Nancy Pelosi's Flickr photostream

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has a Flickr photostream (dating back to last August. Cool. She hasn't learned about Creative Commons yet, though.

May 9 at 11:22 PM in Photography, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

NPR considers convergence for next generation of radio

At PBS MediaShift, Mark Glaser takes a look at two training programs at NPR — Next Generation Radio and the Intern Edition — and how they are including more web and interactive elements.

May 7 at 04:40 PM in Radio/audio | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

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

NY Times on Flickr

 

While I was traveling I missed this New York Times Magazine piece about the photo sharing site Flickr and some of its most popular shooters, such as Rebekka Guoleifsdottir.

May 7 at 12:43 AM in Photography, Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

10th anniversary of 'Cluetrain Manifesto'

Ten years ago, four authors came together to start a new conversation about marketing. The result was a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto and with it, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger nailed 95 theses on the door of the Internet and challenged us all to wake up to a transformation underway in how companies and people engage in markets.

The Society for New Communications Research is co-hosting a full day of networking, group discussions, workshops and presentations featuring:

• Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and fellow at Harvard's Berkman Institute
• Peter Hirshberg, Chairman of the Executive Committee of Technorati 
• Giovanni Rodriguez, Partner at The Conversation Group 
• Thor Muller, founder of Get Satisfaction
• Jeremiah Owyang, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
• Deborah Schultz, independent social media expert

When: May 29, 8:30 am - 8 pm

Where: Offices of SAP
3410 Hillview Ave., Palo Alto, CA

Space is limited; price is $145 through May 10. Register online at: http://conversation.eventbrite.com/

May 6 at 11:18 PM in Books, Social-media | Permalink | Comments (1) | |

You Suck at Photoshop

Josh Quittner in the May 10 issue of Time magazine writes about the clever video series You Suck at Photoshop. See the others in the series on MyDamnChannel.

May 6 at 11:00 PM in Photography | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Historic night for Obama, Dems

The headlines say it all:

May 6 at 09:42 PM in Current Affairs, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Speaking at Digital Hollywood today

I'm flying down to SoCal today for Digital Hollywood, where entertainment meets technology.

I'll be speaking at 3:45 pm on this panel at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel:

Personalized Media Platforms: Widgets, User Generated Media, News, Music & Blogs
Jim Brady, Executive Editor of washingtonpost.com
JD Lasica, Co-founder, Ourmedia
Derrick Oien, President, Intercasting
Jessica Stoner, V.P. Business Development, Pandora
Michael Jones, CEO, Userplane and VP, AOL
Leonard Brody, co-founder and CEO, NowPublic.com
Ted Cohen, Managing Partner, TAG Strategic, Moderator

I know Leonard, Michael, Derrick, Jim and Ted, so this should be fun.

Update: Actually, it was a lot of fun -- very lively and engaging, as "Ted" panels tend to be. If you're interested in some of the tidbits and takeaways from the panel, I just posted them on my Twitter feed. Not sure if the panel discussion was recorded or not.

May 5 at 12:01 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1) | |

Maker Faire photos

Here are 33 photos taken at the Maker Faire — a celebration of geeky, whimsical craftsmanship — at the San Mateo Fairgrounds today.

Scott Beale has many more here.

May 4 at 11:41 PM in Amusing, Current Affairs, Photography, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Where Twitter is heading

Dan Farber at CNET News.com on where Twitter is heading. (You do know what Twitter is, right?)

May 4 at 12:10 AM in Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Mobile: Loopt lets you know your friends' locations

Steven Levy in this week's Newsweek: Hey, I Know Where U R. Loopt lets you use a cell phone to share locations. Excerpt:

What kinds of things happen when you share locations with 40 or 50 people?

It's amazing how often you're near someone and don't know about it—not in the same restaurant, but three restaurants down. It's such a common occurrence that some nights. rather than just go home at 11, I'll drive somewhere because I know I'll find people I can meet up with.

Maybe your significant other would wonder why you're hiding.

For that very reason, there's a feature in Loopt where you can set your location to appear to the world that you're somewhere different than you actually are. If you want it to appear that you're at the library while you are really somewhere else, you could do that.

You could lie?

For your privacy. This feature came out of a conversation with the National Network to End Domestic Violence. They were saying if a battered wife turned off the feature, the abusive husband would think something's wrong, so people need the ability to look like they're somewhere that they are not.

May 2 at 10:40 PM in Mobile | Permalink | Comments (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 at 10:31 PM in Amusing, Digital life, Youth culture | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Israel's Web 2.0 scene

Social marketing expert Ayelet Noff talks about the social media and Web 2.0 scene in Israel during this 9-minute video interview I conducted with her during our blogger posse road trip to Israel. A former New Yorker, Ayelet is a rising star in Web 2.0 circles in Tel Aviv and helped us with all phases of our trip. (Apologies for the lighting — this was the first interview I did on my Samsung hi-def camcorder.)

Watch video in H.264 MPEG-4 on Ourmedia
Watch in Flash on Ourmedia
Watch video in Flash on Veoh (with ads)

May 2 at 01:43 PM in Israel, Podcasts & interviews, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Bush-McCain Challenge

Take the Bush-McCain Challenge. Can you tell the difference between President Bush and Sen. John McCain? Take this 5-question quiz and find out.

May 2 at 01:12 PM in Amusing, Politics | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

13 ways of talking to a programmer

Lisa Williams at IdeaLab blog: Thirteen Ways of Talking to a Programmer, including specs, wireframes, mashups and code freezes.

May 2 at 10:39 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Causes on Facebook

Socialactions.com: Brotherly Love on Facebook.

Contribute Magazine has posted an interview with the co-founders of Facebook Causes, Sean Parker & Joe Green. The duo has founded a company called Project Agape, which seeks to spread the practice of micro-philanthropy through social networks. According to their website, the word Agape is ancient greek for "brotherly love, or a selfless regard for other human beings".

Facebook Causes is the first and only project of Project Agape. The application allows any Facebook user to raise money for a nonprofit or U.S. politician by posting a fundraising widget on their Facebook profile and inviting friends to join the cause.

May 2 at 12:14 AM in Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Wireless AirCard: Internet (almost) everywhere

In December I bought a Sierra Wireless AirCard 875U. It's time to tell you how the experiment is going.

What it is: The AirCard is a wireless 3G modem that you can insert into your Mac or PC laptop's USB port to gain connectivity to the broadband Internet.

Why I did it: I'd put up with Internet downtime from Comcast, my service provider, for years. Comcast is a monopoly, and acts like it. There's no DSL service in my East Bay community, and I know of no satellite service that provides true broadband speeds. So whenever the cable broadband connection went down, I was stuck for days without an Internet connection. I was also tired of going to too many coffee shops and airports only to find wifi at skyjacker rates with Tmobile. So I finally ponied up and bought the AirCard (a) as insurance when my service went down, and (b) as a handy way to jack into the Net at conferences and on the road.

Interesting angle: Last month, during our blogger posse's trip to Israel, Israel's leading wireless provider outfitted all of our Macs and PCs with ... Sierra Wireless AirCards. We were up and running in minutes, and they worked like a charm, though a bit slow on Mac X 10.4.11 (Tiger) rather than superfast 10.5 (Leopard). We blogged merrily on the bus all up and down Israel from Haifa to Jerusalem.

Lesson learned: I knew I wouldn't be using it much, so when I signed up for the accompanying AT&T Premier service, I chose a plan that assumed a ridiculously low megabyte usage per month for a price of something like $30/month plus overage charges. After using the AirCard exactly twice in the first month, -- just to check Gmail -- my first bill came to over $150!

I quickly switched to an unlimited plan of $51/month. It's pricey, for sure, but I've been using it more and more. Today, for example, while other NewsTools2008 attendees moaned about the poor wifi at Yahoo!, I bypassed the hotspot and used my AirCard. Dan Gillmor also uses a 3G USB modem, and more than a few conference-goers took notice.

Drawbacks: After traveling with the AirCard to New York, San Francisco, LA and Carmel, I've yet to find a city where AT&T's 3G network doesn't reach. (Granted, I haven't used it in the hinterlands.) So the only drawback from my perspective has been the price: $149 to $335 for the device plus $610 a year for the service plan. Still, for me, it's worth the convenience and peace of mind.

If you use a different detachable 3G modem and like it, feel free to post your findings below.   

May 1 at 11:15 PM in Gadgets | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

ReelChanges: viewer-funded documentaries

Big banner on the wall: "How can the intersection of journalism & technology serve democracy?" That's the overarching theme of NewsTools 2008, where 200 or so folks are gathered today (and tomorrow) at Yahoo! as well as Saturday at a Sunnyvale hotel for Innovations in Journalism Expo 2008. I'll post a few highlights from today:

ReelChanges

The most impressive new venture I've come across today is ReelChanges.org: viewer-funded documentaries, which launched shortly after midnight last night.

I knew of founder Hal Plotkin from his days as a tech reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Now he and his small team have been "working in a cave" for the past year to open the nonprofit Center for Media Change, which just launched the nonprofit ReelChanges.org and an upcoming site, ReelChanges.com.

ReelChanges is all about audience-funded media, particularly documentaries and investigative journalism. Films already on the site include Life on the Inside, a moving behind-bars look at a wrongful conviction and life inside the nation's largest women's prison. "Our goal is to democratize the media," said Plotkin, who contrasted ReelChanges' model with the agenda of the corporate media. The site's guidelines for filmmakers are here.

Plotkin said some of the site's functionality, such as its "transactional module" for donations, is still at least 10 days away. Plotkin and team have grand ambitions for ReelChanges, with an eye on becoming a major player in the transaction journalism space, suggesting a prospective "transformation of journalism." He cited one early user's willingness to pay for a video roundup of a scrapbook convention and he could see the day when people want to pony up for coverage of an event important to their niche interests. (Think of parallels to Eventful.com, which uses the power of the crowd to entice music acts or speakers to make an appearance. Here it would be stories you'd like to see covered, a la Christopher Allbritton's audience-funded trip to Iraq or Josh Marshall's coverage of the 2004 presidential race.)

I'll be watching ReelChanges' progress and pulling for it to succeed.

Other sites worth a look

Other urls that have come up today:

• Redwoodage.com, (Think. Share. Act. Live.), what used to be called a lifestyle portal -- a site that appeals to the over-40 crowd.

• MediaRights.org, a site that "maximizes the impact of social-issue documentaries and shorts. By engaging with the MediaRights community, filmmakers reach audiences, educators and librarians bring films into their classroom, and nonprofits and activists integrate media into their campaigns."

Good news

Best bit of news I heard today was that Geneva Overholser will become the dean of the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication this fall. Congrats, Geneva!

Other folks I spotted or chatted with today: Larry Pryor, Amy Gahran, Leonard Witt, Charlotte-Anne Lucas, Jon Garfunkel, Robert Niles, Mary Hodder, Dan Gillmor, Barry Parr and many others.

May 1 at 09:19 PM in Film, Media, New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

9 tips to improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Catching up with Mark Glaser at PBS's MediaShift blog:

9 Tips to Improve Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Top tips:

1. Get inbound links and link out as well.

 Terry Heaton, senior vice president of AR&D, notes that internally linking is also important, and is something the top newspaper sites do well. “The main reason Wikipedia links always appear near the top in Google is because their Google Juice is rich with links from and to themselves,” Heaton said. “The ‘weight’ of a link is measured, in part, by the source. Wikipedia gets a ton of traffic, so a link from them is ‘worth’ far more than a link from, say, any TV station in the country. Hence, Google ‘sees’ the links and values them accordingly, which raises Wikipedia’s search results…Internal linking, therefore, always reaps SEO rewards. ...

2. Headlines and title tags should have key words up front. ...

3. Web addresses for your blog posts or articles should include key words.

4. Page descriptions should be unique or eliminated. ...

5. Highlight your best content on every page. ...

6. Create theme or category pages, and run more special series.

7. Limit tags and categories to the most important ones.

8. Create a Google News sitemap and optimize images.

9. Get into offline conversations as well as online ones.

More from Mark:

State of Investigative Reporting at Newspapers, Broadcasting. Live-blogging a panel in Berkeley, Calif., on the future of investigative reporting.

Are Veteran Media Execs the Ones Who’ll See the Future?

April 30 at 10:15 PM in Media, New media, Search engines | Permalink | Comments (1) | |

NewsTools gets underway

I'll be attending NewsTools on Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Silicon Valley. Ustream should be carrying live streams of the event here. Here's a list of the attendees.

April 30 at 06:24 PM in New media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

SanFran's MusicTech Summit

Ran into Brian Zisk at Web 2.0 Expo last week. Brian's putting on the second San Francisco MusicTech Summit on May 8 from 9 am to 6 pm. The conference features the leading Bay Area developers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and organizations in the music/technology space.   

Speakers from Google, Pandora, imeem, SonyBMG, SeeqPod, SomaFM, Sun, YouTube, Warner Bros Records, GETV, RockYou!, BMI, ASCAP, WuChess, Apple, INgrooves, Norwest Venture Partners, Gang of Four, CD Baby, Keker & Van Nest, Vator.tv, Mozilla, and others will be on tap. Ticket prices go up this Friday. I'll see if I can make it over there this time.

April 30 at 12:03 AM in Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Call your Facebook friends for free

Deb from Communicano passes along this info:

Ifbyphone has just announced a Facebook app called Phone-Me-Now that gives Facebook friends free click-to-call capabilities -- without disclosing their caller ID and no matter what type of phone they're using (mobile or landline -- even a rotary dial phone). The widget uses some of the same powerful technologies Ifbyphone also uses to give its small and medium-sized business clients enterprise-level Web presence.

April 29 at 11:29 PM in Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

The Great Unbundling: Newspapers & the Net

I missed this essay by Nicholas Carr earlier this month: The Great Unbundling: Newspapers & the Net, an excerpt from his new book  The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google.

April 29 at 11:13 PM in Media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Obama in 30 Seconds contest

MoveOn's Obama in 30 Seconds contest is down to 15 finalists after 1,000 entires and over 5 million votes. You should be able to see and vote on the finalists  here (for the People's Choice Awards). I liked the one above titled "Obama 2012."

April 29 at 06:44 PM in Politics | Permalink | Comments (2) | |

Economics of Social Media conference gets underway

Wish I could be at the Economics of Social Media conference today in LA. Impressive list of speakers. Here's coverage on Technorati.

April 29 at 04:13 PM in Social-media | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

How to find the right domain name

At the IdeaLab blog, Dan Gillmor writes about the value of finding the right domain name and he points to a couple of free services I hadn't heard of:

MakeWords is a "name generator" -- essentially, you plug in keywords and it gives you suggestions. The flexibility is impressive. You can tell it how the domain name should start or end, and you can get refinements from a long list of keyword themes, as well as affixes by theme. For example, I searched on "California" and refined it with a "travel" theme, and got a list or allegedly available names that included farescalifornia.com, flightcalifornia.com, getawayscalifornia.com and tripscalifornia.com.

NameBoy is another generator. In my experience it's simpler to use, but much less nuanced. You type in a primary and (optional) secondary word, and it spits out results.

April 29 at 12:45 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1) | |

Public media: Are you on the map?

How are new mapping tools and geotagging technologies being used to unite communities and tell important stories from around the globe? Find out how you can make your mark on the new media landscape at the 2008 Beyond Broadcast conference on June 17, 2008 in Washington, DC.

Beyond Broadcast has become an annual destination for makers, scholars and policy experts exploring public media for a digital, participatory era.  The theme of this year's conference is Mapping Public Media. How do mapping and visualization tools reveal shifts in the public media landscape? Panels, presentations and demos map the emerging landscape. (Alas, I won't be able to attend.)

Early bird rates for registration end on Wednesday.

April 29 at 12:01 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Next generation is reshaping politics through social networking

San Jose Mercury News: Next generation is reshaping politics through social networking -- a Q&A with the authors of the new book Millennial Makeover: My Space, YouTube & the Future of American Politics (Rutgers University Press).

April 27 at 11:24 PM in Books, Politics, Social networks | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Public radio tries to reignite its public

NY Times: Public radio tries to reignite its public.

Flush from a $2 million Knight Foundation grant, this program, “The Takeaway” is designed with it partner, Public Radio International, and collaborators including The New York Times, the BBC World Service and the Boston public station WGBH, to be a stark counterpoint to the taped interviews on NPR’s venerable “Morning Edition.” ...

April 27 at 11:01 PM in Radio/audio | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

Video contest: What is Remix Culture?

Owen Gallagher, Creative Director of TotalRecut.com, passes along word of a remix contest that I'll be a judge in:

TotalRecut.com is hosting a Video Remix Challenge over the next two months and we want you to create a short video using the theme: 'What is Remix Culture?' You can you use any footage you can find, including Public Domain and Creative Commons work, but the finished video cannot be longer than 3 minutes or shorter than 30 seconds long.

The prizes include a laptop computer loaded with video editing and conversion software, a digital camcorder, a digital media player, as well as Special Edition Total Recut T-Shirts, books, DVDs and CDs. We have an amazing lineup of judges for the contest including Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Kembrew McLeod, Pat Aufderheide, JD Lasica and Mark Hosler. You can find out more information at: http://www.totalrecut.com/contest1.php.

Entries will be accepted from May 1 until June 2 when public voting will begin. The best 10 videos at the end of the 2-week voting period will be put forward into the final, where they will be voted on by the judging panel. The winners will be announced around the 1st of July. So get busy making those videos!

Here's a link to the YouTube promotional video for the contest.

April 27 at 09:50 PM in Video | Permalink | Comments (0) | |

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