I spent several years of my childhood in a remote corner of bush Alaska. When thinking about those times, I remember one village in particular: Point Lay, mid-way between Point Hope and Barrow. In Point Lay, in the late 1970s, we got our news twice a week from people and mail arriving on our regular mail planes. Every Tuesday and Friday, depending on the weather, news from the outside world would arrive, filtered by the people who happened to be on the airplane or the magazines we were subscribed to. We didn’t have television, or good radio reception. Aside from the delivery vehicle, the news we received was much like living in rural America a hundred years ago—second or third hand, heavily filtered.

Meanwhile, much of the rest of the country got their news from Walter Cronkite, or their local newspaper. In the newspaper, a growing number of stories came from syndication services: the Associated Press and Reuters being the most prominent. Most comics and many other feature stories come from various syndication services, and for freelance writers, being a syndicated columnist, such as Dave Barry, is one way to make meager newspaper sales add up to a nice income. In the print world, newspapers and magazines pay for every story or comic published.

But becoming a syndicated content producer was still a challenge—you had to persuade each newspaper to pick up your content. The newspapers were the publishers, as were the television networks. All content, all news, was filtered through the mass media. And there were only three nationwide commercial television networks. Instead of hearing about what the average traveller on a bush airplane thought was important, most of America would only hear what Walter Cronkite or the various newspaper publishers thought was important.

Everyone’s a publisher

Times have changed. Aside from making it easy to publish content, wikis, blogs, and other content management systems often include an automatic way to syndicate that content. It’s called Really Simple Syndication, or RSS for us acronym-loving technophiles.

The web made it possible for anybody to be a publisher. RSS makes it easy to see when there are new stories at your favorite web sites.

Whether you realize it or not, you probably already use RSS news feeds. If your home page has headlines that update every day, it’s probably using RSS. When you visit a site that shows snippets of content from other web sites, it’s using RSS to get that content.

Because nobody trusts anybody online automatically, the blogging world has developed a simple but powerful way of building credibility: comments and trackbacks

If you use one of the content management systems to publish content, you too can become a news source. Several implications here:

• Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can subscribe to news feeds from anywhere in the world
• There’s a news feed for every interest under the sun
• Anyone with something to say can find a place online to say it
• Big media companies no longer have a monopoly on the news.

Blogs have made RSS popular, and along with two other important features, are creating a new generation of citizen reporters. These two other features are trackbacks and ping services.

TrackBacks: Cross-site comments

If everyone’s a publisher, how do you judge the quality, accuracy, or fairness of what you read? You obviously can’t believe everything you read online. We used to be able to trust mass media to hold to an ethical standard of journalism, but anybody who believes that’s true today hasn’t compared Fox cable news assertions with the facts. Now, with millions of blogs contributing to the content mix, it’s absolutely certain you’re going to find biased, unfair, poorly-thought-out arguments. Given such a chaotic mix, how can you trust anything anyone has to say?

The answer is, you can’t, without knowing the back story. Who is writing the story, and what are their biases? Everyone has bias. The blogging world was built upon that assumption, unlike traditional media with its claimed objectivity.

Because nobody trusts anybody online automatically, the blogging world has developed a simple but powerful way of building credibility: comments and trackbacks. Built into all blogging software is a way for anybody who cares to leave a comment about each story. While the blog owner can censor comments (and thanks to various types of spam that can appear on blogs, it’s necessary), you can make some judgement about the quality of the content by the quantity and nature of the comments.

Trackbacks are a form of dialog between blogs. Trackbacks appear in the comments for a particular story, and link to a blog entry by another author, on another web site. By using trackbacks, bloggers can conduct extended dialogs, and you can trace the entire conversation.

Comments and trackbacks are crucial elements for judging the quality of content. If a story sparks a long, heated debate, you can infer that it’s controversial. If all of the comments support the story, perhaps the story is right on target—or perhaps the blogger has censored comments from people who disagree. If there aren’t many comments, it becomes much harder to judge.

Pinging update services

Another new key feature of the blogging world are ping services. The word ping originally comes from sonar, which sends out a “ping” sound through water so that the sonar operators can detect objects by hearing the sound come back. In the computer world, you send a ping out to various things to see if they’re there. In the blogging world, your blog software sends out a ping to various services to let them know you’ve written a new entry.

Blogs rank highly on Google results because they are updated regularly—but more importantly, because so many of them link to each other through the various ping update services

By pinging various aggregator sites, you essentially announce to the world that you have a new entry. Search engines find you quicker. Your entry appears in content aggregators. If you refer to other blogs in your story, they get notified about your story. This feature alone makes blogging more powerful than the other content management systems out there.

Straight from the source

So why read what amounts, at best, to a whole bunch of amateur journalism? Generally because you’re bypassing the “professional” journalists and sometimes getting stories directly from the people making the news. Several CEOs of companies are now blogging. Activists blog. Politicians are starting to blog. And people in extraordinary circumstances blog every day.

The prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib reached the main stream media because a soldier posted pictures on his web site. Would we have ever heard about these abuses, without the internet? Perhaps not. Executives at major technology companies are starting to blog—companies like HP, Sun, and Microsoft. Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, has a blog. Porn stars and Washington interns have blogs. Darth Vader even has a blog—or had one, until his fateful meeting with Luke.