"We Media, How audiences are shaping the future of news and information" written by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis is a very comprehensive paper on the evolving participatory new media ecosystem. At all levels it provides orientation or in-depth analysis for bloggers, digital communities of practice or (citizen) journalists. There is a lot about building trust and credibility as the new currency of new media. It is a long, but very readable piece of work.

"Media futurists have predicted that by 2021, 'citizens will produce 50 percent of the news peer-to-peer.' Mainstream news media , however, have yet to meaningfully adopt or experiment with these new forms."

The U.S. Media Center has the vision "to be the global leader in providing intelligence and insight into the future role and use of media and enabling technology."

Technorati announced a new Blog Finder. This directory of blogs is organised by subjects, as " bottom-up, user-generated tags". As usual they are presented in "... order of authority, which means highly-linked blogs appear first." The blogosphere is discussing it here.

A very informative annotated comparison of social bookmarks was created by Brian Benzinger. Check it out! Benzinger has been involved in Web creations since age 11, he is now 18.

"CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading." This collaborative bookmarking service is multi-lingual and you can surf the many interesting tags easily. The tags on learning and collaboration yielded interesting papers.

Using the free social bookmarking service del.icio.us you can search by tags or search your account. The tags are now visualised by Vox delicii. Michael Migurski analysis the growth and decay of the 'mind-shares' represented by colours. The coloured stripes represent in almost real time the most popular sites by the users.The intro is worth a read for comprehension.You can also navigate via "Gainers", "Losers" and "Top Names". (Unfortunate titles in the ranking universe!) 'Graphing the mindshare of information' is seen to be a bottom-up activity. Here  you can see what delicious users are saying about the tool.

There is more on CollaborativeRank by the University of New South Wales in Sydney. "Del.icio.us users who bookmark helpful/timely URLs (as evidenced by others subsequently bookmarking those URLs) will be rewarded with higher CollaborativeRank, which means that their tagging will have greater influence on this search engine's rankings." There is a list of the 500 active 'Del.icio.us domain experts'. strong current made it to 339 (4.8.) but is down to a slack 16867 today. (Via Micro Persuasion)