Three Ways to Improve Citizen Media in Belarus: learning from the West

Learning from the West 3 ways to improve citizen media in Belarus Evgeny Morozov/Transitions Online

3 ways to improve: a personal perspective

Increase the # of serious, analytical, investigative posts

Legitimize blogging: from users with free time to users with smth to say

Make the blogosphere more accessible/useful to journalists and other professionals

Life of a post written in English

Step I: Create a new post

Step II: Write the text

Step III: Tag it

Step IV: Post it to the blog!

But it also appears here…

And here…

… and here

And if somebody diggs it, also here..

And very likely also somewhere here…

But what if your post is really good?

Within a few hours, it would make it here…

… and here

And of course here…

Then it appear on pop. aggregators

And “buzz” aggregators…

And “human” buzz aggregators

And news aggregators…

Other bloggers will easily find it…

… and write about your post/blog

You might even appear on some community news programs…

Perhaps, even MSM will mention it…

Result: Slashdot/Digg effect

Observations?

In 24 hours: from virtually nowhere to MSM

Increase visibility/popularity of one’s blog by thousands of times

Establish connections to top blogs

Hard work pays off quickly; visibility cycle is very short

Incentives to post go up tremendously, as better posts lead to better visibility

Life of a post written in Belarusian

Write a post on LJ…

Repost it on minsk_by

… and a few other communities

… and hope that you’ll be featured in RFERL overview…

Or “Nasha Niva”…

But…

You are still pretty much invisible to other bloggers

There is no way for them to express whether they like or dislike your post

They can’t easily share it with others

Very few of them use RSS, i.e. most of them don’t actively search for info on selected topics, but rather read whatever is on minsk_by

Implications?

Low incentives to post in general

Even lower incentives to write long, analytical posts

As a result, most bloggers write for the people in their “friend list” on LiveJournal not even hoping to get global audience

Many of them just write password-protect posts—which is almost unheard of in the West

Results ?

 Blogging culture that thrives on short and often very personal posts at the cost of longer and more controversial pieces offering social commentary

Busy people and professionals might be discouraged from blogging, since no matter how good their arguments are, they are given equal treatment by the rest of the LiveJournal mob

Hypothesis As more content-meritocracy is introduced to the .by blogosphere, it will a) have better/deeper posts b) become more appealing to serious people

Other benefits  The more blogging and content-sharing tools are localized, the easier it will be for journalists, bloggers, and other professionals to take full advantage of the blogosphere!!!

Search better

Track the buzz/Hunt for Emerging Stories

Track trends

Track key people

Track key phrases

Track Full Conversation

Track full conversations II

Track both MSM/blogosphere

Track LOCAL conversations

Track Feedback to your stories

Thank you! Questions? Email: morozove@tol.org

disclaimer: I've done my best to attribute slides, graphs and screenshots used in this presentation. Nobody is perfect, and some of them may have slipped in unclaimed – apologies to the original right holders. Let's hope that my frivolous use of your graphs or tables falls under fair use ;-)