Unconference on digital media

KQED is sponsoring the Un-Conference on Digital Media, Education and 21st Century Skills with Lightning Talks.

When: Saturday, May 17, 10 am to 3 pm

Where: KQED, 2601 Mariposa, San Francisco                

Why: Share something you know or have done, and learn something you didn’t or haven’t.

What it is: An unconference, where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants. Come and discuss what you know, or would like to know about new media, education, and 21st century skills.

Details: Lightning talks, short presentations given at a conference (or un-conference) by attendees. Lightning talks last only 7 minutes, allowing several to be delivered in a single period by different speakers. We encourage you to present your work, and come on up to the podium! Send requests to lrule at kqed.org

Agenda: Morning: Welcome and Opening Statement; Introduction and Interests; Lightning talks

Lunch provided. Afternoon hands-on sessions: Google Earth training (bring a digital picture of a place you love); Mobile Devices, storytelling, and place-based learning (you’ll walk the neighborhood) or suggest your own topic and lead a tutorial or discussion. Call with questions: 415-553-2192              

Also: Friday evening (May 16, 6:30-8:30 at KQED) as we celebrate our local high school digital storytellers who participated in the KQED’s 6th Annual Digital Storytelling Contest. Stories will be screened and fabulous prizes awarded.

May 7, 2008 at 12:52 AM in Digital life, Digital storytelling | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

the txting generation

Boston Globe editorial: the revenge of e.e. cummings.

Item: A new study warns that writing text messages could hurt a writer's command of standardized English.

We had to LOL when we read how txt-msg lingo is replacing stndrd english in student academic pprs. 1 casualty of da trend is uz of capital letter to start a sentence. kids feel free to lowercase everything. pnktu8n is also dissed. tchaz try to help but its often 2 l8.

new paragraphs r not uzed in txting either. kids prolly think all dis iz ok cuz even Richard Sterling, emeritus xecutiv director of the ntl riting prjct, gives it the nod. natl riting prjct is sposd 2 improve riting instruxn in americas schoolz.

"i think in the future, capitalization will disappear," he sed in the nytimes. 4 lazy students dis is 2G2BT!

a big natl study by the College Board and Pew Project on the Internet and American Life finds teenagers riting more b/c of txting but in a hybrid language with conventions of its own: call it Textlish. they don't consider it frml english but 64 percent admit it seeps into their writing at school. ...

May 2, 2008 at 10:31 PM in Amusing, Digital life, Youth culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Open-sourcing the sports car

My friend Britt Blaser, founder and CEO of Open Resource Group, passed along word about a fascinating fellow named Claudio Ballard, an inventor whose obsession with automotive perfection is matched by his commitment to small, high-quality U.S. manufacturers. Claudio hosted a reception the other night at the New York Auto Show. (Said Britt: "They're throwing a Bloggers' reception, not a Press reception, because they know it's a new world.")

"Claudio and his team enthusiastically embraced our suggestion that the car's design be an open & collaborative project. This is a first, where our oldest industry, cars, can be designed using our newest medium, online collaboration," Britt said.

Doc wrote about the Icon GTR Roadster (pictured above) here. (When was the last time open source made you drool?)

Its a beautiful thing, and so hot it’s scary. It packs more than 800 horses in body that barely outweighs a Miata. It will rocket you past 200 miles per hour, and carve around curves on a suspension that’s as close to Formula One as you’ll find off a speedway.

They’re only producing a hundred of them in their first run. They are also interested in input as well as interest from fellow enthusiasts. This is the open source part of the story, and one of the big reasons I’m interested in it.

No price listed (hey, if you have to ask ...). Designed and built in the USA. Count 'em, 800+ horsepower.

Britt provides this background:

Claudio Ballard is an authentic American inventor and visionary. He's also a computer guy who always wanted to own a Shelby Cobra. When he had the chance to buy one, he decided he'd rather invent a new one: a Cobra for the 21st Century. Last summer, Doc and I started a conversation with Claudio about how the community of auto and open source enthusiasts might play a role in the development of an iconic car and an iconic company. The Collaborative Design Initiative is the result.

From Claudio's message:

The Iconic Motors Collaborative Design Initiative (CDI) will be a continuing conversation about the best way to conceive, equip and produce cars right here in America, using the very best suppliers: little companies that normally serve the space and aeronautical industry and the people who custom-build race cars. And we'd love for you to contribute your own ideas! Using Digg-like polling, we'll float the best ideas to the top - you will, not me. If one of your ideas wins, you'll be rewarded monetarily and recognized publicly.

OK, I've got a green streak, but at the same time, I'm a testosterone-fueled guy. The Iconic Motors website is here.

March 24, 2008 at 08:00 PM in Digital life, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

The social media resume

Paper resumes are passe. The New York Times has the word on multimedia Web 2.0 resumes.

March 10, 2008 at 09:27 PM in Digital life, Social-media, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

A night with Brewster, Gigi and friends

Have you ever been to an old-fashioned salon, where immensely intelligent and talented people gather around a dinner table to discuss issues of surpassing importance (without being too self-important)? Or remember those days in college where you stayed up late at night discussing great ideas or stuff that matters?

So it was last night at a social gathering at the home of Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and his wife Mary Austin. It’s bad form to blog private events without getting everyone’s permission, so I’ll simply point to some highlights:

• It was great reconnecting with old friends and associates, such as guest of honor Gigi Sohn, who runs Public Knowledge, and Blake and Jason Krikorian, who run Sling Media.

• Also great meeting some new people, like Will F. of the Omidyar Netwok and Jason D., the CEO of Skydeck.

• The views of the Presidio and San Francisco Bay were breathtaking. 

• The food was so sumptuous that I plan to buy the Cha Cha Cha Caribbean cookbook that Mary used.

• Brewster spoke with deep insight about the different “wars” that have been fought over the Internet. The first conflict layer occurred over its infrastructure, its architecture. Arpanet produced a distributed network of peers with no central control, giving us today’s flourishing World Wide Web. The second conflict came in the 1990s to early 2000s with open software and open systems prevailing over closed proprietary systems like AOL. The new, third conflict is over access to content and whether the Web will follow the model of a global public library with access to all knowledge or a hobbled proprietary model where huge swaths of information become locked down under a pay-per-view DRM model.

• The thrust of most of our conversation centered on the threats to the public commonweal courtesy of Hollywood, media monopolies and the telecom giants, which have been seeking to rewrite the rules of the digital age in ways detrimental to the public interest. (Those issues were the subject of my book Darknet.) Examples: the mobile Internet as a First Amendment-free zone (see Verizon v. NARAL). Rep. Howard Berman’s effort to rewrite copyright law to make copying of a music CD for a friend a series of 16 felonies, one for each song on the CD. The unremittingly slow rollout of true broadband in the United States. And so on.

Lawrence Lessig and Craig Newmark, who could have added much to the conversation, weren't able to attend.

6 Steps to Digital Copyright Sanity

One significant step forward was Public Knowledge’s smart decision to go on offense rather than defense (in some ways similar to the 10-point digital culture road map I outlined in the final chapter of Darkent) in a whitepaper written by Gigi Sohn last fall: Six Steps to Digital Copyright Sanity: Reforming a Pre-VCR Law for a YouTube World. Read it, and understand the forces we’re up against.

Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation are two of the nonprofit organizations doing extraordinary work in representing our interests on Capitol Hill.

March 7, 2008 at 08:03 PM in Current Affairs, Digital life, Digital rights & copyright, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

MeetMoi: dating for those on the go

Meagan passes along word about MeetMoi, a new mobile dating site that launched a few days ago. She says:

We are a recent start-up with hopes to revolutionize social networking with the first truly location-based mobile dating service. 

The idea is this: we're sick of dating sites that force us to sit behind a computer and introduce us to people who may be miles away. That's why we came up with this service. With MeetMoi, computers are left behind and people connect while on the go. So whether it is a bar, an office, or a restaurant, users can open their cell phones and use MeetMoi to browse, chat, flirt with and meet people near them.

Using groundbreaking technology, MeetMoi looks for people in a specified location and helps its users find local matches. Since MeetMoi values safety above everything, no one's actual location is ever revealed.

Sounds like a worthy entrant in the mobile space. If you're in the market, give it a whirl and tell us what you think.

March 5, 2008 at 11:57 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Wikipedia founder's offline life goes online

Felt like I was reading a tabloid this morning when I read the San Jose Merc's lead story on its business page: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales dogged by tawdry tales online. A long shower helped.

March 5, 2008 at 10:17 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

The cut-and-paste personality

Wall Street Journal: The Cut-and-Paste Personality. Lacking inspiration and a moral compass, some online daters are borrowing other people's witty Web profiles.

February 19, 2008 at 10:16 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Trust, privacy and digital footprints

In an article in Sunday's NY Times, How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Times, Randall Stross writes about the shift in digital culture when it comes to postings on social networking sites. Excerpt:

In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering consequences. Stacy Snyder, 25, who was a senior at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., offers an instructive example. Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set. ...

Susannah Fox, associate director of the Pew project and an author of both the 2000 and 2007 surveys, told me that she was surprised by the reduced concern about online publication of personal information. Internet users are not just passively allowing personal information to slip from their control and end up online, where it is searchable; they are also actively putting the information online themselves. The “Digital Footprints” study coined a new phrase, “active digital footprint,” to refer to the personal information that individuals increasingly place online voluntarily.

December 30, 2007 at 12:03 AM in Digital life, Privacy, Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

'Here Comes Another Bubble,' v. 1.1

You may have read the controversy over the Richter Scales' video Here Comes Another Bubble, a smart, clever sendup of Web 2.0 culture done to a Billy Joel tune.

Lane Hartwell objected to the band's inclusion of her photo (for a split second) in their mash-up -- yes, they should have attributed her contribution or used a photo with a Creative Commons license and attributed the photographer -- and sent YouTube a takedown notice. ValleyWag covered it with a post titled, Here Comes Another Takedown.

So the band just released version 1.1 of the video, sans Hartwell's photo and with (too-quick) credits at the end. Footnote: I'm one of the photographers credited, for my shot of Robert Scoble during his book release party. I thought that shot looked familiar!

December 19, 2007 at 10:29 PM in Amusing, Digital life, Video, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (1)

Should wi-fi be free?

Recently at ChrisPirillo.com: Should wi-fi be free? And how to find it. Excerpt:

When Starbucks introduced for-pay Wi-Fi in 2002, it seemed like a great deal. But five years later, the model appears old and stale and ready for a complete overhaul.

According to my friend Mike Elgan at ComputerWorld.com, Starbucks will begin providing their customers with free Wi-Fi within the next year. This is an excellent development. I believe we shouldn’t have to pay for wireless access points, and I bet you don’t, either.

As you know, Wi-Fi is widely available. It’s no longer some new-fangled fad… and paying for it has become rather antiquated. The problem is, free doesn’t always mean secure. Thankfully, there are programs such as Hamachi to keep you safe. Hamachi is a free program that allows you to create your own Virtual Private Network, or VPN.

Any time I am out and about, I rely on jiwire.com to point me towards any hot spots in the area. Simply input your country, state and city, and the site will give you a list of all locations (including addresses and phone numbers) who have Wi-Fi available for you.

iStumbler for Mac OSX is an amazing tool. iStumbler is the leading wireless discovery tool for Mac OS X, providing plug-ins for finding AirPort networks, Bluetooth devices, and Bonjour services with your Mac.

Should wi-fi be free? Not as a citizen's right (not yet, anyway), but I'm with Chris. Wi-fi is fast becoming pervasive and free through businesses that want to attract the wired generation. I often choose where to have lunch or grab a coffee drink based on whether they offer free wi-fi.

November 2, 2007 at 12:01 AM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0)

Support digital artists' efforts

Just came across Strayform: The Creation Network, geared to funding digital artists. Great idea.

Strayform is community where artists and fans can thrive with no DRM, no commericals and no corporate middle-men. Fan funded proposals let artist get paid without giving up a big cut, without blowing money on ads, and without long term restrictive contracts. Since the Artists are paid up front and the Media is Creative Commons licenced, fans can use freely on any device and share on Peer to Peer networks.

October 28, 2007 at 04:08 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (1)

StreetAdvisor: Tell the world about your street

Here's an interesting social media site in the real estate space: StreetAdvisor, a new startup based in San Francisco. ("Let the world know what you REALLY think about your street!") From the folks behind the site:

StreetAdvisor.com is an entirely new kind of online real estate community powered by crowd-sourced reviews, photos, and videos.  The new StreetAdvisor provides a real-life "insider" view making it the essential guidebook to finding the right street to call home, connecting with neighbors, and discovering new things, documented by the people who have lived there.

Consumers can learn and share vital details about where they live including noise levels, traffic, neighbors, entertainment, and public services, etc., much in the same way people share their experiences with products and travel at popular online shopping and travel sites. It also allows for firsthand recommendations and negative experiences about local businesses, entertainment, services, lifestyle, and back road gems.

Today the site launched some new upgrades, giving homeowners, renters, and buyers a place to review, share, and learn what it's like to live somewhere. The site is currently in public beta and is initially focusing on the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Go ahead, plunk your address in there (mine came up empty, but it's very early). If this takes off, I'll definitely use it to help scout out prospective neighborhoods for my next house.

July 31, 2007 at 06:04 PM in Digital life, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

10 new ways to make money online

Web Worker Daily: 10 new ways to make money online. Go to the site to see the explanation for these 10 suggestions:

1. Offer your professional expertise in an online marketplace. 

2. Sell photos on stock photography sites. (Try Fotolia, Dreamstime, Shutterstock, and Big Stock Photo.)

3. Blog for pay. 

4. Or start your own blog network.

5. Provide service and support for open source software. 

6. Online life coaching.

7. Virtually assist other web workers.

8. Build services atop Amazon Web Services.

9. Write reviews for pay or perks.

10. Become a virtual gold farmer.

February 23, 2007 at 09:51 PM in Digital life, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (1)

A new crop of kids: Generation We

A special CNET News.com feature: A new crop of kids: Generation We.

When Amy Jo Kim's son Gabriel says he wants to "watch videos," she knows he doesn't mean DVDs or television. He wants YouTube. ...

"He finds TV boring. So during Reading Rainbow we look up stuff on Wikipedia like side commentary. But I'm driving that," said Kim, a 40-something game designer and resident of Half Moon Bay, Calif. "His interest in TV has really declined, because it's just there, you can't customize it."

"What we're talking about is a generation that has the ability to be in touch with each other immediately at earlier and earlier ages," said Nancy Robinson, vice president and consumer strategist at Iconoculture, a Minneapolis company that tracks consumer trends for consumer giants like Nestle and Sony. "If you asked someone 10 years ago about the necessity of a cell phone for a 5-year-old, they would have laughed and walked away; now you can buy that at Target."

This generation hasn't rejected TV, but the way Generation We watches the tube has evolved from their parents' days. What's been called the "Tivo-ization" of households now give kids unprecedented freedom over the handling of their TV diet, so much so that young kids often don't understand the traditional way of watching shows with a set geography and time. And now that TV shows are migrating to portable devices and are streamed on demand from the Web, the experience for kids is even more interactive and community-based.

Jonathan Steuer, a researcher at Iconoculture, has a 5-year-old daughter who recently asked to watch one of her shows while they were visiting a friend's house. Because the friends didn't own a TiVo, "I had to explain to her the show wasn't on there," he said.

"You've got a generation of kids who've had an unprecedented amount of control of their media and they're not going to give it up," Steuer said. "It does put out a challenge--for anyone in the media busines--of how to keep attention in that media." ...

I want my MTV mix masher
Take what MTV Networks is doing with its teen-targeted digital cable channel, The N. It produces television shows that air on cable, but its audience can stream the shows via the Web through its broadband player, The Click. On the site, kids can use a so-called video mix masher to take a scene from a show, put a comment on it and add other scene asynchronously to create their program. Part of it is what The N calls "vomenting," or adding commentary to shows via text blurbs or audio, ala Mystery Science Theater."

Dixie Feldman, an editorial director at The N, which reaches about 50 million homes, said that group's audience is increasingly turning to the Net to watch shows and bond with their peers from all over.

"On the Net, geographic boundaries disappear--a teen can watch a scene in New York, and another teen in Nebraska can watch and comment on that same scene," and they can both create something new, she said. "The Net creates that community aspect."

January 23, 2007 at 11:29 PM in Digital life, Youth culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Sex With Emily

At Macworld Expo in San Francisco the other day, and at the Culture Catch Salon during the event, I got a chance to spend some time with Emily Morse, who created the podcast and CBS Radio talk show Sex With Emily in 2005. She talks about the kinds of relationships and sexual issues that people confess to her and, in the longer version, she discusses details of her podcast, how it got started, and where she plans to take it from here.

I'm still experimenting with how many sites to upload to. I finally had time to upload a video to Revver, a site I like quite a lot. Unlike the other sites, there's a human approval process -- took about 4.5 hours to go live.

Watch it on these sites:

16-minute version:
• Ourmedia page | watch or download video: 16:00; MPEG-4/QuickTime (H.264); video quality: **** (out of 5)

5:30 version:
• Ourmedia page | watch or download video: 5:30; MPEG-4/QuickTime (H.264); video quality: **** (out of 5)
• Blip.tv page | watch video in MPEG-4 (quality: ***) or in Flash
• YouTube (Flash) (quality: ***) or see below
• Revver (Flash) (quality: ***)

Cross-posted to Real People Network.

January 23, 2007 at 04:43 PM in Digital life, Podcasting, Radio/audio, Video | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Internet as political force grows, poll finds

MediaNews (ugh) via San Jose Mercury News: Internet as political force grows, poll finds. Shift away from TV, newspapers continues.

Candidates and those who run their campaigns have known for some time how the Internet has energized politics and reshuffled the old rules of how office-seekers, the media and the public operate. A survey released Wednesday about online activities and the 2006 election shows just how dramatic that shift has been.

Americans who received most of their political information online (15 percent) has doubled since the previous midterm election in 2002. And almost a third of the public -- 31 percent -- used the Internet during the 2006 campaign to get political news and discuss the election through e-mail.

Those findings came from a telephone survey of 2,562 adults, conducted for the Pew Internet and American Life Project between Nov. 8 and Dec. 4 ...

Spurred by greater broadband use, a growing number of Internet political activists -- about 14 million people, according to the survey -- are generating and sharing political content, including video clips that had a major impact on some races.

``There's a viral, grass-roots system for sharing information now that gets around the traditional gate-keeping function of the mainstream media,'' said Lee Rainie, director of the project for the non-partisan Pew Research Center, which reports on trends and attitudes.

January 18, 2007 at 02:17 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Lynda.com: Free courses for a week

Standing in line this morning I bumped into Lynda Weinman, a legend in the field of online design. (I’m talking about podcasting on Friday afternoon, so we were both wearing Conference Faculty badges.) Years ago I bought Lynda’s book creative html design and stiil keep it within reach. Whenever I tweak a new design for this blog, my first stop is the browser-safe hues palette on Lynda’s site. We talked about exchanging some materials between Lynda.com and Ourmedia’s Personal Media Learning Center.

Later, I attended a session on masking taught by Photoshop guru Deke McClelland. Afterward I chatted up Deke and Lynda.com’s Michael Ninness. There are something like 21,000 tutorials, videos and articles on the Lynda.com site. What I didn’t know is that you get a free week to plow through as much as you’d like before the subscription gate comes down. That’s an awfully generous, and very smart, way to get people hooked on the rich content centering on learning how to create higher quality works.

January 9, 2007 at 08:03 PM in Computing, Digital life, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

The power of 'we fundraising'

In three weeks, Beth Kanter raised over $49,000 for the Sharing Foundation, which Yahoo is matching,

Three weeks ago, using what I learned from my first personal fundraising campaign, I launched a second campaign to raise money for the Sharing Foundation education programs using the Network For Good Charity Badge and entering the Yahoo! For Good competition which would double the amount raised by the winner.

We won!

In just over three weeks, we raised $49,537 from 745 donors and adding the Yahoo Matching dollars brings the total to $99,074!  That's a big deal for a small grassroots organization like the Sharing Foundation. Personal fundraising works! 

Read more at BlogHer.

January 6, 2007 at 09:35 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Convergence and cultural change

San Jose Mercury News: New culture enabling users to control entertainment. An interview with MIT's Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. Excerpt:

If you want to create a fan frenzy around content and ultimately around a piece of hardware, you have to understand the audience, Jenkins said. Then you ``open up a playground for them to experiment with.'' ... If you crack down on fan creativity, you run the risk of losing them to more tolerant media/hardware owners. ...

The designers of the Xbox 360 at Microsoft anticipated that fans would want to take their own custom music lists and insert them into the soundtracks of video games as they played them. Chip maker Texas Instruments, far removed from the fans, anticipated that transcoding -- converting video from one format to another -- would be a key feature for its chips, said Greg Delagi, a vice president at TI's DSP division. Transcoding is now at the heart of what happens on popular social-networking sites such as YouTube as they simplify the process of converting video from one form to another.

Younger consumers have come to expect this kind of thinking about their needs. The music industry had its chance to understand them, Jenkins said, and blew it. They will watch content such as ``Lost'' on all sorts of devices, and they don't want to have to pay for that right more than once, if at all.

December 29, 2006 at 10:32 PM in Digital life, New media, Youth culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Debunking Internet hoaxes

Almost every day I get queries about whether a particular report or rumor circulating on the Internet is true or not. Not sure whether that e-mail you got contains the truth, a shred of truth, or is a complete fabrication? Here are some of the best resources for verifying or discounting possible Internet hoaxes.

Snopes
The granddaddy of them all.

Vmyths
Learn about computer virus myths, hoaxes, urban legends, hysteria, and the implications if you believe in them.

Sophos
Sophos provides information about virus hoaxes, chain letters, scams and misunderstandings to aid companies and individuals.

Hoaxbusters
A service of the Computer Incident Advisory Capability and US Dept. of Energy.

About.com Urban Legends
About.com debunks the most common urban legends.

Hoax info from Nonprofit.net
Fairly extensive database of Net hoaxes.

Break the chain
The name says it all.

EFF's Folklore page
Background on the subject from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Urban legends & modern myths
A collection of the entertaining modern folktales.

CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University
Virus and virus-hoax news.

HoaxKill
A site that identifies hoaxes and provides instructions to combat them, with an archive of chain letters, urban legends and hoaxes.

Chain letters
A chain letters verification site that seems to have gone into hibernation.

Fraud Bureau
A free service established to alert online consumers and investors of  complaints relating to online vendors

Fraud info from Google
More about fraud and scams than hoaxes.

Scambusters
All about Internet fraud.

Have others you rely on? Please add them in the Comments field below.

December 27, 2006 at 06:48 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Where pixels end and reality begins

Steven Winn in the San Francisco Chronicle: It's hard to tell where pixels end and reality begins. Excerpt:

As digital technology assumes an ever-widening role in the way we do business, play games, make friends, buy books, hunt for bedmates, troll for news, decipher meaning, craft identities and both literally and figuratively see the world, the boundary between it and everything else blurs. "We make our own media," exults J.D. Lasica in "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation." "In many ways we are our own media."

It's no wonder we can't trust our eyes anymore. We're so deeply invested in the digital universe, and its infinitely malleable reality, that perception itself has become an endless hall of mirrors. If anything can be Photoshopped -- digitally added or subtracted, heightened or diminished, rebalanced or synthesized out of thin air -- then almost any electronically transmitted image is provisional and subject to skepticism. It may be a defining paradox of the digital age that at no time in human history have so many people had so much access to so much imagery -- and had so many reasons to doubt what they see. ...

Everything we encounter, in newspapers, on computer and movie screens, in museums and on television, passes through new filters that experience has made for us. A certain amount of media literacy, these days, is a minimum requirement.

September 7, 2006 at 12:28 AM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cut and paste culture

The Book Babes, Ellen Heltzel and Margo Hammond, have an essay in today's San Jose Merc Perspective section: Of plagiarism and punishment.

May 7, 2006 at 07:31 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

At the Forum on Digital Transitions

I'm here in Santa Barbara, Calif., for the daylong Forum on Digital Transitions, focusing on where online communities are heading. Here's the speaker list. Author Howard Rheingold gave the keynote last night putting collective action and community-building into historical perspective (with his usual presentational flair). Rep. Lois Capps, the progressive local House representative, just gave a talk about health care and other issues where civic engagement is essential.

Among those sitting at tables here at Corwin Pavilion on the UC Santa Barbara campus: Howard, Doc Searls, Elizabeth Osder, Angela Beesley, Markus Sandy, Jay Dedman, Ryanne Hodson, Micki Krimmel, Robert Kaye, Jennifer McClure, Britt Blaser, John Seely Brown, Mary Hodder, Brad Templeton, Danah Boyd, Bruce Bimber, Dave Toole and lots of other familiar faces.

I hope to post some video from the event later.

Later: Jen McClure is blogging it on her new blog. Here's our group SB Forum video blog on Blogger.

April 10, 2006 at 10:47 AM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Coming in April: OnHollywood

At Web 2.0 last week, I cornered the high-energy, super-sharp Valerie Cunningham about AlwaysOn's just-announced OnHollywood summit -- a gathering of the best and brightest in the movie and tech industries, coming to Hollywood on April 25-27, 2006.

Here's Valerie's 2 1/2-minute description of the conference (in MPEG-4). (Ourmedia page | watch video)

From the AlwaysOn announcement:

ONHOLLYWOOD is where cutting edge technology from the backstreets of Silicon Valley meets Hollywood's digital media revolution. This two and a half day industry insider event borrows on the "film market" tradition by providing an open environment where 80 top digital entertainment and media entrepreneurs meet the big time studio, telco and consumer electronics executives.  …

Among those invited are the top dogs from Yahoo, Disney, Sprint and other bigger players to mix it up with the entrepreneurs, VCs and talent agents that will be wandering the halls of the Roosevelt and hanging out at the pool party on opening night.

Count me in.

Technorati tags: Hollywood,  OnHollywood,   HonorTagJournalism

October 12, 2005 at 04:11 PM in Digital life, Film, Podcasts & interviews, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Preserving the digital world

The Boston Globe has a profile of Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive (Ourmedia's partner): Saving the world as we know it. Excerpt:

The Internet Archive has the ambitious goal of offering ''universal access to human knowledge," and, in pursuit of that, in a small white wooden building that once served the base as a general store, the archivists are collecting every sort of digital file imaginable, from Web pages to podcasts, software programs to movies, presidential phone conversations to recordings of Cowboy Junkies concerts.

Brewster Kahle is the MIT-educated former entrepreneur who began building the library in 1996, for the simple reason that ''nobody else seemed to be doing it," he says. Now, he realizes that he has undertaken a task with no obvious stopping point. In 2001, he started recording 20 television channels, continuously, and recently he has had volunteers scanning thousands of out-of-print books. Each month, the Internet Archive collects the equivalent of one Library of Congress, says Kahle. The collection, available at www.archive.org, has already surpassed one petabyte. That's a million gigabytes. ...

August 15, 2005 at 11:26 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Planet Web 2.0

Forgot to mention that a couple of weeks back I discovered that my blog has been aggregated into the Planet Web 2.0 commnity, along with others like Chris Anderson, Dave Sifry, Mitch Ratcliffe, John Battelle, Marc Canter, Ross Mayfield, Jon Udell, Jimmy Wales and others. Nice little effort by Ian Davis. Didn't know about it, but since they're not getting any ad income off it, it's fine by me -- and it's good reading.

August 12, 2005 at 03:52 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (1) | | (0)

Eye in the sky for house hunting

Glenn Fleishman has a feature in today's Seattle Times about using online resources,
including aerial and satellite maps, to research buying a new house.

Now this is how to shop for a home.

June 5, 2005 at 10:06 AM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Who inherits your digital data?

John Boudreau in the San Jose Mercury News: Pondering new puzzle: who inherits digital data.

May 29, 2005 at 04:30 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Datin' and matin'

In Sites check and rate reputations online, the San Jose Merc's Michael Bazeley looks at digital identity in the online dating scene. Sites to enhance trust in the singles space include TrueDater and Opinity.com.

May 23, 2005 at 01:56 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (1)

Camera phone storytelling

From Dan Gillmor's new blog:

HP has developed an interesting new technology it calls StoryCast, described as "an experimental digital storytelling service that lets people use their camera phones and other mobile devices to easily create and instantly share stories with friends and family. Each story consists of a sort of narrated slide show of photos accompanied by the storyteller's voice."

Apparently it's being used at the Red Herring conference this week in Monterey. ...

Excellent!

May 18, 2005 at 12:05 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) | | (0)

Brewster's awesome undertaking

Bob Garfield of NPR's On the Media interviews the brilliant Brewster Kahle, founder of Archive.org, today (listen as an mp3 in RealAudio). Here's the description of the 8-minute program:

Nine years ago, Brewster Kahle embarked on a project of massive proportion - archiving the Internet. When Bob checked in on how the project is going, he learned that it has grown even more massive. Kahle doesn't want to archive just the Internet, he wants universal access to all information. And he says it can be done.

April 23, 2005 at 12:15 PM in Digital life | Permalink | Comments (0) |