yelvington.com

Get this: 35 percent of all online teen girls blog, while only 20 percent of online teen boys do so, according to the latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life project. This comes as no surprise to me; I have two such female creatures in my household and it's something I can observe up close.

I've blocked Myspace.com at the cable router on a couple of occasions when I was concerned about homework focus. The Internet for them is much less about consuming content than it is about interpersonal communications.

Some of their usage might look to a publisher like "personal publishing," but to them it's much more about showing and telling friends, which I interpret as interpersonal communications. Our 15-year-old, Paige, is now up to 14,638 images in her photo gallery. What she is saying is, "Hey guys, here's what we did Saturday."

I've previously pointed out that the use of our successful participative newspaper-affiliated websites, such as BlufftonToday.com, is dominated by females. Gannett has taken the female group communications concept seriously and has launched "mom sites" in many of its newspaper markets.

If you have any lingering notions that the Internet is a place for geeks and guys, get over it.

In my book Andrew Keen is a pompous fraud and I wouldn't cross the street to put him out if he were on fire, so I particularly enjoyed seeing Markos Moulitsas expose Keen's sloppy "professionalism."

Moulitsas (aka Kos) quotes Keen's book...

It is not surprising then that these prominent bloggers have no professional training in the collection of news. After all, who needs a degree in journalism to post a hyperlink on a Web site? Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, for example, the founder of Daily Kos, a left-leaning site, came to political blogging via the technology industry and the military.

... and then points out that he (Kos) has a degree in journalism (as well as several others), served as editor of his college newspaper, freelanced several years for the Chicago Tribune and has written for the Guardian. (Thanks to Martin Stabe.)

Keen is not a journalist but rather a professional self-promoter. Nevertheless, his straw-man dismissal of blogging is a position still held by too many in journalism.

Across the pond in the UK, there's a bit of a revolt against the National Union of Journalists over luddite positions being taken by the union. Suw and Kevin take a swing, and Neil McIntosh offers some suggestions as to how the NUJ could make itself useful.

While I was traveling Backfence.com suspended operations, and now a lot of people are drawing conclusions, some publicly and some not. At the risk of further muddying the water, here are some of my own fairly random, jetlagged thoughts:

First of all, we should expect and even welcome failure. The trick is to fail forward and inexpensively. The Innosight folks counsel us to "be patient for scale, but impatient for profits." What that means is that we should make sure the business model works before pumping cash into it. We need more and faster failures that help us find a model that works, and only then pour significant money into the machine. This is easy to say and incredibly hard to do when a gaggle of competitors are launching nationwide.

It's still early in the game and the game is changing quickly. For example, the Backfence folks sunk a lot of energy and some significant amount of money into creating a technology platform after struggling with an early version of Drupal; by the time they actually launched with proprietary software, open-source Drupal had raced ahead. As this stuff gets technically easier and cheaper, you can expect a lot more experimentation. Someone is going to get it right. Someone may be getting it right this week.

We still don't know the right scale for doing this sort of thing, and that scale may actually be shifting as more people sign up for cheap broadband and become comfortable with creating and not just consuming content. Backfence cofounder Mark Potts once speculated in a conversation that the right physical community size is under 50,000. We've had great debates about that where I work; one point of view says a local high school district can serve as a useful proxy for defining a natural community, but your mileage may vary.

A successful community model and a successful business model are not the same thing. The tricky part is going to involve finding the intersection. Something like Front Porch Forum might have a great community model but never be able to make a significant profit, or vice versa. Or the right business model might involve delivery of a print component, something many Web-centric developers might overlook or avoid.

Everybody underestimates how hard and how expensive it is to build a powerful brand at a geographic community level. If you went down the street in one of Backfence's markets and knocked on doors, how many people would have a strong, clear, positive notion of what Backfence was all about and why they should use it? This is one place where incumbent, offline media may have a great advantage, although in many cases it can't deliver the message to the targets of greatest opportunity (nonconsumers).

See also comments from:

Peter Krasilovsky
Scott Karp
Amy Gahran
Paul Farhi
Terry Heaton
Dan Gillmor
Steve Outing
... and many more

Lines from the past occasionally float to the surface. Here's one I have been thinking about lately: "OK open systems beat great closed systems every time."

That one came from Scott Kurnit around 1994-95, when he was VP/marketing for Prodigy. His company, originally a joint venture of CBS, Sears and IBM, had built a closed system (great in its day) that was in the process of getting its tail kicked by a bunch of little startup companies that run by people who had no clear idea where they were going.

These startups were pushing open standards: TCP/IP, HTTP, HTML.

Prodigy's system could do animated graphics and had complete control over presentation. HTML at that point couldn't even do tables, and most of the ISP entrepreneurs didn't know how to keep books or create business plans. Flat-rate Internet pricing wasn't the result of a business decision. The ISP entrepreneurs just didn't know how to charge by the minute.

Yet in a matter of months, the open system ended the era of closed, proprietary online services.

There are other examples. VHS versus Betamax, for those old enough to remember videotape. Windows vs. Mac. Today we may regard Microsoft as a predator, but in the early days it appeared radically more open than Apple. Steve Jobs' control-freak personality may have made the Macintosh "insanely great" but that control impulse doomed it to near irrelevancy.

How does this apply to journalism?

Journalism arose as a way to overcome the limitations of personal experience and word of mouth.

The printing press allowed experience to be recorded and distributed broadly. Importantly, that experience could be frozen, protected from the corruption inherent in handing information verbally from person to person (Chinese whispers, or "playing telephone.")

By making it possible for everyone to be publisher, the Internet has created a kind of hybrid of document and conversation that has many of the characteristics of a pre-Gutenberg society.

What we are seeing today, this thing that I once called "a new kind of people's journalism," is colliding with traditional media in the same way the World Wide Web hit Prodigy and CompuServe in 1994.

Mike Smith of Northwestern University's Media Management Center says many young people do not feel a need to seek news. If it's important, the news will come to them one way or another.

He's right, and this spells trouble not only for "old media" but also for reformers who mistakenly believes the answer is "give it to them in whatever medium they prefer," because that's code language for "put it on the Web." That won't work.

Flat publication on the Web is optimized to connect with seekers, not people who aren't seeking.

To connect with the new passive majority, you need to be engaged in a broad conversation (that largely isn't about news), and professional journalism simply has not yet figured out how to do that.

Thanks to investor Bruce Sherman's meddling in the newspaper business, suddenly America's newsrooms are acutely aware that the world has changed, and there's a broad debate about what it all means.

One of the recurring themes: What will be the economic foundation that will support serious professional journalism in the future?

What if that's the wrong question?

What if the right question is: What does an open journalism company look like? How does it work? Because if traditional journalism is a closed system, it's going to be clobbered by an "OK" open system. How can we make that open system "good enough?"

When facing the Web, Scott Kurnit didn't sneer at its primitive interface or its complicated setup requirements; he accurately saw the end of the proprietary online services.

He went on to found The Mining Company, which today is known as About.com, a site that puts many individual "guides" to work in an organized fashion to layer some structure and some value on top of the chaos that is the Internet.

Perhaps there's a lesson there for us.