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May 25, 2006
MoveOn.org, Christian Coalition Unite to Save the Internet
I never thought it would happen in my lifetime. No, I'm not talking about peace in the Middle East. I'm talking about Moveon.org and the Christian Coalition partnering to save the Internet.
I'd been hoping this would happen for months. A few years ago when the FCC tried to roll back the regulations on media cross-ownership, there was an amazing coalition of protesters ranging from the Consumers Union to the NRA. The campaign had many successes because it bridged the yawning gap between liberals and conservatives. We need the same kind of bridge to ensure that network neutrality on the Internet is protected.
So I was amazed when I received the email that Moveon.org and the Christian Coalition had teamed up on an advertising campaign to support network neutrality. They're trying to get the public to donate money for a full-page ad (PDF) that would run in the New York Times. Internet providers, who are trying to get rid of network neutrality and worsten the digital divide, have been spending upwards of a million dollars a day in advertising, particularly in Washington DC, to get their way on Capitol Hill. While it may be impossible to compete with the telcos at that level, this new ad campaign is a heck of a step forward. All they need is 2,000 people to donate $35 each. I'm gonna go find my credit card as soon as I'm done writing this. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 2:23 PM
The Day the Canons Went Silent
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Photo of me talking to a pair of young women while lost in a Tibetan neighborhood of Kathmandu in November 1996. Note my faithful Canon EOS Rebel G camera hanging around my neck. And check out that hair. |
I suppose I'm partially to blame for the Canon SLR's demise. For years, I was a loyal owner of a Canon EOS Rebel G camera, which accompanied me on my travels to probably 30+ countries on five continents. Between 1995 and 2003, it was the only camera I would use, from first trip to the Middle East to our Bali honeymoon. Then in the fall of 2003 I decided to buy a small Canon digital camera before a trip to Oman and Dubai. I think I've used the Rebel on only two or three occasions since, while shooting at least 20,000 photos on the three digital cameras I've owned since then. For years I swore I'd never abandon the 35mm format; even my first digital camera was a matter of packing lightly rather than making a permanent switch. But the ability to get immediate feedback on the quality of a picture was a siren who couldn't be silenced; I could no longer resist the digital camera's charms, even though I knew in my heart I was being an unfaithful cad to my beloved Rebel.
I hope all of you Canon SLR owners pause for a moment of reflection today. An era has come to an end. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 1:42 PM
May 24, 2006
A Day of Out(r)age
Posted by acarvin at 6:52 PM
May 23, 2006
Dan Coughlin Discusses the COPE Act
Posted by acarvin at 8:54 PM
Alyce Myatt, Public Media Activist
Posted by acarvin at 7:05 PM
Public Media - An International Perspective
Posted by acarvin at 5:30 PM
Public Media - Fred Johnson's Intro Remarks
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Video of opening remarks by Fred Jonson at last week's public media roundtable in Boston. |
Posted by acarvin at 5:09 PM
May 22, 2006
This Wednesday: Day of (out)Rage
On Wednesday I'm planning to take part in the Day of (out)Rage, a day of national protest against the COPE Act. For those of you who haven't been following the debate on Capitol Hill, the COPE Act would allow telecom companies to ignore the basic Internet principle of network neutrality, letting them charge users more for complete access to the Internet, while peddling their own content instead. It would also take away local control of public access TV channels. And for those of you who are worried about the digital divide, the bill would let telecom companies conduct redlining, which is refusing to build out broadband access in low-income neighborhoods simply because the residents are poor.
In protest against this legislation, there will be protests in NYC, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. I'll be at the Boston rally, which starts at 1:30pm in Boston at the State House grand staircase. To learn more, visit saveaccess.org or listen to this podcast. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 7:23 PM
May 20, 2006
Winston and the Baby Doll
Posted by acarvin at 4:40 PM
Round and Round
Posted by acarvin at 4:25 PM
May 18, 2006
Public Media Podcast Part 3: Dan Coughlin
The third and final podcast from yesterday's public media community meeting in Boston. Dan Coughlin of Manhattan Neighborhood Network gave a fantastic presention about the COPE Act in Congress that's threatening public media and network neutrality. The audio also includes group discussion, with comments from myself, Fred Johnson, Nettrice Gaskins and others. A Windows Media version can be found here:
http://www.andycarvin.com/podcasts/publicmedia3.wma
Posted by acarvin at 11:59 AM
Public Media Podcast Part 2: Alice Myatt
This is the podcast of the second part of yesterday's public media community meeting. It features commentary by longtime public media advocate Alice Myatt. Here's a link to text notes from the session as well. A Windows Media version can be found here:
http://www.andycarvin.com/podcasts/publicmedia2.wma
Posted by acarvin at 11:47 AM
Public Media Podcast Part 1: Fred Johnson and Andy Carvin
Here's a podcast of the first part of yesterday's public media community meeting. It includes opening remarks by Fred Johnson and an international perspective on public media and the digital divide from me. Here's a link to text notes from the session as well. The podcast is in mp3 format; sorry about the static from the compression process. A Windows Media version can be found here:
http://www.andycarvin.com/podcasts/publicmedia1.wma
Posted by acarvin at 11:36 AM
Public Media: Apocalypse Soon?
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Fred Johnson listens to Nettrice Gaskins as Danielle Martin liveblogs the event. |
Danielle Martin liveblogged the event, so I encourage you to read her detailed notes from the gathering. Meanwhile, I'm currently compressing the audio of the event into three separate podcasts that I'll post shortly. And word has it that video of the event will soon be available - I'll share that too when I get ahold of it. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:25 AM
Re-Releasing My Email List FAQs Under Creative Commons Licenses
Hi everyone,
Yesterday I got an email from Miguel Guhlin asking permission to use the Frequently Asked Questions guide to the WWWEDU email discussion list as a template for a new list he was creating.
I originally created the FAQ in 1994, back in the days when no one really worried about who was using your content, since the Internet was mostly noncommercial at that point in time. I've always offered to let people use the FAQ as a template for their own FAQs - I even adapted it myself six years ago for the DIGITALDIVIDE List FAQ - but for whatever reason it never occurred to me to assign a copyright license to it. I've never wanted to stop people from using it, but it would be helpful for people to understand exactly what my intentions are regarding my ownership of the text.
So, I've decided to add a Creative Commons license to the FAQ. Creative Commons is an easy way to assign specific copyright privileges to content, to encourage people to use the content in the spirit you intended it to be used. In this particular case, I've added what's known as an attribution-sharealike license to the FAQ.
This license means that you are free:
* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
* to make derivative works
* to make commercial use of the work
Under the following conditions:
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (ie, me).
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. In other words, when you publish your new FAQ, that you include the same Creative Commons license in the FAQ so users can benefit from it in the same way I'm letting you benefit from it.
Hopefully the license will make it clear to people that they're encouraged to adapt the FAQ and use it for their own purposes. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 9:24 AM
May 16, 2006
Low-Power Educational Radio in Scotland
I was going through the file folders of my handheld digital audio recorder throwing away some extraneous files when I found some audio I recorded for a podcast at the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow last September. The audio included an interview with Brian Rowan of the broadcasting equipment manufacturer Clyde Broadcast Products. Clyde Broadcast has been working with a group of Scottish secondary schools to develop a network of low-power radio stations programmed by students. The interview, which is about six minutes long, was recorded in a very noisy expo hall with one of the student radio stations broadcasting in the background. Combine that with Brian's Scottish accent, the interview takes a bit of concentration to follow, so I'd recommend listening to it with headphones if possible.
Enjoy the podcast. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 2:23 PM
May 15, 2006
On-Air BBC Mixup Brings New Meaning to "Instapundit"
As someone who's had the opportunity to be interviewed by news outlets like the BBC and CNN on a few occasions, I've always been proud of the fact that all of my hard work researching the digital divide, education technology and Internet culture is paying off. I mean, it's not like any John Q. Public can walk off the street into a studio and become an instant expert technology, right?
Well, wrong.
Last week, the BBC's News 24 Channel was doing a live story on the recent court case pitting Apple Computer against Apple Records. During the live program, they turned to Internet expert Guy Kewney to offer some insight on the court ruling. Sitting on a stool in the TV studio, Kewney first appears to be stunned or confused. A moment or two later he gathers his composure and answers several questions, though it almost seems he's just mimicking the anchor's words:
"I'm very surprised to see... this verdict to come on me, because I was not expecting that. When I came, they told me something else, and I'm coming, 'you got an interview,' so a big surprise, anyway...."
When talking about how the ruling will effect the cost of downloading online music, he seems to make a reference to how the decision will be good for bridging the digital divide. "Actually, if you go can everywhere, you're gonna see a lot of people downloading through the Internet, the websites, anything they want. But I think it's much better for development and for poor people what they want to get on the easy way and the faster things they're looking for...."
After a couple more questions, the interview ends abruptly, cutting to a field correspondent.
Just another lackluster TV news interview? Not exactly, because "Guy Kewney" wasn't Guy Kewney.
Scenes from the interview with "Guy Kewney."
You can also watch the video or listen to a podcast.
It turns out the real Guy Kewney, a balding, bearded white man with a pinkish complexion, was waiting off-stage for his cue to go on the air, when the wrong Guy Kewney, the African man with the French accent, was brought onstage to shoot the live segment. From his expression, you could tell he had no idea what the heck he was doing on TV, but he just ran with it. After a few moments he actually seemed somewhat comfortable on camera, even though his answers didn't offer any earth-shattering insight on the court case.
Here's how the real Guy Kewney recounts the aftermath on his blog:
"I'm dreadfully sorry!" said the studio manager, wringing his hands as if he wanted to suddenly take the day off, retrospectively. "It seems I rang Reception, not the Stage Door, and asked if you were there. And they said yes!"So he went down to reception, and was introduced to me. That is, not this pink me, but the other, black me. Until we find out who he actually was, it's a simple mystery how he persuaded BBC's receptionists that he was me, and that's before we ask "Why?".
But, having done that, he had Evidence: a security pass with his name on. And that, it seems, is the definitive article; it must be True! And any other evidence could be discounted.
"Well, to be honest, I did think it couldn't be you. I mean, I've seen your picture on your web site, and he didn't look like you. So I asked him who he was, and he said: 'Guy Kewney' and I said 'Are you really Guy Kewney?' and he said yes. And I asked reception if that was you, and they said yes!"
So that was that, and they took him upstairs and put him in front of the camera. Security passes can't lie.
But the question remains: who was this guy and how did he get himself on television? An Associated Press article about the incident claims that the man was a taxi driver, but doesn't elaborate how he ended up in the studio. Guy Kewney - the real Guy Kewney - reports on his blog today another account that makes a lot more sense:
His name is Guy Goma - which goes some way to explaining why he (and the BBC receptionist) assumed that someone asking for Guy Kewney was asking for him.And he wasn't there to pick up a fare, because he's not a cabbie. He's a Business Studies graduate, from the Congo, and he was there in reception because he was applying for a high level IT job with the BBC.
Apparently the unflappable Mr Goma assumed the whole thing was some kind of initiation prank. His own speciality is data cleansing, and (my source inside the Beeb tells me) was "a little upset that nobody asked him about his data cleansing expertise."
Personally, I'm inclined to believe Kewney. I mean, he is an expert.... -andy
http://odeo.com/claim/feed/7aab579fc473a402 (odeo/7aab579fc473a402)
Posted by acarvin at 4:43 PM
Belarus, Flash Mobs and the Ice Cream Revolution
Veronica Khokhlova of Global Voices recently posted a blurb about a group of young people in Belarus who were arrested for organizing an ice cream social.
For those of you who don't follow eastern European affairs, Belarus is one of the most authoritarian states of the former Soviet bloc, shutting down independent media and quashing all forms of public protest. Yet a determined group of Internet-savvy young people are pushing back by organizing gatherings through the use of flash mobs. A flash mob is a sudden, seemingly spontaneous activity planned through rapid transmission of announcements over the Internet, SMS text messaging and other communication devices. In many countries, flash mobs are often seen as communal practical jokes or even performance art, with hordes of participants suddenly showing up in a public place, doing something irreverent, then vanishing without a trace.
In Belarus, young people are employing flash mobs to push the boundaries of what the government will tolerate in terms of free assembly. Last Friday, flash mobbers descended upon a public square in the capital Minsk to gather together and eat ice cream. No rally, no speeches, no sit-in nor march - just standing around and eating ice cream:
If this were almost any other country in the world, standing around eating ice cream wouldn't even cause the local authorities to bat an eyelash. In Belarus, though, it was treated as an organized public assembly, so plainclothes government agents broke up the event, arresting some of the young participants:
How did the authorities know about the protest? They probably monitored the websites used to plan the flash mob, like this livejournal site. As reported on the Transitions Online Belarus blog,
Flashmobs are becoming an essential part of the Belarusian protest movement. The youth uses Internet to get organized, predominantly through the online communities at LiveJournal (there are specific communities for just the purposes of mobbing- http://community.livejournal.com/by_mob/, for example).The problem with all of that is that KGB is reading those online communities as well, so there are usually security people present at the flashmobs even before they start. It is even getting quite uncanny to read about the plans for a flashmob on Thursday and then read how many people got arrested on Friday-all on the same LiveJournal page.
The blog goes on to ponder whether it's time for Belarus flash mobbers to make their planning a little more clandestine.
What I could never understand is why the flashmob community never went for an online discussion forum that would be more secure and would require registration, so as to prevent the security people from reading the details…Could be a special password protected blog or a yahoogroup: both are easily implementable, and, if our flashmobbers are so picky, can be syndicated via RSS.
Techniques like this, or perhaps using an email-SMS relay like I recently discussed on my blog, might help decrease the chances of flash mobbers getting arrested. Unless, of course, the whole point of the activity is to draw attention to Belarus' absurd zero-tolerance policy towards any kind of protest. So the question remains whether these flash mobs are merely an attempt to rebel against authority in a relatively harmless way or test the waters for much bigger public actions against the government. For all we know, maybe the Ice Cream Revolution began last Friday. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:25 AM
May 13, 2006
Yatta Yatta Yatta
Posted by acarvin at 4:00 PM
Caffeine Overdose in Second Life, Take Two
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Yesterday I posted a video of my Second Life avatar Abdi Kembla overdosing on caffeine while virtually attending the Beyond Broadcast conference at Harvard. But later I realized the video was missing something: metal. tag: beyondbroadcast |
Posted by acarvin at 9:34 AM
A Wet Morning at Beyond Broadcast
It's 9:15am here in Cambridge, and we're getting ready to start the second day of the Beyond Broadcast conference. Shawn van Every of NYU's ITP program is giving some opening remarks while Jennifer Myronuk, Kenyatta Cheese and Jay Dedman are at the panel table, getting ready to leave a group discussion about public media. Unfortunately the wifi is down right now so I can't post this in real time; hopefully it'll be working soon.
There we go. Wifi is up again. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 9:24 AM
May 12, 2006
Eszter Hargittai on What College Students Actually Do Online
Professor Eszter Hargittai of Northwestern University just gave a fascinating talk about her research on how college students use the Internet, the digital divide that exists in terms of how people use the Net, and its policy implications. Here are some notes. -andy
The digital divide: We need to move beyond the binary thinking of haves and have nots and start thinking about the second-level digital divide - differences between people who are online and how they're using the Internet.
Various factors influence IT use - socioeconomic status, equipment, autonomy, social support, level of experience. And skills play a major part in influencing how they use digital media. But how do all of these factors interrelate? What's the relationship between skills and socioeconomic status, for example?
She tries to focus her research on average users rather than niche groups. The average person comes up with things you'd never imagine as they try to figure out how to manouver online.
She collected data from 270 young adults in a fall 2004 phone survey. She found that people with higher education had higher levels of online skills. But what really mattered was whether or not they had autonomy in their use - could they use it at home on their own terms.
People in more privileged positions might be using the Internet in ways that really benefit them - this adds to the divide.
Now she's looking at college student use of the Internet, based on 1,300 students at University of Illinois/Chicago (UIC) between Feb and March 2006.
Demographics: 58 percent female, less than 50% white - very diverse.
Used the internet for six years on average, 12 hours a week, with 80%+ using it several times a day. Around 87.5% of their use is at home, with only 8.2 percent in a library or lab, and 1.7 percent at work.
When asked how often students visit blogs, 29.1 percent visit personal blogs of friends and family on a daily basis, with 60 percent doing it sometimes. Interestingly, the least likely category of blogs they access are political blogs, even though these are the blogs emphasized in mainstream media.
Types of sites used: facebook, flickr, google, craigslist, livejournal, blogger, delicious, dig, skype, youtube, myspace. Facebook was most popular - 78 percent - and 50 percent for myspace.
64 percent have ever visited the Chicago tribune, 62 percent BBC, druge 3 percent, instapundit 1 percent, daily kos 1 percent.
Most popular activities: getting info for school work, downloading/ listening to music; looking up a word or definition; finding a fact about something.
41 percent knew what an aggregator/newsreader was; 36 never read privacy statements.
User backgrounds and types of activities: there are statistically significant differences in behavior.
Groups that use the Web less frequently: Women, African Americans, Latinos, students with parents who have lower levels of education, people who don't access the net at home much, people who don't own laptops, people who know less about the Internet
Differences in skill, not just access, may contribute to digital inequality. Skill differences may result in differential web use, suggesting different opportunities. It's not enough to focus on technical access; training and support are absolutely necessary.
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at 3:38 PM
Tom Kriese Talks About Omidyar.net
From Tom Kriese's talk:
Omidyar.net's online community was created by the team that created eBay. The Omidyar Network is a foundation founded by Pam and Pierre Omidyar. We're looking to promote individual social empowerment on a global scale. The online network we created supports this work, giving Internet users access, community collaboration tools, and ownership of what they're creating.
O-Net is based on the philosophy that everyone has something to contribute. Any member can access and respond to any comment posted on the site. You can create your own discussion threads. Content gets organized based on member input.
All members and comments can get rated - users give them positive or negative points. This system helps rate how the community feels about people or information, giving numerical scores for each. Members are also given a set number of points they can use to rate others and their content. You earn more points based on the amount you contribute to the site, so it encourages participation. If you get too much negative feedback, you lose your posting privileges; that way, the community can police itself.
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at 3:13 PM
Radio Open Source: A Blog with a Radio Show
Notes from the talk by Brendan Greeley, Radio Open Source
Radio Open Source is a blog with a radio show. We want to have the blog come first - bring people in through the blog and use that to produce the radio show. Mary McGrath and Chris Lydon started the show Connections in the mid-90s, and used a lot of bulletin boards. The Internet was a major tool, but not the primary driver; now they're using Radio Open Source.
Blogs are the new talk radio; they're used for making decisions. Blogs have motion. Talk to many early bloggers and they'll say they were sick of yelling at some broadcaster on the TV and instead wanted to broadcast their own ideas. Blogs have motion - one post after another in rapid succession, also like broadcasting.
Open Source looks like a blog, using a common three-column layout. Without having to tell people, we wanted them to feel that they could use the site in blog-like ways. You can leave your mark. We act like a blog, using permalinks, technorati tags; we read blogs and encourage people to blog. We don't ask for links -we ask for opinions.
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at 3:11 PM
Ethan Zuckerman's 90-Second Tour of Internet History
Notes from Ethan Zuckerman's lightning-fast overview of Internet history at the start of the Online Community panel. -andy
The Internet's been around since 1969, but email was invented four years earlier - people were using it to talk on a shared computer. Communication has been a fundamental part of the Internet even if it wasn't what the network was designed for. The first email list was created in 1975. Later, it was BBSes - Bulletin board systems, starting in 1978. By 1979, we had USENET, the precursor to all of today's Web bulletin boards. MUDS - multi user dungeons, were invented in 1979. Minitel - France's national interactive TV system - 1982. Minitel's chess game happened to have chat - the first instant messaging.
1990 - the World Wide Web first designed by Tim Berners Lee at CERN. '95 - geocities and tripod allow everyone to create their own homepages. Same year Ward Cunningham creates the first wiki. '97 - the first weblogs. 2001 marks the beginning of wikipedia.
So why now? All of this stuff has been around forever. It's because we've reached a critical mass of users. Two-thirds of Americans are online, hundreds of millions worldwide. Of course now.
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at 3:07 PM
Jonathan Zittrain is Not a Rap Mogul
This afternoon's session about online communities got distracted somewhat by the real-time question and answer system used at the conference. As panelists talk, participants and virtual lurkers are able to submit questions and respond as the panelists are speaking.
The last panelist, Berkman co-founder Jonathan Zittrain, participated over a Web cam from Oxford, England. Ethan Zuckerman introduced him as "JZ," and this caused a long list of comments over whether the JZ in question was no other than rap superstar/business mogul Jay-Zee.
Here's a taste of the thread:
# Who is this "JZ"? (5 votes)
[vote that it be answered] [answer briefly]* EthanZ: Jonathan Zittrain, law professor at OII and Berkman
* snoop: isn't he a rap mogul?
* Anonymous: A famous Rapper known his love of cyberlaw and hos
* duwop: a man sitting in very dark room. why?
* Anonymous: darker and rainier in oxford than cambridge (ma)
* Godess: JR realy is God - I know - look at how strong he looks
* Anon: JZ - God - just made the lights dim
* patrick duffy: JR? Wasn't he shot?
As Jonathan gave his talk, this chat went on back and forth on a large screen in the plenary room. What started as sporadic giggles became a vocal minority of participants who struggled to contain their laughter. (I must confess - I was one Snoop and Patrick Duffy in this thread.)
It was a fun little break in the seriousness, but it also demonstrates the risks of having wifi access and real-time chat during a conference. People are going to say what they'll say, constructive or not. But that's the beauty of Web 2.0 - letting go of the old rules and trusting in your fellow community members to do the right thing. Admittedly, I listened a little less to Jonathan's talk than I otherwise would have if I hadn't been reading or participating in the chat. I just hope they don't use it if I'm ever invited to speak here - someone, no doubt, would exact their revenge and find some creative way to make jokes about my initials. :-) -andy
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at 3:05 PM
Birds of a Feather Tonight on Journalism, Media Literacy & the Digital Divide
For those of you who are attending the Beyond Broadcasting conference, Shava Nerad and I will be co-hosting a birds-of-a-feather on journalism, media literacy and the digital divide. We want to discuss the spectrum of media criticism skills you need to participate as a content producer today, and the challenges faced when not all communities have equal access to these skills. To join us, please go to the conference wiki and add your name to the list of attendees for the BoF. We'll be meeting at Pho Pasteur in Cambridge (no, we're not buying, but we're good company). Hope you'll join us... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 1:51 PM
Public Broadcasters Need to Take the Digital Divide Seriously
Rebecca MacKinnon just asked the broadcasters panel at the Beyond Broadcast conference about their responsibility in bridging the digital divide. As broadcasters embrace the Internet and encourage the public to contribute their own content to public discourse, should they be concerned about the fact that the digital divide? If the elites in the community - ie, tech savvy Internet users - are the only ones that can participate in the new world of public media, is it truly public media?
David Liroff of WGBH and Bill Buzenberg of MPR both commented on the importance of having public broadcasters involved in public outreach to ensure that all people can have a voice in a community. Bill, however, questioned whether they should be the ones lobbying for greater Internet access for the poor. Isn't there a group better suited to be doing this?
Frankly, not really. We digital divide activists have been fighting what's generally a losing battle as far as policymaking is concerned. Very little attention is ever paid to the digital divide as far as the media is concerned, so there's little pressure for policymakers to deal with it. As public broadcasters embrace Web 2.0, it makes sense for them to engage the public and policymakers in a frank conversation about the digital divide, media literacy and what it means to be a 21st century citizen. Public broadcasting, at a fundamental level, exists to serve the public interest. Isn't bridging the digital divide in the public interest?
I'm thrilled to see people like Bill Buzenberg leading the way in demonstrating how the Internet can be used to get local citizens involved in shaping the way news stories get developed. It's an exciting time to be a Web-savvy public broadcaster, absolutely. But as I've said in the past, it ain't "We Media" unless it includes all of us. Part of the public debate must focus on what happens as disenfranchised populations with limited Internet access and IT skills fall further and further beyond. There is so much potential in utilizing the Internet to empower the voiceless. We need to talk more about municipal wifi and entrepreneurial efforts like Fon.com to get low-cost wireless into every community. We need to make sure that public media initiatives truly reflect the diversity of the community. We need to ensure that all people have equal opportunity to gain the skills to participate in public media. Otherwise, we're just taking the privileged upper middle class audience that has traditionally benefited from public broadcasting and giving them cool new tools to play with, leaving disenfranchised populations in the dust, wonder when they'll get their chance to speak.
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at 11:12 AM
Caffeine Overdose in Second Life
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Video of my Second Life avatar Abdi Kembla overdosing on caffeine while watching the Beyond Broadcast conference at Harvard. tag: beyondbroadcast |
Posted by acarvin at 10:58 AM
Chris Lydon, Terry Heaton, Bill Buzenberg, David Liroff
Posted by acarvin at 10:40 AM
Terry Heaton on the Nashville Experience
Notes from Terry Heaton's talk:
Glenn Reynolds says we're witnessing the triumph of personal technology over mass technology.
The reality is that the business models to succeed now isn't in the old way of doing things, it's in the disruption caused by opening up to the masses.
Media is unbundled at the point of origin and rebundled at the point of consumption. But if that's all you do, you're just a content provider, and that's economic suicide.
Mediated people make their own media. If you can't get your arms around that, you can succeed in this new world.
As Gordon Burrell said, what do you do when the deer have guns? That's what's happening in Web 2.0 and broadcasting. So you get into the ammunition business!
WKRN TV Nashville: they operate 15 websites, including two aggregators, blogs and a search site. We're aggregating 400 local bloggers and have a writer going through it and highlighting the best stuff - so you can access either all of them or a selection. We also provide them with advertising tools so they can make a little money. It improves ratings, revenue and the number of visitors.
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at 10:29 AM
Bill Buzenberg Talks Public Insight Journalism
Bill Buzenberg of Minnesota Public Radio, talking about Public Insight Journalism. Notes are summaries, not direct quotes. - andy
MPR has been obsessed with user developed content. We have 900k listeners in Minnesota, around 15 million national, four million newsletters... One of the new things we've started is a mini wiki- a free news and music culture encyclopedia for our local community. We use Gather.com for generating local news stories with the general public.
Now we're focusing on Public Insight Journalism - "On any given story, someone in the audience will always know more than we do," says MPR president Bill Kling. We've created a database of listeners willing to give us info - around 18,000 people now. We take our database and write to them on different issues, contacting health care workers on health care stories, etc. We get back hundreds of emails and give them to the reporters to help them create a good story. The reporters used to be skeptical - now they're not.
We write to our database and ask them to tell us their personal economic story - are you getting crunched? Hundreds of people write back, giving our reporters a map of what's going on across our economy. We can even take the data to economists to get their take on the situation. It's giving the newsroom story ideas of things they'd never thought about before.
We did a story on the education achievement gap. We asked people to share their thoughts, and hundreds of people replied. We get to use their stories while the public can rate the stories. All of this led to a townhall meeting. Same thing with the future of small towns - our listeners have lots of ideas, lots of expertise on the subject, so we're able to capture the public's collective wisdom. We also created a budget simulator, where users could go through the state budget and make choices, then show whether you balanced the budget or not, and what programs you ended up eliminating. Around 11,000 people used it, even though it takes about 20 minutes to go through and do it. They can then email their results to policymakers, who are amazed at how better informed their constituents are than they realized.
We're now expanding it nationally. We've generated over 130 stories that have been informed by public insight journalism. If we can get the foundation support, we want to see other broadcasters using these tools.
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at 10:18 AM
James Boyle of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain
Notes from the keynote speech of James Boyle of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain, co-creator of the comic book, Bound By Law. My notes are rather incomplete because I was video editing some clips I shot in Second Life, so they don't really capture what a dynamic, funny speaker he is. It was a great keynote. Most of the notes are not direct quotes, just summaries. -andy
"We are in the middle of a somewhat scary and exciting flowering" of online creativity, he said. "Most of it is still to come - that's incredibly exciting. My talk is on how to not screw it up."
Two propositions:
1. We are extremely bad at predicting the future of any kind of tech innovation. The FCC predicted cell phones would be a "niche market." They once thought the telephone would be a one-to-many broadcast system rather than a person-to-person medium. We need more technological humility.
2. There is a blindness regarding the ability for commons-based media to generate interesting kinds of content. We are blind at every level of network policy as the opportunities that commons-based production can lead to. At every level of the system we have to have a balance between property, control, ownership, etc, and openness.
We tend to undervalue the open side of things and focus too much on its dangers. We have a bias against openness in the system.
WIPO is now discussing a "broadcasters right" which gives broadcasters a slice of the copyright simply by broadcasting it. So they can veto future uses of it rather than just the content owner. Some telcos say they shouldn't spend more money building out the network unless they get a broadcasters right as well. So now they want it to apply to webcasts, which could effectively destroy nascent Web 2.0 citizen journalism. "This is dumb in a rich, patterned, complex way - a fine dumbness."
The way we train young lawyers today is all about control. We never tell them to prepare a client to let go over their content, or let the public create their own content. There's a major cultural gap between lawyerly thinking and Web 2.0 culture.
We need to make sure we leave an open process for whatever you're doing. Allow a constant feedback loop and push back on just how much control is needed. Don't give up on net neutrality. Don't give up on the power of the commons. But this isn't a religious question, it's an empirical question.
Let's say it's 1992 and you want to create the Encyclopedia Brittanica on steroids. The lawyers will want strong copyright control and editorial control, so hire only the experts that'll be best at and fire them if they don't perform well. And we need to protect the brand so no one else will copy it. Fast forward to today. When was the last time you used an encyclopedia? You google instead. But in 1992, it's ludicrous - yet it just happened to be true.
tag; beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at 9:50 AM
Beyond Broadcast in Second Life
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Video of the Beyond Broadcast conference hall as seen through the virtual reality world Second Life. The African chap in the hat drinking copious amounts of coffee is my avatar, Abdi Kembla.
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Posted by acarvin at 9:34 AM
At the Beyond Broadcast Conference
Hi everyone.... I'm now at Harvard Law School along with around 300 other media activists for the Beyond Broadcast conference. Berkman fellow Jake Shapiro is giving some opening remarks right now . The wifi seems to be working, so I plan to blog for much of the day. Unfortunately, I forgot to take off my moron cap when I woke up this morning and managed to leave my camera at home, so I guess I won't be shooting video. At least I have my digital audio recorder, so I'll see what I can do with that. More later... -andy
tag: beyondbroadcast
Posted by acarvin at 9:06 AM
May 11, 2006
Vlogging for Alaa
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Video of me encouraging bloggers and video bloggers to participate in the online campaign to free Alaa Ahmed Seif al-Islam, the Egyptian blogger who was detained during a pro-democracy protest earlier this week. The video is 10 megabytes; I've also created two smaller versions: |
Posted by acarvin at 5:39 PM
For Schools & Libraries, Web 2.0 + Congress = 0
Earlier today I posted a blog entry at learning.now providing an overview of the new legislation known as the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). If enacted into law, DOPA would effectively ban access by students to online communities using school or library computers. The bill is intended to block access to sites like MySpace, which 99% of the time don't have an appropriate place in the classroom. But the bill is written so broadly that it would require schools to filter almost all online communities and interactive discussions, effectively rendering Web 2.0 impotent as far as the classroom is concerned. My story even got picked up by BoingBoing (thanks, Cory!).
We've just started a discussion on the blog, and I'd encourage you to participate. Ironically, it's discussions like this that could be theoretically blocked by the legislation. Thankfully both of my blogs are hosted noncommercially, and there is a loophole for noncommercial services. But what about all the educators and students who've used commercial tools like Flickr or Blogger? Have the nascent days of Web 2.0 been nipped in the bud as far as schools and libraries are concerned? Will the promise of online constructivist learning be wiped out with the swish of a presidential pen? -andy
Posted by acarvin at 1:55 PM
Letters from an Egyptian Prison: Another Blogger is Detained
Fresh on the heels of Hao Wu's arrest by Chinese authorities, Egyptian blogger Alaa Ahmed Seif al-Islam has been detained by Egyptian police. Several days ago, Alaa was participating in a peaceful protest in support of an independent Egyptian judiciary when he was picked up by authorities and detained.
His wife Manal writes
Alaa and the rest of the group that was kidnapped yesterday, will be detained for 15 days. They didnt go directly to the prison as we thought, but spent the night at the Khalifa's police station and are supposed to be transferred to the prisons now. The 3 women will go to El Qanater prison, as Tora prison where the rest of the 40 detainees are held has no section for women, and the men are supposed to join the rest and go to Tora prison, but some think that they will also taken to El Qanater prison (which has sections for both men and women).
Amazingly, Alaa is blogging from prison. It seems that he's writing blog entries on paper so they can be taken out of prison and posted. In his latest post, Alaa writes
Today it hit me, I am really in prison. I'm not sure how I feel. I thought I was OK but I took forever to wake up. The way fellow prisoners look at me tells me I do not feel well but I can't really feel it.I'd say prison is not like I expected, but I had no expectations. No images, not even fears, nothing. Guess it will take time. I expect to spend no less than a month here. I'm sure that's enough time to see all the ugly sides of prison, to be genuinely depressed.
Meanwhile, bloggers involved in the Global Voices blog have started a "Google Bomb" campaign. No, it's not what you think. A Google Bomb is an online campaign where lots of bloggers all use the same word to link to the same page. In this case, participants - including myself - are linking the word Egypt to The Free Alaa blog. Because Google determines search rank in part by the number of people linking to a site with specific keywords, the goal here is to cause any Google search for the word Egypt to go to the blog about Alaa's arrest. At last check, the site still isn't in the top 100 search results, but hopefully that will change soon.
All bloggers are strongly encouraged to participate in the campaign and hopefully shame the Egyptian government into releasing Alaa immediately. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:43 AM
May 8, 2006
Scientific Publishers Leery of Cornyn-Lieberman Open Access Legislation
Last week, US Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Connecticut) proposed the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (PDF), a groundbreaking bill that will shake the foundations of scientific research publishing. The bill proposes that scientific articles based on research funded by the federal government must be made freely available to the public over the Internet within six months of publishing. If enacted into law, the bill would force scientific publishers to release the full text of articles that would otherwise be accessible to libraries and professionals who pay hefty fees for access. All federal agencies that spend at least $100 million a year funding scientific research would require its grantees to participate in the program, hosting the research texts online in a "stable digital repository."
"Tax payer-funded research should be accessible to tax payers," said Sen. Lieberman in a statement. "Our bill will give researchers, medical professionals and patients in Connecticut and throughout the nation access to scientific discoveries and advancements that can help bring new treatments and cures to the public."
"Unfortunately, as it stands now, most Americans have little - to no - timely access to this wealth of information, despite the fact that their tax dollars paid for the research," said Sen. Cornyn in a speech on the Senate floor. "Our bill simply says to all researchers who seek government funding that we want the results of your work to be seen by the largest possible audience. It will ensure that U.S. taxpayers do not have to pay twice for the same research - once to conduct it, and a second time to read it."
Cornyn continued:
The Internet has dramatically altered how the world gathers and shares information. The Internet gives the homemaker in Houston the ability to find volumes of information about a recent medical diagnosis given to a family member. It allows a young community college student in rural West Texas -- a great distance from the nearest research library -- to learn the latest in scientific discovery and hopefully spur him to continue his studies.While a comprehensive competitiveness agenda is still in the works, ensuring greater access to scientific information is one way we can help bolster interest in these important fields and move this issue forward while at the same time helping accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation. Through this legislation, I hope to ensure that students, researchers, and every American has access the published results of federally funded research, and I ask for my colleagues' support.
The bill would mark a sea change in the way scientific research is published. The majority of scientific publishers guard the copyright of their content very closely, often allowing only an abstract of the content to be made available for public consumption. For those people who wish to have the full text, they must either pay a small fortune in subscription fees or physically visit a research library that subscribes to the publication. With this bill, the text of these research journals would not be kept in a veritable lock box. It would guarantee that the public would be able to review the research for itself in a timely fashion, while still allowing publishers exclusive rights to the content for the first six months of publishing.
Not surprisingly, publishers are none too pleased. In today's New York Times, Howard H. Garrison of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology worried that the legislation could inflict serious economic damage on the publishing industry. "People won't be able to gauge how many people will be reading the articles and that has ramifications for advertising, promotion," he said. "Does it reach 1,000 scientists, 2,000 or 50? If the articles are on a government Web site, your readership may be halved."
Other publishers, such as Joann Boughman of the American Society of Human Genetics, take a different stance: that the public shouldn't necessarily be trusted to use this knowledge wisely. "Consumers themselves are saying, 'We have the right to know these things as quickly as we can.'" she told the Times. "That is not incorrect. However, wherever there is a benefit, there is a risk associated with it."
The sentiment of this statement is as old as the printing press, when church leaders feared that giving the general public direct access to the Bible would undermine their authority and lead to the corruption of religious practices. It takes the position that certain types of knowledge should only be in the hands of those who have the training, the money or the power to utilize it; otherwise, the public will be at "risk," as suggested by Ms. Boughman. But knowledge does not belong to one class of people. Open access publishing recognize everyone's right to access knowledge in a time and manner of their choosing, without mediation by those who wish to control that knowledge. It will allow people to make more informed judgments on medical treatment, and assist others in improving their understanding of important research that was previously available only to those who could afford access.
Meanwhile, the predictions that this law will undermine the publishing industry may be premature. There are already numerous open-access publishers experimenting with new economic models, such as the journals of Public Library of Science. The Internet has already forced the broadcast industry, the newspaper industry, the telephone industry, even the movie rental industry to rework their practices. Why shouldn't the scientific publishing industry be expected to do the same, particularly when the end result will inevitably serve the public good? -andy
CORRECTION: Peter Suber of Open Access News has posted a clarification about what I wrote:
The bill applies to the peer-reviewed version of the author's manuscript, not to the published version, which may include extensive copy editing and mark-up. The bill's mandate applies to grantees or authors, not to publishers. Publishers are not forced to release anything, merely to coexist with free copies of different versions of a subset of the articles they publish.This may seem like a fine point, but it has two important consequences. First, it's another reason to think that the policy will not, in fact, harm journal subscriptions. Researchers will still want access to the published versions and therefore libraries will still feel demand to subscribe. Second, it shows that the policy does not regulate publishers but only grantees, with whom the funding agencies have a contractual relationship. The FRPAA is too new for many publishers to have weighed in on yet. But in the debate over the NIH policy (different in many ways but similar in this respect), many publishers inaccurately claimed that it was an attempt to regulate publishing.
Thanks to Peter for setting the record straight. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 3:53 PM
May 5, 2006
Subbiah Arunachalam on India's Open Access Movement
Blogger Richard Poynder has a great interview with Digital Divide Network member Subbiah Arunachalam about the Open Access movement in India, specifically focusing on open access to scientific research. It's an important read for anyone interested in the future of open access journals like Public Library of Science, particularly in an Indian context. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:07 AM
May 3, 2006
Tsunami Alert for New Zealand and Fiji
A tsunami alert has been issued for New Zealand and Fiji after an 8.0 earthquake struck off the coast of Tonga. More info at the World Wide Help blog. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 12:51 PM
Web Inventor Weighs in on Network Neutrality
Sir Tim Berners Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has just posted a blog entry in which he pushes for policymakers to protect network neutrality and not allow the Internet to be parceled into balkanized fiefdoms where access to content is determined by the telecom carriers.
When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone's permission. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against particular types of data.Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint Cerf, or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system provider, or their government, or their hardware vendor.
It is of the utmost importance that, if I connect to the Internet, and you connect to the Internet, that we can then run any Internet application we want, without discrimination as to who we are or what we are doing. We pay for connection to the Net as though it were a cloud which magically delivers our packets. We may pay for a higher or a lower quality of service. We may pay for a service which has the characteristics of being good for video, or quality audio. But we each pay to connect to the Net, but no one can pay for exclusive access to me....
...The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy. It is the basis of democracy, by which a community should decide what to do. It is the basis of science, by which humankind should decide what is true.
Let us protect the neutrality of the net.
For more on this looming threat against the Internet, visit SaveTheInternet.com. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:24 AM
May 2, 2006
Mapping Municipal Broadband in the US
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C|Net's municipal broadband map |
It's a nice basic overview of the state of municipal broadband here in the US. I just wish it had more detail, such as links to individual municipal initiatives and the legislation - now that'd be really useful.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 1:38 PM
Si Se Puede! Marching for Immigrant Rights
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Video from the May 1 immigrant rights protests that took place in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts. The video follows a group of 1,000 protesters from their rally at Harvard and along their four-mile march to Boston Common. I filed this story for today's edition of Rocketboom. |
Posted by acarvin at 1:28 PM
May 1, 2006
Quoted in the Austin American-Statesmen
The Austin American-Statesmen is running a story about the digital divide and featured a quote from me. The article discusses a world technology congress taking place in Austin, and contextualizes it by examining Internet access in a South African village.
Internet connections are virtually unheard of. In a place where many households run on about $160 a month with government support, the $650 a month Kgabo said the school needs to reconnect a reliable Internet link is hard to come by.That lack of digital access "is representative of a much larger problem for a lot of countries where literacy is very low," said Andy Carvin, director of the Digital Divide Network, a global collection of activists and officials focused on extending access to technology.
"It's also very expensive," he said. "I have many African colleagues who spend hundreds of dollars a month to get access at home."
You can read the full article here -andy
Posted by acarvin at 9:58 PM
Introducing my New PBS Blog, learning.now
I'm very excited to announce the launch of a new blog, learning.now. This blog, which I'll be writing and editing for PBS Online, will focus on the intersection of Internet culture and education. One of the primary goals is to help guide educators through the ins and outs of what's often referred to as "Web 2.0," including blogging, podcasting, vlogging, RSS, social software and community networks. I'm planning to explore some of the creative ways students and teachers are using interactive technologies to improve learning, as well as dissect the controversies that often occur when classroom culture and online culture collide.
The website officially kicks off Tuesday, but I wanted to give readers a sneak preview of the site. And please feel free to offer any suggestions on the types of subjects you'd like me to tackle on the blog. I'm hoping this will be an engaging discussion in which I can learn from all of you and share some of the exciting work that's going on in classrooms today.
For those of you visiting my blog because of learning.now, welcome to Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth. This has been my personal homepage for the last 11 years, and I use it to discover a whole range of issues, not to mention share stories about life in general. I hope you enjoy the new blog, as well as my old one. :-) -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:38 PM
Photos from Today's Immigration Rallies
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Protestors at Harvard Yard |
I photographed the protestors the entire way, as can be seen in my photo gallery that I've uploaded to my Flickr account. I'm just finishing work on a video as well, which I'll post soon. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:22 PM
Immigrant Rights Podcast, Part 2
My second mobile phone podcast today, recorded during the immigrant rights march from Cambridge to Boston. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 2:31 PM
Immigrant Rights Podcast, Part 1
Here's a podcast I recorded over the phone just prior to the immigrant rights rally at Harvard. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 12:50 PM
