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The local “citizen journalism” entity Backfence is closing the doors on its network of 13 sites, according to a post at PaidContent. Backfence CEO Mark Potts told PaidContent’s Rafat Ali in an e-mail that the investors are “continuing to talk to potential buyers or new investors, but have decided for business and operational reasons to shut down the sites rather than operate them without sufficient support.”

PaidContent also links to a long piece in the American Journalism Review about local online journalism and Backfence, which has a troubled history. I last wrote about it in this post entitled “Backfence around a ghost town.” Peter Krasilovsky at The Kelsey Group has some thoughts about the closure, and so does my pal Kent Newsome. And Ashkan at HipMojo wonders whether it wouldn’t be better if newspapers took a stab at some citizen journalism themselves — but admits that would be a difficult mix of cultures (and I would have a tendency to agree).

Pete Cashmore says Backfence marks the death of citizen journalism, but gets taken to task in the comments section of his post. And one of those commenters — a former employee at Backfence — puts forward an interesting idea: what if Craigslist.org started adding some aspects of “citizen journalism” to its local sites? A very interesting idea indeed. Any comment on that, Mr. Newmark? And Jeff Jarvis makes some good points in this post.

(from the Telegraph):

“Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany’s Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women’s clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings. This aura of dangerous “glamour” charmed a large circle of friends and acquaintances drawn from the jeunesse dorée of the age.

Many of them knew him at Oxford, where he made friends such as Darius Guppy and Viscount Althorp and became an enthusiastic, rubber-clad member of the Piers Gaveston Society and the drink-fuelled Bullingdon and Loders clubs. Perhaps unsurprisingly he managed only a Third in Politics, Philosophy and Economics.”

full obit is here.

Please don’t ask how I came across this, because I can’t even remember what kind of circuitous route I took to get there, but somehow I wound up at The ListeNerd’s blog and he linked to a great video clip of someone known only as “Operation Bumblebee” singing an a capella version of a song by the band Arcade Fire, while an unidentified person in the foreground paints. It’s a lot better than my description of it makes it sound, I assure you 🙂

http://blip.tv/scripts/pokkariPlayer.js?ver=2007062101http://blip.tv/syndication/write_player?skin=js&posts_id=291806&source=3&autoplay=true&file_type=flv&player_width=&player_height=

Click to Play

Incidentally, there is an actual Operation Bumblebee, aimed at preserving bee populations in Britain, and the same name was also used for a top-secret project involving missile tests by the U.S. Navy. Isn’t the Internet great?

Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void touched off a small avalanche of blogosphere debate with his post about the “death of the A-list” today — an avalanche that was helped along by my blog pal Kent Newsome (who has written in the past about being on the “M-list”) with his hilarious “Declaration of Blogging Independence”. Other thoughts on the topic include those from Rex Hammock and Ben Yoskovitz, as well as The Last Podcast. But the best comments by far come from my friend Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, who makes the point that an A-list will always exist — it’s just human nature (Tony has also posted some further thoughts on the subject over at The Blog Herald). And it’s worth reading the comments on Tony’s DJI post and the ones at Hugh’s post as well. I think Hugh’s point is somewhat different than his headline implied. And if you need a succinct and, well… uncensored take on the whole issue, you could do worse than to check out Loren’s video at 1938media.

This is fascinating: from BoingBoing.net via Sean Bonner comes a link to a blog in Islamabad that has been reporting live on the capture of a radical Islamic leader who tried to escape — disguised as a female relative of some young women — after the bloody siege of a mosque:

Update: 2:40

1. 600+ Students (male and female) came out of jameya and surrendered. Parents are outside Lal masjid in a huge number and are not willing to give 20-24 years of their upbringing in hands of the admin of lal Masjid. 2. Ghazi brothers are thought to be fled away from the Lal masjid – They cannot be contacted; neither any students who have come out could give an indication of their presence inside. Their families can’t be seen in as well, including Um e Hasan (Principal of Jameya and Wife of Ghazi Abdur Rasheed). 3. Deadline extended to 3 PM – relaxation given to have maximum number of students out from the Lal Masjid, before the REAL OPERATION.

3:00

1. 750+ Students come out and surrenders.
2. Dr. Amir Liaquat resigns (??)

3:15

APC’s are in action again; Media asked to get away as far as possible from the site. Deadline is extended till 4 PM. The Ghazi Brothers may be inside premises of lal masjid.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt talks to Pat Mitchell of the Paley Center for Media during the World Economic Forum in June. Schmidt talks about Google’s efforts to expand into newspaper advertising, radio and TV advertising and other areas, and discusses what he sees as the company’s successes and failures — including the first trial of newspaper advertising and the difficulty of striking partnerships with big media companies like Viacom.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc43ERgjg_w&w=425&h=350]

(hat tip to Howard Owens for the link)

Matt McAlister has a great post up about the idea of media as a platform, which I encourage anyone interested in the future of media online to read. He says that in his view it isn’t really about “openness” or “walled gardens” and other popular metaphors:

It’s not about stopping bad behavior or even embracing good behavior. It’s about investing in an architecture that promotes growth for an entire ecosystem. If you do it right, you will watch network effects take hold naturally. And then everyone wins.

McAlister says that the most successful media platforms, broadly speaking, are those that give their users the power to impact the experience for themselves and to improve the total experience for everyone as they use it.

“When you look around the Internet media landscape today you see a lot of successful companies that either consciously or subconsciously understand how to make media work as a platform.

MySpace created a fantastic expression platform, though perhaps unwittingly. Wikipedia evolved quickly into a massive research platform. Flickr and del.icio.us, of course, get the network effects inherent in sharing information…photos and links, respectively.

Washingtonpost and BBC Backstage are moving toward national political information platforms.”

There are lots of other good examples and smart thoughts from Matt. Go on and read the whole thing. I’ll wait 🙂

Jack Shafer of Slate.com, a veteran journalist and all-around smart guy, has a great piece in which he looks at what newspapers were like decades ago — in terms of size, coverage, layout and staffing levels — and asks the provocative question: After the staff cuts, will the newspapers of the future look like the newspapers of the past? What you think of the answer may depend on whether you work at a newspaper or not:

“By my personal measure, the national and foreign news published in the summer of 1972 by the Times and Post matches the current product, even though it is less “featurey.”

That both papers did fine work with half the current manpower should encourage serious readers—even though it may depress journalists.”

(Thanks to Rob for the link)

Rolling Stone magazine has released the hotly-awaited (by me at least) list of the top 20 most annoying songs. Number one: My Humps by the Black-Eyed Peas. Yup, that sounds about right. Glad to see Who Let The Dogs Out and My Heart Will Go On in there as well, although I think Celine should have tied for first. The Crash Test Dummies (a fine Winnipeg band) also make an appearance for Mmm mmm mmm mmm or whatever it’s called, and so does Wham! for Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go (hat tip to ListeNerd for the link)