How the Crowd is Changing the News (SXSW)

Here at SXSW, we attended the session "CrowdControl: Changing the Face of Media or Hype?" At the end, one of the speakers asked the crowd, which they thought it was. Almost everybody responded with the former, while maybe one or two raised their hand for hype.

I think it's pretty clear that citizen journalism, the real topic of this discussion, is changing and has already changed the face of media. There are varying opinions on if that is for better or for worse, but the very fact that these opinions are able to be voiced is a testament to the stength of the crowd.

On the panel were Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Randi Zuckerberg from Facebook, Lila King from CNN.com, Jason Rzepka from MTV, and Joseph Kingsbury of Text100 Public relations.

Much of the conversation was centered around trust. Who can you trust? How do you know you can trust them? How do you know these citizen reporters don't have an agenda? Things of this nature.

Cashmore says brand still plays a role in trust, and that you should have some level of skepticism when a story comes from something like Twitter (assuming you are unfamiliar with the source). His point is accentuated by the fact that here at at SXSW, a massive Twitter hoax regarding Conan O'Brien was perpetrated from Digg's SXSW party the other night.

"People need to become more educated consumers of news" and "learn what you can trust and what you can't," says Cashmore. That is probably easier said than done, and possibly asking a lot of the average person that doesn't reside inside the news industry, but he's right. If people don't want to be misled or misinformed, they need to not only consider the source, but acknowledge multiple sources before totally abandoning the grain of salt.

This actually reminds me of something Andrew Lih said in another session I attended this past weekend about Wikipedia. His advice to journalists (as well as students) was that there is "no better starting point" than Wikipedia, and "no worse ending point."

Cashmore made a point about Wikipedia in that it is controlled by a few people, so it's not exactly the crowd like Twitter is the crowd, or like the Blogosphere is the crowd, but I think the point runs parallel. A tweet may be a great starting point for a piece of news, but it should not be the ending point in acceptance of fact.

The crowd is there for balance. The more viewpoints that are available, the more a reader is able to take away from a story. When points are debated, more info is revealed, and even if some of that doesn't sit well with you, you can use your own judgment to assess where you come down on the subject at hand. This comes back to Cashmore's statement about becoming a more educated consumer of news. Perhaps we only need to strive for a better educated public in general, and the quality of so-called citizen journalism will grow.

That should be easy.

For more from SXSW, check out our exclusive interviews at live.webpronews.com.

Google’s Blogger Users Can Now Customize Their Designs

Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.

"Over the past few years we've worked to scale Blogger and ensure that it is capable of handling hundreds of millions of pageviews per day," Google says. "But we also believe that blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice. So last year we started working on a tool that would allow everyone to easily customize their blog’s look and feel, and today we’re proud to introduce the Blogger Template Designer."

Features of the template designer include:

- 15 new templates (with more on the way)
- Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
- Hundreds of background images courtesy of iStockphoto
- Customizable colors, fonts, and more.

"While alternative offerings force users to choose among a limited set of rigid template designs, Blogger provides an intuitive yet powerful interface so anyone to customize their blog's design & layout - putting the user in complete control," the company says.

It's interesting that this kind of customization has not been available from Blogger until 2010, as Blogger itself is over a decade old, and has been Google-owned since 2003.

The Blogger Template Designer is available through Blogger in Draft, Blogger's testing ground/sandbox site.

Google Apps Billed As Disaster-Ready Solution

We'll let you decide whether, given the recent loss of life in Haiti and Chile, Google's timing is a little off here.  But for better or for worse, the search giant picked today to promote Google Apps in a blog post titled "Disaster Recovery by Google."

A few points in Google's defense: it created a Person Finder tool in response to the earthquake in Haiti, which it pulled out again following the earthquake in Chile.  Also, the company used its homepage and official blogs to solicit aid donations and spread awareness both times around.

So on to the new development.  In a lengthy post on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, Rajen Sheth, a senior product manager over Google Apps, asserted that the service can save businesses from losing any information in the event their hardware is damaged or destroyed.  Physical backups will only help businesses restore things up to the latest backup point.

Sheth then noted that storing information with Google Apps can be cheaper than relying on physical solutions and storage area networks, too.

He at last concluded, "No one likes preparing for worst-case scenarios.  When you use Google Apps, you have one less critical thing to worry about."

Google Lets Users Find Results Based on Location

Google has added the ability to search by location to its list of search options. The option is called "nearby".

"Location has become an important part of the way we search. If you're a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer's market, location can be vital to helping you find the right information," says Google Product Manager Jackie Bavaro.

"One of the really helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding 'Minneapolis' to your query and missing webpages that only say 'St. Paul" or "Twin Cities,'" Bavaro adds.

Google has been using users' locations to deliver search results for quite some time, but this marks the first time the search engine is actually letting users dictate when they want it to be used to retrieve results for specific queries. In local search, Google is generally pretty good at delivering nearby results anyway, but giving users this added little bit of control can't hurt, and simply gives users another way to refine their results to match their preferences.

Users can view results by their default location, or set a custom location. The feature is currently only available on Google.com in English.

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