Two efforts to turn media on its head have launched these past couple weeks that deserve more mention: The Huffington Post will feature an interesting mix of celebrities and commentators while News & Observer publishing (a Knight Ridder company publishing four newspapers in the North Carolina Triangle area) launches a Philly Future like effort allowing the community to take part in reporting what’s important to them.

I…err… think that’s the case. Anyway – they are definitely first among this region’s papers. Check out PhillyFeed. The first podcast is kinda like NPR… but with attytood.

Speaking of Attytood, the podcast and Will Bunch’s blog make the Daily News among the most forward thinking, risk taking newspapers online in the region and beyond.

A growing number of efforts are joining Philly Future in attempting to provide tools their local community can use to communicate, share news, and connect.

Backfence.com‘s launch, in particular, has raised a stir from folks in various corners of the web.

Dan Gillmor: Backfence Launches

A VC: Hyperlocal – Backfence vs 101

Jay Rosen: More on the Migration: Developments and Sightings

Steve Outing: Citizen-Journalism Site Backfence Debuts

An editted repost of a comment I left at “A VC”:

I feel Roland Tanglao’s efforts at Bryght are very important: they show just how far barriers have gone down and infrastructures have gone up that enable anyone with little technical know how, or money, to start a site these capabilities.

I run Philly Future (http://www.phillyfuture.org) on a related toolset (CivicSpace) to what Bryght provides – and I have ran it with a small team of volunteers for a very, very long time (various incarnations since 1999 – community aggregator since January 2004 – open participation since mid 2004).

We feature the headlines of over a 100 regional blogs and feeds, and encourage direct, original works to be published to the site – it’s an effort to provide service to our community much like that of the other great sites mentioned here. Very similar to the 101s (which I love as Roch Smith – their founder – knows), but with a slightly different model: While we provide a river of news aggregator – the focus for us is editorializing our regional web – their focus is a pure representation of the community via it’s river of news.

It’s great to see so many other efforts exploring this space now. It recalls the Sidewalk/Digital Cities/RealCities portals larger companies pursued a few years back. The crucial difference is the flow reversal: It’s the communities themselves who are being empowered to determine what is the news and become collective owners of these sites.

Compliments to NowPublic as well – I think they are helping explore and build the infrastructure for distributed journalism.

Check it out here. Details here.

Engadget interviews Bill Gates and asks some revealing questions: see part 1 and part 2.

Om Malik: RSS, Tiger Safari and the Bandwidth Bottleneck.

In a related note – I need to get a Mac!