For years, wide-eyed journalists, politicos and academics have captured people’s imagination with musings about the many ways the Internet would democratize our society.  A decade and a half after the Internet’s emergence, the anticipated transformation is certainly underway.  Media, political, and corporate institutions have begun to incorporate readers, constituents and consumers into their regular operational and decision-making processes.  However, relative to the initial projections, the pace of change isn’t fast enough – at least to the impatient ones, including us here at MixedInk!

There are a couple of reasons for this.  First, government, media, and corporations are hesitant to cede real power to their stakeholders.  News reporters and editors don’t want to be fact-checked by their readers because it threatens their perceived status as “experts.”  Politicians want complete control over their policies, platforms and messages.  Companies want to know what their consumers think, but they don’t want consumers to have a say in decision making.

This reluctance is increasingly beside the point, however.  New, more democratic norms are coming to govern the relationship between reporter and audience member, elected official and constituent, company and consumer.  This is because free markets and elections provide these institutions with an existential reason to engage citizens transparently and democratically that overrules their hesitance: doing so brings them more votes, more dollars, and more attention.

Another challenge is that the trial and error process of testing social technology takes time.  Social processes are often counter-intuitive and difficult to manipulate, so it’s hard to build web-based tools that are a natural social fit.  New online tools thrive not because they solve some previously impossible technological problem, but because they provide “elegant organization” that offers an outlet to harness people’s energy in a productive (or at least entertaining) way.  It’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict how people will interact with each other using a new tool in advance.  Thus, finding ways to ‘organize elegantly’ requires a slow process of trial and error.

In practice, this has meant that innovative media and political organizations simply try out different tools to see what works, and then, over time, others imitate the tactics that turn out to be successful.  Being currently immersed in this trial and error process, the MixedInk team is very much aware of the time it takes; the way people use our private beta site sometimes surprises us.  As a startup, however, we don’t face the same risks as those at large, prominent institutions.  If things don’t go so well for us, few people will notice.  If they fail, everyone pays attention!

There’s plenty of cause for optimism, though.  The pace of change seems to have increased within the last several years between the growth of new media and the beginnings of a shift towards more democratic user engagement among corporate, political, and media organizations.  As Vanessa mentioned in a recent post, Dell’s IdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea are significant innovations in the world of corporate America.  Others, like the YouTube/CNN primary debate here in the US and the UK Prime Minister’s “Ask the PM” represent the beginnings of a democratic transformation within the media and political sphere.

To continue our online democracy’s forward progress, it’s important to recognize and address the risks involved with each of these efforts, though.  Each one engaged a large, critical mass of stakeholders with an up-front promise to publich, incorporate, and respond to their input in a meaningful way.  This sudden, very public democratization of communications meant risking that users might overwhelmingly contradict each institution’s official message and branding.  Yet by capitalizing on citizens’ desire to communicate directly with decision-makers, these efforts have been quite successful.

For all of us who aim to contribute to the emerging wave of online democracy, understanding the risks that that innovators like Starbucks, Dell and CNN face can be the difference between success and failure.  Only by adequately balancing risk and reward will new social technologies and applications be able to bring our emerging online democracy to its inevitable tipping point.  In my next post, I’ll describe a few different models for engaging citizens that provide varying degrees of risk and reward, allowing institutions with a range of risk-aversion and participatory ideals to strike the balance that’s appropriate for them.

In my last post, I described the vertical disaggregation process occurring within the news industry, wondering aloud (as is fashionable these days) what business model will support the news in the new media environment.

Actually, this question needs to be more precise. A better one is: Which business models will support which types of news generation processes – regardless of whether they happen in a newsroom or not? I believe that, in addition to vertical disaggregation, there will be a simultaneous process of horizontal disaggregation. That is, various types of news that have historically been created within a single company will end up within distinct entities, which are in turn supported by different revenue streams and cost structures.

The gurus of news 2.0 believe geographical scope will be a (if not the) major fault line along which content creation and aggregation are broken down, though hyperlocal journalism has had limited success so far. The national and regional news sites that already exist will be complemented by hyperlocal sites that tell you what’s going on in your neighborhood, on your block, or even in your apartment building. As it would be hard for a single neighborhood to generate enough advertising revenue to support paid reporters and editors, this type of hyperlocal site will only become possible through partial reliance on user-generated content, which the site obtains practically for free. A number of startups are already targeting this market.

But geographical breadth is just one of a number of social and technological fault lines along which horizontal disaggregation can occur. Any social or technological variation in the news content creation process could necessitate a different business model, and thus, be housed within a distinct entity.

Jeff Jarvis (CUNY professor of journalism and well known blogger) proposes separating the functions of newsgathering, editing, and analysis:

So maybe we need to disaggregate the newsroom yet further into its distinct and, we hope, marketable skills. Reporting and news-gathering (words, images, sound, video, data, investigation) may well be something that freelancers (professionals and amateurs) do. And editing — curating, vetting, enabling, educating, to cut up the task yet further — may find new value. Analysis may happen more and more in the commentsphere that the community has become.

This makes sense. But why stop there? Why not further divide the news generation process into its component steps? Conversely, will it make sense in some cases for news production processes remain unchanged? (Indeed, some magazines are thriving even as other print media declines.)

It will all depend on what type of news is being produced. Let’s consider five types of journalism. These are by no means exhaustive, or completely distinct from one another:

- Investigative journalism involving in–depth interviews, breaking news from private sources, or a high degree of technical expertise
- Crafting narratives from widely available, understood, and agreed-upon facts (e.g. sporting events, political events, market information, etc.)
- Opinion and analysis
- Hyperlocal news
- Collection and dissemination of raw data

These vary in the extent to which they can be crowdsourced, in citizens’ desire to participate in their production, in their need to be fact-checked, and in the degree of subjectivity involved in crafting narratives.

If we were to do an analysis of how much it costs to produce each category of journalistic text, either in per-article or per-word terms, I suspect we’d find huge variation, perhaps even an order of magnitude or more. We’d also find huge differences in revenue per unit, as some news is more viral, and some news inherently leads users to spend more money (which generates higher demand for advertising). In other words, it makes perfect sense that they would need separate business models!

These days, somewhat counterintuitively, news crowdsourcing experiments often create more work for the journalists who organize them – not less. Someone must generate internal support for the project, set up one or more technology platforms, encourage the community to participate, and/or monitor large numbers of contributions (the quality of which varies significantly). But eventually, as the technology improves, and as news sites institute permanent, flexible processes and deploy them with greater frequency and scale, these costs will shrink on a per-unit basis. Technology will selectively afford opportunities to crowdsource expensive components of the news creation process, thereby eliminating those costs from newsrooms. In this way, technology will magnify the differences in cost and revenue per unit between different types of news.

My prediction is that we’ll end up with multiple, distinct business models, each associated with different processes for gathering first- and second-hand information, crafting narratives, editing copy, fact-checking, etc. These processes may happen within a single company or within separate firms – I imagine there will be some examples of each. The point is that different types of news will become sustainable in different ways.

Intensive investigative journalism will probably always require a high level of professional journalism. The others, theoretically at least, could some day be largely crowdsourced, though the processes for crowdsourcing would likely vary significantly. A lot of data is already being collected by readers (polls, photos, comments, videos, etc.), though one might argue we have a long way to go in finding a structure that approaches traditional journalistic standards and fully exploits the value of this content.

Eventually, I think it will be possible to crowdsource a much larger share of journalism than we currently anticipate. MixedInk will be a socially and technologically different way to produce some types of news. It will enable motivated crowds of readers to assume responsibility for certain phases of the news generation process. Along with other technologies that facilitate crowdsourcing of content creation, it will help to cushion the fall of traditional media while producing a more democratic public sphere.

It’s important to acknowledge up front, though, that there won’t be a single solution to the news ‘crisis,’ but many distinct solutions. Journalism may be transformed almost beyond recognition, but I, for one, do not worry about its future. The demand for news is clearly not going anywhere. If anything, by providing pressure for change, the crisis is helping to avoid stagnation in our public discourse. It will result in a stronger news product that better engages and reflects the priorities of readers.

Much has been written on the subject of the internet-induced transformation currently underway within the news industry. (Those who’ve already had their fill of this topic should feel free to wait for Part 2.)

The basic idea is that the economics of distributing information online are radically different from print, so the business models that evolved within the physical world of newspapers no longer apply. The gradually declining fortunes of today’s newspapers mark the end of the previous era.

In meatspace, it made sense to keep the entire value chain - ad sales, news and editorial content, printing, and distribution – under a single roof. Given the economies of scale and high coordination costs from one end of the chain to the other, companies consolidated into local monopolies and national oligopolies in order to minimize costs and maximize profits.

The internet is changing things. Distribution costs are now much lower due to the ease of online publishing; new communication tools facilitate coordination among the different activities; and buying and selling advertising inventory is much simpler through automated web-based ad networks.

With the reduction in coordination costs, suddenly there’s much less pressure towards vertical integration. The value chain is more efficient when divided between multiple entities, each focusing solely on a single stage of the chain rather than doing everything (newsgathering, printing, distribution, etc.) in-house. Separate companies can develop their core competencies and engage with complementary firms within a competitive marketplace that stimulates innovation at each step in the chain.

So, the consensus among many internet gurus is that the news media is being reorganized. Within the new value chain, distinct companies are performing different functions - selling advertising (e.g. Google Ads, Tacoda), creating content (e.g. AP, NYTimes.com), and aggregating content (e.g. Digg, Google News), and other more narrow ones. They integrate almost seamlessly to deliver a product that was previously provided by a single company. Communications infrastructure firms, like Comcast, are also part of this new chain – they’re today’s delivery boys. But they’re simultaneously a part of many other web-based value chains, and they’re paid by end users, so their fortunes are much less dependent on the news industry.

This is not to suggest that the disaggregation process described so far is complete. Far from it. As more and more consumers get their news online instead of in hard copy, print advertising sales dry up. Online ad revenue, while growing, will probably never make up the difference – a major reason for this is that classified advertising, once a major source of newspaper revenue, has moved elsewhere. (Anyone heard of a site called Craigslist?) Newspapers of all shapes and sizes are being forced to cut back on editorial staff.

So the big question on everyone’s mind as the media ecosystem transforms is: As newsrooms cease to be able to support themselves as vertically integrated newspaper monopolies, how will they continue to do their jobs - if at all? It isn’t only journalists and news companies with a natural self-interest in protecting their livelihoods who ask this, but also foundations, academics, media watchdogs, and others who seek to safeguard a robust fourth estate out of a conviction that the health of our democracy depends on it.

Stay tuned for my thoughts on what’s in store in an upcoming post. The short version: Different types of news will sustain themselves through different business models.

Breaking from its conventional emphasis on editorial oversight, CNN is launching a completely user-generated news site at iReport.com this week.

In August 2006, CNN made a big move to bring citizen journalism into the mainstream when it launched iReport on CNN.com. iReport submissions are chosen by editors and checked for accuracy before CNN shows them online or on television. As a result, CNN has showcased only 10% of the nearly 100,000 news-related photos and videos that it has received since 2006. User-generated videos and news have provided some of CNN’s most compelling footage, which were especially noteworthy during California’s wildfires and the shootings at Virginia Tech.

The new CNN site will be fully open, allowing users to post anything (though the site will be monitored for inappropriate content). “The community will decide what the news is,” says Susan Grant, Executive VP of CNN News Services. Modeled after YouTube, iReport.com will allow citizen journalists to upload videos, photos, and audio files, while visitors can search, rate, and share clips.

The trend toward mainstream user-generated news doesn’t end with CNN. ESPN recently launched “ESPNU Campus Connection,” which “combines student reporting with gripping college hoops action,” according to its website. ESPNU is putting students to work as sportscasters responsible for generating coverage, sideline reporting, commentary, and analysis. This gives students a chance for a unique professional experience and offers ESPN exposure and more extensive programming on college campuses.

This is a win-win for publishers and consumers. “For a publisher, you’re engaging consumers, and mixing up your offerings. For consumers, you’re getting a voice and having an impact,” points out Piper Jaffray Web analyst Aaron Kessler.

Here at MixedInk, we’re excited to see these big players recognizing the potential of citizen journalism and supporting it with creative – and sometimes risky – new initiatives!

Also see ReadWriteWeb’s report on CNN here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/cnn_to_launch_completely_user.php

There’s always been a heavy anti-pundit streak in the online political realm. But lately, the volume of criticism seems to be growing.

The general consensus is that pundits are blowhards. They make statements – often absurd, offensive or false statements – for which they’re rarely held accountable. What is most frustrating is that they are granted unfettered access to millions of ears and eyes, regardless of the validity of their claims (or lack thereof).

This is not a left-vs-right thing; it’s a populist attitude that can be found on both sides of the aisle. Here’s Rightwing Nuthouse, from last August, pointing out what it takes to succeed as a pundit:

The trick in being a good political pundit is not in formulating wildly original analysis or penetrating insights into “what it all means.” Rather, it is much better to say exactly what everyone else is saying except be meaner, or funnier, or more serious, or more dismissive than the next fellow. A good turn of the phrase and an attitude will bring you stardom in punditland.

While their backgrounds and expertise may seem to qualify them to opine on political issues, the talking heads’ obsessive focus on strategy and tactics crowds out all but the most simplistic analyses of the government policies which are at stake.

Even when it comes to the horse race, politics is such a stubbornly unpredictable arena that the pundits seem unable to read the political tea leaves any better than their audiences. Or, at least, no better than those who follow politics closely (of whom there are a sizable number).

This rant from Colin Delaney at e.Politics following the Iowa caucuses calls the pundits out on their mistakes:

Well, who was the big loser in the Iowa caucuses? It wasn’t Mitt Romney or Hillary Clinton, and it certainly wasn’t Ron Paul. The big loser was political punditry.

…What was revealed to be vapid and empty last night was the endless, often cable TV-driven spouting of impression and prediction — when did political talking heads suddenly gain the ability to accurately foretell the future? Most of ‘em sure ain’t that good at it… even a cursory stroll down memory lane turns up plenty more. Remember when Fred Thompson was going to change the race irrevocably? Or when John McCain was doomed and should just pack up and go home? When Obama’s young-voter strategy was a waste of time, ’cause the damn kids never show up to vote anyway?

Political pundits: please stop telling us what you THINK is going to happen, because in the world of online communications, you don’t actually know more than we do. We have access to the same polls, we read the same on-the-ground reporting and scroll through the same blogs and we can see every significant piece of video the same day…

…Pundits, please just shut up and surrender some airtime to actual journalism.

Glenn Greenwald, a once-independent blogger who now writes for Salon, wrote about how wrong the pundits were on the Iowa Caucus results in a recent post, aptly titled “Worthless chatter.” He lists a number of quite damning instances in which pundits not only inaccurately foretold Governor Huckabee’s collapse in the Iowa caucuses, but did so with a degree of certainty which now seems absurd, if not downright manipulative.

Underlying much of the criticism is a belief that pundits are an undemocratic influence on the country’s political narratives, and thus, its political outcomes. Once a certain analysis or prediction becomes conventional wisdom among pundits, regardless of its initial veracity, it can serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Aware of this phenomenon, pundits often go so far as to make statements they know to be untrue in order to increase the likelihood that their preferred reality will be come to be.

So why is the pundit criticism getting louder now?

Pundits may be more extreme in their transgressions as they try to entertain for more airtime despite having no more material to work with. It also could be that the critics have more visible platforms than ever before.

But I would argue that on top of this, there’s a growing, organic, anti-pundit sentiment out there in the general public that the critics are beginning to tap into. People now have access to almost all the same information the pundits do - we’re savvier media consumers. We are seeing how frequently the pundits are incorrect, how their analyses are influenced by biases which may not be immediately apparent. And we’re justifiably angry.

Politicians recognize this. Both Republicans and Democrats talk about “the pundits” in voices dripping with disdain, instructing us to ignore their cynicism. Candidates in both parties claim they’re going to prove the pundits wrong, and brag of having exceeded expectations. Pursuing their own self interest, politicians are collectively stirring up a mini-rebellion, challenging the voters to show the supposedly omniscient pundits that this country is still a democracy (which, incidentally, means voting for them). It’s almost as if they’re arguing that proving the pundits wrong is valid enough reason for voters to support their candidacies in and of itself! This type of anti-elitist rhetoric used to be reserved for attacking corporate fat-cats, union leaders, and government officials and bureaucrats.

Bloggers definitely see it, too, and point out how wrong – and grating! – the pundits are. Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong, two leading bloggers of the left, have long railed against the “DC cocktail party circuit.” But even on DailyKos, a leading left-wing blogging community run by Mr. Moulitsas, there’s been an up-tick in the criticism lately, with special emphasis on Chris Matthews (unaffectionately dubbed “tweety”).

Others in politics are also leveraging anti-pundit sentiment. Credo Mobile, the activist network connected to Working Assets, just circulated an online petition accusing the punditry of “biased and uninformed commentary”:

“Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back to the White House?”

That was the headline of a Maureen Dowd column in today’s New York Times.

Hillary Clinton’s win in New Hampshire was shocking. The performance of the national press corps in the days preceding the vote, unfortunately, was not.

Journalists have been replaced by a punditocracy that makes its living (and gets its kicks) by perverting our democratic process. The misogyny that was unleashed by the media’s feeding frenzy on the video of an exhausted Clinton tearing up at a small New Hampshire roundtable of voters was just the tip of the iceberg.

To be clear, we are not endorsing any candidate. This is not about who we choose for president, but rather how we choose our leader…

Firedoglake summed it up:

America is sick of [expletive] this year. From politicians. And especially from pundits.

So what’s the solution? Though their offenses seem greater than ever before at the moment, this situation is not new. And yet the pundits’ stature within the media seems undiminished.

Marc Andreessen, blogger and entrepreneur of Netscape fame, has a proposal:

If the world were a sane and just place, every pundit, commentator, expert, and reporter who predicted the things that didn’t happen and missed the things that did — which is to say, all of them — would resign their jobs tonight.

Since that won’t happen, the only logical response is to put one’s hands over one’s ears and say “Nanananananananananananana” every time one sees them on television from here on out.

While that’s certainly one solution, there’s got to be a better one, a more systemic one.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could take the narratives that shape our politics out of the hands of a privileged few?

Sure, the blogosphere is a big step in the right direction. Because bloggers are more numerous than pundits, and because there’s room for more websites than there is room for major news outlets, people can choose the bloggers they agree with or like with greater precision than they can choose their pundits. The blogosphere is thus more meritocratic. Also, bloggers tend to be more up-front about their beliefs – they do not disguise their points of view as fact – so any efforts to manipulate the debate are more transparent, by definition.

Yet bloggers are still lone individuals, people with agendas, interested in imposing their own lens on the political discourse. No matter how much that lens align with yours, no single individual can always speak on behalf of an entire community. In stepping into the role of pundit, any single person would end up with too much control over the debate.

If, within the media ecosystem, there were some way for groups to speak with a single voice, we could collectively shout down pundits’ efforts to manipulate the debate. If only there were a way that people could create our narratives from scratch, thereby avoiding the undemocratic influences of those who would digest and interpret our news for us. Hmmmm…

By 2012, one quarter of entertainment will have been created, edited, and shared within peer circles, rather than coming out of traditional media groups.  This is the conclusion of a global study on the future of entertainment, called “A Glimpse of the Next Episode,” conducted by Nokia and The Future Laboratory.

In carrying out the study, The Future Laboratory interviewed entertainment industry leaders as well as trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors.  This was combined with Nokia’s own research from its 900 million consumers around the world to construct a global picture of entertainment over the next five years. 

Nokia termed the phenomenon Circular Entertainment, noting that people are showing “a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups - a form of collaborative social media,” according to Nokia’s Multimedia Vice President Mark Selby.  Trends Director at The Future Laboratory Tom Savigar added, “Consumers are increasingly demanding their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging and collaborative.” 

At MixedInk, we have been very busy developing a collaborative writing tool to satisfy this demand.  Where blogging has enabled anyone to share their thoughts online, MixedInk is excited about making it easy and fun to remix and mash up opinions within a group to generate newer, bigger, and more compelling ideas. “Key to this evolution is consumers’ basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate,” notes Savigar.  We agree.  While wikis have allowed people to write together online, we are making it easy for people to compare and contrast what many different people think – and communicate easily about those opinions. 

“Whereas the act of watching, reading and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment,” says Savigar. 

MixedInk will help this expanding movement to grow.  We are motivated because we believe that an active and passionate group can create stronger, more powerful content than its individual members could produce alone.  And perhaps most importantly, we are inspired by the potential for such a platform to democratize the political arena, the media, and the workplace. 

“We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of,” says Savigar.  We already see the beginnings of this evolution, and we look forward to playing our part in making it a reality. 

Get ready. The Next Episode will be written by you. 

Sparse posting as of late – sorry about that. We’re up to our ears trying to ready the site for release. The good news is we’re on track to do so this winter, as planned.

Last week, I was at the Networked Journalism Summit, a conference organized by Jeff Jarvis and David Cohn, “bringing together the best practices and practitioners in collaborative, pro-am journalism” at CUNY.

In a word, it was…awesome (sorry, I’m an entrepreneur, not a journalist!). It was both encouraging that so many really smart people are experimenting with ways to democratize the media, and a relief that no one has yet been able to find all the answers – meaning that MixedInk can help to provide part of the solution.

The big unanswered questions that seemed to keep coming up were:

1) how the media will be able to make money without sacrificing journalistic quality and integrity (and whether advertising revenue will ever be sufficient);
2) how professional and amateur journalists can coordinate and divide responsibility effectively to produce high-quality, accurate content; and
3) how the public can be motivated to contribute in a way that adds value.

From MixedInk’s perspective, the event was unquestionably a success. In the afternoon, I manned one of several ‘tool’ tables, sandwiched between DayLife and Topix, two other innovative startups in this space. A number of leading media outlets dropped by our table and expressed very strong interest in viewing a demo when it’s ready next month. Several said they would even test our platform with their readers. Though it depends what comes of these initial conversations in the next couple of months, I’d say Jeff Jarvis and David Cohn accomplished their goal of focusing the event on action rather than talk.

Amid the excitement, there was a potentially depressing moment during one of the morning sessions. Jay Rosen, the brilliant NYU journalism professor and founder of newassignment.net, was asked whether there’s any way to avoid using a community leader to tightly moderate and channel contributors’ energy in a productive direction. To my dismay, and likely that of others in the room, he responded, “The dream of a self-perpetuating content production system is an illusion.” He might well have been describing MixedInk, though we would say our content production system is “community led” rather than “self-perpetuating.”

Unfortunately I didn’t have a chance to speak with Jay later in the day, but if I had (and managed to keep my wits about me), I would have said something like this: “With all due respect, we look forward to proving you wrong, Jay. Relying on heavy moderation is not scalable, it’s less democratic and it may even be less meritocratic. Given the right structure and application, the community can be trusted to produce quality content. We won’t hold it against you, though, if we’re ever lucky enough that you want to work with us ;-)” (Yes, I would have smiled and winked at the end.)

You can find a lot more detail about the day in the following accounts:

• Jeff Jarvis’s post mortem
• Scott Anderson’s (of the Chicago Tribune) version
• NPR’s take (audio)

Thanks again to Jeff and David for putting this fantastic event together – and for highlighting MixedInk as an innovative tool in the new media arsenal.

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the second annual YearlyKos Convention in Chicago, where over 1500 members of the “progressive netroots” – a term that encompasses Democratic bloggers and internet activists – gathered to celebrate their successes and discuss what comes next. The conference provided the opportunity to meet some of the leading voices in the left half of the blogosphere as well as a chance to see some fantastic panels and presentations on what we can look forward to, technologically speaking, in the campaigns of the future.

As we hoped, it also turned out to be a great way to introduce MixedInk within the political sphere. We believe our platform could have a major impact on politics; the people I spoke with seemed equally excited. Looking back a year from now, I think we’ll find that the seeds for several pivotal partnerships were planted in Chicago.

Not surprisingly, one of the coolest moments of the conference was the candidate forum, where 7 of the 8 candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination took questions from moderators and the audience on domestic policy, foreign affairs and general personal and political philosophy. The fact that this forum attracted such a high profile group of leaders speaks to the power that the progressive netroots have accumulated.

Regardless of one’s political outlook, a presidential primary debate like this is guaranteed to be compelling theater; there’s a 50% chance (or greater, if you believe current polls) that you’re watching the next US president. But this was no ordinary presidential debate.

The moderator, Matt Bai of The New York Times Magazine, opened by saying, “We do normally ask that applause and reactions be kept till the end. We’re making no such request today [laughter]. I fear it’s too late, but I’m gonna ask you to remember that we are on a tight timeline and trying to get along with the program, and to the extent that you could limit the interruptions we would appreciate it…” This narrow opening was all the crowd needed.

Bai would soon regret having given the crowd free reign, and said as much joke that he was losing control [updated based on Matt's comment - see below]. This group refused to play the role of the passive audience. People acted pretty much the same as they might while watching an event like this on TV in the comfort of their homes – only now, the candidates could actually see and hear them.

Applause, laughter, jeering, hissing and booing all flowed freely. Senator Edwards, a crowd favorite, was constantly interrupted by applause, though he didn’t seem to mind. At one point, when facing a tough question, Senator Clinton made a stalling remark as she tried to come up with the right to say, and the crowd laughed at her outright! It was the sort of the remark a candidate might slide by with in a typical debate without someone to call it out, but this crowd wouldn’t tolerate even a hint of evasion. And Senator Dodd was booed loudly when he tried to explain his vote for Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. The crowd even broke into song at one point – it was announced that Senator Obama was celebrating his birthday, so the audience serenaded him with a poorly coordinated (though very affectionate) rendition of Happy Birthday.

At first, all of this struck me as highly undignified. It was like a vaudeville show instead of a presidential debate – I half expected people to start throwing rotten tomatoes! Did the audience want our candidates to be treated like entertainers? We Americans are used to debates where candidates speak in paragraphs comprised of neat little sound bites memorized in advance, moderators tightly control the conversation, and audiences are powerless to interfere. Traditionally, they are opportunities for the candidates to tell us their positions on the issues and to compare and contrast their views with each other, without any interference from voters.

Gradually, I began to see the merits of this more participatory format, as I realized it was an offline translation of the blogosphere’s core principles. This crowd of online activists rejects the model of candidate as untouchable, deity-like avatar and instead treats its candidates as real people. If there’s no TV screen between us, why must we continue to act like we are separated from them by sound-proof, one-way glass?

The existence of the political blogosphere itself is premised on the notion that citizens should have a right to express opinions that matter – beyond merely voting once every four years. Flowing from this, the crowd seemed to stake the claim that we have the right to interact with our politicians through direct conversation, whereby they observe our reactions and respond in real-time – conventional notions of debate etiquette be damned. The netroots believes we can learn more about who a candidate is in this type of interactive format than from the canned speechifying that is a conventional debate.

This re-imagining of the debate structure is part of a seismic shift in our politics (and our media, and our consumption patterns, and…) toward a technology-enabled, two-way exchange of perspectives. We envision MixedInk as another tool in citizens’ arsenal – along with participatory debates like this one, blogs, YouTube videos, and a range of other platforms – to make their voices heard and to ensure their voices matter.

You can find video from the event, along with plenty of other YearlyKos footage, here.

An edited version of this post was published as a diary on Daily Kos

UPDATED: Matt Bai was kind enough to respond with an email. He gave me permission to republish what he wrote:

Hey David, thanks for the kind words and for sending me the link. I love what you wrote. I take strong exception to only one thing, which is your assertion that I regretted my announcement to the crowd and said as much. Couldn’t be less true. I was a big proponent of letting the crowd express itself, and I thought (and still think), as you do, that it was one of the best things about the forum. I completely agree with you–this is exactly the kind of wall the Internet helps us break down, and while some of my colleagues in the media found it “creepy” (I think that’s what Ana Marie Cox quoted someone as saying), I thought it was really fun and a lot more interactive. It also made me feel more at ease on stage. I did joke that I was losing control at one point, but I wouldn’t have changed a thing.

Thanks for writing.

In addition to being a terrific writer, Matt Bai is part of a small minority of journalists that understands the transformation that’s taking place. It’s no wonder he was selected to moderate the YearlyKos forum as a representative of the mainstream media.

MixedInk is founded on the premise that citizens/consumers/members/employees want to tell the people in charge, and other members of their group, what they think. That’s why people vote, blog, comment, write letters to the editor, sign petitions, rate products, respond to surveys, etc.

And politicians and executives want to hear from us - or at least, they make a big show of saying so. The thing is, sometimes it seems like they want credit for giving us a voice without actually allowing us to be the final arbiters of what we can express.

On the political side, the next Democratic presidential debate on CNN is taking the innovative step of letting voters submit their questions to the candidates by uploading a video to YouTube. This seems like a move toward a more democratic primary process, and it certainly is an improvement on just having Brian Williams or Tim Russert (or their staffs) write the questions.

The problem is that ratings and comments have been disabled on the site where you view questions that have been submitted. So, we (the voters) can’t register our support for questions or tell how popular a question is. CNN gets to choose which questions to ask from among thousands, and they don’t have to choose the ones we like best. They’ll be able to find questions they would have asked anyway, more or less, only the questions will come out of the voters’ mouths.

On the corporate side, a recent survey found that 57% of senior marketers found user-generated media to be “very” or “somewhat” important - a sign that things are headed in the right direction. Yet only 22% said they were “very willing” to give their consumers more control. The pollster explained, “Despite the increased awareness of the power of consumers in a digital age on brands and sales, marketing executives are reluctant to loosen their grip on marketing content, unwilling to give too much control to these empowered consumers.” General Motors’ first foray into consumer-created advertising is a great example of what can go wrong for marketers.

But the answer is not for companies to institute top-down solutions. The marketing department should not simply choose which ads they think are best and which are inappropriate - as XLNTads, MasterCard and others would have marketers do. Instead, they could use better aggregation and voting mechanisms, limit participation to trusted contributors, disallow certain words, and/or enable trusted users to flag inappropriate material. And they need to be transparent about how any final content is selected.

We have no doubt that citizens and consumers will ultimately come out on top, as the more transparent, democratic efforts to collect content from users will attract more, higher quality contributions. But in the short term, in the absence of standards for soliciting bottom-up content, corporate and political marketers will do everything they can to create the illusion of incorporating our input.

A high school teacher named David Colarusso has created a new site called Community Counts, which provides the functionality missing from YouTube off-site, allowing viewers to vote on the debate question videos submitted via YouTube. The site has benefited from James Kotecki’s (and others’) promotional support and has already collected thousands of votes.  As bottom-up, innovative side-steps like this one gain increasing traffic and attention, hopefully corporate, media and political organizations will begin to understand that we won’t settle for partial control of our collective voice.

We have to keep the pressure on them, with efforts like Community Counts, to institute truly democratic systems for their users to express themselves. If they want to reap the benefits of our free labor and ideas and our commitment to their products and policies, they have to earn it.

You guessed it - that’s where MixedInk fits in