Here's a full list of the projects, which include a really impressive array of efforts, including a bunch from outside the United States to use the Internet to spread news and information -- in particular by using mobile phone technology.

Of course the Berners-Lee project will get big buzz; from what his partner Martin Moore of Media Standards Trust told me over lunch, it's focused on creating transparency for news content on the web.

But equally interesting to me, journalistically, is a great project by Dave Cohn, a former Columbia J-School student I've worked with, in which he will try to marry freelance investigative reporters with the small donors who want to support their work financially. I saw him here in Las Vegas at the Interactive Media conference where the awards were announced, and after talking with him about it more, really believe Knight is on the right track supporting smart young journalist/new media thinkers like him and many of the others. Best of luck to all of them!

When we launched our project in the summer of 2007 in the wake of the city's approval of a carbon tax to fight global warming, we began with the premise that experts and interested participants from the community would have enough to say that at least some would want to become "citizen journalists," that is, frequent contributors on the pro-am group weblog we were setting up. After all, the subject of global warming was, er, hot, and Boulder had just become a pioneer in acting locally on a issue of planetary scale.

But while we got enthusiastic feedback, no one seemed to be stepping forward. We came to believe this had mostly to do with the psychological barrier of become a (capital "J") journalist, a daunting prospect for folks with little to no background in reporting and writing skills (something we hoped to address through training).

But last winter, we decided to experiment with a different approach to grease the skids for participants.

We launched a series of online forums that we felt would lower the hurdles for potential contributors, making it much simpler for them to take part. They no longer had to act as "journalists" -- they could simply make online comments in our forums, a pretty tried-and-true community building tool.

Since we also wanted to take advantage of online conversations already taking place, we divided our forums into half-a-dozen different specializations, such as government watchdogging, energy efficiency, business and transportation issues. By cross-seeding existing forums and our own, we thought, residents with expertise in those topics (of which we know there are many in Boulder and environs) could then also take part in just that one forum on our site, without being overwhelmed or distracted by other carbon tax-related issues.

And perhaps in the process, we mused hopefully, some forum participants would become sufficiently engaged that we could entice them into posting to the main group weblog itself, even with some regularity.

Only it didn't work. After months of trying to spark conversation in the forums, not much has happened beyond a few interesting guest posts. Now we think we understand why.

In the interest of sharing lessons learned, here's our thinking. Many of those we've approached in recent months to participate in the forums have been very interested. But at the same time, they've started to make it clearer to us that the barrier is not the technological one of having to post to a forum or blog. Rather, it's a political barrier -- there are just too many interests at stake in a small city to so publicly voice their views.

By expressing themselves on the controversial carbon tax topic in an open forum -- rather than in more private and safer listservs or face-to-face conversations - they expose themselves to controversy, possibly even career harm.

We think this is an important insights for us about our project as a whole, as well as perhaps for other sites that seek to build single-issue conversations in relatively close geographical quarters. Some topics are just more difficult to focus a conversation on than others.

But like the legendary experimenter Thomas Edison - who once said "every wrong attempt discarded is a step forward" -- we continue to plunge ahead.

We welcome your thoughts, suggestions, approaches along the way. Anyone experienced similar challenges? Were you able to overcome them, and how?

Our aim when we launched this project -- with the help of  the Knight Foundation and it's News Challenge grant -- was to see if two long-time environmental reporters could partner with civilians to explore participatory journalism’s potential.

But our initial approach -– create a group weblog where various players could share their views and talk with one another -- hit a wall. It is tough to get community members to think of themselves as citizen journalists with information and ideas to share, especially as authors on a blog.

So, we've created a simpler method of participation – our new online discussion forums. We think these new forums can build on existing online conversations in carbon tax-related topics, and we'll synthesize, highlight and distribute the key points of these public conversations through the blog and other venues.

Without a doubt it is the people in the community who are the most important aspect of this project.  Because there’s an immense storehouse of energy and environmental expertise within the Boulder community, we feel strongly that experts and commentators will rise to the surface and become active participants in the discussion over how well or poorly the city’s carbon tax dollars are being spent.

We won't get a mass-media-sized audience, but we do hope to prompt community engagement. And if we’re successful, we’ll have found a model through which communities can set their own agendas more effectively by giving citizens the tools they need to cover themselves and talk to each other more easily.

What do you think of this approach, or of the balance between blogs and boards generally?

So another partner and I, former ABCNews.com colleague Dorian Benkoil of Teeming Media, have put together a document that we hope provides some of those answers. "Choosing the Right Content Management System for Your Web Site(s)" is our comprehensive  67-page analysis of content management systems, products and solutions, as well as best practices and common pitfalls. The report was written together with digital media consultant Amy Webb of WebbMedia Group. You can click here to download an excerpt.

One thing our white paper does is help you frame the right questions, including those that involve incorporating user-generated content. It starts by just asking: Who is providing your content? Does it come from a user or community group? Do you bring in content feeds from elsewhere, such as blogs? And will you want any of the following: blogs, podcasts, discussion forums? Asking the right questions at the front-end will save a lot of pain in the back-end!

For more information, contact me a BVG Media via email at cms@bgvmedia.com, or visit our site BGVMedia.com and click the "Buy Now" button to purchase the report.

As the blog editor Mark Glaser puts it, "Idea Lab will be a place where you can read about what innovators are doing to help reinvent community news. The dozens of authors at this new group blog -- hosted by PBS.org and funded by the Knight Foundation -- have received grants from Knight in their 21st Century News Challenge, and are going to report first-hand on the status of their projects."

Check out our first entries on Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker-- a blog post about our initial progress with the project, and another about some lessons learned.

Last night’s Paley Center panel on citizen journalism was a great give-and-take between panelists ranging from practicing citJers to former network news chiefs, and an audience of well over 100 and full of questions.

For my part, I made the case that media and news organizations, in order to take full advantage of the power of the Internet, must focus attention on the potential for citizen journalism. There’s proof enough of that in the growing number of citizen media sites – I,Reporter has identified more than 500 of them for the KCNN.org citmedia directory, while Placeblogger.com has ID’d more than 2,100 similar placeblog sites – and the fact they’re of such a remarkably wide variety in terms of who contributes to them, what type of content they post and their geographic scales. Panel moderator Merrill Brown put it this way, “Citizen journalism is not an outpost.”

That emergence is largely due to the dramatically dropping cost of barriers to entry, with cheap electronic newsgathering gear and web publishing tools. But make not mistake, it’s also because the mainstream media simply can’t do all the work the community needs, especially in coverage at a very local level.

Yet I did acknowledge citmedia is no panacea for the news business, somehow relieving us of our responsibility to rethink what we do. That’s partly because content quality issues continue to hamper citizen media, even though, as panelist Debra Galant of Baristanet pointed out, “readers keep you honest.” It’s also partly because many citJ operations have deliberately ignored revenue-seeking models. As a matter of fact, a recent J-Lab report shows more than half of citJ sites it surveyed not only have no working revenue stream, but also don’t plan on developing one. For many of them it’s about building community, not building bank accounts. It’s a civic exercise, not an entrepreneurial one.

In my view, citmedia is better thought of as a complement to, not a replacement for the mainstream news media. Traditional news organizations embracing citmedia can gain a level of engagement with their audiences that’s too often missing in their current approach. It puts them in the conversation, and recognizes media as less a bullhorn, more of a conversation. As former CBS News head honcho Andy Heyward said, “Mainstream media becomes on of a chorus of voices, competing in a world there there’s no more barrier to entry.”

To achieve this blend, though, we do have to shed some of our more petrified notions of what journalism is -- without losing our grip on journalism essentials – and embrace much of what citizen journalism has to offer the future of our profession.

For instance, the notion of distributed journalism suggests that while the traditional work of journalism– sustained, sophisticated, investigative reporting and comprehensive coverage of complex issues – must continue for a fully functioning democracy, there’s a real role for the citizen journalist. That may mean contributing spot news from the scene of a disaster, or it may mean collective research on a widely distributed issue, like Sunlight Foundation has done with some success, or it may be just a super-powered web version of the old news tip phone line.

After all, the question of what is journalism is not a simple one at all. I have my own definition, BBC News has its definition, Fox News has its definition. Which do we choose? Journalism should and must reflect the changing community around it and adapt accordingly. So I’m certainly glad for the Baristanet's and Current TV's of the world to push our limits and help us collectively find our way.

If you're in New York on  Tuesday, Oct. 9, try and come by a panel I'll be sitting in on at The Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Television and Radio). I'll be in some amazing company for the 90-minute program, called "Beyond the Anchor Desk: The Rise of Citizen Journalism," There'll be folks like ex-CBS News President Andy Heyward, long-time TV documentary producer Jon Alpert and new media luminary Merrill Brown, as well as some rising citizen journalists themselves, including Debra Galant of Baristanet, a pair of young producers from Current TV and a poster from NowPublic.com.

The general aim of the panel is to give some historical perspective on what is now known as citizen journalism, but which has been evolving for a number of years. What I hope to contribute is my own sense of what citizen journalism is, and the extent to which its varied forms are spreading. But I'd also like to explore some of the failings of mainstream media that have led to citJ's rise (as well as some of the weaknesses of citJ), and ultimately the ways the two can complement each other.

Come by if you're in town. And I'll plan on posting further thoughts after the program, in case you miss it.