The junta in charge of the Internet

...is Google, for search; Facebook for social and Twitter for realtime socializing.  So says Mr. Jarvis, explaining that content is not king.  Newspapers should take heed, he contends:

I think they should follow the advice of Mark Zuckerberg, member of the ruling junta, that their job is to bring communities elegant organization. In a sense, they always have done that; they helped communities organize their knowledge so they could organize themselves; that’s the essence of an informed democracy.

We're trying a measure of that elegant organization on a shoestring with our new communities pages.  Yes, I know others have done this before, but we're hoping we can build on their attempts.  This is our Plano page, which attempts to organize in an elegant way our listings and other event databases, plus put a blend of internal and external news feeds from selected sources front and center via Yahoo! Pipes.  We're also manually choosing good content from sources that don't have reliable feeds, using Publish2.

At the same time we're launching a series of beat blogs for about 18 of those communities, with dedicated reporters whose mandate is to reach out to the community in a virtual and real way.  We'll bring our scores of citizen opinion contributors in on the project and our NeighborsGo community editors (who solicit conent from users).

This is an exciting project.