Last month I had the plea­sure of talk­ing with Ezra But­ler, Luck­yS­tar­tups’ Israel cor­re­spon­dent.  In our inter­view, Ezra and I dis­cuss every­thing from my per­sonal life and where I grew up to the ser­vices I pro­vide as a “one-stop-shop” for star­tups, plus of course, let’s not forget, Ezra’s love for alco­hol and choco­late. We also dis­cuss the dif­fer­ence between Amer­i­can and Israeli men­tal­ity, the amaz­ing Israeli tech scene and I offer my own 2 cents to startups:

1. If you don’t know social media, don’t do it on your own!  If you want to do social media on your own then read up first– if you try to do it with­out guid­ance, odds are your cam­paign won’t be a suc­cess.  If you want to learn more about how to use social media in the right man­ner, a few good blog­gers to read are Chris Bro­gan, Chris Heuer, JD Lasica and my own blog.

2. Don’t rush things!  A lot of star­tups are being pres­sured by investors to launch, espe­cially dur­ing these dif­fi­cult eco­nomic times.  Don’t launch until your prod­uct is at its best or you may suf­fer an unwar­ranted flop!

Watch the video above to see my full interview.

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Ear­lier this evening we wrapped up the kick­off meet­ing of the Pub­lic Media Col­lab­o­ra­tive (no web­site yet, pri­vate wiki com­ing, Face­book group here) at Tech­Soup in San Fran­cisco. The idea, spawned by Susan Mer­nit, ini­tially drew eight of us (folks like David Cohn, Mar­garet Rosas, Joyce Kim) to a restau­rant last month to plan a gath­er­ing around col­lab­o­ra­tion to pro­mote com­mu­nity build­ing at the local level with social media and technology.

It reminded me in some ways of the cit­i­zens media sum­mit I orga­nized in 2005 that drew 40 peo­ple to the offices of the Inter­net Archive a cou­ple of miles from here — with some impor­tant dif­fer­ences: Where the sum­mit drew public-spirited cit­i­zen pub­lish­ers from around the coun­try who were run­ning Web pub­li­ca­tions, this gath­er­ing rep­re­sented a much broader slice of local par­tic­i­pants: social media entre­pre­neurs, non­profit employ­ees, polit­i­cal activists, jour­nal­ists, video pro­duc­ers, phil­an­thropists and others.

Some 40 peo­ple turned out for this inau­gural meet­ing. Amy Gahran live-tweeted the event on Twit­ter (hash tag: #PMC). Among those who turned out: David Siskin, Dave Toole, Chris Heuer, Julian Dar­ley, Brian Shields, Austin Heap, Jen Myronuk, Marnie Webb, Amy Gahran, Joyce Kim, Kristy Graves, George Kelly, Raines Cohen, Heather Gold, Richard Landry, David Cohn, Adina Levin, Michael Stoll, Mar­garet Rosas and many others.

In short, we’re a monthly meet-up and work­ing group whose mis­sion is to use media & tech­nol­ogy to build democ­racy and edu­cate and empower local and vir­tual com­mu­ni­ties. A few highlights:

Susan Mer­nit told the gath­er­ing she was “struck by how con­tent and video have become more acces­si­ble” to users, and that the impe­tus to engage with media cuts across dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties, like jour­nal­ists and advo­cates of pub­lic hous­ing. Pub­lic Media Collaborative’s goal is not to do one big thing but rather to sup­port more “episodic and bursty” efforts based on efforts and inter­ests that overlap.

Some­one sug­gested that the group’s pur­pose was to “cre­ate a solu­tions ecol­ogy,” a short­hand descrip­tion that I like a lot. I men­tioned that it seemed that the group’s pur­pose, in essence, was to con­nect the con­nec­tors, though Richard Landry pointed out that we can also serve a bridg­ing func­tion in reach­ing out to orga­ni­za­tions that need guid­ance in the social media sphere.

After a lot of folks’ input, I sug­gested that the orga­ni­za­tion seemed to be cir­cling in on three main components:

• As a dig­i­tal salon, with monthly meet­ings that cen­ter on a par­tic­u­lar topic or cause, with smaller break­out groups to sup­port each other’s efforts.

• As a cross-disciplinary sup­port group with a com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel to clue in each other about timely efforts.

• As a resource cen­ter with a pooled knowl­edge base and ongo­ing workshops/bootcamps around social and pub­lic media. (More on this soon, as the launch of Socialbrite approaches.) Or, as Joyce Kim says, the Col­lab­o­ra­tive can serve “as a resource bank where we can build upon each other’s exper­tise to help on our own com­mu­nity projects.”

If you live in the Bay Area and are inter­ested in join­ing up, drop me a line or just pop into our next gathering.

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I orig­i­nally intended to ask my Twit­ter friends for a solu­tion to this, but I don’t want to inun­date them with dozens of tweets, so here’s the prob­lem I’m having:

In early 2008 I cre­ated the Trav­el­ingGeeks site on Word­Press in advance of our trip to Israel last April. After our return, I trans­fered the domain con­trol on GoDaddy to Renee Blod­gett, who hired a pro­gram­mer to make some fixes. I believe, but am not cer­tain, that they copied over my files and did their own instal­la­tion and pointed their DNS servers for the domain to their Word­Press installation.

Fast for­ward to Jan­u­ary 2009. We’re plan­ning a new Trav­el­ingGeeks trip to Lon­don this June (more on that soon). I just down­loaded the new WP 2.7 and uploaded it to my GoDaddy pre­mium account to replace the orig­i­nal instal­la­tion. The instal­la­tion resides on jdlasica.com in the “trav­el­inggeeks” folder at the same level as my index.html file for jdlasica.com.

Once I get this com­pletely new blog set up, I know I’ll need to get Renee to point the DNS servers to it. And I do know how to upload new themes and a revised CSS Stylesheet. But here are my two questions:

1. Dur­ing devel­op­ment, how do I actu­ally see the new site? (since jdlasica.com/travelinggeeks.index.php doesn’t show it; http://jdlasica.com/wp-admin/install.php doesn’t work; and http://jdlasica.com/travelinggeeks/wp-admin/install.php says: “Word­Press already installed”; if i go to travelinggeeks/wp-admin/install.php, that’s the instal­la­tion on Renee’s server)

2. How do I log into the admin­is­tra­tion panel? (url = yoursite.com/wp-login.php but I don’t know what to put in for “your­site” dur­ing development)

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Happy win­ter sol­stice! The sol­stice arrived at 7:04 am East­ern time this morn­ing. Finally, the days will start get­ting longer again. Infoplease.com and Wikipedia have details on the sol­stice. (Flickr photo taken at Stone­henge in 2004.)

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After hav­ing an account at the WELL — the old­est con­tin­u­ing online com­mu­nity — since the early or mid-‘90s, I closed my jd@well.com account today. (I’ll rem­i­nisce some other time.) Too many spams and newslet­ters I no longer read for me to con­tinue the account.

If you want to con­tact me, fol­low me at jdlasica.com/twitter and direct-message me, or con­tact me through the “CONTACT” or “Email me” links above.

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Christo­pher Carfi at the Social Cus­tomer Man­i­festo offers thanks to the incom­ing Obama administration’s vision in open­ing up Change.gov
con­tent with Cre­ative Com­mons and says, “We have cre­ated iPhone and wid­get based
ver­sions of Change.gov, and a new con­duit for cit­i­zens and gov­ern­ment
to connect.

Here’s the story.

IPhone ver­sion (You can get the iPhone and other mobile ver­sions here)

Wid­get ver­sion (You can get the wid­get here)

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Happy Hal­loween! Photo repub­lished from moaan on flickr. I’m tak­ing Bobby trick-or-treating tonight.

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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.

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