MetaFilter has just become energised about a new project: MetaFilter Online Journalism (aka MoJo). You can see the origin of this idea in this thread. It is basically being put forward as some kind of website in which members of the public will be able to perform collaborative and investigative journalism, something which has been tried often, with varying degrees of unsuccessfulness.
My personal thoughts on the matter are that if MoJo can be designed well, it could really signal a change in how the media works. Of course, designing it well will be damned difficult. However, I’d give the MetaFilter crew (backed by Rusty of K5 fame) as good a chance as anyone else. Here’s a comment about parallels to software development and trust matrices I made in the thread. I also set up a FreeFilter site for discussion of MoJo.
mssv 