All posts by Jim Muttram

More on the role of journalists…

…this time from PaidContent.org. “I’ve spoken about this a lot of time, but if you still want to hear me blather on about it, listen to this 10 minute interview I did with StreetIQ’s Andrew Coffey, at the Milken conference last month. I talk about journalists as entrepreneurs, audiences as media users and creators, etc, familiar topics to our regular readers.” Download the interview, here, or stream it from here.

Has Windows Live got the answer to Google Answers?

Windows Live has launched QnA in beta. It’s a response to Google Answers (which uses paid researchers with community comments ) and Yahoo Answers(which relies on community amateurs). QnA has individual ranking and community features. Meanwhile, MS’ “Live” experiment continues its headlong rush to get competing offerings onto the market. The latest is Live Shopping. Unlike Froogle, which it is clearly aimed at, Live Products using products that happen to appear in the main index and attempts to extract and format them. Froogle, in contrast, asks for submissions and as a result has better formatted entries. Techcrunch has the skinny.

A new role for journalists


What role should journalists adopt in the Web 2.0, citizen journalist world of 2006? Jeff Jarvis thinks he has at least one of the answers. Quoting Gruner + Jahr boss Bernd Kundrun (after translation from the German) he suggests “moderator”. It is striking how quickly this idea is gaining ground. Jonas Bonnier (left) made the same suggestion at the PPA Conference in London last week. In fact, he went further, saying he didn’t want his journalists wasting their time writing original articles; rather they could be gainfully employed polishing and packaging what had already been written either professionally or by the citizenry. Not an idea without controversy, I suspect…