I spent this afternoon at the Institute for the Future‘s 30th Ten Year Forecast Retreat at the Claremont in Berkeley, where the theme was grassroots economies, the sharing economy and sustainability. If you don’t know the Institute for the Future, you should. Paul Saffo and crew have been doing a top-notch job for years looking at global trends and their likely impact on society.

I was in the session titled “Innovation Agenda: Experiments from the Edge,” and spoke about Ourmedia.org. Fellow panelist Greg Steltenpohl — founder, former CEO and Chair Emeritus of Odwalla Inc., the leading supplier of fresh juice in the US, and co-founder of the Interra Project — talked about new business approaches.

Enjoyed sitting next to the wonderful Jerry Michalski, and spent a while chatting up Joi Ito and Howard Rheingold, both of whom spoke earlier in the afternoon (Jerry spoke this morning). Also enjoyed meeting the Institute’s crew, including Andrea Saveri and Lyn Jeffery.

Decided not to blog the talks in real time. I’ll post the summaries if I receive them.

Joi, by the way, just got a copy of Seth Godin’s new book, All Marketers Are Liars. I’ll be checking it out.

Bob Garfield has an insightful new piece for NPR’s On the Media on what he calls the chaos theory of big media. Jeff Jarvis (briefly), Om Malik (briefly) and yours truly (briefly) are among those interviewed.

See An Impending Period of Transitional Chaos for Media.

I (and others) have been writing about this for some time — the notion that we’re in the midst of a major transformation in the mediasphere, away from traditional media pumped to us through one-way pipes and toward media that’s much more under our control — circular, responsive, malleable, multidirectional, personalized.

Simply put, people are looking to exert greater control over how they interact with media.

I just listened to it — good piece, 12 minutes long, entertaining and dead on.

“The age of the mainstream media is passing. the new order is taking shape,” Garfield intones. “Digits are the new widgets.” He sees “an impending period of radical changes in the economy, the culture and society itself,” and warns that “we are heading into a historically turbulent moment.” Indeed, we’ve already entered this transformative period, which is ushering in “the democratization of media.”

The result may be frightening to Madison Avenue, but it’s empowering to the rest of us. “We cease to be demographics, we become individuals again,” Garfield concludes.

“Mass media will be overthrown by micromedia,” adds Drazen Pantic of Unmediated, perhaps a bit too melodramatically.

The show airs this weekend — it aired Friday in LA, and it airs today in other cities.

Cross-posted to Darknet.

Slate writer Paul Boutin interviewed me Wednesday for a piece on Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive: Brewster Kahle made a copy of the Internet. Now, he wants your files.

Last Friday Paul attended one of Brewster’s famous Friday afternoon brown bag lunches, where we go around the table and everyone discusses what’s happening in their areas.

Excerpt from the article:

Thanks to the ruthless hippies who run local politics, the Presidio’s former Army barracks are filled by nonprofits rather than condos. Search-engine wiz and dot-com multimillionaire Brewster Kahle founded the archive here in 1996 with a dream as big as the bridge: He wanted to back up the Internet. There were only 50 million or so URLs back then, so the idea only seemed half-crazy. As the Web ballooned to more than 10 billion pages, the archive’s main server farm—hidden across town in a data center beneath the city’s other big bridge—grew to hold a half-million gigabytes of compressed and indexed pages.

Kahle is less the Internet’s crazy aunt—the tycoon who can’t stand to throw anything away—than its evangelical librarian. “The history of digital materials in companies’ hands is one of … loss,” he tells me in a rushed meeting. …

The final step in building the archive into a true global library: getting you to contribute. Ourmedia, a project launched two weeks ago, offers free, unlimited, permanent storage of your videos, photos, Word files, podcasts—anything that’s not porn and not covered by someone else’s copyright. The one catch: The files, stored on Internet Archive servers, will be freely available to anyone in the world. …

Bonus url: Google satellite shot (thanks to its purchase of Keyhole) of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay.

I finally got a chance last night and over lunch today to have a lengthy chat with Len Apcar, editor of The New York Times on the Web, whose panel followed mine this morning at the International Symposium on Online Journalism in Austin.

Can’t reveal too much other than in broad strokes. Some interesting takeaways:

- The Times is well aware of the grassroots media phenomenon, and is looking at sensible ways of incorporating grassroots media into the website. It’ll happen gradually.

- Len is particularly interested in social networking and has even visited Tribe.net in San Francisco with Martin Nisenholz to get a first-hand glimpse of a market leader. Sounded like the Times is still early in the process of determining how they might want to incorporate social networking into the Times network.

- During his panel today, Len said that he and the Times don’t want to be seen as one-way, take-it-or-leave-it big media, and they’re constantly looking at ways to bring readers into a burgeoning converation. He said, “I look at OhmyNews as a form of social networking. We’re looking very closely at our audience. We have user content in the paper now in terms of movie reviews, hotels I stayed at, … and we want to do more.”

I got a chance to reconnect with Nora Paul, Steve Yelvington and Jane Ellen Stevens, and met “Blogumentary” filmmaker Chuck Olsen, Jon Dube of MSNBC.com, University of Texas’s Rosental Calmon Alves and washingtonpost.com editor Jim Brady in person for the first time. Also met Alberto Cairo, infographics director of Spain’s elmundo.es,

Once Ourmedia.org matures, perhaps we can start sharing grassroots media with the Post, New York Times and other media organizations.

Just got off the phone with Alex Williams of Corante, who invited me to attend the Podcast Hotel and Videoblog Festival — which he wonderfully described as a “happenin’” — July 15-17 in Portland.

I accepted, and if I can talk my wife into it, she and our soon-to-be 6-year-old will come along.

It’ll be not just a be-in — to use another throwback ’60s term — but a hands-on workshop as well.

It sounds wonderful, and Alex tells that Eric Rice will be among the 50 or so people expected. By then, I hope to have some videoblogs and podcasts in the bag, if I ever get a free moment for my life again.

Here are the details.

The most interesting thing about citizens media, of course, is that you never know what we’re going to produce. What’s apparent is that people want to take part in media — and to take it apart, remix it, annotate it, recirculate it. Reclaim their place in the ancient craft of storytelling.

They want to turn media into a circle instead of an arrow.

They want to turn that one-way pipe back on the broadcast media.

Since Ourmedia.org launched two weeks ago, we now have about 9,500 members, with hundreds more joining each day. Something important is happening out there.

One of the things that’s most interesting to me — since I have a book coming out on the subject in one month — is watching the dynamic between our media and the other media — their media.

Sometimes we want to create our own work without much input from the culture at large. And sometimes we want to dip into the larger culture.

At Ourmedia, we’ve been wrestling with copyright and fair use since we launched (and well before that). Yesterday I wrote a long Forum post about where we’ve decided to draw the line: against the uploading of copyrighted music singles, television shows, movies and trailers, but allowing reasonable and legitimate borrowing of snippets of copyrighted works — if it’s done for personal creativity and only noncommercially. It’s more complicated than that, so you’ll have to read the post and see our attorney’s thoughts as well.

In 14 days, we’ve had 14 copyright violations that we’ve spotted — and promptly removed them. But we’ve also had several thousand legitimate uploads — some of startling creativity.

We’re only at the start of this, but the road ahead looks promising.

I’m programming new content for our home page now, and smiling as I’m doing so.