One of the great things about liv­ing in the Bay Area is that it remains ground zero for cutting-edge tech­nolo­gies and social move­ments, includ­ing the per­sonal media rev­o­lu­tion (sorry, New York, but you’ll catch up). Tonight I attended Dan Gillmor’s offi­cial book release party for We the Media. (That’s Dan in a photo I took one week ago at BlogOn.)

I hope to blog my review of the book some­time in the next week or two. One of the sur­real things tonight was read­ing the book on BART dur­ing my train ride into the city — and then see­ing or meet­ing sev­eral of the peo­ple Dan wrote about, such as Phil Gomes and Dave Sifry (just back from his stint at CNN dur­ing the con­ven­tion … more on that in a few days).

But the co-star of the evening was the spank­ing new Cre­ative Com­mons
head­quar­ters (in the SOMA dis­trict of San Fran­cisco, a half block from where I worked at Microsoft Side­walk for two years). It’s an amaz­ing new space, sub­si­dized by the gen­eros­ity of Mitch Kapor.

Turn­ing out for the fete were (among scores of oth­ers): Larry Lessig, Howard Rhein­gold, Glenn Otis Brown, Tim O’Reilly, Marc Can­ter, Fred von Lohmann and Cindy Cohn of EFF, Derek Slater of Berk­man fame, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Craig New­mark, Ev Williams, Gary Rivlin, Brian Dear, Scott Rosen­berg, Gor­don Mohr, and a num­ber of other tech lumi­nar­ies I didn’t get a chance to meet.

Dan tells me there’ll be another such gath­er­ing in the East Bay.

Con­grats, Dan, on a ter­rific book and on your ded­i­ca­tion to the cause of par­tic­i­pa­tory journalism.

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Bill Maher’s HBO series Real Time returned tonight. The usual stuff — an unfunny open­ing mono­logue (note to the often clue­less Bill: the audi­ence wasn’t groan­ing because you used the f* word, they didn’t like your using rape as part of a joke), fol­lowed by more heat than light dur­ing the panel seg­ment, fol­lowed by the inspid New Rules — but it’s some­times worth watch­ing because Maher lobs bombs in all direc­tions, and the open­ing scene with Maher read­ing My Pet Goat over a nar­ra­tion by Michael Moore was pretty clever.

Moore, who got a stand­ing ova­tion from the audi­ence, made the inter­est­ing pre­dic­tion that he doesn’t think the Novem­ber elec­tion will be close because (a) the Amer­i­can pub­lic knows it’s been hood­winked, and (b) the poll­sters are polling only likely vot­ers, and he pre­dicts a higher-than-usual turnout from an ener­gized elec­torate. We’ll see.

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Any­body out there who uses pMa­chines’ Expres­sio­nEngine? It’s a sleek new con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem I just pur­chased, but I’m hav­ing a very hard time fig­ur­ing it out. (Plus, they have no online or phone support.)

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From Kevin Drum: Paul Krug­man com­plains today in Tri­umph of the triv­ial that TV news flatly refuses to cover the actual pol­icy pro­pos­als of the can­di­dates for president:

I’ve been read­ing 60 days’ worth of tran­scripts from the places four out of five Amer­i­cans cite as where they usu­ally get their news: the major cable and broad­cast TV net­works. Never mind the details — I couldn’t even find a clear state­ment that Mr. Kerry wants to roll back recent high-income tax cuts and use the money to cover most of the unin­sured. When reports men­tioned the Kerry plan at all, it was usu­ally horse race analy­sis — how it’s play­ing, not what’s in it. …

Some­where along the line, TV news stopped report­ing on can­di­dates’ poli­cies, and turned instead to trivia that sup­pos­edly reveal their per­son­al­i­ties. We hear about Mr. Kerry’s hair­cuts, not his health care pro­pos­als. We hear about George Bush’s brush-cutting, not his envi­ron­men­tal policies.

So true. If you want to find out what’s really going on, turn off your TV and tune in some blogs.

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OJR:

To Fix or Not to Fix: Online Cor­rec­tions Poli­cies Vary Widely
By Mark Thomp­son
More news­pa­pers are choos­ing to cor­rect errors in their online archives and Web sites by edit­ing sto­ries rather than sim­ply attach­ing cor­rec­tions. But should archived con­tent be tin­kered with?

Many News­pa­per Sites Still Cling to Once-a-Day Pub­lish Cycle
By Rosen­tal Cal­mon Alves and Amy Schmitz Weiss
Of 30 sites mon­i­tored in a Uni­ver­sity of Texas study, only 12 updated their home pages fre­quently, and the rest made few or no changes dur­ing the day.

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I’m a big fan of Apple’s Keynote pre­sen­ta­tion soft­ware (Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s Pow­er­point), and I used it in a talk at the Dig­i­tal Sto­ry­telling Fes­ti­val this month.

Now comes word of the win­ners of Apple’s Keynote Present Your Pas­sion con­test. Meg Spoto used the tools in Keynote to tell the story of how she turned her pas­sion for mak­ing cards into a suc­cess­ful busi­ness. Check out all the win­ning entries here. (Site’s cur­rently down.)

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Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Jour­nal inter­viewed me for her arti­cle in the Wall Street Jour­nal today, ‘Wiki’ May Alter How Employ­ees Work Together.

It’s a good primer on wikis, so I’ll excerpt it below. My com­ments (about the use of a wiki as part of a col­lab­o­ra­tive edit­ing exper­i­ment for Dark­net) got left on the cutting-room floor, but Ross May­field is quoted.

Ross writes on his own blog: “What’s really inter­est­ing is what’s hap­pen­ing in the Kwiki devel­oper com­mu­nity — new SubEthaEdit and Tech­no­rati plu­g­ins. Plu­g­ins on the open source Kwiki frame­work also run on Socialtext.”

Here’s the excerpt:

Con­tinue reading »

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Jesse Walker in Rea­son Online: Jab­bing Jib­Jab. Copy­right law vs. polit­i­cal satire.

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I hope we’ll see much, much more video blog­ging in the months and yeara ahead. Mark Glaser’s OJR col­umn pointed to Steve Garfield’s Video Blog, where he crashed the Demo­c­ra­tic con­ven­tion party and has posted seven video reports so far. Ter­rific stuff.

Writes Steve today:

I’m work­ing hard to post at least one new video a day.

Video Blog­ging isn’t as easy as post­ing text and pic­tures from your cell phone, but by doing a project like this, I hope to help us all fig­ure out the eas­i­est way to get video on a blog.

I’ve just added Steve to my Open media blogroll there at the left and hope to learn more about his technique.

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Mark Glaser’s lat­est col­umn just posted at OJR: Blogsploita­tion: Big Media Tries to Steal Blog­gers’ Thun­der at DNC. Mark has been fol­low­ing the news of the Demo­c­ra­tic con­ven­tion mostly through weblogs. Mark looks at how the main­stream media are
launch­ing their own blogs in com­pe­ti­tion with the cre­den­tialed bloggers.

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