PeerToPeerJournalism

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Also known as P2PJ. A term that really fell out of O'Reilly p2p West 2001.

There are many hopes and fears that PeerToPeerJournalism will create the DailyMe.

See also the [story] on KuroShin that there's a PeerToPeerJournalism list at http://lists.infoanarchy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/p2pj.

CategoryWebLog (kinda)

A lot of people think PeerToPeer means something like a distribution system, ala NapsterDotCom, with redundancy and bandwidth optimization and all sorts of crazy stuff. But I don't. I think defining something by an implementation of it is not the best idea.

I think p2pj really is about the j--Journalism, not the crazy networking stuff the hard hats like building. Journalism is JOUR nal ism. For those rusty in French, It's about recording the "events of the day." Peer to peer means interacting person to person, mouth to ear, hand to hand. As I was telling my friend last night in a bar, that was peer-to-peer journalism. I was telling him what was new--to his face. He didn't read about my life in the newspaper or even my diary. I was just telling him stuff. Beer to beer journalism.

p2pj is gossiping. It's not really the most interesting thing. Use e-mail, InstantMessaging, the phone, or even a bar. What's really the interesting case is when the readers are the writers. Then the readers can broadcast to other readers who can respond by broadcasting to other readers.

Of course, this isn't new either. This is what I'd like to call "a bunch of people at a bar." I guess the trick is to organize it so you can have a whole stadium's worth of people yabbering at each other. However, organizing that is a social problem, not a technical one.

Maybe it's just the new cheapness of the VanityPress. Then maybe p2pj is the editorial selection of what to read, and the PeerToPeer bit is I going to my friend, "here, read this." Or I broadcasting to the other readers that they should read this. But that isn't journalism. That's just Google.

Well, if it has to be journalism, then it would be the readers reporting to each other about the events in the day. I thought that's what diaries were about?

I suppose it would be readers writing about events in the day not directly related to them. So, grassroots journalism.

Zines, in other words.

I think that's the most accurate. It's cool how zines became popular after photocopying became cheap, and now that the Internet drops production costs, zines have taken on a whole other twist. Now (almost) anyone can create a largish site. And they break the ContentCycleOfDeath? (Without content, you don't have any users; without users, you can't afford to make the content) by having the users make the content for you. -- SunirShah

PeerToPeerJournalism

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