Several of our folks from Morris DigitalWorks went up to Vancouver last week for the Open-Source CMS Summit and some stayed for Northern Voice, the Canadian blogging conference. It may seem bizarre for a big U.S. media company from the South that creates and sells closed-source software to be in that particular situation, but it makes sense to us.
At any rate, through a bizarre turn of events, Ken Rickard wound up giving a presentation about Bluffton Today that he quickly titled "Big Media Strikes Back" for the benefit of a couple of dozen of the attendees who apparently were pretty desperate to avoid seeing Scoble deliver a Windows Vista preview. (It must have been tough choosing between the Evil Empire and Big Media.) Mark Hamilton blogged the event and Roland Tanglao snapped an image of Agent Ken.
I missed the whole thing, including many fine ethnic meals I am still hearing about. I was in Washington for the Newspaper Next symposium and I had meat loaf at the Post Pub. Power food for big media.
Speaking of Bluffton Today, it's a finalist for a Digital Edge award next week at the Connections conference in Orlando.
AugustaChronicle.com, SavannahNow.com, TheIndependent.com, OnlineAthens.com and CJOnline.com are other Morris sites with one or more finalist slots.
Comments
Citizen Journalism
I also attended Northern Voice that weekend and had the chance to meet Ken and sit in on his Bluffton presentation (which was intriguing to say the least -- I'm writing an undergrad Honours thesis on community blogging). Anyway I just wanted to share this link with you.
One of the other presentations that took place at Northern Voice was in fact an introductory workshop for NowPublic.com, whose representative dropped the pro-democratic term and touted the news portal as the "new face of citizen journalism".
It is sort of like Digg, where traffic to a particular link determines that story's newsworthiness. The interface of NowPublic.com is pretty user-friendly as well, and makes fair use of Web 2.0 applications (tagging, syndication, etc.).
Being a Communications student, I have some reservations about NP's journalistic integrity; and, suffice it to say, the quality of journalism (and that of academic/scholarly blogging) was one of the bigger themes/questions raised at the Vancouver conference. Moreover, the news topics posted to NP are, in my opinion, somewhat esoteric, so it's not a site I would choose to read or aggregate.
What do you think?