New Media

NowPublic is one of the fastest growing participatory news networks in the world. Time Magazine voted it last year one of the top 50 websites and The Guardian UK declared it's one of the top 5 most resourceful news sites in the world.

They have come up with a way to measure "news influence" on the web. They insinuated that traffic to one's site and/or blog is not one of the lead indicators, but how the people listed are connected to others (especially other influencers) through social media like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook and others.

I honestly don't know what to make of this list. I am at the same time amused and disturbed.

I already published at The Daily Gotham how it's weird that Arianna Huffington comes in at #2 because I thought she lived in California, not New York City. Then there's the grand daddy of the New York blogeratti, Nick Denton, coming in at #34.

It is though rather refreshing to see friends and colleagues on that list : Anil Dash, Nancy Scola, Joshua Levy, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Jake Dobkin and Jen Chung and one of my biggest inspirations as a web designer and developer, Jeffrey Zeldman.

Yet, and I repeat what I already said at our New York site, the most disturbing data point of this list is that I come in at #9.

Yup.

I am, as per NowPublic, one of the "top ten" news influencers in the New York new media market.

I will definitely have more to say about this new metrics system. Suffice it to say that I think it is not only thought provoking but vindicating.

It's cool that someone has been able to measure what I've been up to for the last two years : Building a sphere of influence through networked broadcasting and outside of the metrics of traffic volume or popularity.

As a former student of neo-baroque aesthetics and its network effect in arts, culture and communications, I felt inspired of the potential I saw on the web 12 years ago. It was a potential that I saw unfolding in the Net Art movement. And it was a potential that I saw come to a halt when Big Business, Big Media and Big Politics threw themselves on the net as a way to accelerate their hierarchical and teleological standards of growth and success.

Think of the 3 Bigs thwarting the growth of the net by imposing the growth of the walled web gardens a la Facebook, Daily Kos or The New York Times.

Yet networks are networks and old standards of influence and success will succumb to the net effect; not to the old measures as a result of the false scarcity and uniqueness created by popularity.

So, even though I truly believe this is a flawed index, it is by far the best attempt at measuring influence based on assumptions that are native to the technology and structure of community and communications on the web.

I got our letter late last night saying that we finally got credentialed for the 2008 DNCC in Denver. It's a convention that promises to be historic and I want to be there front and center.

You can read the press release and check out the whole list of bloggers at the DNCC's blog.

UNFORTUNATELY the DNCC messed up when they went ahead and decided to pick a blog in New York that not only is not only NOT from the grassroots, but that is owned by people working in corporate media.

It's the reason why I got interviewed by Wired.com on the matter :

"What's amazing is that we've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for local candidates along with the other state blogs," says Liza Sabater, publisher of The Daily Gotham, one of the New York state blogs that got the cold shoulder from the DNC officials. "Why would you give (the credentials) to a blog ... owned by a journalist? You're supposed to be supporting independent bootstrapped bloggers, not people who are coming in with influence and access. You're supposed to be giving it to people who are helping you to get candidates elected."

I will be appearing as a panelist in the "HOT TOPIC" panel at Fair Media Council's Connection Day (PDF).

Hot Topic!
Convergence: How Technology Has Changed News
Today, you get your news delivered straight to your cell phone, you listen to podcasts and watch streaming video on your local news radio web site. Find out how all the technological advances that enabled these new news delivery methods impact the types of stories you get in the news, as well as how the inner workings of newsrooms are changing to accommodate your unquenchable thirst for information.
With:

Carl Corry, Executive Producer, News12.com
Ethan Dreilinger, Product Manager, CBS Mobile News
Luke Funk, Sr. Web Producer, myfoxny.com
Liza Sabater, Blogdiva & Publisher, CultureKitchen.com

Fair Media Council is a New York metro area not-for-profit media watch organization that educates and advocates for quality local news coverage.

In an attempt to go beyond discussions about the "digital divide", I organized a panel at this year's South by Southwest festival to discussing the exploding market segment of 'minority' technologists and early adopters.

I apologize in advance for my hemming and hawing. I have a lot of work to do with my public speaking skills. But stay until the presentation done by Stephen Wilmarth and his students from The Center for 21st Century Skills. A victim of our anti-immigration policies, this straight A student gives a heartbreaking account of how after being deported with her mother to Brazil, she tried to keep up with her technology program and classmates using Skype and other social media.

This podcast first appears at the South by Southwest website.

It's not shocking to see how the corporate masters of people like Ann Coulter and Don Imus to insist in selling them as valuable assets. They prop up and pay bigots because they represent millions of dollars. Hate is the road most travelled.

Hate is easy to exploit, it's an emotion that replicates faster than love thanks to the addictive qualities of adrenaline. Capitalism is based on the mining of adrenaline through the celebration of hate, the use of addictive substances in food, the exploitation of fear.

The big companies behind the likes of Rush Limbaugh will make sure their well-oiled money machines keep on raking in the benjamins. What is shocking to this cynic heart is to see how civil rights advocates fall for the money crap when it comes to gauging the worthiness of a cause.

It's still astounding to me to hear and read people on the left rationalize keeping racists and mysogynists by the measure of money they generate or popularity they have. More than once I've seen people on TV or read emails of people who said "why bother" when it comes to calling for Imus' oust.

And you know this is not just on big media outlets --FireDogLake is the perfect example of the racist pox on the lefty blogosphere being defended by many because of their popularity and for the amount of money they've raised for democrats.

Sigh.

Don Imus' money machine should be unplugged in much the same way Ann Coulter's and Rush Limbaugh's. Here's what Chris Rabb has to say about that :

I haven't done any business blogging in a long while. Well, I have a reason now : The idiots of Splash News and 6 other agencies are happy slapping themselves on the back for threatening Perez Hilton with a lawsuit for photographs they claim he "stole" from their website.

Perez Hilton is to be hit by a multi-million dollar federal lawsuit from the top seven paparazzi agencies in the US.

Splash News, INF, Ramey, Bauer Griffin, WENN, Most Wanted and Flynet have joined forces to stop Perezhilton.com from using copyrighted images.
"Perez claims he is making a fortune off exploiting pictures taken by photographers. He blatantly violates copyright and makes advertising revenue off other people's works," said Gary Morgan of Splash News.

[...]

The seven agencies have spent the last few weeks conferring over how to stop Hilton. In an unprecedented co-operation between paparazzi and showbusiness agencies, the heads of the agencies agreed to take action.
A letter was sent demanding full payment of all infringed material or face a lawsuit next week.

I honestly do not understand why people in the gossip business hate Perez Hilton (aka Mario Lavandeira) so much. I don't know if it's because he is :

1. A successful blogger
2. A successful gay blogger
3. A successful gay latino blogger

Even if professional gossip bloggers like Mario wanted to register with the Splash News site and check the prices on their photos (which are not posted publicly, by the way), this is what they are hit with:

Just wanted you all to know that I am blogging about business and technology with a vengance over at lizasabater.com.

All the geeky and nerdy stuff that I always never post because it seems out of place here will be posted over at my personal blog. I will continue writing about business and tech here only as it pertains to politics.

Please remember, if you come on over for a visit, don't forget to bring the mojitos.

Yesterday I attended Fair Media Council's "Connections Day". I was one of the participants in the Blogging: The Power of Citizen Journalism panel.

I had a blast because I finally met Bob Cox, founder of the Media Bloggers Association and Steve Safran of Lost Remote. Bob is the patron saint of bloggers and Steve? Well, as you can see by his energy in this post, he's Bob's so-good-yet-evil twin.

As Steve points out, the debate was rather agitated and it went from, how can blogs be used by disseminate your message to the "we still own the media and you bloggers suck" debate. The three of us agreed we are in a transitional period at the moment, because the rules of engagement through reading and writing are changing.

Here's what I get from the discussions we had during the panel and afterwards:

Blogs and Politics
7pm October 25th
NYU Vanderbilt Hall
7:00pm to 9:00pm

co-hosted by the NYU Law School Democrats.

Top tier New York Bloggers will be on hand to discuss new media in New York politics and analyze the result of the DL21C Blog Straw Poll.

Link to survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=362362674986

RSVP http://www.dl21c.org/insertform2.php?event_id=159

Blogging: The Power of Citizen Journalism

Learn why blogging has become such a phenomena, what it’s good for …. And what it’s bad for.

Moderator:

Patrick Foye, President and CEO, United Way of Long Island

Panelists:

Jim Cameron, President, Cameron Communications, Inc.

Robert Cox, President, Media Bloggers Association

Norm Prusslin, Director, Media & Interdisciplinary Arts Minors, Stony Brook University

Liza Sabater, Publisher, culturekitchen.com

Steve Safran, President, Safran Media Group, Managing Editor, LostRemote.com

*Sponsored by Briarcliffe College

For more information go to
http://www.fairmediacouncil.org/programs.asp