Not sure if I’ll be able to attend, but this looks worthwhile:

Beyond Broad­cast 2008: Map­ping Pub­lic Media will be held June 17, 2008, at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.
 

Hosted by the Cen­ter for Social Media, the conference’s theme this year is  “Map­ping Pub­lic Media,” and they’ll be using map­ping and visu­al­iza­tion tools to exam­ine shift­ing forms, func­tions and fis­cal strate­gies for pub­lic media projects. Pan­elists will exam­ine the role of media in inform­ing and mobi­liz­ing publics, and the rise of both cit­i­zen and data-driven news. They’ll also be fea­tur­ing demon­stra­tions of how mak­ers are using par­tic­i­pa­tory tools like Google Earth to cre­ate daz­zling inter­ac­tive maps for pub­lic knowl­edge and action. Reg­is­ter or look for a detailed agenda here.

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Brian Solis:  Ladies and Gen­tle­man, The Con­ver­sa­tion Has Left The Building.

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I’ve men­tioned these two com­pa­nies in the past, but they’re worth another look for any­one inter­ested in Web 2.0 col­lab­o­ra­tion tools.

Yugma,
based in Min­neapo­lis, is a web meet­ing, desk­top shar­ing and
col­lab­o­ra­tion ser­vice that does what tools like Webex do except they
cost 10 times as much, are sold as sep­a­rate pieces, and are
pro­fes­sion­ally installed and man­aged. A quick, DIY Web down­load, Yugma
is sold in a “Freemium” model: a sub­set of free-forever fea­tures, a
larger set that is free for an eval­u­a­tion period, and then sold inex­pen­sively there­after. Says PR rep Ellen M.: “I installed it on my PC and on
my mother’s, and have already saved myself two hours of dri­ving by
remotely (‘Leave the mouse alone!’) set­ting up her new email account.“

Two peo­ple on a Yugma con­fer­ence can:

• see each other’s desk­tops and files
• con­trol each other’s desk­top appli­ca­tions using remote key­board and mouse, a la Gotomypc
• draw dia­grams for each other (“whiteboarding”)
• high­light and draw lines and cir­cles on shared doc­u­ments (“annotating”)
• pass files to each other
• chat
• sched­ule Yugma meetings
• speak to each other with micro­phone and earphones

Ten (20, 30, 50…) peo­ple on a Yugma ses­sion can:

• speak to and hear from other participants
• change pre­sen­ters dur­ing the same session
• record the proceedings

Best
of all, Yugma is a light­weight Java client that can sit live on your
desk­top like instant mes­sag­ing. When­ever the mood strikes, you can tap
your friend’s vir­tual shoul­der in Syd­ney and share what’s in front of
you, just like peo­ple used to do in a real office.

Sight­Speed of Berke­ley, Calif., is a high-quality, afford­able Web-based
video­con­fer­enc­ing appli­ca­tion.  It helps busi­nesses con­duct online meet­ings across town, across coun­try or across the globe.  For
instance, the com­pany is based in Berke­ley, but CEO Peter
Csathy (whom I inter­viewed for my book Dark­net when he was pres­i­dent of MusicMatch.com) lives and works from his home in the San Diego area, using SightSpeed’s video com­mu­ni­ca­tions
tools.

Sight­Speed lets busi­nesses
con­duct multi-party video­con­fer­ences, record calls for play­back later
by those not able to attend a “live” event, share files dur­ing a video
con­fer­ence and con­nect a spon­ta­neous video call between reg­is­tered
users with one click.

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I attended Per­sonal Democ­racy Forum in New York last year and found it to be a com­pelling gath­er­ing of political-minded tech heads and oth­ers inter­ested in the inter­sec­tion of pol­i­tics and tech­nol­ogy. It’s brought to you by the same folks who pub­lish TechPresident.com.

Speak­ers include Vint Cerf, Craig New­mark, Ellen Miller, Matt Stoller, Josh Mar­shall, Lawrence Lessig, Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton, Eliz­a­beth Edwards and Mike Arring­ton. Too early to know whether I’ll be able to attend, but reg­is­tra­tion is now open for $595.

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San Jose Mer­cury News: Who’s watch­ing you on the Web?

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The New York Times has the scoop on a blog­ger who scored a cool $300,000 book deal. Excerpt:

Read­ers dis­cover stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com,
like it and for­ward links to their friends, who for­ward them to lots
more friends. News­pa­per colum­nists men­tion it, steal­ing — er, quot­ing —
some of the bet­ter jokes. By the end of Feb­ru­ary, the NPR pro­gram “Talk
of the Nation” runs a report on it, debat­ing whether the site is racist
or satire.

And then on March 20 Ran­dom House announces that it
has pur­chased the rights to a book by the blog’s founder, Chris­t­ian
Lan­der, an Inter­net copy writer. The price, accord­ing to a source
famil­iar with the deal but not autho­rized to dis­cuss the total, was
about $300,000, a sum that many in the pub­lish­ing and blog­ging
com­mu­ni­ties believe is an astro­nom­i­cal amount for a book spawned from a
blog, writ­ten by a pre­vi­ously unpub­lished author. …

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The Media Law Resource Cen­ter, in part­ner­ship with the Stan­ford Law School Cen­ter for Inter­net and Soci­ety and the Stan­ford Pro­fes­sional Pub­lish­ing Courses are pro­duc­ing a Con­fer­ence, May 15–16, 2008, on  the emerg­ing legal issues sur­round­ing dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing and con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion. You can reg­is­ter here and get more info here.

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The NY Times takes a look at pro­gres­sive polit­i­cal blog pio­neer Ari­anna Huff­in­g­ton and the influ­ence of the Huff­in­g­ton Post. (Beau­ti­ful shot of her, above, by NY Times.)

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NY Times: Online real-time chat is get­ting an upgrade, cour­tesy of sites like Vivaty and Meebo.

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Terry Heaton also has this: Ama­zon attempt­ing to squeeze POD industry.

In
a move that frankly sur­prises me, Ama­zon is slowly pulling the plug on
the Print On Demand (POD) pub­lish­ing world by forc­ing such pub­lish­ers
to have their books printed exclu­sively by Book­Surge, its own print­ing division. …

Let’s hope this is just a tem­po­rary brain freeze on Amazon’s part.

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