community

Institute for the Future's Franz Dill discovers the Dunbar number, the theoretical size of the number of "stable relationships" human beings tend to form.

I've referred to the Dunbar number frequently in explaining to journalism and new-media audiences the concept of hyperlocal relevance. It works like this: If I have about 150 people in my inner circle, and I never see them in your newspaper, then your newspaper isn't about me and my kind.

I'm quoting economist Paul Romer at the top of my presentation Monday to the World Editors Forum in Moscow. Romer has said many smart things, but one of my favorites is this: "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."

Yahoo News has launched local pages for metropolitan areas across the United States, aggregating local news from RSS feeds and via screen-scraping. Users of Yahoo's personalization tools will get a link that aggregates their hometown news by default, and a cluster of local headlines on the news.yahoo.com page.

If you're one of the dozen or so who don't already have Jeff Jarvis' blog in a newsreader and check it daily, you should follow the link and read his rip on NJ state legislator Peter Biondi's really dumb bill that would outlaw anonymity in online conversation -- and make forum operators liable for any anonymous defamation.

Marketwatch's Bambi Francisco asks for advice on managing interaction toward a positive end:

The Bakersfield Californian is working reader contributions into both online and print products through a feature it calls Your Words, and kpaul has an interview with Ray Hacke of the Californian about how that process works. They're avoiding the term "citizen journalist" and preferring "contributing writer."

There's an ongoing conversation in online news circles about identity and community. Vin Crosbie's distinction between anonymity and pseudonymity is a good one. I think there actually are five identity models that I've experienced: