Learn from DailyKOS/YearlyKOS
The NYTimes has a good story about DailyKOS “blog” and how it’s spawned a real-life gathering for a YearlyKOS convention in Las Vegas. (Hat tip to Leonard Witt at PJNet).
[DailyKOS] is now less a blog than a civic phenomenon. With some 600,000 visitors a day, Daily Kos reaches more Americans — albeit like-minded Americans — than all but a handful of the largest daily newspapers. The Chicago Reader, an alternative weekly, recently profiled a 23-year-old law student who writes on Daily Kos’s front page under the pseudonym Georgia10, positing that she may well be the most-read political writer in the city, even though few people know her real name. (For the record, it’s Georgia Logothetis, and she lives with her parents.) In this way, Daily Kos and other blogs resemble a political version of those escapist online games where anyone with a modem can disappear into an alternate society, reinventing himself among neighbors and colleagues who exist only in a virtual realm. It is not so much a blog as a travel destination, a place where what you have to say can be more important — at least for a few hours each day — than who you are or what you do.
DailyKOS is one of the most interesting citizens media experiments out there, and is shortchanged by being commonly referred to as a “blog.” The majority of its content is in the “Diaries” which are contributed by anyone who has an “aged” account (to prevent spamming). There are dozens of regular contributors who get “Recommended” up by readers so these stories get promoted on the front page. There are also legions of first-time diarists who become overnight successes, by providing their own personal stories or passionate views on local politics.
The conservative side of the spectrum was so impressed with the liberal DailyKOS community, it has started a similar site using the same Scoop software, called RedState.org. It’s not nearly as popular as DailyKOS, but the spread of these sites beyond “tech portals” like Slashdot.org signal a coming of age for self-regulating user-contributed content communities.
I pointed this out at the recent WeMedia conference in the UK - news organizations need to start understanding the realm of citizen journalism beyond blogs. Interpreting individual bloggers as modern day “columnists” is obvious. But mainstream news organizations will be surprised how the role of “editing” is being done quite well by intelligent crowds of contributors, and that the never ending debate of, “Can you trust a blog?” becomes a lot more interesting.
