Spalpeen

In response to a question on the NUJ New Media email list. 

Google is clearly eyeballing Wikipedia with Knol. (Disclosure: I work for Mahalo.com - many people have cast Google’s Knol as a direct response to Mahalo)

The key questions that journalists and the NUJ as a whole should be asking here is: will there be any vetting of content? Will writers be paid?

The NUJ always seems to be at least couple of steps behind with everything related to the web. Jeremy Dear wrote today/yesterday that bloggers should be thinking about joining the union. That might have been a relevant statement two or three years ago. And it’s still irrelevant today considering the farce of a process that is “applying to the NUJ”.

An entirely new form of publishing is rapidly being built through companies like Wikia, Squidoo, Digg, Mahalo, etc. Technically, we have 3,000 part time employees at Mahalo on top of the 50 in house guides - all of them are getting paid to write. The numbers at other sites are even bigger. Mahalo’s numbers could be 10-100x bigger in 4 years.

5 years ago, it was unheard of for people to get paid to blog. 6 months ago, it was unheard of for people to get paid to write search pages.

If the NUJ is really serious about its role of defending workers AND new media, it should be completely on top of every single new development where people get paid to write online. They should be reaching out to people and asking them if they need help with dealing with their employee(s). The application process to the NUJ should be as simple as clicking a link.