Offer to #ONA12

  Quick note to link back to an earlier post, and my application to present rivers and linkblogging at this year's ONA meeting in SF, Sept 20-22.
  A little background...
  Blogging and aggregators were innovations ten-plus years ago, but the product categories haven't stopped evolving. Much of that has been inside Twitter and Facebook but these are awkward places to do journalism, and it's a problem if those become the sole channel for the distribution fo news. They're too easily shut down by governments, financiers, or just the people who run them, whose interest may, in the long term, not be a good match with the news orgs that depend on them.
    Think of the recent troubles betw Time-Warner cable and MSG. It took the phenomenon of Jeremy Lin to get the channel turned back on.
    And there are good arguments that if the channel can be shut down arbitrarily by the publisher, that it is impossible to do journalism there. Yet many news organizations seem to be overlooking that.
  I have developed my own software in this area, new stuff, that's completely connected up to Twitter, but here's the key point -- it still works without them. So if there should be an outage, anyone who publishes their link flow the way I do, using RSS and a simple bridge to Twitter, we will stay on the air, but those who rely exclusively on Twitter could have problems.
  I would like to come talk about rivers and linkblogging at #ONA12. I've talked at ONA before. At the fifth meeting in Hollywood, on the keynote panel with Joe Trippi and Arianna Huffington. And last year, Jay Rosen and I did a podcast from the meeting in DC.
  This is an important year of change for publishing. There are new possibilities that I think the ONA members should be aware of. It's a good time to have a look at what's possible.