DISQUS

Great to meet you as well, John -- even if only virtually so far. Here's to meeting in person before 2009 is over :-)

Zoli, I disagree that citizen journalism "failed" in this case. Yes, the report was untrue, and lots of people (including me) spread the report -- but at the same time, it was debunked relatively quickly.

I think that's actually a pretty good example of how social media (I hate the term "citizen journalism") can work. It's a process, not a single event.

With CNN having grabbed iReport, and Fox having uReport, I can't believe CBS didn't go for the obvious: WeReport.

And Twitter Karma, and Twistori, and... :-)

Some great suggestions for all generations.

I guess I've always felt kind of in-between generations (born in 1962) -- not really a Boomer, but not really Gen-X either. So I really liked the Big Chill, but it didn't feel like watching my friends and I -- Breakfast Club was closer, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But the one I identified with the most was probably Repo Man, for whatever reason.

I wonder if Google wanted to move away from the capital G to a lower-case one simply because lower-case looks "friendlier" than capitalized.

Thanks, Daniel.

@Matt: well, obviously he needs to sleep -- but he's not the only one who works at TechCrunch, is he? And the post still hasn't been updated. I assume he's woken up by now.

@knackered: I'm not suggesting that wire services shoot first and ask questions later. I'm just saying that getting things onto the wire first is more important than just about anything, and if you have worked at a wire service or know someone who has, you know what I'm talking about.

The fact is that mistakes happen all the time -- not the "I made up a story" kind of mistakes, but spelling errors, mis-attributions, etc., and in some cases misunderstandings. It's a factor of trying to be first. I'm not saying blogs and wire services are identical, I'm just saying there are similarities.

I'm not sure it's true to say that right and wrong don't matter, Allen -- even for Duncan :-) I think it's probably fair to say that being right is only *one* of the things that matter. And frankly, when it comes right down to it, it's only part of the equation with traditional media as well.

Was it a news story, Nate -- or was it a just blog post? What's the difference? Your blog post about it didn't require fact-checking or spellchecking. Why did Duncan's? I'm not yanking your chain -- I'm interested in how we define the differences.

Thanks, Daniel.

Thanks for the comment, Fred -- maybe I overstated that a bit, or put it badly.

I just meant that comment systems such as Disqus are better the more people use them and the more comments that are aggregated by them. As I think you're suggesting, that could be accomplished in a number of different ways.

Meanwhile, in some kind of bizarre coincidence, for some reason Disqus didn't get activated on this post.

Thanks for the support, Tim -- nice to know I'm not the only one :-)

Zoli, I admitted that it was sophomoric, and that interrupting the Motorola guy was definitely offside; but at the same time, I thought popping some of the CES hype machine bubble was a valuable -- and yes, funny -- thing. I just think we need to keep the whole thing in perspective, that's all.

Thanks for that comment, er... weenie. :-)

Thanks for the comment, Drew -- those are fair points. And thanks for taking my comments in the spirit in which they were meant.

I just thought it was odd that you were so worked up about Mahalo, because you seemed like such a nice guy when we met. But then Jason does seem to have that effect on people :-)

Damn. Rookie mistake :-)

Thanks for letting me know, Cynthia.

Well, Jake, all I can go by is my 18-year-old daughter and most of her friends -- and a number of twentysomethings I've spoken to as well.

For them, email is a last resort that barely ever gets checked or responded to -- preferred methods of communication start with cellphone, then text message, then IM, then Facebook.

Email is way down at the bottom -- right next to "write a letter" :-)

Somewhere between 500 megabytes and a gigabyte, Joe.

Fair enough, Andy. I just think you were awfully quick to accuse Mike of doing all this for links without having a whole lot of evidence.

I'm all for that, Jason :-)

You're welcome, Rick. I think your post was an excellent lesson in how to take responsibility for something.

I think you're right, Alex -- journalism may never be moved over completely to that model, at least while print is still around. But for the Web part of the process, it makes perfect sense -- and then at some point you take a "snapshot" of the facts as they are known, and print that.

This isn't really all that revolutionary -- wire services have effectively been doing "agile" journalism for decades, with multiple updates, corrections, additions, etc. And newspapers have had the benefit of that -- but now they have to think about doing it themselves.

As someone who worked at Washingtonpost.com told me, all that's really required is to move from the traditional "write, edit, publish" media mindset to one that's more like "write, edit, publish, edit, publish, edit, publish."

I don't think I would pay, Brian, but I suppose it's possible that there are people who might. The guy who wrote the blog post I linked to certainly suggested that he would.

And thanks for the note about the posting time. I guess Wordpress doesn't automatically adjust for daylight saving time :-)

Thanks, Rohan. I think you are right about the shift in mindset required. I see it on an almost daily basis :-)