Trend: User-Created Content Update

This Week In User Co-Creation:


Profile of NECN via RocketBoom
http://www.rocketboom.com/vlog/archives/2006/01/rb_06_jan_24.html

http://www.boston.com/news/necn/
Another Viewer-Created News Channel, like Current, this one with a LOCAL PERSPECTIVE (BOSTON/NEW ENGLAND). Note: the recent acquisition by Boston Globe (which ladders up to NY Times Company -interesting to see how NYT incorporates this experiemental free creation into the main papers)

and

SMITH Magazine
The hyperbolically-titled "bloggers revolution" has changed publishing. Virtually free to publish, the internet phenomenon has created digital publishing, a medium that is simultaneously wholly democratic yet often schizophrenic. Now there's a mag that's unabashedly harnessing the infinite pool of online writing talent into one monthly publication.

SMITH (http://smithmag.us/) Magazine, launched earlier this month, seems to operate on the age-old adage that "everyone has a story to tell." While once the storyteller had to wait for the reporter to come a-knocking, now he or she can be the interviewer and interviewee.
Features, anecdotes, free-form stories, SMITH Magazine sits on the pulse of today's cultural narrative. Presently a "webzine," its publishers promise to make the leap to print soon; catapulting from the precarious ether of the "blogosphere," and out into the so-called "respectable" realm of printed publishing.
As Scoop Nisker always says: "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."
SMITH Magazine: Read this month's copy, write next month's issue.

via CoolHunting.com

and

Beastie Boys' Documentary "Awesome, I Fuckin' Shot That"
(http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/movies/19awes.html?8dpc)
via NY Times

excerpt: As the Beastie Boys set out to commemorate a concert at Madison Square Garden, the hip-hop group had a different idea. Why not smash the model? They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory."