JibJab’s lat­est car­toon is What we call the news, with brief guest appear­ances by Michael Arring­ton, Chris Pir­illo and Robert Scoble. From Chris: I’m in a Jib­Jab cartoon!!

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Profy asks: Is Picly the Digg for photos?

A few inter­est­ing pho­tos (like the one above), but noth­ing here to knock Flickr off its perch as king of social media pho­tog­ra­phy sites.

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Mov­ing at the Speed of Cre­ativ­ity: YouTube blocked by fil­ters at your school? Try Teacher­Tube and Zamzar. (Or Our­me­dia, for that matter.)

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Dan Far­ber at ZDNet: Social media addic­tion in the workplace.

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Dean Taka­hashi in the San Jose Mer­cury News looks at how far Sec­ond Life has come:

When I first started
vis­it­ing Sec­ond Life, the vir­tual world cre­ated by Lin­den Lab, I didn’t
find much to get excited about. In 2003, it had a few thou­sand
sub­scribers will­ing to pay $14.95 a month to cre­ate 3-D ani­mated
avatars, out­fit­ted with per­son­al­ized cloth­ing. They roamed the world,
buy­ing cool objects to put in their vir­tual houses. But in spite of its
appeal to artists and techies, it was mostly a wasteland.

Fast for­ward to now. The ser­vice is free and has more than 5 mil­lion
mem­bers. There are inter­est­ing new uses of the site bub­bling up all the
time. That’s in part because Lin­den Lab has made the vir­tual world and
its tools as open as pos­si­ble, allow­ing peo­ple to express them­selves in
a myr­iad of ways. …

Dean has more here.

This com­ing Wednes­day, April 4 at 3pm, on the 4th floor of Wal­len­berg Hall (I was there the other day) at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity, Daniel Hueb­ner, direc­tor of com­mu­nity affairs at  Lin­den Lab, will hold a How They Got Game  workshop.

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I’m at Social Media Con­sen­sus, a gath­er­ing of Web 2.0, Sil­i­con Val­ley and non­profit folks at the Social­text offices in Palo Alto, Calif., talk­ing about social media and the impact of the Inter­net on society.

We’re going through work­shop exer­cises designed by two social media execs at Microsoft UK. Those on hand include Stowe Boyd, Tom Forem­ski, Julia French, Erik Langner, Ross May­field, Sara Olsen, John Mer­rels, Britt Bravo, Sam Perry, Vin­nie Lau­ria, Chez Pim and Eszther Hargittai.

Later:
Best quote from today: Bron­wyn Kun­hardt of Microsoft UK, who con­vened us today: “The social media space is a gold mine of impact.“

Best dis­cov­ery: Change.org, a very cool site for global polit­i­cal action that launched 2 months ago, says Britt.

I’m booked solid today, but Liz Henry did a great job live-blogging the ses­sion. Excerpt:

What I’m notic­ing here is that the sites we’re talk­ing about, other
than change.org, are not social net­works, and we want them to be. We
all in this room seem to believe that social net­works are invit­ing,
wel­com­ing, intu­itive, and powerful. …

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A dou­ble dose of report­ing on cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism by the San Fran­cisco Chronicle:

Rein­vent­ing news. Korean ‘cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism’ site faces challenges

OhmyNews intro­duced the world to “cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism” — break­ing news, inves­tiga­tive report­ing, tales of daily life, writ­ten by thou­sands of ama­teurs all over South Korea. But now the online news­pa­per finds itself in the throes of change.

After hav­ing turned a small profit for three years, OhmyNews slid into the red in 2006. It faces grow­ing com­pe­ti­tion in South Korea, has failed to catch fire beyond its bor­ders and, most impor­tant, has lost its lus­ter as the must-read, lat­est new thing.

In an effort to get back on track, the pri­vately owned com­pany is plan­ning an ambi­tious relaunch in late May — dubbed OhmyNews 2.0 — that seeks to dou­ble the num­ber of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ists in South Korea, to 100,000 over the next three years.

Vol­un­teers chang­ing news media landscape

NewAssignment.net seeks to
cre­ate “open source” report­ing, via the Inter­net, with vol­un­teer
writ­ers and pro­fes­sional edi­tors col­lab­o­rat­ing on stories.

“We don’t know how it will work yet but we don’t have to
know,” said Jay Rosen, a jour­nal­ism pro­fes­sor at New York Uni­ver­sity
who heads up the project. “It’s a fruit­ful hybrid of the dis­ci­pline of
pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists and the ani­ma­tion of vol­un­teer par­tic­i­pants.
We think it will be productive.“

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Elliot Mar­golies, direc­tor of the Com­mu­nity Media Cen­ter in Palo Alto, Calif., just posted three video excerpts from the appear­ance Dan Gill­mor and I made there last week as part of their new Con­ver­sa­tion Series.

Here are the three videos Elliot just posted to Ourmedia:

Ourmedia’s birth­day and his­tory: Me talk­ing about Ourmedia’s sec­ond anniversary.

Are we los­ing pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ists as news­pa­pers die?: Dan talk­ing about the future of newspapers.

  The scari­est media con­sol­i­da­tion is not what you think: Dan talk­ing about the dan­ger of tel­cos and cable com­pa­nies con­trol­ling what bits come into our homes.

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San Jose Mer­cury News: IBM to demon­strate high-speed chip.

IBM will demon­strate a new
chipset today that can down­load a high-definition movie in a sin­gle
sec­ond, com­pared to the cur­rent time of 30 min­utes or more. The com­pany
said its opti­cal trans­ceiver chipset trans­fers infor­ma­tion eight times
as fast as cur­rently avail­able com­po­nents. Such high speeds would have
a sig­nif­i­cant impact on the way peo­ple share and access media and
infor­m­ma­tion, from video to music to cor­po­rate finan­cial data.

The
new chipset, which sends data at 160 Giga­bits — or 160 bil­lion bits of
infor­ma­tion per sec­ond — will be unveiled at the Opti­cal Fiber
Con­fer­ence in Ana­heim. IBM did not release a tar­get date for the
chipset to be intro­duced inside a real-world product. …

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For your edit­ing plea­sure … Just watched the lat­est Col­bert Report on Com­edy Cen­tral, which was notable not for the lack­lus­ter inter­view with EFF’s John Perry Bar­low but for Stephen Colbert’s spoof inter­view with New­sHour anchor Gwen Ifill. Col­bert is ask­ing view­ers to remix the inter­view — and he has offered plenty of ammu­ni­tion in the way of trans­mutable video footage. If one is good enough, he’ll air it on the show. You can down­load the inter­view for remix­ing from colbertnation.com, or directly here or here, and sub­mit it here.

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