it can be turned to a variety of purposes, as millions of people around the globe have discovered. Blogging has become one of the most preferred ways for people to post news, opinions and, yes, even what they’ve had for breakfast as they write from their basements in their pajamas—the latter a capsule description of the way some people like to deride citizen media. Blogging providers and services abound. The “big 3” services for individuals are: Blogger: a free hosting service owned by Google that’s probably the least flexible of the pack but also probably the simplest to use. Google let Blogger languish for a time, but it has been improving the service lately. WordPress: currently my blogging software of choice. WordPress has both hosted (free and paid) and self-serve options where you install the software on a computer owned by you or your Web hosting service. It also has a large variety of “plug-ins” that let you extend and customize what you can post and how people can view and use it. TypePad: a mostly paid hosting service from Movable Type, a company that has focused more and more on the business market. Posterous: aimed at folks who prefer visuals and short updates to lots of text. Along with a similar service called Tumblr, it’s one of the faster-growing sites in the genre. The main thing to understand about any of these blogging services is their convenience. You can create a blog in about five minutes, and later you can make it pretty much as simple or elaborate as you want. 82 Mediactive If you have a passion for something, blogging is a natural outlet. The best bloggers have several things in common:  They write with a genuine, conversational human voice, more like a letter to a friend than formal journalism. A blog is not a press release machine, or at least shouldn’t be.  They invite conversation. This trait isn’t universal: Some extremely popular blogs don’t allow comments, for reasons that seem appropriate to the people who run those sites. But I strongly advise that you not just allow comments, but encourage them.  They link out to other sources. They don’t just tell what the author knows or thinks, but point readers to useful material from others as well. Should you write infrequent but long posts, or frequent but pithy ones, or something in between? My answer is: Yes. Do whatever you feel is best, not what someone prescribes. (If you want to get lots of traffic, or visits from other people, more frequent updates are generally a good idea.) For years and years, the question has kept coming up: Is blogging journalism? We may as well ask whether writing on paper is journalism. The answer, of course, is that most blogging is not journalism, but some blogging is. In short, as blogging pioneer (among many other accomplishments) Dave Winer has pointed out, blogs are tools to be used in any number of different ways. Let’s agree never to ask this question again, okay? Twitter (Microblogging) The traditional media pick a Big New Thing in Technology all the time, and in 2009 it was Twitter. This time, the traditional media got it right. Twitter is a “microblogging” service that lets you post messages of up to 140 characters in length, called “tweets.” That’s not as short as a typical newspaper headline, but it’s not long enough for more than a basic thought. Yet the very limitation of Twitter—combined with absolutely brilliant positioning by the company—has turned it into what has aptly been termed the “nervous system of the Web.” The flow of information on the service is diverse, of course, given the millions of users; but it’s also useful, not just entertaining. Dan Gillmor 83 Twitter users soon find that almost every event they care about—if they are following the right people—is first mentioned in the “tweetstream.” Search engines aren’t as good at capturing real-time information flow, though they’re getting better at it (and increasingly they include Twitter in their own results.) Of course, the value of this stream of data depends as well on whether you’re paying close attention; it’s easy to miss things that scroll by. With third-party Twitter-management software, discussed briefly below, you can set up searches to keep track of things you care about. I use Twitter both as a creator and a reader; it’s an essential part of my daily media. I use it as an alert system to get tips and early warnings, and to keep an eye on what people I respect think is important. I follow the “Tweets” (Twitter postings) of about 350 people and organizations. I’ve selected and organized them carefully, looking for rich information from the relative few rather than a fire hose from the many. Many of the people I follow are involved in the media. I post frequently as well, and as of this writing have about 11,000 followers—a decent number, but not remotely in the ballpark of the most avidly followed people or services. The main reason Twitter has become so popular is that the people behind it—including Evan Williams, co-founder of Blogger (see a pattern?)—have made the service the center of an ecosystem. They’ve made it easy for other people to build applications and services on the tweets of the millions of Twitter users, in all kinds of ways. Third-party applications that manage your Twitter stream are invaluable for organizing the people you follow and creating searches that you can check from time to time. If you have a blog, you can use Twitter to build the audience by tweeting to point to blog postings you think are particularly interesting. I don’t recommend tweeting about every blog post, because your Twitter followers may well grow tired of this kind of self-promotion when they can just as easily get an RSS feed from your blog. In general, the best newsworthy Tweets contain hyperlinks to something else. When someone I follow because I like her work suggests I look at something related to her expertise and makes it sound interesting in her brief description, I tend to click through and check it out. I can’t overstate the value of Twitter when used in this manner.

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