Entries by Ross Dawson

Giving structure to citizen journalism

Jay Rosen has just announced that Reuters is giving $100,000 to NewAssignment.Net, which provides a more structured model for open source journalism, bringing together amateur and professional media creators. The money will be applied to hiring a full-time editor for the site. Jay gives some background to why Reuters is choosing to support this project: […]

Can technology create world peace?

I was interviewed for a podcast today by the enormously energetic Sanjana Hattotuwa, for his ICT for Peacebuilding blog. Sanjana’s overview of our broad-ranging discussion is here, and the podcast is here. While we covered a lot of territory, including reputation systems, getting traditional media to adopt social media technologies, global innovation networks, and more, […]

Interview on MySpace and social media

Yesterday I was interviewed on ABC Radio National’s Counterpoint program about MySpace and social media, together with Sebastian Chan, the web services manager for Powerhouse Museum – the interview is available for streaming and download (listen from 39:10). I talked about how social media is unleashing our latent humanity, by providing us with new ways […]

Impressions of Influence Forum 2006

I’ve just got back from the Influence event, held in the lovely Hunter Valley wine region north of Sydney. A very interesting experience, and as far as I’m aware a unique event globally. Phil Sim has been running Mediconnect, doing events and an online PR exchange for some years now. These bring together Australian technology […]

Web 2.0 and user filtered content

Tomorrow I’m heading off to the Influence conference run by Phil Sim’s Mediaconnect. The event brings together media and other influencers (I believe I’m labelled a “new media influencer” there) and corporates, discussing current trends in key technology sectors. I’m on the Web 2.0 panel tomorrow, so I thought I’d briefly capture here my introductory […]

A manifesto for the newspaper industry

Tom Mohr, formerly president of Knight-Ridder Digital before its sale in June, has just published Winning Online – A Manifesto, proposing that the US newspaper industry should merge into a single industry-wide network, at least for its digital assets. He suggests that there is $4 billion of additional revenue to be gained by 2010, primarily […]

The gradual rise of music collaborative filtering

A piece just out in the New York Times covers the current array of music collaborative filtering services (though it doesn’t call them that), including Pandora and Last.FM. I’ve written about these numerous times in my books and blog, including my initial thoughts on discovering Last.FM in 2003 (still love it!) and a comparison between […]

The slow pace of change in distribution channels

BusinessWeek reports that Apple is readying release of move downloads from its iTunes site, pitched at $14.99 for new movies and $9.99 for back catalogue. At the same time, it says, WalMart is actively lobbying Hollywood studios not to allow Apple to provide these downloads. Wal-Mart’s actions are said to have included threatening not to […]

Funds management and investment in the modular economy

Last week’s 25th anniversary issue of BRW focused on the future 25 years forward, so not surprisingly included interviews with both Richard Watson, Chief Futurist at Future Exploration Network, and myself. The extensive interview with Richard was a fun and broad-ranging discussion on the future of technology, which unfortunately is not available online. I was […]