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I’ve never let the fact that I only squeaked through by the skin of my teeth in my high school and college physics classes ever prevent me from being a huge fan of that area of study. As anyone who has even a passing fancy of physics knows, the Large Hadron Collider was turned on just a bit ago, and while the Earth has yet to implode, we might not be out of the woods yet.

The device, know as the LHC by folks in the know, is the world’s largest particle accelerator complex and it’s designed to collide opposing beams of protons. All the major reports I’ve read say something to the effect of “the consensus around physics circles is that we’re going to be ok,” but where things start getting scary is when you dig down and find stuff like Wikipedia article on the “Safety of the Large Hadron Collider“: 

“A major concern amongst CERN opponents is that any micro black holes produced by the LHC particle collisions […] According to the standard calculations are harmless because they would quickly decay by Hawking radiation [… but] Otto Rössler believes that micro black holes created in the LHC could grow exponentially.”

You read too far into it, and you start to get the feeling your congressman gets when he hears about child predators on MySpace: fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Thankfully, we have Twitter, the first place to turn in any disaster. It’s not really a fear that the world’s going to end - we all know it will at some point. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t much rather know when I need to bend over and kiss my ass goodbye than have a black hole walk up, tap me on the shoulder, and quietly announce that my planet has been scheduled for demolition to clear a path for a galactic byway.

Monitoring Twitter for the following hashtags and searches produce more up to the second coverage than you can shake a stick at: LHC, #lhc, CERN, #doomsday, and The Large Hadron (note: “the Large Hardon” will produce significantly different results). 

Similarly, searching FriendFeed will give you many of the same results with the added color commentary the service is known for.

Update: I’m seeing a number of Tweets that saying that the test loops have been completed successfully, and based on conversations I’ve had with Stan in the last few minutes, Europe still appears to exist. We may live through this thing.

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YouTube has announced a contest for aspiring documentarians and journalists to take home $10,000 for creating a series of journalistic pieces to go towards beefing up their “reporter” content selection. This isn’t the first thing they’ve done to emphasize their efforts to grow this sector of the service. A quick catalog of the recent posts to the YouTube company blog shows that almost exactly half of the last 20 posts concern something to do with citizen journalism on YouTube.

They’re definitely making a valiant effort to appear pro-journalism and pro-citizen reporting. Everyone knows this is something that’s desperately needed for the site. The above chart is from an incredibly even-handed article from PCMech entitled “Its Official, YouTube Sucks,” and shows the general distribution of content types by category on the sharing site. The question remains, though: are their journalism programs and contests good first steps or are they completely misguided window dressing?

I’ve got a feeling it’s the latter, and I sat down to analyze this, one of the more serious moves to encourage journalism on the site, to gain some insight as to what they’re thinking. They announced it earlier Tuesday on the YouTube blog:

Today, in partnership with the Pulitzer Center, YouTube presents Project: Report(www.youtube.com/projectreport), a journalism contest (made possible by Sony VAIO and Intel) for non-professional, aspiring journalists to tell stories that might not otherwise be covered by traditional media.

Winners of each round will receive technology prizes from Sony VAIO and Intel, and the grand prize winner will be granted a $10,000 journalism fellowship with the Pulitzer Center to report on a story outside of their home country. 

So, it’s time to pick up that video camera, take on this assignment, and start reporting your stories to the world. 

Yours,

Olivia M.

YouTube News & Politics

Aside from what can charitably be described as YouTube’s shaky history with journalist types who try to use the system, there is one other important factor that indicates to me that this is a half-hearted effort (or at least one that’s doomed before it starts).

It occurs to me that of all the players on the field in the world of Internet video, if any single company is in a position to encourage and make a success of anything journalistic (let alone citizen reporting), it’s YouTube.  There’s a wide variety of endeavors out there, many of which we’ve covered here at Mashable, that are doing everything from compensating reporters by encouraging donations targeted towards certain types of reporting to folks making a full-on commercial endeavor out of bringing you the news like Revision3.

The one thing all these companies have in common is that they’re completely venture capital-backed. Each one of them is taking extremely risky gambles, all betting that their business model is going to win out in the end.

Google is the one player in the field that has the backing to really make a serious effort in this regard. A contest where the prizes are some Sony schwag and one grand prize of $10k earmarked for another documentary isn’t exactly the carrot needed to get the creative juices flowing by those that would be regular producers of quality content.  At the end of the contest you’re going to have one moderately excited winner and a whole bunch of disenfranchised losers.

Why doesn’t Google add another 0 to the grand prize money pot, and announce reward quality serial news producers with smaller payments capable of sustaining the very draining lifestyle of news content production? It isn’t as if Google doesn’t have a machine in their basement that almost literally prints cash - they’re hands down the largest and most watched company on the Internet that has a hand in video distribution.

The problem of a lack of monetizable content keeps rearing it’s ugly head when it comes to actually recouping some of that monstrous investment Google made in YouTube. These sorts of contests are designed to encourage quality producers to stay around the site, but may indeed have quite the opposite effect.

—Related Articles at Mashable - All That’s New on the Web:CNN to Launch Citizen Journalism Portal iReportABC News Betters Citizen Journalism ToolsBECOME FAMOUS: Top 10 Blog AwardsThe Flaws and Strengths of Citizen Journalism (video)YouTube: New Reporter Channels Encourage Citizen JournalismNowPublic Rebirth: Weighted Crowdsourcing, Lifestream Updates, and MoreBackfence Closes, Citizen Journalism a Failure

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008 at 5:31 am and is filed under youtube, News, google, contest, Web apps, Opinion, citizen journalism, Film, Political, San Francisco-San Jose, pulitzer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.