I’m at Gnomedex, the annual geek love fest up in Seat­tle. This was my favorite con­fer­ence last year, and they’re off to a good start on day one. Sat­ur­day they’ll con­tinue a live stream of the proceedings.

More and more famil­iar faces at these gath­er­ings. Like: Buzz Brugge­man, Susan Mer­nit, Dave Winer, Hal­ley Suitt, John Hart­man, Eric Rice, Josh Ban­croft, Der­rick Oien, Doug Kaye, Brian Dear, Arieana Foley, Bre Pet­tis, Dave McClure, Mitch Rat­cliffe, Steve Gill­mor, Kathy Gill, Steve Rubel, Scott Rubel, Bob Wyman, Corey Denis, Boris Mann, Dan Far­ber, Kaliya Ham­lin, Scott Mace and plenty of others.

The high­light of day one was for­mer Sen. John Edwards’ appear­ance. (Seat­tle P-I photo above. I’ll post pho­tos on Sun­day; it’s still too many steps to post my Dig­i­tal Rebel XT’s shots to Flickr.) I was an early sup­porter of Sen. Edwards’ can­di­dacy for pres­i­dent — and I still think he was the best can­di­date run­ning in ’04. Edwards didn’t give a keynote, but fielded ques­tions and led a dis­cus­sion on mostly tech-related ques­tions, with the occa­sional polit­i­cal ques­tion thrown in.

I had a chance to praise him for his work with the OneAm­er­ica Com­mit­tee fight­ing poverty and putting it back on the national agenda. I asked what we in the tech com­mu­nity — and the 320 smart peo­ple in this room — could do to help spur pub­lic aware­ness and action to fight poverty, and how we could con­tinue the con­ver­sa­tion after today. Edwards said he would instruct his staff to open up a chan­nel for that dia­logue to take place.

We haven’t heard any­thing so far, so I hope we can fol­low up. There were a lot of good ideas float­ing around the room after he left. I also had a chance to shake his hand and give him a copy of “Dark­net” to get him up to speed on some of the issues fac­ing soci­ety as we all become tech­nol­ogy and media cre­ators instead of pas­sive consumers.

I’ll be post­ing video inter­views of Michael Arring­ton and Robert Scoble within the next week.

Other high­lights

• Check out bLaugh, a new “blog humor site,” fea­tur­ing occa­sional car­i­ca­tures of blog­gers. The ini­tial one — of Steve Rubel (Rubel with­out a cause) — is priceless.

Chris and Ponzi’s rules for Gnomedex include: “Blog, cast, snap, stream – it’s yours. Feel free to blog, record, remix with­out per­mis­sion. No weird licens­ing schemes. … Assume your pic­ture will be taken. … Assume what you say will be blogged.”

Good quotes:

• Kathy Gill: “Micro­mar­kets is where it is. The mass mar­ket is dead.”

• More Kathy Gill: “Geeks shouldn’t name things.”

• Michael Arring­ton: “Jig­saw is one of the most evil ven­ture backed com­pa­nies on the Internet.”

• Michael Arring­ton on the revamped Netscape: “It’s a frickin’ Digg clone now, it’s pathetic.”

• Marc Can­ter: “It’s not about big or small, it’s about open or closed.”

• More Marc Can­ter, in argu­ing for open APIs: “If you can suck, you can spit.”

Later: Seat­tle Post-Intelligencer’s cov­er­age.

Our­me­dia was invited to attend the Trans­mis­sion Global Online Video Gath­er­ing on June 7–10 in Rome, but we couldn’t make it because it was held the same week as Vlog­ger­con. I orga­nized a Cit­i­zens Media Sum­mit in San Fran­cisco in May 2005 attended by 36 peo­ple, so I’m a softie for these kind of efforts.

Anna Helme, who works with an Aus­tralian online video dis­tri­b­u­tion project cur­rently in devel­op­ment called Engage­Me­dia (a site that looks really inter­est­ing), did much of the orga­niz­ing for Trans­mis­sion. Anna writes:

The Trans­mis­sion wiki con­tains mp3 record­ings of some sessions.

Here is a photo essay put together by Jerry from Asia247 on his blog.

Some of the pro­pos­als made for work­ing together after Trans­mis­sion can be found here. Mainly they involve mak­ing sure we can share and syn­di­cate con­tent, pool­ing help and tuto­ri­als resources, pool­ing data­base info such as screen­ing organ­i­sa­tions inter­na­tion­ally, devel­op­ing the Trans­mis­sion net­work fur­ther and attempt­ing to avoid re-inventing the wheel or dou­bling up on devel­op­ment work.

My own ideas are avail­able as a PDF attached to the bot­tom of my blog here. It remains to be seen which of these pro­pos­als are taken up and put into prac­tice. I think most of us left feel­ing quite inspired, and know­ing more from being able to get inside each oth­ers projects for a few days.

Sounds sim­i­lar in some ways with what we’re try­ing to do with the Open Media Coali­tion, only with a greater social justice/political bent.

Con­tinue reading »

NPR “On the Media” co-host Bob Garfield is writ­ing a book — with the help of his audi­ence. He writes about his col­lab­o­ra­tive online book project, Lis­te­nomics, in his Adver­tis­ing Age blog.

Dan Gill­mor, Lawrence Lessig, Chris­t­ian Crum­lish, Chris Ander­son, yours truly and oth­ers have nav­i­gated these waters over the last few years. It’s a lot of work, and will require lots more than post­ing chap­ter syn­opses online and ask­ing for feedback.

Some­one should write a book about it.

Alter­Net: Cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism at its best. An all vol­un­teer news­pa­per run by Liber­ian refugees helped their com­mu­ni­ties more than the writ­ers ever imagined.

New City Chicago:
DIY Media. The Daily News makes its case for online cit­i­zen journalism.

Steve Out­ing at E&P: How to Make Your Web Site More Conversational.

Medi­aL­ife: OhmyNews, where the read­ers report. In J schools they call it cit­i­zen journalism.

What kinds of videos are peo­ple watch­ing online? It’s sure not Lost or Des­per­ate House­wives, even if down­loads of tra­di­tional TV shows com­mand most of the media’s atten­tion, thanks to Apple’s bot­tom line.

At Super­nova on Fri­day, Mary Hod­der, CEO of Dab­ble, said she’d list the dif­fer­ent vari­eties or gen­res of grass­roots video her com­pany is see­ing on the Web, and here it is:

1.  Mini tv show-style  — It’s Jerry Time or Ask a Ninja
2.  Videoblog­gers:  telling their own life sto­ries like Ryanne Hod­son
3.  Genre guys:  snow­board­ing or car videos
4.  Com­men­tary: Rock­et­boom or the Bush Blair video.
5.  Indie film shorts like Four Eyed Mon­sters
6.  Ran­dom.. silly.. funny.. ridicu­lous… ephemeral Tag: momwalksin  tag: lip­sync
7.  How-to’s that actu­ally show you how to do some­thing in detail or teach:  French Pod Class
8.  Remixs and mashups:  The Pres­i­dency Then and Now or Matrix Reloaded or Broke­back to the Future.
9.  Inter­views like those at GETV.
10.  Par­o­dies like the 8up com­mer­cial.
11.  AMV or anime music videos:  Love­less
12. music videos — lip­sync sit­ting at the com­puter, danc­ing around with
music play­ing, that in effect, remakes the artists own music video into
ones the users like, that stars them­selves. Here is Hips Don’t Lie.

Mary for­got a couple:

13. Cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism, like you see at Real Peo­ple Net­work or Min­nesota Sto­ries.

14. Dig­i­tal stories.

If you’re won­der­ing why Our­me­dia is down right now — and the site can’t tell you because, well, we’re down — we’re in the process of migrat­ing to new servers, and this may take another day. Apolo­gies. We’ll be right back.

Ryanne has just fin­ished post­ing the last of the video pre­sen­ta­tions recorded at Vlog­ger­con on June 10–11. If you couldn’t attend, or missed a ses­sion, catch it online.

The panel I mod­er­ated on Oral His­tory and Dig­i­tal Sto­ry­telling, with Denise, Jen­nifer and Susan, is here.

San Jose Mer­cury News: Cisco to invest in home video firm Akimbo. Move aimed at speed­ing up Inter­net video revolution.

So, is Inter­net video a rev­o­lu­tion, like the head­line says? Or a “fad,” as the reporter says not once but twice?

After Super­nova, headed down to the street to Blog­ger­con 4, which its orga­niz­ers decided to put on oppo­site Super­nova as a protest against the latter’s high fees and too-traditional con­tent agenda. So far, not a great deal new here, though a nifty dis­cus­sion about user gripes about soft­ware short­com­ings. A few pho­tos tomor­row. I posted a few pho­tos on Flickr.

Doc Searls is doing a Doc­nog­ra­phy of par­tic­i­pants’ com­ments. Doc didn’t, how­ever, cap­ture the com­plaint I voiced about DRM and the increas­ing monop­o­lis­tic behav­ior by Apple.

I pointed out that those of us who want to sup­port artists and lis­ten to them on our iPods are more often than not given a sin­gle choice — the iTunes Music Store — and Apple has decided not to allow any third party music player, like the Sonos, to play any songs pur­chased at the iTunes store because of monop­o­lis­tic behav­ior: they want you to buy their stereo music box. So we have this per­verse sit­u­a­tion where pirated music from the Dark­net will play from device to device while legally pur­chased music will not. This penal­izes both users and artists.

“Bull­shit!” exclaimed ZDNet’s Steve Gill­mor, who said he sim­ply goes down to the local music store, buys CDs, rips them, trans­fers them to his iPod with­out DRM.

Which misses the point. The dig­i­tal gen­er­a­tion doesn’t want to buy phys­i­cal CDs and do that workaround to get their dig­i­tal music in a for­mat they want that works across devices. We need to push back against Apple’s monop­o­lis­tic behav­ior here. If they keep it up, a boy­cott may be in order.

Regard­ing lia­bil­ity: Robert Cox, pres­i­dent of the Media Blog­gers Asso­ci­a­tion, said he gets emails from blog­gers every day from blog­gers who are being sued or being threat­ened with a law­suit. He rec­om­mends that any­one who achieves a level of pop­u­lar­ity in the blo­gos­phere should con­sider incor­po­rat­ing your blog “so that if you get sued, you get to keep your house.”

The best part of Blog­ger­con, as always, is the social­iz­ing with old friends and net­work­ing with famil­iar names. Among those on hand here: Terry Heaton, Buzz Brugge­man, Dave Winer, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, Sylvia Paull, Matt Mul­len­weg, Dan Far­ber, Steve Gill­mor, Mark Glaser, Marc Can­ter, Scott Beale, Niall Kennedy, Jay Rosen, Lisa Stone, Jory des Jardins, Elisa Cama­hort, Susan Mer­nit, Philip Tor­rone, Ponzi, Chris Pir­illo, Guarav and Ashish from Tekriti Soft­ware (the orig­i­nal devel­op­ers of Our­me­dia), Lisa Williams, Robert Cox, Toni Schnei­der, Paolo Valde­marin, Frank Payn­ter, Greg Narain and Bram Cohen.

Here’s how to tune in today and tomor­row. Here are what the blog­gers here are post­ing.

Spent the morn­ing at Super­nova, the busi­ness tech­nol­ogy con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco. Tomor­row I’ll post Just posted to Flickr a photo of FCC Com­mis­sioner Michael J. Copps (for­got my flash card connector).

I mod­er­ated this morning’s open­ing panel, “The Rise of the VideoNet,” with Jeremy Allaire (Bright­cove), Jonathan Taplin (USC Annen­berg Cen­ter), Mary Hod­der (Dab­ble), and Robert Lev­i­tan (Pando). We spent a really good hour talk­ing about the rapid rise of video sites — 225 in all today. Mary Hod­der will soon post an entry on Nap­ster­i­za­tion with a break­down of video site traf­fic num­bers (YouTube leads the way with 42 per­cent, MySpace with 24 per­cent, and so on).

We showed one of the best Men­tos and Coke videos to kick things off.

The panel dis­cus­sion will be pod­cast. Live audio stream­ing of all gen­eral ses­sions, as well as pod­casts, blogs, and videoblogs, will be avail­able here.

Here are some notes I took dur­ing Kopps’ impor­tant talk:

“Cen­tral­ized end user con­trol is increas­ingly at risk. Broad­band providers are increas­ing con­trol over what comes into our homes over their pipes. … Cable and DSL providers con­trol 98% of the broad­band mar­ket. We’re nowhere near to see­ing a ubiq­ui­tous third or fourth player to turn broad­band into a vibrantly com­pet­i­tive market.

“If the mar­ket­placde is truly com­pet­i­tive, then gov­ern­ment should get out of the way and let a thou­sand flow­ers bloom.” But cur­rently, the band­width providers exer­cise a great deal of con­trol over how you may use your connection.

“I’m amazed at the speed with which this issue came to the atten­tion of the Con­gress, open­ing up a national dis­cus­sion on the prin­ci­ples. … The [broad­band providers] want to inverse the real demo­c­ra­tic genius of the inter­net. … Entre­pre­neurs may have to ask per­mis­sion to inno­vate from the own­ers of the broad­band pipe.

“We need to change the terms of the debate. It’s not a net neu­tral­ity issue so much as an Inter­net free­dom issue. … Any­one who thinks the inter­net is going to halt media con­sol­i­da­tioni has to under­stand that the inter­net may be head­ing down this very same path.

“These issues are too large to be left to a hand­ful of broad­band reg­u­la­tors. We des­per­ately need your input. We need more of your input than we’ve been get­ting. Deci­sions with­out you are too often deci­sions against you.”

Here’s Colette Voegel blog­ging about today’s ses­sions. Here are some oth­ers.