The Urban Dictionary has some pretty funny, and mostly negative, definitions of Indymedia. One consistent theme seems to be that Indymedia is anti-semitic, a critique that sort of surprises me. I can see that that would be one critique, because most Indymedia coverage, where it needs to be, is anti-zionist, and zionists are going to label anti-zionists as anti-semitic. But for that to be the main thing people repeatedly harp on is kind of strange.

A chain of several localized websites where 16-year-old stoners with Che T-Shirts can pretend to be journalists and write bullshit news articles containing zero credibility or research. What better way to fight back against the corporate-controlled media by getting your news by some of the most blatantly agenda-driven sources in the world? YUH MAAN FOCK DA SYSTEM RAGE AGINST DA MACHINE!!!1!!
Oh Indymedia, what won't you blame on the Jews?

This lecture by Clay Shirky at Etech, a recent O'Reilly conference in San Diego, is really excellent and concerns how you manage web software that allows some degree of free posting by the public. He has some really really good ideas, many of which are very relevant to how Indymedia Centers manage themselves. Especially important is this concluding remark he makes:

Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn't realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we're supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having the language to talk about this is the right place to start.

(via Jos&eacute)