Assignment Zero a project by Jay Rosen along with Wired, was the subject of tonight's Social Media Club meeting. I like Social Media Club. Founded by Howard Greenstein, one of the founders of the old WWWAC, and a fixture in the NYC digital scene Howard has assembled some great people to help like Jason Chervokas of @NY fame. The SMC has already spread to several cities and it is really interesting to watch Howard put together the organization.
It's taken me several decades to embrace my inner geek so I really like the title. Going to the meetings is like joining the science or chess club in High School. I never joined one, and in fact I'm not sure if my high school had one, so this is like making up for past wrongs. Since my job is in many ways to bring different forms of social media to iVillage it is also a good place to go to think about new things. Meetings are interesting and at each the subjects seem to always come back to reputation, trust, and the wisdom of crowds.
The Pro/Am connections that Assignment Zero is playing with, are very interesting. It is more structured and accountable than a wiki yet reaching towards open source unlike traditional journalism. The HuffPo announced a political crowd-sourced project with newsassignment.net, the parent site of Assignment Zero, and soon up is Newsvine. I'm going to follow this and perhaps contribute.
