Much of the culture of the Net has been built upon a kind of idealism, especially in relation to people offering their time to contribute content at no charge….

I should note that I came across this article today by getting recommended to it by one of the people I “follow” and trust on Twitter: Jason Calacanis. Another example of a type of “social graph search”,and something I will be discussing in some depth in the May issue of The Information Advisor.

On another note regarding whether idealism will and can work on the Net, I am attending a lecture later today by a professor in Media Studies in SUNY Buffalo, Trebor Scholz, who is giving a talk at the New School here in New York City that looks like it will be on a topic I’ve been wondering about recently: the labor implications when Internet users that contribute their time and efforts, at no cost, help firms “co-create” their products on the Net. The title of his talk is

“What the MySpace generation should know about working for free”

His New Assignment.net endeavor is a project that combines the efforts of hundreds of amateurs (bloggers, citizen journalists) spread out over the country, along with some professional guidance and editing as a new form of journalism, with the hopes that tapping into the efforts of so many committed people (over 900 volunteers at the moment) can ultimately produce a better form of reporting than traditional approaches.

The initial endeavor for his project (which is supported by a $100,000 grant from Reuters), was called Assignment Zero, and looked at the promise, benefits, and pitfalls of “crowdsourcing“, with the results to be published in Wired magazine, and has a special emphasis on Citizendium, an attempt to improve on Wikipedia “by adding ‘gentle expert oversight’ and requiring contributors to use their real names.”

The first installment is out today, titled “Wiki Innovators Rethink Openness“and although it is just an initial draft, it looks quite intriguing and is worth following closely, both on the topic itself, as well as this new form of journalism.

If you’re interested in the future of news and journalism, I’d pay close attention to whatever Jay Rosen says as well as the direction of his projects, particularly this one…