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.

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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.

Chris Brogan redux: 50 Steps to Establishing a Consistent Social Media Practice.

I’ve been using FriendFeed more and more over the past few weeks (here’s my feed), largely at Robert Scoble’s suggestion. Now comes Chris Brogan with FriendFeed – The Hidden Conversation. Excerpt:

If “joining the conversation” is one goal of your exploration of social
media, it’s almost become a requirement that you maintain a presence on
FriendFeed. It’s an application
that acts as a central aggregation and discussion point for many of
your other Internet points of presence. You can add your YouTube,
Flickr, Twitter, Jaiku, Brightkite, Upcoming.org, Last.fm, and a
gazillion other services into it, and then when you create activity on
any of those services, other people following your activity stream can
form commentary around what you’ve posted.