The site Gather has announced a contest for two $1000 scholarships to two full-time journalism students, one undergraduate student and one graduate student whose articles best represent citizen journalism.

This is the kind of thing there needs to be lots more of to establish a culture where people realize that they can do real reporting and distribute it on the Net.

Arianna Huffington, whose name will help distribute news of the contest, shall be the judge. I wonder what it is beyond her name though. While she is a leading pundit and the face of a massively popular news links/superblog site, I haven't seen much in the way of citizen journalism from her quarters.

I can think of three other online journalism figures who are better equiped to judge: Dan Gillmor, who wrote the book on Citizen Journalism -- "We the Media" -- or two of the real-time living pioneers of citizen journalism: John Byrne of Raw Story, or Josh Marshall of his TPM mini empire.

The blog Goddess Musings has the dish on a Democratic establishment/netroots squabble emerging for the congressional race in Illinois' 6th district. Apparently, the Democrats' man in charge of trying to get a House majority has picked a female veteran of the Iraq war who lost both her legs in Tammy Duckworth for the seat (yet another Fighting Dem -- check out the DailyKos/Air America features on this). There's already a very successful netroots Democratic challenger named Christine Cegelis who has been very active in getting her candidacy together (Michael in Chicago has written numerous posts about Cegelis recently the blog MyDD) that Emanuel appears to have overlooked. This is Hackett/Brown all over again, sort of.

Kos has a posting up about the nefarious tricks that pro-GOP bloggers in Virginia appear to be making to cloud the waters about Gov. Mark Warner's support of Tim Kaine, which the media outlets go on to cover:

From the National Journal Hotline:

When we saw this blog post asserting that VA Gov. Mark Warner was finished campaigning for candidate Tim Kaine, we did not make too much of it. After all Warner just on the campaign trail with Kainein NoVA on Monday and the two are slated to join forces again tomorrow in SW VA. But when some GOP officials started circulating the post to the media, we thought we'd check it out.

"Nothing could be further from the truth," says Warner political adviser Mame Reiley. She said that Warner is with Kaine "lock, stock and barrel" and that Warner had actually recently asked his staff to "carve out some more time" on his schedule so that he can spend more time with his preferred successor.

It's one of those too-good-to-be-true stories about the promise of the Net for free speech and democracy in the Middle East, but this article from the LA Times, starting with a blogger who criticized the Syrian regime is worth a read-through:

Nour fought the crackdown. When his website was blocked, he copied his daily bulletin and e-mailed it to every reader registered on his site. He sat down at his computer to do the same thing the next day, only to discover that his e-mail address had been blocked.

Undaunted, Abdel Nour gave himself a fresh address, and the bulletin went whizzing off. Come the next day, that address, too, had been disabled. So he created another.

The cyber-jousting went on, day after day, for a month and a half. At last, the security services gave up. "Finally," Abdel Nour said, "they surrendered because they realized they can't control it."

The staff at MoveOn could have chosen to take the traditional route and used the collective brainpower of its notoriously small staff to come up with ideas for its anti-Rove campaign. Instead it followed the path of Democracy for America's (hat tip to Bob Brigham at Swing State Project):

Finally, after a week and 17,740 entries from MoveOn members we have a winner in the Fire Karl Rove Slogan Contest. And the winner is...

"Loose Lips Deserve Pink Slips. Fire Karl Rove."

Now that we have the slogan we need to get it out there. We've designed a downloadable poster from the winning slogan. You can print it easily on a desktop printer and it's perfect to place in your window, hang on your refrigerator, and tack on a bulletin board at home, work or in your community, in a gym locker or anywhere else that makes sense. Take a minute right now to click on the link below to download and print the poster (you'll need Adobe Acrobat Reader).

There's a lot to recommend the savvy of the recently-launched Grow Ohio site; at its heart, it's the incipient statewide network for online Democratic activism at the grassroots level. It's also likely the House Rep. Sherrod Brown who is backing this project will use Grow Ohio for his 2006 Senate campaign against GOP incumbent Mike DeWine, but it blazes trails in a number of directions. Grow Ohio has a group blog format divided into Ohio's five distinctive regions that lets anyone post their entries on regional news -- and later will allow for group blogging in all 88 of Ohio's counties. It also collects the user membership information into a database, and has a front-page concept that fuses local politics with statewide concerns. Not only this, but the site is developed to soon offer all sorts of directory contacts and links to activists and local officials, breaking down to the most local levels, including a calendar for locals to list their events.

There's a great story over at the Russian ex-pat English paper, The eXile, about a online controversy that started with LiveJournal's Abuse Team closing down a nationalist Russian's blog. The crime? A photoshop adaption of a Soviet propaganda poster from WWII, rewritten to spout some fairly banal anti-Western sentiment:

The story began sometime in May: a certain user vchk, blogging on the Russian sector of the Livejournal site, uploaded an old Soviet propaganda poster that had a Slavic child against the backdrop of a dead woman and a burning village. The inscription was supposed to read "Daddy, kill a German!" But vchk -- or whoever messed with the original -- wrote it the cute way: Kill a NATO soldier.

Then, about a month and a half ago, after an anonymous denunciation to Livejournal's now infamous Abuse Team led to the guy's blog getting closed down, several politically-minded bloggers, including a mathematician named Mikhail Verbitsky (the now-defunct user Tiphareth), organized a virtual flashmob in support of Livejournal's first Russian political victim. Dozens of people started posting "Ubei NATOvtsa" or "Ubei NATO" in solidarity. The provocation -- as some called it -- led to a massacre indeed: according to unofficial estimates, some 20-30 blogs -- including Tiphareth's -- were deleted for indecency, violence, or violations of the Abuse Team's Terms of Service. Some were restored after users deleted the offensive posts, while some, like Tiphareth, proudly refused and took their blogging business elsewhere.

The Democratic Party's new site is up, but the Big Things that might make it cutting edge are apparently still on the way:

"Over the next few months, Democrats.org will add more tools and features -- including event listings of Democratic activities on the national, regional and state level and new event organizing tools."

Still to come. Where have I heard that before? After looking at the site for a while, I can't find much here that's different from the old Democrats.org, except that there's the Democracy Bond -- (read here monthly political subscriptions), but that isn't great web design, just a marketing concept.

While the world waits for the organizing tools to arrive, how about a simple directory of links to the state parties -- they often list their local events with some efficiency -- with a subdirectory listing for contacts to county chairs? It would give at least some appearance that the Democrats are including the web in their 50-state strategy.

There's an interesting entry at EchoDitto by Tim Jones on the politics of web technology providers.

The focus is on Convio, Inc., an Austin-based company that made its name last year providing web services to the Dean campaign.

It began Friday afternoon, when John Aravosis' AMERICAblog linked to a little-noticed Washington Post article revealing that Convio has begun working for The Alliance For Marriage, a major advocate of the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Aravosis contends that in doing so, Convio is violating its own "Right To Be Heard Policy," which promises that Convio "does not work with groups that promote prejudice and hate even if they are in full compliance with the law."

John called for a left-wing boycott of Convio. The call was picked up by trendsetters like Daily Kos and Atrios, followed by a host of other political blogs. The chatter promises to only get bigger....

Who's going to end up paying: us or The New York Times?

The Times' announcement that it would start charging for its Op-Ed content and columnists starting this September provoked a response from Kos that he would stop linking to the opinion pages, and also that "in this world of endless punditry, everyone is easily replaceable." Hundreds of other bloggers chimed in with similar thoughts.

Putting a barrier to content by subscription certainly dampens the amount of attention that bloggers give to a news outlet (for a rough example, compare on Technorati that there are more than 300,000 links to the reg-req. New York Times and 50,000 for subscription only Wall Street Journal), especially in an online news environment where so much of the content is free.