Information is plentiful. Attention is scarce. That’s why FM Network — the startup announced by John Battelle and funded by web and media luminaries — is destined to lead the new cohort of content creators wherever they may be going.

FM Network is short for “federated media,” according to Paid Content, where I first noticed John’s newest venture. He is, of course, well-known in technology and media circles, particularly in the San Francisco area, where his biography on the UC Berkeley J-school website notes his founding roles at Wired, the Industry Standard, etcetera.

John recently announced that he had angel funding (money given under less onerous terms than is provided by venture, or as is sometimes joked, vulture capitalists). And what a choir of angels indeed! In his own words: “I’m proud to announce that FM has … an extraordinary lineup of investors. Omidyar Network led the round, with The New York Times Company and Mitchell Kapor, Andrew Anker, Mike Homer, and Tim O’Reilly also participating.”

The Times needs no introduction. Omidyar Net is the for-profit, non-profit foundation of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. The other investors are movers and shakers. They provide more than cash. They bring credibility.

Paid Content reports that“Battelle hopes to launch FM with 10-20 tech-related blogs including Boing Boing and his own SearchBlog and that he is only inviting “high-quality, high-authority” blogs into the network. He’s not trying to launch blogs but looking for established authors. The relationship won’t be exclusive and bloggers will retain their own IP — and, I would guess, liabilities.”

It sounds like John intends to aggregate like sorts of content in one place, hoping to draw traffic on the strength of his reputation and following, and to compound that with the reputations and followings of the federated blogs. This strikes me as the virtual-world expression of the Media Mall concept I blogged about recently, though I was talking then more of local (i.e. geographic) communities than of location-independent communities of interest such as technology.

Given that FM will exist online, its user interface — the opening page that greets visitors — will be crucial to its function. I look forward to seeing how FM will provide one door thru which to enter 10 or 20 sites (without pissing off the site that feels it has the worst location); and whether it will add value on top of this mix of content — for instance, a look down into what the Federation members are saying. Much of this will be new, exciting and frustrating to the participants, and instructive to onlookers. Good luck!

(I had wanted to say more about similar (and not) efforts, from Nick Denton, Jason Calacanis, Tom Foremski, Corante, Pajamas Media, and 9rules, to mention a few, but the baby woke up crying this morning, and now she’s on my lap crying for attention — as are we all!)

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

I missed the opening third of the panel discussion on citizen media held Sunday night at the Hillside Club in Berkeley (I plead Father’s Day!). The portions I caught, however, offered encouragement that more inclusive media are emerging. How do we make do-it-yourself media self-supporting? Panelist Dan Gillmor was at his honest best when he said, “There may not be a business model here. We’re not certain of this.”

Dan literally wrote the book on citizen media (“We the Media”). He is a former technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. His current project is the for-profit site Bayosphere. It is a work in progress (Dan is soliciting assistance if you have the time and inclination). His quote notwithstanding, I’m sure Dan has a plan to make Bayosphere pay its way; I took his remark as a realistic admission that there may not be pots of gold (or paychecks) at the end of this particular rainbow.

Joining Dan on the panel was Becky O’Malley who, together with her husband Mike, revived the Berkeley Daily Planet as an alternative newspaper for the college town with its own political orbit. Becky (and I’ll tell you a back-story about her in a moment) made an interesting comment about economic sustainability and community journalism, saying they may not be mutually necessary. She cited one Berkeley community, the Le Conte neighborhood, that had about 1,500 people signed up for its newsletter! How many blogs draw such traffic? Her remark reminded me that my neighborhood in San Leandro has a successful (though not quite so well-subscribed) newsletter (edited by my wife, Mia Ousley, who started an email discussion as an adjunct). These efforts keep people informed and develop a sense of neighborhood but there’s no money in them.

Peter Merholz, author of the Beast Blog (a compendium of items relevant in the East Bay region of San Francisco) was the third panelist and probably one of the best living proofs of what is meant by citizen media. Peter said he started putting stuff online because he enjoyed doing it, and because he knew how. (If he mentioned anything about commercial potential or lack thereof, I missed it.) Nevertheless, the Beast is useful; it was in his blog that I found a brief mention when Becky revived the Planet.

And with that incestuous reference, let me tell you my back story about Becky which, trust me, leads eventually to a point apropos of this blog.

Becky and I share a mutual friend, Indiana University journalism professor Carol Polsgrove. The whys of our associations are not relevant. Becky and I simply have this bond, so when I saw her name on the panel list, I thought: “Yes, I can race back from an event with my Sacramento in-laws in time to catch this.”

Nor was it just Becky who I wanted to see. Sunday night’s panel was the latest in a series of cybersalons that I’ve been attending for years. I’ve grown to like the people who attend. They’re friends, acquaintances, kindred spirits on at least a few topics of mutual interest, even if we’re not likely to have family picnics together.

I’m beginning to think that media and community are a linked pair, much as neutrons and radiation — you’ve gotta have both to achieve critical mass. The question is: can the containment system be built to harvest useful energy. I took a stab at that question with a two-part blog about Media Malls. I’ll return to that thought when time permits.

(Two last notes. At Sunday night’s event I learned that Kevin Werbach is holding the Supernova 2005 conference on digital media, etcetera in San Francisco this week, and there is a free email newsletter for those who cannot attend. Also I have partially restored the linking ability that I lost (and complained about) last week, but I’m not sure what happened nor am I satisfied with my fix.)

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

While visiting a friend last night, I watched the documentary “Control Room” on a cable video-on-demand channel, The 85-minute show depicted the Iraq war as seen and reported by the Arab-language news channel Al-Jazeera. Watching it on demand gave me a sense of the opportunities in video publishing in the post-network era.

(Note: If you follow this blog, you know that I have been unable to paste links into my copy for several days. That problem has followed me to Sacramento, where I’m using my buddy’s Mac — suggesting that my difficulties are not caused by my Toshiba laptop. Blogger Support, if one can even use such a term, has yet to reply to my plea for help. So please forgive my inability to provide the extensibility that I would like to offer through the selective use of embedded links,)

The video itself was gripping — very spare in its production details, using titles over images to introduce the piece, and allowing the imagery itself to provide the “shock and awe” value. (A search for “Control Room Al-Jazeera” will take you to the official movie site, and a place for a free download.)

But I don’t want to dwell on the content. I see a business opportunity — video on demand is going to make cable providers hungry for content. That was one of the themes that came through in a recent presentation by Advertising Age editor-at-large Joe Garfield. It was entitled: “The Chaos Scenario: What happens if the old media/marketing model collapses before the new model is built?”

In a June 7 article referencing that presentation, MediaNews reporter Wendy Davis writes that Garfield “predicted that the challenges (of this emeging media landscape) will include a dearth of inventory, with publishers unable to create content fast enough.”

Later, Davis writes: “Garfield also stressed that online content still needs to be created, and that it’s not yet clear where the money for this endeavor will come from–especially because there’s no Web equivalent to television’s “upfront market” that can finance programs before they’re available to consumers.”

Dearth of content. Lack of mechanism to finance works for hire, Sounds like a market opportunity for someone.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini

Interested in Citizen Journalism? If you reside in the San Francisco Bay Area, or will be in the area Sunday night, try to visit the Hillside Club in Berkeley, for what promises to be an interesting panel, including Dan Gillmor, Becky Malley, Peter Merholz, and possibly Craig Newmark.

(Note of apology: for the second straight day, Blogger refuses to accept embedded links. Normally I write in Word, then paste the finished piece into Blogger. Wednesday it started stripping out links. I cannot even insert links when I write directly in the Blogger draft mode! In an effort to serve me better, Blogger Support urged me to RTFM. That didn’t work. So I continue, as best I can in vanilla text mode.)

Dan is author of We Media, the manifesto and guide to citizen journalism. Becky is editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet (which I know has a print edition; I wonder about its online presence?) Peter, I learned from the Wikipedia entry on him, apparently coined the term blog. And the Craig of Craigslist needs no further introduction. The program runs from 6 pm to 8 pm, at the Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, in Berkeley.

Citizen journalism has been a recurring interest with me and I will attend with the same question that animates this blog (if indeed it has any life!) — how can we make this stuff pay for itself and create jobs.

I continue to collect and read material in this realm, and toward that end Mark Graham of iVillage recently pointed me to an eContent Magazine article on the topic. (I don’t think the text is online so in this case my link-lessness matters not.) One tidbit in the article was novel. In a reference to the Northwest Voice,a citizen journalism project serving residents near Bakersfield, California, eContent says the Voice “uses iUpload blogging software, which provides a simple form for participants and back-end editorial control for the editorial staff.” This latter point is important because public discussions can draw a nasty element that drives away the more temperate folks.

Now I must run. I had to cut short my alleged vacation. Duty called. Of course, bless duty for paying the bills!

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

(Note: I know not why, but none of my links nor formatting would paste from Word into Blogger today, and rather than infuritate myself with wondering why, I simply post this crippled version, shake my head and walk away!)

Two days of excellent discussion in Paid Content failed to find a simple answer to a beguilingly simple question: “What is a media company today?” But the exercise exposed me to a site — unmediated.org — which seems like a great resource for small producers in what I like to call the Mini Media realm.

The dialog occurs in the June 14 and June 15 editions of Paid Content. (For reasons unbeknownst, I could not access the permanent link this morning, so to read the original, please use Google advanced search, type in the title (above) and append Take One; then repeat the procedure with Take Two. Sorry!)

When Paid Content editor Staci Kramer posed the question to the e-zine’s readers, the responses were understandably all over the map. Media firms are breaking out of their old silos and converging on the Web. Newspapers, television and radio stations all produce content in multiple forms. For instance, the San Francisco Chronicle (where I work when not on vacation, as I am today) started in print shortly after the Gold Rush, began one of the first newspaper web sites (SFGate.com) more than a decade ago, and today lists a string of podcasts and mixed audio/photography offerings on the Podcast Directory. So what is a media company today could boil down to this: firms that manage to make money.

One of the voices that popped up to answer the question was that of Eli Chapman, a co-founder of Unmediated.org, which appears to be a gathering spot for the tools, techniques and people that are making Staci’s question so difficult to answer.

I am frankly embarrassed to have only now discovered Unmediated but, after all, I began this blog with the presumption that I had much to learn and, so far, I have been right. One of the tidbits that caught my attention was an Unmediated Q&A with Matt Thompson and Robin Sloan, the creative duo behind the Googlezon video clips.(If you’re not familiar, they’re pseudo-documentaries that postulate a Google-centric media universe within a decade; the Q&A contains link to the originals.)

Thompson and Sloan are at the cutting edge of whatever is happening with media, and Sloan’s closing quip suggests they’re mystified: “What I wanna know,” he says, “is when are we gonna start getting PAID? (Hey, would anybody buy an EPIC t-shirt?)”

What a liberating admission! I have asked the exact same question in this blog, and have suggested that we’ll be forced to give away content and earn our keep by selling artifacts like t-shirts and personalized magazines.

So when I hear guys like these express bewilderment about business models, three thoughts come to mind. First, if they sell a Googlezon t-shirt, I will buy it. Second, thank God for my day job! And third, I’m on vacation, so it’s time I started to act like it.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

I’m back from a weekend in a lovely Redwood park near San Francisco, a trip too brief to offer much rest, but long enough to distract me from “the conversation.” I did, however, return for a purpose that bears on my interest in new media business models — to wit, if we’re heading into the era of citizen journalism, will out media minutemen want or require training?

What brought this to mind were back-to-back meetings yesterday. The first was with a dozen folks who will be running a two-week journalism workshop for high-schoolers, Afterwards, I taught the final class in a 10-week feature-writing course populated by two dozen adults with varied experience in journalism.

I’ve seen relative newbies make astonishing progress when exposed to the techniques of story-telling. One woman handed in her final feature last night with the words, “Here’s the day’s spew.” Turned out to be an 1,800-word piece that she’d started writing after lunch. I only read the top but it started well. I was impressed. I don’t know how you write, but I’ve rarely nailed down 1,800 words in five or six hours!

Will citizen journalists benefit from training? Absolutely. Even pros need refreshers.

Will they seek it? Consider human nature; those who most need instruction will be the least likely to seek it, but those who want to improve will benefit enormously.

Should training be required? Absolutely not. The First Amendment, like the Second, presumes the widest possible freedom. People have a right to shoot themselves in the foot, in the literary sense, even if this occurs for lack of formal training. We already have a well-ordered militia in ournalism. It’s called mainstream media, and there are many, myself included, who feel these well-trained folk are doing a poor job of defending the public’s right to know.

Where will citizen journalists get training? Good question. I wonder if the education industry is alert to this new market for people who need short courses on everything from techniques to ethics to technology. Let me pause here, because the question just occurred to me and I simply don’t know.

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media

What if you could make television shows on your desktop and send them out over the Internet? We are about to find out if I understand the upshot of a new software tool based on BitTorrent. The tool set is called Broadcast Machine. It was released by an outfit called the Participatory Culture Foundation.. That foundation is either related to or spun off from Downhill Battle, which describes itself as “a non-profit organization working to break the major label monopoly of the record industry and put control back in the hands of musicians and fans.” Regretfully, I have just revealed everything I know about these topics. But do bear with me while I explain why I’m blown away by the potential behind this — and what I am sure are similar efforts as yet unknown to me. My first media job in 1975 was running a closed circuit television and radio station aboard a U.S. Navy ship in the Pacific Fleet. I was an enlisted man. My television station was, for its time, a marvel of miniaturization. But that meant videotapes — most of the programs I broadcast came in this format — were inch-thick reels. The live camera I used to do news broadcasts weighed about 90 pounds and was literally bolted to the bulkhead (aka “wall”). A control panel routed the various video inputs through coaxial cables to 15 or 20 television sets in the enlisted and officer quarters that reached our ship’s crew of 350.

How we got television programming in the middle of the Pacific was a marvel in the pre-Blockbuster-NetFlix-satellite-television era. Our ship would pull up alongside another ship that had come from port with our mail and other supplies, including those one-inch videotapes. The ships would come alongside, about 100 feet apart as I recall, and rig the equivalent of steel clotheslines between each other. They would then cruise along at the same precise speeds, passing stuff back and forth. The Navy calls this process underway replenishment. It’s quite a sight to behold. Anyway, all the crew cared about was getting football games and other sporting events, which arrived two or three or four weeks late, on videotape. I could never understand the fascination. They already knew the score. But I had my biggest audiences during games (talk about market research — I could leave the station while the hour-long tape was running itself, walk through the berthing quarters and literally count noses!) Given this I-used-to-walk-ten-miles-through-the-snow perspective, you can understand my amazement at the ease of production and delivery. On the other hand, given that I’ve witnessed one slice of the demographic glued to the tube, watching beefy brutes tackle one another in a contest whose outcome was already known, I question how much of today’s civilian audience is hungry for alternative content — and, if so, how all this guerilla content will be paid for. Before I forget, I learned about Broadcast Machine through Informitv.com, which is somehow involved in all this new-fangled TV stuff. I signed up for their email newsletter because I found their writing bright, tight and informative, as exemplified by the following segment that ended their report on the BM announcement: “The question is,” said Informitv.com, “will Broadcast Machine users want to support “non-corporate creativity and political engagement” and other substantial non-infringing fair uses, or simply to download the latest hit television programs? No doubt the corporate copyright lawyers are already sharpening their quills in anticipation.” (P.S. I’ll be camping until Tuesday or Wednesday. See you then!)

Tom Abate
MiniMediaGuy
Cause if you ain’t Mass Media, you’re Mini Media