On day 2 of a 4-day Aspen Insti­tute round­table on cloud com­put­ing, Arturo Artom, founder and pres­i­dent of San Francisco-headquartered YourTru­man­Show, gave me a demo of a new online video tech­nol­ogy being announced this morn­ing called TagLift, a new video adver­tis­ing tar­get­ing technology.

As any­one in the grass­roots video space knows, sites like YouTube, Vimeo and oth­ers have had a hard time get­ting busi­nesses to adver­tise on a site where user-created videos aren’t vet­ted. TagLift aims to solve that prob­lem, not by ana­lyz­ing the con­tents of the video but by using a sort of auto­mated crowd­sourced approach, ana­lyz­ing the pref­er­ences of view­ers across mul­ti­ple social net­works and video services.

Or, as they put it: “TagLift is the first tool for meta­data val­i­da­tion that
lever­ages user behav­ior to ‘green-light’ or ‘red-light’ meta­data
quality.”

Arturo said in a state­ment: “Video on the web can be mon­e­tized effec­tively and on a large scale.
You just need the right tools to auto­mat­i­cally match the right ad with
the right audi­ence. Our tech­nol­ogy learns about user usage pat­terns and
checks con­text and meta­data against that information.”

Sounds more promis­ing than some of the other solu­tions out there, and worth a look.

At PBS’s Medi­aShift blog, Mark Glaser con­ducted a round­table last week on import of the Code of Best Prac­tices in Fair Use for Online Video released by the Cen­ter for Social Media at Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity. (I wrote about it here.)

Par­tic­i­pat­ing were:

• Peter Jaszi, Pro­fes­sor of Law, Wash­ing­ton Col­lege of Law, Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity, Code of Best Prac­tices co-chair
• Anthony Fal­zone, Lec­turer, Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Fair Use Project, Stan­ford Law School
• Mizuko Ito, Research Sci­en­tist, School of Cin­e­matic Arts, Uni­ver­sity of South­ern California
• Rebecca Tush­net, Pro­fes­sor, George­town Uni­ver­sity Law Cen­ter, George­town University
• Josh Met­zger, senior VP, cor­po­rate devel­op­ment, Veoh Networks
• Francesca Coppa, Direc­tor of Film Stud­ies and Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Eng­lish at Muh­len­berg College
• JD Lasica, co-founder of Our­me­dia, video blog­ger and social media expert
• Rx, video mash-up artist, ThePartyParty.com
• Owen Gal­lagher, dig­i­tal media entre­pre­neur, founder of TotalRecut.com, for fans and cre­ators of video remixes, recuts, and mash-ups.

Here’s the first part of his series: Will Code of Best Prac­tices Help Video Mash-Up Artists Stay Legal? Writes Mark:

I con­vened an email round­table to talk about the new Code of Best
Prac­tices for Fair Use in Online Video — the idea being to show peo­ple
which ways they could use copy­righted video in their own remixes
with­out run­ning afoul of the law. As JD Lasica, one of the roundtable’s
par­tic­i­pants says: “It is impor­tant for users to know in broad terms
what they could
legally share or not — with­out hav­ing to attend law school at night.“
This is Part 1 of a three-part series.

The Daily Kos on Lawrence Lessig’s impor­tant new ini­tia­tive, Change-Congress.org.

Yes­ter­day, we reviewed Lawrence Lessig’s diag­no­sis
that Con­gress needed fun­da­men­tal change because the influ­ence of money
has cor­roded our abil­ity to trust the insti­tu­tion to get the “2+2=4″
basic pol­icy deci­sions right.  (His NN08 keynote is online here and here.)

Today, let’s talk about solu­tions, and the Change Con­gress move­ment he and Joe Trippi founded is orga­nized around four prin­ci­ples:

1. No money from lob­by­ists or PACs

2. Vote to end earmarks

3. Sup­port reform to increase Con­gres­sional transparency

4. Sup­port publicly-financed campaigns

I’m fly­ing to Aspen, Colo., early tomor­row to take part in another Aspen Insti­tute round­table. This one is on Cloud Com­put­ing: Impli­ca­tions for Social Inter­ac­tion, Gov­er­nance and Money.

Should be geeky but inter­est­ing as hell.

Too bad I missed the Dalai Lama by three days. As you might imag­ine, blog­ging will be light this week.

In Decem­ber I attended an Aspen Insti­tute round­table on civic engage­ment and mobile media held in San Fran­cisco with thought lead­ers in the mobile space such as Jed Alpert, founder of Mobile Com­mons, and Katrin Ver­clas, head of MobileActive.org.

I wrote a report about the gathering’s con­clu­sions, and the Aspen Insti­tute just pub­lished it as a small book: Civic Engage­ment on the Move. It’s full of inter­est­ing analy­sis, case stud­ies and rec­om­men­da­tions. Alas, I don’t con­trol the copy­right and the Aspen Book­store charges $12 (less for bulk purchased).

Update: I over­looked an inside link: You can down­load the 95-page report for free as a PDF here, and in chap­ters here.

From the book­store description:

Civic Engage­ment on the Move looks at how lead­ing edge
prac­ti­tion­ers are using mobile media to engage cit­i­zens to solve
prob­lems, bridge dif­fer­ences and strengthen com­mu­nity. Mobile media
tech­nolo­gies pro­vide new tools for jour­nal­ists, gov­ern­ment and
non­profit agen­cies, civic orga­niz­ers, elected offi­cials, activists and
ordi­nary cit­i­zens to inform, to reach out to oth­ers and to gal­va­nize
com­mu­nity action on a wide range of issues. Writ­ten by J.D. Lasica, the
report details the hall­marks of suc­cess­ful mobile cam­paigns around
civic engage­ment and pro­vides case stud­ies of sev­eral suc­cess­ful and
emerg­ing ini­tia­tives, includ­ing those above that came out of the recent
Aspen Insti­tute Round­table on Mobile Media and Civic Engage­ment. Noted
experts in the field add their insights on using mobile media, with a
list of “Mobile Advo­cacy Dos and Don’ts” by Katrin Ver­clas of
Mobile­Ac­tive and “A Mobile Media User’s Guide” by Jed Alpert, CEO of
Mobile Commons.

I learned a lot about the state of mobile in sup­port of the pub­lic good dur­ing this ter­rific gathering.

Later: Katrin Verclas’s side­bar in the report can be found here:

• the Do’s and Don’ts of Mobile Advo­cacy at MobileActive.org

• Mobile Advo­cacy Do’s and Don’ts at Calder Strategies

• Using Mobiles for your Cause: Do’s and Don’ts of mAd­vo­cacy at MobileActive.org.

A Mobile Activism User’s Guide

I asked Jed for per­mis­sion to repub­lish his 16-page “A Mobile Activism User’s Guide,” and he agreed. So I just uploaded the guide as a down­load­able Word doc to Our­me­dia. Down­load the free guide here. Here’s an excerpt from the guide:

Basics of SMS messaging

Text mes­sag­ing, or SMS (Short Mes­sage Ser­vice), is every­where.  In some parts of the world, text mes­sag­ing is far more pop­u­lar than tra­di­tional tele­phone calls.  Here in the US, text mes­sag­ing isn’t just for the young any­more; SMS is pop­u­lar among nearly every demo­graphic, and the aver­age age of a tex­ter is 30+.

And why not?  After all, text mes­sages are con­cise (up to 160 char­ac­ters) and timely, and they can reach your sup­port­ers wher­ever they are. (95% of mobile sub­scribers have their hand­sets within arm’s reach 24/7.)  Bet­ter yet, mobile is a non-SPAM, opt-in-only medium.  And for that rea­son, text mes­sage open and response rates are higher than in any other medium.  In other words, mobile is a great way to reach out and mobi­lize your sup­port­ers – any­time, anywhere.

Con­tinue reading »

The most inter­est­ing per­son I met at the Stan­ford Sum­mit last week was Turkish-born Babur Ozen, whose busi­ness card says he’s the “boss” of Zip­Clip, which has offices in Palo Alto, Calif.

Babur gave me and Valerie Cun­ning­ham a test drive of the free ser­vice. Zip­Clip lets you add video, images or music from the open Web to your cell phone or mobile device.Above is Babur down­load­ing a photo of Valerie and Steve Gill­mor from my Flickr page to his phone.

Ding, dong, ring­tone sales are doomed

I’ve long been put off by the locked-down, closed, pro­pri­etary devices put out by the big mobile car­ri­ers. It’s been dif­fi­cult or impos­si­ble to swap pho­tos or music clips with your friends, or even to down­load them from your own site. Zip­Clip changes the equa­tion by rout­ing around the car­ri­ers. (Other ser­vices may do the same things Zip­Clip, but I’m not famil­iar with them.)

I asked Ozen about sales of ring­tones, now a billion-dollar mar­ket­place. “That’s dead,” he declared briskly.

Glad to hear it. I still want a ring­tone for my phone, but I want to choose my tone from my musi­cal collection.

It couldn’t be eas­ier. Just add Zip­Clip as an add-on to your browser. Then Just right-click your mouse while brows­ing the web. Videos, pho­tos, images and text are sent instantly to your phone. That’s it! No fid­dling with con­trols or software.

I’ll be spend­ing a lot of time with Zip­Clip and my Nokia N-series phones and the iPhone 3G I plan to get next month.

In the Civic Engage­ment on the Move report that I wrote for the Aspen Insti­tute, I included this passage:

Jed Alpert, co-founder and chief exec­u­tive offi­cer of Mobile Com­mons, pointed to FishMS, a text ser­vice in South Africa that was set up to help con­sumers choose seafood with the least adverse impact on the envi­ron­ment. A con­sci­en­tious con­sumer could text in the name of the fish and get a color-coded response on the sta­tus of local seafood species.

The World Wild­ife Fund reported: Species marked with a green fish can gen­er­ally be eaten with a clear con­science because their pop­u­la­tion num­bers are healthy. Orange means they’re legal to sell, but if you have a choice you should opt for one of the ‘green’ species. Species marked in red are ille­gal to buy or sell in South Africa.

More about that South African pro­gram here and at MobileActive.org.

So I was intrigued when I was lis­ten­ing to Liv­ing on Earth on KQED Fri­day and heard the report about the fish phone. Looks like the idea has now caught on State­side (though no men­tion of its South African ori­gins). From the story:

When you’re in the super­mar­ket or order­ing fish at a restau­rant, ever have trou­ble remem­ber­ing which species has high mer­cury, which is over­fished, and which is the most sus­tain­able? Now, a new text mes­sag­ing ser­vice can tell you every­thing you need to know, whether one fish, two fish, red fish or blue fish. Liv­ing on Earth’s Ash­ley Ahearn takes her cell phone to a local mar­ket to find out how the Fish Phone works.

RealAu­dio for this story
Down­load the story as an mp3

Just heard about a new cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism site that
launched ear­lier this month: Allvoices.com, which weaves together tra­di­tional and new media sources to cre­ate a global forum for
shar­ing news, videos, images and blogs will end its beta ver­sion and offi­cially
launch. From the announcement:

Allvoices pro­vides eye­wit­ness news and per­spec­tive that is
free from edi­to­r­ial fil­ter­ing and cen­sor­ship char­ac­ter­is­tic of global media
orga­ni­za­tions. Using a set of pro­pri­etary algo­rithms, Allvoices has cre­ated a
tech­nol­ogy plat­form that geo­graph­i­cally and con­tex­tu­ally cat­e­go­rizes
con­tributed con­tent based on 4,000 pro­fes­sional and online news sources such as
Reuters and blog posts that deter­mine rel­e­vancy, fos­ter cred­i­bil­ity and
main­tain open­ness with each con­tri­bu­tion made to the site.

Allvoices under­stands that cit­i­zen report­ing is becom­ing a cru­cial ele­ment in
the world of jour­nal­ism in order to ensure a global under­stand­ing of regional
issues across mul­ti­ple cul­ture divides.

Eli Spec­tor of Medi­aMobz — the new video pro­duc­tion mar­ket­place that I’m help­ing out on — points to a new cit­i­zen media site geared to youth cul­ture: Vimby, short for Video In My Back­yard. The site show­cases video and pho­tos taken in back­yards across the nation. The site encour­ages con­trib­u­tors to “help us uncover what’s hap­pen­ing in back­yards all over America.”

Says Eli: “I like the name of their pro­ducer ‘Pred­i­tor’ pro­gram. One of the pro­duc­ers in our com­mu­nity (Corey) is a “Pred­i­tor” for them as well. Here’s a video he pro­duced for them.”

Sounds pretty cool.

I had missed this bit of news last week, but heard about it at the Stan­ford Summit:

Reuters: MySpace joins shared iden­tity ser­vice OpenID

Another mod­est but impor­tant step for­ward for MySpace and the open source/open media worlds.