Using the tagging technique in Final Cut Pro described here, I was able to come up with a number of major themes from the interviews that I conducted with 13 leaders of the new media movement at the Personal Democracy Forum.

* Internet revolution was in the Demand Side and not just the Supply Side.
* Audience are not just consumers, they're now producers
* Audiences can now supply their own demand.
* Audience wants more choice and control
* Markets are conversations
* Journalism is becoming more of a conversation than a lecture.

Analysis
Open-source project: The Echo Chamber
Interview: New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen
Running themes [tags]: 1. Perceptions of the danger Iraq posed to the U.S. and the Middle East. [danger]; 2. The voice of debate: who was covered; who was ignored. [voice]; 3. Motives of political and journalistic actors as portrayed by those actors. [motive]; 4. Arguments for war as given and portrayed. [argument]; 5. Journalistic practice in regard to covering political and journalistic actors. [practice]; 6. Relationship between the public and television news. [public/TV]

In the spirit of "Personal Democracy," I created my own virtual conference at the Personal Democracy Forum 2005. After attending the opening talk and two morning break-out sessions, I pulled aside the following 13 conference speakers and interviewed them about emerging new media trends:

UPDATE 2/8/06: Click on the names below to listen to the interview -- or use this Interview Audio feed to download all of the interviews.

	Markos Moulitsas	DailyKos
	Jeff Jarvis	Buzzmachine.com
	Hugh Hewitt	HughHewitt.com
	Dan Gillmor	Grassroots Media Inc. Author of We the Media UPDATE: Center for Citizen Media
	Chris Nolan	ChrisNolan.com UPDATE:Spot-On.com
	Halley Suitt	Halley's Comment Blog
	Rebecca MacKinnon	RConversation & Global Voices Online
	Doc Searls	Doc Searls Weblog
	Mindy Finn	Republican National Committee Deputy eCampaign Director
	Sheldon Rampton	PRWatch.org & SourceWatch
	Christopher Rabb	Afro-Netizen
	Scott Heiferman	Co-Founder and CEO of Meetup.com
	Hossein Derakhshan	Hoder.com

I captured about 2.25 hours of interview footage by lurking around outside the conference rooms from noon until 7 p.m. I definitely had a unique conference experience, and I plan on cutting together some highlights and open-sourcing the audio of the interviews soon.

With so many new media luminaries at one place and one time, I thought that it'd be a shame to pass up the opportunity to get their predictions on the record for how they see the evolution of media, politics and culture.

Nearly everyone seemed to agree that things are changing so fast that it's really hard to predict exactly what is going to happen.

The emergence of blogs and podcasts have already made lightening quick impacts on politics and culture.

There are even more changes afoot with the technological infrastructure and tools such as CivicSpace & Drupal that have the potential to really empower the grassroots. The public will soon become a powerful institution in it's own right.

I pretty much talked with everyone that I targeted except for two:

Josh Marshall wanted to do an interview but was swamped with all of the irons he has in his fire. He said to e-mail him to try to do a quick interview on Tuesday, but he evidently was too swamped since I never heard back from him.

Arianna Huffington also seemed willing to do an interview, but I couldn't pin her down between running between her panel, Reuters, CNN, personal meetings, phone calls, etc.

pdf2005

Dan Gillmor points to Lance Knobel's lecture titled "Nullius in verba: navigating through the new media democracy." The Latin phrase comes from the Royal Society which translates to "Don't trust in anyone's word."

Since we shouldn’t trust any one person's word, then is there a way that we can trust the Swarm Intelligence contained within the Wisdom of Crowds? And is there a way that we can somehow extract this swarm intelligence through a technological tagging mechanism such as del.icio.us?

Johnson et. al. provides a taxonomy for deception tactics and suggests heuristics to counter each of the tactics. I've only briefly summarized or pointed to Johnson et al's deception detection technique. I thought that it'd be useful if I provided a rough map to some of the insights from their article, and how they could be used in a citizen journalistic context -- or any other domain with the potential for human deception. All references can be found in Johnson et al's article.

I'll just give an overview of the technique and you can go and read the details more in their paper -- the juicy stuff starts on page #359 with the section called "A theory of detecting deception in financial information."

I gained a lot of insight about the problems with American journalism from a lot of different expert perspectives throughout the production of The Echo Chamber documentary.

The media's objectivity standards limit the framing of issues to a very narrow spectrum of perspectives.

One way to overcome this limitation is for journalists to use much more sophisticated analytical techniques that have been developed by the Central Intelligence Agency. These techniques take a more scientific approach for weighing the available evidence against as set of possible explanations for the behavior and motivations of political leaders. These techniques provide very effective techniques for detecting political deception, and would be very beneficial investigative and analytical tool for journalism.

By combing this type of standardized analytical framework with the Internet, then it will be easier to harness the collective wisdom of a decentralized force of volunteer citizen journalists. By collaborating with these civically-engaged citizens, then the press should be able to challenge deceptive partisan framing and defy traditional media logic by investigating complex issues.

WINTERPORT, ME, Jan.18 -- Independent documentary filmmaker Kent Bye is combining the filmmaking and Internet mediums by using the principles of open source content development. Working out of the basement of a log cabin in Maine, Bye has recruited volunteers from all over the world to help transcribe his documentary interviews. He is publishing these interviews on his website and collaborating with academic advisors from across the country in creating The Echo Chamber documentary.

I'm interested in trying to apply the principles of open source development to the process of producing The Echo Chamber documentary. So far, I've been using EchoChamberProject.com and its blog as the primary mediums to facilitate this integration.

I'd like share my thoughts for how the integration of the Internet and Filmmaking mediums could leverage the power of open source to find new methods to:

* Recruit volunteer help for post-production tasks
* Develop film content throughout the post-production process
* Recruit post-production expertise
* Market independent documentary films
* Create new economic competitive advantages through meaning creation
* Handle complexity and defy media logic
* Integrate objectivity and subjective judgments
* Reach new audiences

The concept of Integral Filmmaking combined with the principles of Open Source could introduce new methods for how meaning is created.

Traditionally, the Mainstream Media or documentary filmmakers had the most power in determining what meaning was created through their editing judgments.

But combining the Internet, Blogging and documentary filmmaking mediums could allow the audience to create their own meaning from information instead of relying upon the "objective" mainstream media, partisan press or closed-source documentary films.

The Open Source tactics of the The Echo Chamber documentary and website could create up to four distinct phases of meaning creation that could provide a unique economic competitive advantage.

EXISTING PROCESS OF MEANING CREATION
INFLUENCE OF CONFIRMATION BIAS
INTEGRAL PROCESS OF MEANING CREATION
FOUR PHASES OF MEANING CREATION

There have been acknowledged failures of the mainstream media leading up to the war in Iraq.

My Echo Chamber Hypothesis proposes that the "He Said/She Said" objectivity constraints of journalistic production broke down after there was a consensus within the political leadership in Congress to authorize military intervention in Iraq.

After October 2002, the media served as an uncritical Echo Chamber to the Executive Branch's countdown towards war.

* How can this dichotomous objectivity constraint be overcome without resorting to a partisan press?
* Is there a new paradigm of journalistic production that can more comprehensively cover the complex issues of the day?