Oakland Local Live!

Oakland Local went live yesterday (well, about 16 hours ago). It was founded by Susan Mernit, who was an early advisor to my startup and a prominent tech blogger. Susan made her mark in technology and media as an executive during the early years of Netscape and AOL, and her recent position as a Senior Director at Yahoo!.

Oakland Local has a New Voices grant from J-Lab, funded by The Knight Foundation, as seed money. Her new venture is riding a trend of where the future of media is going: local and hyperlocal. The question is how will it be sustained and in what form? Oakland Local is taking the nonprofit route which is an avenue that some people believe is the only way for local news to survive. I'm not certain of this, but it will be great to watch Oakland Local develop and become a model for many to consider. More from their website and Susan:

Oakland Local is an independent, non-profit community news and information hub, connecting community and news. Our site combines original investigative and feature reporting with community news and information about Oakland non-profit organizations, community groups and engaged citizens.

"Oakland Local is launching in partnership with 35 local nonprofit, neighborhood & community organizations—we combine postings of their news and information with blogging and with reported stories from a top quality news team (Susan Mernit, Amy Gahran, Kamika Dunlap, Kwan Booth, Ryan Van Lenning and others). We are media partners & collaborators with Spot.us, Newsdesk.org, The Center for Investigative Reporting, New America Media, Endless Canvas, Youth Rising, Youth Radio and Youth Outlook as well. Our site offers forums, a directory of 320 local nonprofits and a blog directory of 180 active local bloggers as well."

Did You Know 4.0

HatTip to Dan W. Updated video on how "a surge of new technologies and social media innovations is altering the media landscape." It's also amazing to think that a majority of this driven by a small area in our world called Silicon Valley.



Love the prior version...

Maureen Dowd is Clueless About Google and Media

Wow. Not only is Maureen Dowd pretty stupid about politics (yes, i'm biased here:), she's very clueless about technology and media. Did you read her op-ed, "Dinosaur at the Gate"?

"... Firms, like Google here and Craigslist in San Francisco, have hijacked journalism, making us feel about as modern as the Tyrannosaurus rex model that sits on the Google campus.

Google is in a battle royal over whether it has the right to profit so profligately from newspaper content at a time when journalism is in such jeopardy..."

How clueless are these statements? I bet Dowd thinks she was clever in delivering this analogy, but it only highlights her misunderstanding of Google's role as an aggregator of news. Did she ever visit Google News? I do everyday. I rarely see a Google ad where Google profits from any newspaper content. Sure there are the AP articles with Google Ads, but what percentage of news links are these? I assume single digits. How much revenue is this for Google? Hardly a dent on the newspaper industry. Most of the news links are outbound to hundreds of media sites. Direct links, Maureen. Do you know what this means? Google makes money for the newspapers and sites that make it on Google News. It actually drives traffic to them. After this step, it's really up to the newspapers to monetize this traffic.

Yeah, Maureen, the sorry state of the newspaper industry is Google's fault as much as the Big Three auto manufacturers' demise was at the hands of the Segway.

"World Rallies Around Palestinians"... Anti-Zionist CNN?

Sorry about the light blogging. Holidays and busy with our twins the past couple days...

Anyway, interesting headline from CNN on the conflict in the Middle East:

"World rallies around Palestinians amid Gaza offensive"

Sure CNN is a bit left-leaning, but I didn't know it was part of the leftwing, anti-Israel faction that Jimmy Carter and some other Democrats are a part of.

WSJ's James Taranto has a good commentary on this:

"... The U.S. Census Bureau estimates the world's population at around 6.75 billion. By our back-of-the-envelope calculation, the protesters in CNN's report accounts for roughly one-millionth of that number, and about half of them are in countries ruled by autocracies that use anti-Semitism as a tool to preserve their power.

Yet the network headlines the story "World Rallies Around Palestinians Amid Gaza Offensive." This is an enormous exaggeration. Or maybe it is a small world after all."

Denver Police Are Goons... ABC Should Sue, Cops Fired

I didn't know that the City of Denver was similar to my hometown of Chicago :) Watch these goons push around and then arrest ABC's Asa Eslocker for taking pictures of Democratic senators and big-time donors leaving a private meeting at the Brown Palace Hotel from a PUBLIC sidewalk. I wonder what promises these cops got for playing enforcers roles? Shady, shady.