Blogging is big in Iran. We already knew that from Technorati statistics on the prevalence of Farsi language blogs on the Web. But now comes a fascinating insight into what all those bloggers are blogging about.

This is what the Iranian blogosphere looks like, according to John Kelly - a Columbia University academic who isn’t joking when he tells audiences he thinks there isn’t a human phenomenon that can’t be reduced to a series of coloured dots.

Each dot represents a blog , and the bigger the dot the greater the number of links being made to that blog.

I’m surprised by the size of the conservative politics blogosphere and of the neighbouring religious blogosphere, which are jointly around the same size as the secular and reformist blogospheres.

Most surprising, however, is the equally large poetry blogosphere in the upper left hand quadrant.

John previewed this recently published research at the Media:Republic gathering in Los Angeles last month. And it was the size of the poetry blogosphere that got participants talking — I think most of the American and British participants felt slightly awed that Iranians were using the Web to create art on such a scale.

Some suggested that poetry had a long track record of morphing into radical politics. Someone else said they knew of U.S. groups looking at funding Iranian poetry bloggers as agents of change. At the time this sounded a bit fanciful to me. But thinking about it, history is littered with poets getting their hands dirty in politics, and John Kelly’s image makes the proximity of poetry and political reform blogospheres extremely clear.

I was invited to a gathering of activists, academics and media practitioners by the Berkman Centre’s Media:Republic program in LA last weekend. Exhilarating to be in such exalted company but depressing to find them so anxious about the future of political engagement and so negative about big Media’s future.

The context of the meeting was to establish what we don’t understand about the emerging media landscape in order to inform the direction of future research programmes.

So, in the spirit of Donald Rumsfeld, what do we know that we don’t know?

How distributed can the production of meaning be?
An academic question from John Zittrain of Berkman but very much with real world concerns in mind. He’s worried about where the atomisation of media consumption and production will take society. In an elitist world, one in which communication channels (including media) are controlled by the few, then it is relatively easy to see how the politics of consensus and compromise can be pursued. But many felt that the new social technologies were creating new silos, reducing the quality of public discourse, accelerating disengagement from politics and, possibly, creatng the conditions for extremist politics.

How can we get the public to eat their broccoli?
Traditionally, nearly all media has followed a public service remit to some degree and mixed content with public policy relevance with the really popular stuff. So you get a smattering of Darfur in a diet of domestic news, celebrity and sports. But that only works when publishers control the medium.

I know I wasn’t the only one to squirm as David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal Cluetrain Manifesto, described how increasingly anachronistic the Big Media model of editors deciding what it was appropriate for readers to read was beginning to seem. What seemed to worry this group more than anything else was that if consumers control their ‘DailyMe’ — a personalised news service — then how will the public service stuff get through?

Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation gave some great context when he said, “More and more people are sharing experiences. That means there are fewer shared experiences. Journalism has prospered for centuries because it created shared experiences that I will call community.” He thought that journalists would prosper if they used new social technology to rebuild shared experiences.

What is the future for journalists?

The most interesting exchange I heard came in a session on the nature of journalism in 2013, in which Global Voices’ Solana Larson suggested that the BBC’s model of parachuting in white men to cover the rest of the world was looking increasingly anachronistic . She predicted that by 2013 that there would be no foreign correspondents in the sense of outsiders coming to make sense of a foreign country.

Richard Sambrook, Global Head of BBC News , rather disarmingly agreed, saying the future would be all about ‘authenticity’ — a notion that seemed to underpin much of the event’s discussions but not a word that I ever heard repeated.

At the same time there was a feeling that citizen media hadn’t really delivered on its promise of a couple of years ago. Ethan Zuckerman , a Berkman fellow and co-founder of Global Voices, who probably knows more about this than anyone else, summarized the situation as one in which bloggers took their cue from mainstream media and added that this was a global phenomenom not just true of the States.

Despite pessimism about Big Media’s future and the pefrormance of Citizen Media, a straw poll of those present showed near unanimity in the view that the future was bright for journalism. So how do you square this circle? There wasn’t a huge amount of discussion but the notion of ‘networked journalism’ with professionals working closely with amateurs and experts was one that was mentioned. And when someone said that the most interesting presentations of the meeting — BBC, Global Voices and ProPublica — were all from non-profit organisations, there was much sage nodding.

Is there a conflict between personalised online experiences and privacy?

Manuel Castells of the University of Southern California gave a much discussed speech in which he questioned whether our freedom was being commoditised in the sense that by giving service providers details of ourselves we get more personalised and therefore more useful services but we give up a certain amount of privacy.

Obviously, Facebook has brought these concerns to the fore. But there are myriad ways in which personal data is being captured and used (and sold). How long would it be before just using the phone would mean being subjected to a personalised 30 second advert, asked one speaker? (It’s already happening with one UK mobile phone carrier apparently.)

Public sector bias?

At times the lofty academic analysis left me feeling bamboozled but I found comfort in social media in the form of other participants’ Twitter and chatroom messages as they swapped virtual notes on what they liked and what confused them.

And now, several days later and after reviewing some of the more thoughtful blogs compiled by Media:Republic, I’m struck by the analysis of two fellow London-based attendees who both detected a defeatist attitude amongst the U.S. participants about the ability for commercial media to compete in this new world.

Neil McIntosh of the Guardian looked at the Los Angeles Times and wondered whether its failure to use the kind of presentational tricks used by European media to make news more palatable might be one explanation for its problems. Charlie Beckett of the thinktank Polis thinks an era of super-competition requires a smarter approach from mainstream media and advocates ‘networked journalism’ — the blending of professionals and amateurs/experts — to herald a more participatory form of journalism.

I like my compatriots’ optimism. I still worry that what I think is ‘good’ will turn out to be uneconomic in this new world.

The most memorable line from last week’s WeMedia conference in Miami came from Reverend Lennox Yearwood of the Hip Hop Caucus who works with ‘digital natives’ — young people who have grown up with wikipedia and YouTube and whose changing media consumption was at the root of all that was discussed.

WeMedia is the kind of event where bloggers, academics, social activists, technologists and the occasional VC poke mild fun at the slow-moving ’suits’ from old media, and where the ’suits’ complain that the newcomers don’t understand the realities of the media business while desperately working out whether they’re missing any tricks.

Two years ago in London the vibe was all about how mainstream media needed to get up to speed with blogging. And last year, despite the best efforts of the organisers, the meeting was peppered with bloggers versus journalists spats. But this year it did seem that, finally, both sides had decided it was time to establish how best to work together.

The substance of many of the exchanges was that media companies let their hierarchy and brand consciousness stop them from being bold enough to use social media effectively while activist groups can’t quite believe their luck that all these free tools have suddenly been given to them; tools which make it much easier for them to get things done without needing Big Media’s help.

There was much talk of Ushahidi.com — the remarkable Kenyan site collating post-election conflict and peace-making reports and creating a google maps mashup. And The Hub — the social media site run by human rights group Witness which brings together filmed reports of human rights abuses around the world — offered a model of how YouTube-style content and facebook-style groups might be harnessed for a specific purpose.

Michael Smolens, CEO of Dotsub, demonstrated how his group is attracting volunteers to caption films and videos in multiple languages. Hitherto, he says, Hollywood has assumed that the costs of local language production would be prohibitive and has largely limited itself to English. But now technology offers the potential to extend all video to all languages. The best example to date is of an Indian NGO subtitling training material to help unemployed women to become ‘mothers’ for orphans.

But there was at least one Big Media firm with a good story to tell and one which seemed to draw together all the threads of the conference. Jennifer Carroll, VP of New Media Content at Gannet summed up the challenge facing groups like hers as, “how do you get to the heart and soul of a community?” and highlighted the group’s user-generated site indymoms.com as one possible answer. This is a site in which user-generated content, community activism and commercial advertising all meet head on under the auspices of a major media group.

The tragic events at Virginia Tech earlier this week will take their own place in U.S. history. Alongside the Asian Tusnami and London’s 7/7 bombings, the reporting of them may also come to be seen as a defining moment in participatory or citizen journalism. I was struck by a number of issues newsrooms had to confront.

Does mainstream media’s promotion of citizen journalism encourage risk-taking?
The iconic video from Jamal Albarghouti — was submitted to CNNs i-reports citizen journalism project. Widely lauded, it nevertheless led observers including lhe Philadelphia Daily News’ Ellen Gray to ask whether the lure of recognition by traditional media is prompting citizens to take unnecessary risks.

Is there a risk of repeating unfounded rumours found on the social web?
Facebook the social networking site which focuses on students was the forum for many tributes to those killed. And friends struggling to make contact via phone were able to check whether students were OK via their Facebook pages. But social networking sites like Facebook were used by bloggers attempting to establish the identity of the killer and a Virginia Tech student whose online profile in LiveJournal graphically illustrated his penchant for guns, found himself the target of much abuse. Wired made the observation that mainstream media had not named the accused but this changed when he later turned to traditional media to clear his name.

Does the advent of social media render censoring of material on the grounds of taste irrelevant?
NBC agonised over screening parts of the killer’s ‘multimedia manifesto’ and attracted criticism. But seasoned bloggers like Dave Winer point out the tendency for such material to end up on the Web eventually anyway. Winer advocates allowing citizens to make up their own minds whether to watch or not.

How should journalists handle requests to use material from social media?
On photo-sharing site Flickr a Virginia Tech Shooting pool was set up attracting a number of media enquiries about access to the images. If, as in this case, media requests are made via comments in discussions or blogs, the interested reader can see the newsgathering process in the raw. Journalists leave highly visible footprints and are going to have to learn to step lightly.

Are blogs and social networking sites ‘fair game’ for journalists looking for quotes?
The BBCs Robin Harman, whose personal blog is widely followed by journalists, was one of the first to start compiling eyewitness accounts from blog entries. Some of those he sampled found themselves being contacted directly by journalists for interviews, and some found that objectionable. Robin admits to being shaken by the experience and advocates greater sensitivity among journalists to what should be considered private at such times.

Do journalists have the skills to harness social media?
Amid the profusion of content sources and the huge volume of comment, Shane Richmond, community editor for the U.K.s Daily Telegraph, likened seeking original sources to looking for a needle in a haystack and references Paul Bradshaw’s call for journalists to become proficient in Technorati, YouTube and their like.

I’m not sure about the answers, I’m certain the questions aren’t going away. What do you think?
Mark Jones is Reuters Global Community Editor

Photo credit: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton

When we launched our ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (GBU) feedback pages we wanted to come clean about the mistakes you spotted (we know we’re not perfect) and, in the interests of balance, also share some of the plaudits that came our way (we’re only human).

lt launched in the spring of 1997 as an attachment sent to editorial managers, but quickly spread to journalists, sales people, and others who asked to be on the mailing list. It later became a weekly fixture on the internal website for journalists, and then the Daily Briefing — the internal site for all Reuters staff. Two years ago, the bold and controversial decision was made to actually let the PUBLIC see it, and we unveiled it on reuters.com.

Over the years, many of our most controversial incidents, including some in which we had to withdraw stories, were first uncovered by reader feedback. It is also fair to say that while most reader feedback dwells on the negative, perhaps because that’s just human nature, some comments have been very complimentary. This is especially true of comments on our photos.

Since we first launched GBU on the open Web, the world has changed. There’s been an explosion in blogging and readers have been looking for greater transparency and ways to have their say on matters of fact, tone and accuracy in news content.

That’s why we’re turning The Good, the Bad and the Ugly into a blog. It will still cover the same ground. But rather than appear once a week it will be updated as soon and often as possible by editor Robert Basler.

And, because we do want to encourage readers to join the conversation,the blog means we’ll not always have the last word — readers will be able to comment on the comments from Bob and our team of specialist editors and correspondents. No reader comments will go directly onto the blog; all will be moderated by reuters.com editors.

If things turn really ugly, we’ll hand over to the ‘Reuters Editors’ blog — where our most senior news executives deal with editorial policy issues (among other things).

I hope you like the changes and carry on letting us know what you like and what you don’t.

Mark Jones is Reuters Global Community Editor