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February 24, 2007

Tad Hirsch is a Busy Guy

Tad Hirsch, creator of the SMS group tool TXTmob.com, spoke briefly about some of the mobile activism projects he's done in recent years. Some quick notes, most of which isn't verbatim:

For the past five or six years I've work as I hired gun for a host of community based advocacy orgs. I look at ways to build new systems that enable forms of collective action. This is a bit different from what's been said about participatory democracy, in which individuals create, share content and discuss. It's crucial, but not the only part. I work with folks who form together as groups to affect material social change. My work focuses on mobile media, cellphone activism, VOIP activism.

I tend to partner with small, localized groups of people, some of whom are engaged in formal NGOs, others not. I've done projects with street activists at the RNC and DNC, giving them a radically decentralized approach to street protests. Street theatre interventions as opposed to blockades, so people don't get their heads kicked in and arrested. We set up cell phone groups to help coordinate action. I've done work on a Navajo reservation to help stop the spread of coal-fire plants on their land. It's about generating citizen-based science that can be used in lawsuits, helping them sift through the data and inform their legal arguments.

In Africa I work with human rights groups to create cellphone communications platforms that bypass govt control. The immediate work is to have a network that protects the users and can't be controlled by the govt. We're taking the lessons of lower power fm and community radio and apply it to digital networks.


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Posted by acarvin at 12:33 PM

Map Your Local Media Moguls

Drew Clark of the Center for Public Integrity is now talking about their media tracker tool. Put in your zip code and it'll generate a map of your local media outlets and who owns them. I did a search for Washington DC. Along with the map, it gave me some interesting stats about the DC area:

And the companies with the biggest piece of the local broadcast pie:

Try it yourself and get informed. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:16 PM

At Beyond Broadcast

It's something like 17 degrees outside, so I am mighty relieved to be inside with about 400 other warm bodies at the Beyond Broadcast conference. Henry Jenkins of MIT gave an amazing keynote about participatory democracy and participatory culture. He talked a bit about DOPA Jr, noting as I have in the past that placing restrictive access to the Net at schools and libraries does more harm to disenfranchised populations than mainstream ones, since they often lack Internet access at home and have to rely on public access. As more and more people embrace social media tools to participate in civic life, those who get blocked because they're forced to use public access end up getting left out of public discourse yet again. Henry also used a great line referring to DOPA and its ilk as part of the mass de-skilling of America's youth, forcing them to unlearn the participatory culture skills they use outside of school because policymakers fear the impact of giving them access at school.

Right now there's a panel featuring reps from Yahoo, MTV and one of the guys behind Four Eyed Monsters. Maybe it's the long week catching up with me, but I am so bored. Can't wait til the unconferency sessions this afternoon. I feel like I'm at a tag-team lecture. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 11:36 AM

February 23, 2007

No News is Good News in Watertown

"So, you're in Watertown - is there any news there?"

"No. If there were, I'd move."

This is Lisa Williams recounting a conversation she had with someone during her talk about placeblogging. Lisa runs H2Otown, the successful community blog for Watertown, MA. Lisa is talking about local news and their reticence to work with local bloggers to cover what's going on in a community. Media outlets get nervous with terms like "citizen journalism," but they don't realized there are groups of bloggers in communities who aren't trying to be journalists, per se, but are still trying to create an online place where residents can come together and talk about their community: things that need to be fixed, road conditions, events and the like. Unless there's breaking news in these communities, the media ignores them, but that doesn't mean there isn't lots of important things to talk about it. As Lisa puts it, "Why is it possible to know more about what's going on in Indonesia than the East End?" As soon as you step out of the metro area of a given city, media coverage just evaporates. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:37 AM

Beth Kanter: Jumping into the Social Media Waters Without Shrinking

Nonprofit technology consultant Beth Kanter, who runs Beth's Blog and contributes to NetSquared, spoke this morning at the IMA conference about trends in nonprofit technology. These notes are not verbatim, so please do not treat them as direct quotes.

I turned 50 last month, so I decided to launch a user-generated content contest. I challenged my friends to go to remix photos of me, make a birthday card and post it to flickr. I had 54 people enter the contest, and I only knew half of them. One even created a birthday blog for me. What did I learn? Relax, the parachute works - people can make great stuff. Just don't parachute in, though - become a part of the community first.

Nonprofits are in between the early adopters and innovators, trying to explore new ways to engage stakeholders. They have limited staff and skills, and they get sucked into the hype, some wanting it to just go away. Others argue we should go back to basics rather than focus on social media tools. But it's not an either-or choice. You need to support your basic needs _and_ embrace Web 2.0. We need community "technology stewards" - people who can help lead the way and help nonprofits figure this all out. (The term was coined by Nancy White.)

Here's a quick tour of some low-risk experiments.

The first step is reading blogs and dropping comments. You don't need one yourself - just start participating. Lots of nonprofit folks have personal blogs before they have professional ones, so they start building their social media skills independently. They start talking about work, though, and they become informal tools for professional development. Personal blogs aren't just techies- they're upper management, and they're using blogging to help recruit new people.

Then there are organizational blogs. They offer a personal face for the organization to the public and their donors. They also facilitate connected networks. Social change orgs like idealist.org and the Genocide Intervention Network are integrating social media tools with meetups, so people go out into the real world to make change happen.

We started using the tag NPTech to help aggregate all sorts of content related to nonprofit technology. Hundreds of people have tagged thousands of pieces of content - links, video, photos, etc. It helps the whole community aggregate resources that relate to it. This has led to a lot of ad hoc collaboration, like using the tag to identify nonprofit tech events, rate them, discuss them.

I'm reading the firehose and putting it into nice glasses of water. Not everyone has to drink through the firehose. Some people can manage the flow of content while others just focus on receiving the highlights.

I also want to mention personal fundraising - tools that let anyone set up a tip jar and generate charity. I posted a widget to help raise money for a Cambodian to go to college, and people clicked on the widget and donated a few dollars until we reached the goal. I took this idea, and used a Yahoo charity contest to plug another Cambodian campaign - send $10 to send a kid to school. We went out in the community asking everyone we met to donate money, and did it through our social networks. We raised more than $50,000, and Yahoo matched it.

Jumping into cold water can be really uncomfortable, but your donors don't shrink. Start with a small project, get used to it, and enlarge it.


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Posted by acarvin at 11:11 AM

Dave Winer, Hypnotism, and Dinner in a Chaat Room

Last night was a treat. Radio Open Source hosted a party over at the Jury's hotel, which featured an interesting mix of the show's producers, conference attendees, and local members of their online community. Unfortunately I couldn't stay very long, because I'd also been invited to go to this week's Berkman Bloggers meeting at Harvard, along with Steve Clift from e-democracy.org. We had around 20 people in the room, including Dave Winer, placeblogging guru Lisa Williams and Shava Nerad of Tor. Steve talked about the gubernatorial e-debate he ran in Minnesota last October, while Shava surprised us with the random opportunity she had to eat lunch with Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick in Somerville earlier in the day.

Once the meeting wrapped up, we slogged our way through the icy puddles of Cambridge to the Bombay Club, where we had a wonderful dinner. J insisted that she order all the food for us, and I'm glad she did, because we all got to try a lot of random dishes we otherwise might have never tasted. They even had a nice chaat buffet, arguably India's favorite snack food, which is an unfortunate rarity at most US Indian restaurants. And all the while, Winer kept whipping out a glowing green pen he'd picked up at the conference, apparently trying to hypnotize several of us by swinging it in our faces.

Now, it's Friday morning at IMA, and Tom Gerace of Gather.com has just started talking as part of an opening session about online social networks. The ballroom isn't as packed as yesterday morning, but it's still well attended. There should be some good sessions later today; I'll try to blog some of them, assuming I can keep my laptop charged. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 8:58 AM

February 22, 2007

This is Brendan Greeley

Watch the video
Quick little video of Brendan from our session this morning.

Posted by acarvin at 5:05 PM

February 21, 2007

In Her Language: Vlogging Her Way Through Autism

Please watch this amazing video by Amanda Baggs, a videoblogger who is classified by her doctors as a "low-functioning autistic." She is unable to talk and appears to be totally disconnected from the rest of the world, but she is extraordinarily eloquent and descriptive of her insular world when given a computer keyboard through which to communicate. This video, which she shot, edited and posted on YouTube under her online name SilentMiaow, begins with several minutes of her doing repetitive actions and making chant-like noises - things that non-austic people might describe as stereotypical of people with austism. It has an eerie, performance-art quality to it - until you get to the second half, when you see her translating and interpretating what you've just seen, explaining her actions' meaning through the use of a computer-synthesized voice. The video inspired CNN to do a special on her tonight. She's also an active user of Second Life, and has an avatar that looks and acts like a low-functioning autistic person.

Her blog captures just how eloquent she is as a communicator when using assistive technology to capture her thoughts. In this post, she describes some basic advice she had been given when she first began coping with autism:

I eventually want to do a video series of basically things I wish someone had shown or told me when I was a kid.

One really big one is how to recognize overload. I did have a few crude techniques worked out, but I didn't know what they meant, or how to respond to them.

Basically, I carried certain objects that normally produced certain sensations. I had a necklace with piano wire in it that made soft bell-like noises. I had a scarf made out of multicolored criss-crossing ribbons. I had soft clothing.

The more overloaded I got, the more the soft bell-like noises turned into loud and obnoxious clanging that hurt my ears. The multicolored scarf became painful to look at rather than interesting. And the soft clothing turned to sandpaper.

So one good way to recognize overload, if you don't have some other way, is to have some sort of object that you know what it's like when you're not overloaded. If it becomes more and more unbearable in some way, you're getting more and more overloaded (and should probably find something to do about it).

Her blog is called Ballastexistenz. At first I thought it might be a cyberpunk reference, but its origins lie in Nazi Germany's treatment of people with disabilities. Amanda explains:

The reason that I have chosen one of the offensive terms used in the German eugenics movement against disabled people - which, for reference, predated Nazism, was heavily influenced by American ideas, and survived after World War II - is to force people to look at the sentiments that drove that movement, that came before it, and that are still prevalent worldwide today.

Ballastexistenz means about what it looks like: Ballast-existence, ballast-life. Some of the other terms that were applied to disabled people at the same time included leeren Menschenhulsen (empty human-shaped shells/husks), and lebensunwertes Leben (lives unworthy of life).

In using these terms, I do not for one moment forget the gravity of them. The ideas that gave rise to that terms have existed a long time and continue to exist. These ideas threaten the lives and well-being of disabled people everywhere. Autistic people are frequently described in these hateful ways, as empty shells without souls, burdens on our families and society, contributing nothing, ballast that merely weighs everyone else down.

CNN advertised their special by saying "You'll never look at autism the same way again." They totally nailed it. Watch the video. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 10:25 PM

The Hotel Shower-Shampoo Disconnect

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Whoever it is who's designing the fancy-shmancy elongated bottles of hotel shampoo clearly never stepped foot in hotel bathroom, or they would have realized they'd engineered a really bad design.

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Posted by acarvin at 2:10 PM

A Contradiction in Terms

Tom Mohr, former president of Knight Ridder Digital, is talking in the CEO session about the changing business of online newspapers. He keeps using a phrase that's driving me crazy when talking about opportunities to attract young "readers" - "Gen Y consumers." Generation Y, he acknowledges, has grown up entirely digital, but he isn't talking about the fact that they don't see themselves as consumers. They're producers, not to mention bloggers, remixers, gamers, vloggers - but they are not consumers in the way previous generations of business execs have defined the term. They are not sponges - they give back to the Net and expect us to respect that essential nature of their personality. Until we come to grips with that, we're doomed to keep making the same mistakes.

The consumer is dead, long live the producer. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 11:28 AM

Embracing the B-Listers

Colleen Wilson, Senior Interactive Producer at KQED, spoke during our panel session this morning about their foodie blog, Bay Area Bites. When they first decided to create a blog, they invested a lot of time investigating and participating in Bay Area food blogs. One might assume that the goal was to identify and recruit the A-list food bloggers in the community, but they didn't. Instead, they embraced the B-list bloggers: second-tier bloggers who were good at what they did, but hungry for more. If you're an A-list blogger, it might take a lot of incentive (read: money) to recruit them away from what they're already doing, but bloggers just below that tier are more likely to embrace new opportunities.

Once they selected a team of bloggers, KQED offered them training to improve some of their technical skills, like image editing. They weren't paid at first; they had to prove themselves on the new blog and demonstrate their commitment. After a while, KQED started paying them a stipend - $25 a post. It's not a lot of money, but it was enough to give them a sense of ownership in an important community resource. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 11:12 AM

Brendan Greeley: Blog Fairy Dust is a Myth


He made it to IMA 2007: Brendan Greeley.

Right now I'm sitting on a panel session on user-generated content projects in public broadcasting. Brendan Greeley is talking right now about his role as blogger-in-chief of Radio Open Source, "a blog with a radio show." Radio Open Source has pioneered the integration of radio programs with online communities, engaging the public to discuss the topics of the show, as well as suggest segments, guests and questions. Brendan noted that in recent weeks, around 50% of shows have been suggested by its community members.

In terms of fostering a community around a radio show, Brendan said it's important to help craft expectations, so the public know how they can and can't participate. "Users want to be taught what do to," he said. "And don't be afraid to be a dictator," he added, noting there have been times when the discussion threads on the blog started to break down due to user insensitivity and disrespect of each other. In times like this, the public expects you to lay down the law and put the conversation back on track. Community breaks down when flame wars erupt.

In his closing remarks, Brendan stressed the importance of integrating online communit work into the job descriptions of the entire production team. At Open Source, every producer is expected to blog the segments they're producing, as well as read and respond to user comments. "If people know you're reading the comments," Brendan explained, "they're more likely to behave themselves."

But the notion of changing job descriptions is really important, because it forces the production team to take responsibility for the online content while embracing a sense of ownership of it as well.

"You can't sprinkle blog fairy dust over your program and make it bloggy and beautiful," Brendan said. "You better than anyone in the building know what the show is going to be about," he said. There was a learning curve, but now all Open Source producers write posts, as well as read and respond to comments. "The technical stuff can be solved in a week.... The real question is do the producers on the show, do the news staff, feel an obligation to update the site.... If they're not invested in some way, then the blog will be a dumping ground for things produced a few days ago that you're listeners aren't interested in any more." -andy

Update- Another great quote from Brendan: "Anonymity breeds contempt." Brendan has discovered that having producers blog under their real names and using their names when communicating via email, users are more responsive because they see the people behind the radio program. And it goes both ways, in my view: requiring people to register to a community and use their real names, it holds people more accountable for what they say, and they're less likely to hide behind anonymity in order to flame another group member.

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Posted by acarvin at 10:20 AM

Dealing With Outside Links? Punt!

Christine Perfetti is taking questions from the audience now. Someone asked her what to do on websites when you link to other websites. Do you do a straightforward link, or do you pop open another window? Perfetti dodged the question, saying her company's work focuses on getting people to come and stay at your website, rather than driving users elsewhere. Unfortunately, this model completely ignores the reality of the live Web, in which bloggers and others rely on outside links to engage in a distributed conversation. Links are a form of currency for users and the people to which you link, thus adding value to your own site. The more difficult those links are (read: popups), the harder it is to engage in the conversation.

Driving traffic to your website is nice, but life is distributed, folks. If you don't link often and give users a smooth linking experience away from your site when it's appropriate, they'll feel like you're holding them hostage. And you stifle the conversation. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 9:29 AM

Pfun vs. Pfunction at Pfizer.com

Christine Perfetti of User Interface Engineering is giving the opening keynote to the IMA's 2007 tech seminar. Admittedly, I've spent more time than I should during her speech working on my presentations, but one story caught my attention. Christine talked about the Pfizer website, which lost touch with its online audience due to a certain amount over over-exuberance. At one point in time, Pfizer redesigned part of their homepage to link to a "Pfizer FunZone." The purpose of the FunZone, as the name suggested, was to give users, including young people, a fun, welcoming experience on their website. Here's a description from their website:

Look at bugs under an electron microscope, unjumble scientific words with the scrambler, and take a trip back in time on the time machine. Experiments and other resources for kids of all ages are on the Pfizer FunZone web site.

Unfortunately, the reality is that many more people go to the Pfizer website looking for information related to depression than they do for fun. A Christine put it, kids don't exactly tell their parents, "I don't care if Lost is on TV - I want to hang out in the Pfizer FunZone!" Beyond the irony of Pfizer's layout decision, one could argue that the emphasis on having fun ended up alienating potential customers suffering from depression. In the end, Pfizer dropped the FunZone - the site is totally dead at this point. They still don't make it that easy to find depression-related info, though. It's buried in a drop-down menu at the bottom-right part of the page, while links like animal care and business to business get prominent placement at the top center. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 8:57 AM

Late Night at the IMA

Once the afternoon sessions wrapped up at the IMA conference, many of us headed over to a reception and dinner at the top of the Prudential building - nice view as always. It was a relaxing event. Live jazz. Good company. Crab cakes. Cash bar. (Three out of four ain't bad.) I wasn't able to linger for dessert, though, as I had to run back to the hotel to rendezvous with Brendan Greeley to work on our presentations for Thursday. We had planned to do a pair of powerpoints, but concluded that since we were going to be talking about tools like wikis and tagging, we'd be remissed if we didn't use them as the organizing principles of our talk. Powerpoint out, MediaWiki in.

By the time it hit 11pm, we concluded we'd gotten enough done to worry about the rest tomorrow - and John Bracken kept emailing us about drinks, social director that he is. So we went downstairs and joined him, along with Doc Searls, David Sifry and a bunch of other folks who whung out and chatted about RSS longer than normal people ever would. Most intriguing idea: Sondra Russell of CPB wondered aloud why no one has made it possible for people to receive credit report updates via RSS.

Things wrapped up soon after midnight. The bar closed, and a security guard booted us out, telling us to take our drinks upstairs. Move along, move along.... -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 8:19 AM

February 20, 2007

NPR Social Media Forum, Part 2

Here's part two of the podcast from last week's social media forum at NPR. Part one can be found here. Participants in the podcast include David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Jay Rosen, Zadi Diaz, Euan Semple and Jeff Jarvis. NPR media reporter David Folkenflik moderates, and Michel Martin chimes in as well. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 5:33 PM

NPR Social Media Forum, Part 1

Given the amazing response we've received from the social media advisory group I co-hosted at NPR last week, we've decided to release the full audio of the two-hour forum as a pair of podcasts. Each podcast is about an hour long. As far as I know it's the first time NPR has released the audio of one of its in-house "Digital Den" forums before, so I'm really excited to share it. The podcast includes a discussion featuring David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Jay Rosen, Zadi Diaz, Euan Semple and Jeff Jarvis, moderated by NPR media reporter David Folkenflik.


Here's part one of the podcast. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 5:21 PM

Arrival at the IMA Conference

I'm now in Boston at the Marriott Copley Place, having gatecrashed the CEO session of the Integrated Media Association (IMA) public media conference. The IMA is essentially a group hug of leaders within public tv and public radio who give a damn about the Internet. It's kinda like deja vu all over again, because Doc Searls and David Weinberger are speaking now, though David Sifry of Technorati has joined the posse this time around. I'm actually not sure if today's sessions are on or off the record, so I'm going to err on the side of cowardice and not liveblog the event. The guys are getting a lot of laughs from their pledge drive jokes, and the audience is asking good questions. On the whole, though, it's quite similar to the conversation we had at NPR last week.

I've got a busy, busy week ahead of me. Later tonight, I'm getting together with Brendan Greeley of Radio Open Source (who incidentally is the official blogger for the conference) so we can crank out the Powerpoint deck for our presentations. We may even have an after-hours drink with John Bracken, assuming we can entice him with the Elvis paraphernalia at the bar Brendan suggested. (Does blogging about our invitation to John serve as a form of virtual arm-twisting? Depends on whether he reads my blog today or has a vanity feed on Technorati.) Tomorrow, I'm participating in a developer's session to talk about NPR's use of Movable Type for its new Rough Cuts blog, and then Thursday and Friday, I've got two sessions with Brendan and maybe one with Steve Clift as well. And just when you think I can catch my breath, it'll be time for the Beyond Broadcast conference at MIT on Saturday and a vlogger dinner organized by Steve Garfield. I'm getting exhausted just thinking about it. Another venti americano, please.... -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 3:52 PM

February 19, 2007

Subscribing to User Comments

In case you hadn't noticed, I've added a convenient link in the right navigation column for people to subscribe to the RSS feed of all comments posted to the blog. If that's not convenient enough, the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/carvin-comments. Enjoy! -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 5:05 PM

February 17, 2007

Users, Power and Objectivity

Watch the video
This 10-minute video features Jay Rosen, David Weinberger, Jeff Jarvis, David Folkenflik, Zadi Diaz and Michel Martin discussing the shift of power from media outlets to the public, and the reasons for objectivity in journalism, among other topics. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 4:56 PM

David Weinberger: NPR, User-Generated Content and Trust

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Berkman fellow David Weinberger makes the case for NPR to trust the public when it comes to uploading user-generating content and discerning the differences between NPR content and user content. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 2:25 PM

Rosen, Semple, Jarvis

Watch the video
Montage of comments from Jay Rosen , Euan Semple and Jeff Jarvis from the social media roundtable at NPR.

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Posted by acarvin at 10:30 AM

Jay Rosen: Attention Grabbing vs. Attention Granting

Watch the video
Jay Rosen of NewAssignment.net and PressThink explains why he thinks NPR is the opposite of attention-grabbing, and why that's a good thing. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 9:10 AM

February 16, 2007

Zadi Diaz: From the RNC to Nerdcore

Watch the video
Zadi Diaz of Jetset Show talks about her life as a videoblogger, from covering the 2004 Republican National Convention to documenting nerdcore at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 9:00 PM

Bringing Social Media to New NPR Programming

After a quick break, I asked Matt Martinez and Lee Hill to talk a bit about the shows they're working on here at NPR. Matt is heading up the new morning radio show targeting younger audiences. He described how his sister, a 28-year-old nurse, isn't interested in NPR because she finds it boring, even though there is lots of stuff that would actually be interesting to her if it were presented in the right way. He also talked about how the show strives to be a show that never ends. Rather than being based on a set clock at a set part of the day, the show would break out of that, utilizing the Internet to allow the public to continue interacting when they want.

Lee, meanwhile, talked about the role that NPR Rough Cuts has played in developing Michel Martin's new show. Each dress rehearsal segment is posted online, with Michel blogging and asking for assistance in crafting the show's format. The public develops a sense of ownership and begins forming a community around a show that hasn't even hit the airwaves yet.

Will try to write more about this session later; it's hard to liveblog and moderate at the same time.... -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 11:09 AM

Morning Social Media Discussion at NPR

Right now I'm in the NPR board room with an amazing group of bloggers, social media gurus and NPR staff talking about the potential impact of social media on public radio. Here are my notes from the opening session, with Jeff Jarvis summarizing some of the brainstorms we had yesterday. Please note these are summaries, not direct quotes. -andy


Jarvis: We don't want to preach to the choir here. NPR is already doing podcasting and other great things, so we needed to see where we should obnoxiously push things.

Phase 1 of interactivity: React.
Phase 2: contribute. Please give us your stuff.
Phase 3: Create. We can all create our own stuff, and that's a social act.

So the question is what is NPR's relationship with that world of creators?

Doc:

When Tim Berners Lee invented the Web, there were two metaphorical systems. When we build a website, it's often static. We borrow the language of construction and real estate to describe this stuff. But there's another system. When you're on the Net, you're no further away than anyone in the world than the distance to your screen. We now syndicate, publish, update, aggregate dynamic content on the live web. Technorati's search engine indexes blogs and other sites that are too new for Google, which essentially searches the static web. The live web changes all the time - it's actually more like radio. Technorati gets pinged whenever a blog is updated, and it's immediately updated. It's a whole other world of live, dynamic content driven by RSS. (Reminds me of Mal Watlington's quote: "If you don't have an rss feed, you're dead to me." -ac)

Jeff:

The other day, Howard Stern announced his engagement. It was instantly all over blogs and even on Wikipedia before People magazine or news sites could do anything about it. This liveness. These people out there own their own stuff, and it's going on all the time. And they're all linked to each other, networked. So what is NPR's relationship to that world?

I would argue that part of the relationship is a new kind of network. You're already a kind of network, of complicated relationships with stations and other producers. What's the essential job of a network? To find the good stuff. In the past, you had to make it yourself within the network. But now everyone's creating it, NPR's network should expand to include that good stuff as well - good content, good talent, good people.

When we hear the term user generated content, we need to stipulate a lot of it is crap. No one is gonna say to you to change your standards and wallow in the crap - you should find the good stuff and help make it better, help teach people how to do it. Teach them to file FOIA requests or avoid getting sued, for example.

David Weinberger: Jay wrote the seminal piece that knocks down the straw man that any of us would make the argument that the media is crap, we're great and we'll replace you. We're all npr listeners and love it. But in defense of crap, it's multidimensional. Lots of people don't like putting out their first drafts online, but that's what bloggers do. Some stuff taken out of context can seem like crap, even though it's valuable in context. A tiny percentage of stuff is high quality, but a greater amount of stuff isn't perfect, but is still valuable and worthy of being shared. Just because people are recording content with poor equipment doesn't mean you ignore it. People can differential between what NPR creates and what the public creates.

Jeff:

What does creating mean? You're making stuff from scratch but you're also remixing things. People pick up the stuff that hits the cutting room floor and remixes it into something new. The public can help organize all of this stuff in really incredible ways.

It's about enabling the public. Helping them do good stuff, based on NPR's definition of good stuff.

Zadi: It's about authenticity. I'm not a teen anymore, but I still remember what it's like. So enabling teens to tell their own stories, I'm offering a way for them to have an authentic voice. I give them a platform to speak to me, each other and the public about what's going on in young adult life.

It's like NPR's a theme park - you create the rides, the games, the feeling of the place, and the public will come and participate in a way that makes sense for that space.

Weinberger: There are three types of filtering. NPR creates something and says it's good. There's stuff that NPR people link to, which carries some of NPR's weight, and there's what the public is doing in relation to all of this stuff, on NPR's site and on their own sites.

Jarvis:

Journalism back and forth: there's journalism, plus there's the ability to interact with this world by the public adding journalism of their own.

Jay Rosen: When Berners Lee invited the web, he saw it as a collaborative medium, not a broadcasting medium. When he did that, the Net was very disorganized. But it was built for that purpose. The audience we usually have in our minds is the mass audience of the broadcast age. They're connected to us as listeners, but they're not connected to each other. They're an atomized audience. In the age of the Web, they're still connected to you, but they're connected horizontally to each other. So now they can inform each other horizontally without going to NPR at all. My new project. Newassignment.net, is trying to explore this. The cost of likeminded people to find each other and collaborate is plunging rapidly. We're trying to figure out how to take all of this and get lots of people working on one story, so the knowledge they have can come together. The people always know more than journalists do. And they can do it on their own, or with journalists. It's really hard to do, but we think it can be done. It's also developing a donation model in the process. People ought to donate money, but we really want them to donate their knowledge, time, sources, energy and enthusiasm.... If we can find a way to measure those types of in-kind donations, that social capital.

Tom Regan: Readers help give us the pieces that end up being the newsiest stuff of the day, but we'd never find it ourselves because we don't have the resources to find everything. So the public helps fill in the blanks.

Jeff: So it's about bringing in the public to do stuff we couldn't do on our own.

Jay: Public Insight Journalism did an amazing job of inviting 25,000 people who want to help APM do their stories. That's just incredible. But what they haven't done is connected those people to one other. It's an expert database, not a community. They haven't overcome the atomization of the audience yet. It's a radical idea, but it's been used conservatively so far. Meanwhile, OhMyNews! In Korea is trying to create a citizen newspaper, where the labor is divvied story by story, while NewAssignment.net will have groups of people divvied up working on the same story. I want to figure out how to help a single beat reporter by connecting them with a social network that would help them get to the heart of a story.

David: Rolodex vs. social is a key point. You don't just request ideas and thank people for sending them. You give them an opportunity to talk about it. Digg.com and Reddit.com lets people rate news stories and discuss them; the readers create their own front page. In the case of NPR, having part of the site that's digg-like, where readers get to decide what's important. It doesn't have to be all of npr's stuff, but sections of it. And you create a social network around it, creating new relationships with you and the public.

Jeff: Yesterday I turned to Zadi and asked what she wanted from NPR in relation to jet set show.

Zadi: NPR has expertise in the field. Young people want to improve their skills, their expertise, connect with correspondents. They could gain so much from having an actual relationship with NPR. They want to be listened to, be recognized their thoughts are relevant. They may not be old, but they do have their own wisdom. It can be a two-way street, even with a younger audience, since they're the ones creating so much of the stuff out there.

Andy: And Zadi got me thinking about a vlog version of globalvoicesonline.org, with social networking like TakingITGlobal.org.

Zadi: NPR is a bastion of storytelling knowledge, and those skills can be passed on to networks of young people to craft their own stories. Jetset set up a wiki for a kid named Brendan, so he could have the public pitch story ideas for an online fiction project he wanted to create. They came together and crafted the plot, the story, the characters, even the costumes. Even young people have expertise, and Brendan was able to tap into this expertise for his project.

Jeff: It's a three-way situation. You've got NPR, the audience and the member stations. NPR has a b2b relationship with stations, b2c with the audience - as do stations. There's one npr, hundreds of member stations, countless thousands of audience members - and they're creating content now. Things are changing for stations. ABC skipped the stations and put shows on iTunes. The heck with them. The stations created NPR, rescued it, so now maybe NPR can use social media to help the stations. And it's all about what goes on internally at NPR too.

Euan Semple: At the BBC, we had employees blogging publicly because we didn't give them an internal outlet. When you give them a social platform to ask dumb question and surface good ideas, they embrace it. It's incongruous to do this stuff publicly without embracing it internally.

Jay: All of these things pose challenges to professional news. One obstacle is visible with Public Insight Journalism. They're tapping about five percent of its potential because of how they think of themselves as professionals. So it's harder to do these things. Technology is the easiest part; changing the culture is hardest.

Jarvis: Think in terms of pilot projects. Don't change everything at once.

Euan: It's like trojan mice.

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Posted by acarvin at 9:48 AM

In a World Where Everyone Creates...

Watch the video
Jeff Jarvis, David Weinberger and Zadi Diaz discuss the evolution of the relationship between NPR and the people formally known as the audience, who are now content creators in their own right. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 6:25 AM

February 15, 2007

Doc Searls: The Static Web vs. the Dynamic Web

Watch the video
Doc Searls talks about two of the competing metaphors that exist on the Internet - the static Web vs. the dynamic Web - at an NPR brainstorming session today. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 11:20 PM

Social Media Thinkers vs. The Weather

Today and tomorrow I'm hosting a small group of really interesting people from the Web 2.0 universe as part of a social media advisory group I'm putting together for NPR. The plan is to start at 3pm today with some informal orientation activities and a visit to the All Things Considered studio, before diving into the meat of things with reps from the NPR leadership at dinner tonight and tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, this week's meteorological Valentines Day Massacre is wreaking havoc on people's travel plans. David Weinberger had a Kafka-esque experience with United Airlines in Boston last night; at last word he's en route via Amtrak. Doc Searls appears to have made it, despite the horrifying doppler radar image on his blog. Euan Semple was forced to take a bus from New York - and this is after getting off a plane from Cairo - while Rob Paterson managed to get here after being stranded in Montreal. Farai Chideya cancelled due to the storm as well, though I'm hoping we can kludge together a videoconference from the NPR's new digs in New York. Now it's just a matter of tracking down Zadi Diaz, Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen.

Needless to say, I'm still keeping my fingers crossed that everyone gets here without frostbite or lost luggage. But given the horror stories I've heard so far, I'm not exactly holding my breath. Save travels, everyone. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 9:27 AM

February 9, 2007

JD Lasica and the Story of OurMedia.org

Watch the video
An interview with social media advocate JD Lasica discussing the history of the pioneering video and podcasting service OurMedia.org, which he co-founded in 2005.

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Posted by acarvin at 10:07 AM

February 8, 2007

We Media and "Soft Power"

The late afternoon session at We Media today focused on "soft power" - how the Internet and online tools have empowered people in ways that weren't possible when traditional forms of power - money, infrastructure, etc - are scarce and concentrated. The panel, moderated by Chris Nolan, including Jay Rosen of PressThink, David Sasaki of Global Voices, and Val Prieto of BabaluBlog, among others. I took notes for most of the panel; again, please note that these aren't verbatim quotes. -andy

Jay Rosen of PressThink: Traditionally, power is seen as a scarce resource. Governments have power, big companies have power, because they have amassed a scarce resource. When we talk about soft power, it's not necessarily scarce, because it happens when people are arranged in a certain way. United We Stand, Divided We Fall notes the difference between what happens when we form a community or when we don't. If we don't, we lack the power, we feel powerless. Soft power is people power, but it's also the social structures that connect people together and give them something in common.

Now, the cost of locating each other, sharing, collaborating, making stuff, etc, is plunging rapidly. A social Moore's law. Now we can do all sorts of things together we couldn't do before. You can't just go to a place and find it; it exists in the space between people.

David Sasaki, Global Voices: Soft power is the power to be heard. Until recently, those people with that power were columnists, journalists; now it's anyone with access to the Net. With Global Voices, we're aggregating the best blogging from around the world, but things like censorship prevent other voices from being heard. So you can't say that _everyone_ has access to power now.

Val Prieto, BabaluBlog: I wanted to blog and tell the story of the Cuban diaspora experience. We're publishing stories from people in Cuba who can't publish there.

Chuck DeFeo: It's the power of grassroots voices being heard. In the 80s and 90s, conservative talk shows help lead the way of giving people a voice through the media. It was a powerful thing. More recently, blogs took off, and it's an extension of what goes on in talk radio. Our website has several thousand radio listeners who are now bloggers, creating contest in conjunction with our radio programming.

Val: We get to participate, have our opinions heard.

Chris Nolan: What about the echo chamber problem?

Sasaki: That's where Global Voices come in. Go to a site like Digg and you find the same stuff over and over. People begin to miss editors who help guide you. GV gets editors who are experts in their region, and curate the best of what's going on there.

Jay: The reason blogs attracted so much attention was because they came first. But it's the content generating tools that are the real change agents. The people out there who used to be called the audience, are still an audience in the sense that they consume media, but they are also connected across to each other. That fact has big implications. All the stuff the audience knows can now be brought to bear. NewAssignment.net is attempting to figure out how to do real reporting given this horizontal dimension of the Net. Imagine how thousands of people could contribute to the creation of one news story. That's the challenge we're tackling. So blogging just opened the door to the world of self publishing.

Chris Nolan: Blogging filled a vacuum in readers' lives.

Chuck DeFeo: I spent a long time in campaign politics before getting into media. Voter participation was a big part of it. Those of us who have been doing this for a while may remember when the question was, when are we gonna have the 1960 moment, when broadcast TV became the dominant medium over radio. I don't think that was a healthy thing, because it eroded grassroots politics, where voters actually participated in the process.

Val Prieto: Cuban Americans are primarily conservative, so you get a certain amount of the echo chamber. But there are always dissenting opinions. It may only be one or two out of 10 comments, but it's there. As long as you foster debate, what's the harm?

Sasaki: I'm really against the echo chamber. Partisanship may be a step up from apathy, but what you want is dialogue and participation.

Audience member: on a day when yet another helicopter gets shot down in Iraq, the news is dominated by the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Media tells us that's the number one story.

Val: But that's because it makes money.

Chris Nolan: With digg.com, people would say it would replace your front page. Digg is a tool; but why isn't it being seen as a tool among newspapers?

DeFeo: Politics is a reflection of the electorate. We're more partisan because the electorate is more partisan. Meanwhile, editors post stories knowing what the audience wants, so yeah, you'll get Anna Nicole Smith.

Gaby Bruna: I was born in the 1980s. I can do anything from what I want from my computer, and my generation was the first one raised during this revolution. Now you can go to social networking sites and find or do anything you'd want to do.

Chris Nolan: but some say social networking is just the best tool ever to direct spam.

Sanjeev Chatterjee: These tools can help bring important social topics to the front, but news hasn't always covered what's important. So we need to find ways of differentiating what we're trying to do.

Jay Rosen: I was talking recently with Jimbo Wales at Wikipedia. I asked him how it all really works. He said the only reason it works is because the wikipedia community come there already knowing what an encyclopedia is. It's already in their head. The commonality of that vision makes the creation of Wikipedia practical. If they didn't have a shared vision, it wouldn't ever work. A successful social media site has tools, people, a community, yeah, but they also have a shared vision.

Sanjeev: Either there's a cultural monolith that informs that vision, or there's a universal idea that defines it.

Jay: It could be a universal human need, but it's more likely a product of our culture. We use the term community very loosely. Most of the things we call communities aren't communities; they're a shared space, a public. A real community has shared values and beliefs that creates the community even before the website even exists. Lots of communities that didn't know they had large numbers now can discover themselves and collaborate online.

Audience member: Sometimes people need to be told what's important. Otherwise we'd all just focus on junk celebrity news. We don't want to hear bad news, even though it's important.

Nolan: It's true because newspapers have abrogated their responsibilities. Popularity determining the news works in some places, but not others.

Georgia Popplewell: I want to tell a story from Global Voices. One of our authors in Tunisia created a Google Map that shows all the prisons in Tunisia. You can click on prisons and get info on jailed dissidents. He got a lot of news coverage, but someone on our discussion asked if it was a bit too sexy for human rights campaigners, and others replied and said that's what we need: better packaging for important stuff that isn't inherently sexy.

Gaby: The greatest democratic value of the Net happens when nonprofits can use the Net to guide people to take positive action. And it requires the right packaging to attract an audience.

Val: All you have is your integrity. Without it, no one will believe what you're writing. You might as well just write about cats rather than something important. I won't accept funds from anyone because I don't want to seem like someone's lackey. Because I'm concerned that if I take money, they'll question my integrity.

Jay: There are new dynamics loose in the world. It doesn't mean the old dynamics disappear. Just because there's new power doesn't mean old power is gone. So what you have instead is a new transparency laid on top of a new transparency. We're trying to figure out the rules, but that doesn't mean you can throw out old rules like editing, judgment, etc. We need to live in a world where both of these systems happen at the same time. Formulas won't work anymore. Market it in a traditional way, you might lose your credibility.

DeFeo: We're trying to figure this out, but like Jay said, we need to have a shared vision for it to work. I think we should double underline this. Successful communities have a shared vision, and now we have the tools to create it ourselves.

Alan Rosenblatt: As someone who teaches people how to use the Net for political change, I think a lot about how the Net gives people power to take action. And shared values are crucial. Informing people is just the most basic part of the Net. It's making connections, internalizing what's at stake for a community, then influencing people in power to make actual changes in society. If it's just talk, talk, talk, then we'll never really have any power.

Sasaki: If you think about it, it's really hard to change someone's mind. If we just go to blogs with the same point of view, no one changes their opinion. Isn't it important to engage in changing minds rather than preaching to the choir? Meanwhile, censorship keeps getting in the way of people using the Internet for social change. A lot of us take for granted we can say what we want, but it's not the enabling tool for a lot of people.

Val: Most Cubans don't have Internet access, so they're pretty much censored completely.

Sanjeev: Think of when those UCLA police tasered a student. You see all these other students shooting footage on their camera phone, but they're not trying to stop it. (Actually, is that true? I thought they were yelling at the police to stop. -andy) We need to do more than get information out there; we need to act as well.

Okay, I'm gonna wrap this up - I'm starting to get hand cramps. -andy

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Posted by acarvin at 4:51 PM

Don't Mind Me If I Gripe About Panel Formats

I've got a minor gripe with the format of the We Media conference. The main sessions are organized as panels, typically with five or six people. I can live with that, even though it's kinda large for a panel. And with 90 minutes per session, you'd think it would be enough time to engage them and the other conference attendees. It's not that simple, though, because each session has five or six official "go-to participants." These are people who are in the audience that get first dibs to respond after the panelists have their say. So by the time you go through as many as one dozen people - the panelists and the go-to folks - there's not a hell of a lot of time left for the rest of us to jump into the discussion.

Granted, we've only had one session use this format, but others are on deck. I'll be curious to see how many other people get to participate in the conversation. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 12:03 PM

We Media Community Forum

The open session of We Media was a forum on the role of community. They organized the session with five panelists and five "go-to people" in the audience, with others jumping in when they could. Here are my notes from the session; it's more of a summary than collections of verbatim quotes. -andy

Jan Schaffer, J-Lab: J-Lab is looking at citizen journalism projects that are community-based. They've just published a big report this week. A lot of hyperlocal citizen journalism projects are acts of community building rather than acts of journalism. They care a lot about community with a lot of "naked passion," which causes some traditional journalists to be nervous.

These sites define success as impacting their community, serving as local govt watchdogs, creating community dialogue, encouraging voter turnout. Some report that people in the community who normally wouldn't engage each other are coming together. They're creating a fusion of news and shmooze - much more observational than traditional journalism.

Lisa Stone, BlogHer: Women are the majority of web users, the power users of Web 2.0. BlogHer started as a conference for women bloggers, asking the question, "Where are the women bloggers?" Now we're a network with hundreds of blogs and dozens of editors reporting about what they care about.

Jennifer Carroll, Gannett: Gannett is starting to look beyond geography and focus on connecting people, to say that we care a lot about what's going on in their communities: the small acts that add up to something powerful. The impact has been immediate and way beyond anyone's expectations. All of this is right under the service, waiting to explode, and now we just need to help people make those connections.

Farai Chideya of NPR: Half of my family is in Zimbabwe, and I just got back. We live in a blessed bubble, where we have free range to do what we want online. I was shooting a documentary over there about my father, who was a blacklisted journalist. Now, everyone has cellphones, but the networks don't work well. Same thing with the cybercafes. In Zimbabwe, the consensus that providing online infrastructure would increase good governance and free speech, but the govt is deliberately preventing this from happening. So there's a link between open access and open government. People want to connect but their policymakers won't let them.

Dorian Benkoil, MediaBistro: Mediabistro.com is both an online and offline community with a 15-year history. Our membership is collectively smarter than any of us who run the site, so if we need help answering a question, the community fills in the blanks.

Shel Israel, Naked Conversations: There are 123 million newspapers printed and delivered every day. I doubt that there are 123 mil people reading them, and those that do, what percentage of the paper do they read?

When I started college, I walked into the commons and picked up a copy of the New York Times. I'd never seen it before, so I sat down with some coffee and hoped that girls would think I looked smart. By the time I graduated, the girls were still ignoring me, so I got engaged to the Times instead. I read it every day, but it's kinda funny. I'm reading about restaurants in Chelsea that I'll never visit. Meanwhile, my granddaughter, who is seven, has never picked up a paper, but she'll be influenced by the people she meets online and the news she consumes there. Media companies will be distribution points for people collecting what interests them. Newspapers - dead trees smeared with dead berries - will go away.

My mother hates Google and loves libraries. She's appalled I wrote about without going to a library, doing the research online. (mic goes dead, power goes out.) We choose what's interesting and assemble it. The Internet makes it easier to assemble, disseminate, digest, respond and create.

Ian Rowe, MTV: Media is no longer only determined by a bunch of people behind closed doors dictating that the rest of the world must watch a program at a specific date and time. MTV is excited about the explosion of self-publishing, but we also want to ensure there's still top-down packaging of information. We still have the power to get information to large audiences of young people. So it's a matter of figuring out a business model that supports both top-down and bottom-up.

Audience member: I'm a college professor, and my students ask if we're talking about community or communities, plural. Once the barriers to entry becomes so low, we get involved in multiple communities, we need to think about the implications of that on political personhood, if you will.

Rich Skrenta, Topix.net: We've had more than 200,000 discussion posts on Denmark's publishing of the pictures of Muhammad. There was a lot of racism, but a lot of thoughtful discussion, too. During this, we started geotagging comments by IP address, and we realized that people from Europe, the Mideast, the US were all jumping in. This made us wonder about the implication of an editor in Palo Alto editing something written by a person in Iran. We've got people talking and trying to come to agreement, shedding light on the issue.

Jan Schaffer, J-Lab: Conversation is an act of information but not necessarily journalism. People consume media to get a job done. Maybe that job is finding movie listings, sales ads, community news. You consume it because it helps you get somewhere. So we're going to see more and more niche models of media. And the ones that help people get the info they need will be the ones that succeed.

Lisa Stone, BlogHer: News about Zimbabwe just doesn't get covered on the front page of the paper, yet lots of people still want to talk about it. If you look at attorney blogs, they cover what they're doing in court, and that's expertise you don't see among legal journalists. They're blogging about it and talking about it, because they're not finding the info they need in mainstream media. They're filling in the blanks. So people develop an area of extreme expertise, so you can attract those people who care about that expertise.

Audience member: how do you define the term "journalist"? Lewis and Clark were journalists - at least they called themselves that. They walked through the woods and wrote dispatched for home newspapers. Can anyone be a journalist now, because they have some kind of expertise?

Jan: Journalism is gathering data, verifying it. Some of it is useful, sometimes not. Mainstream media journalism doesn't validate consensus. Ordinary people don't frame whether the Democrats are up and down. They don't think like that.

Ian: There's a big difference between investigative journalism and widespread opinion that's consumed as fact. The blogosphere is amazing because oppressed people - the average American - didn't have a voice before. Now they have a platform. That's incredible from a democracy point of view. My postings can be skewed or wrong, but if it becomes a meme, it becomes a "fact," and that's not journalism. Journalists need to preserve and cherish the role of investigators, fact-checkers.

Shel: Murrow said news is what's interesting or useful. I'd say it's that, but what's interesting or useful to me personally. Not all bloggers are journalists, just as tabloids aren't always journalists. Someone in London shot the Tube bombing video online, getting the word out before the BBC knew what was really going on. No one is going to pay me to go to an event and "cover " it. Journalists still get to do that. I wish bloggers could do that. (NewAssignment.net, anyone?) The future journalism is somewhere between the professionals and the millions of folks with their feet on the ground in the real world.

Lisa Stone: SaveDarfur.org is helping make up for the lack of serious media coverage on Darfur. BlogHer has two editors who cover what women are doing in philanthropy and advocacy. For example, a women in Canada has a sick relative, so two bloggers started an online auction after being moved by her story, to raise money for the disease. It really caught fire, and they raised $9,000.

Audience member: conversation contains the seeds of journalism, but not everyone wants to be a journalist. Big media speaks, but we converse. Our local blog (in Dallas) has had stories picked up by the local papers. Every story came about because a user comment said there's a topic that someone needs to look into it. It's the conversation that leads to news.

Mark Glaser, MediaShift: The stuff that goes on in my local community isn't covered by big media. They've failed in their job, because they don't cover local issues any more. That's why hyperlocal sites can come out of nowhere and have an impact. So how can mainstream media sources remain relevant to their communities? And how do they make a business out of it?

Ian Rowe: We help curate the stories of our audience and help others get exposed to it. We create a 360 view of journalism that honors real stories from young people who previously lacked a large platform.

Shel Israel: Decisionmaking and power is moving from organizations to communities. It's leaving the board rooms to neighborhoods. The most influential people no longer have long titles; they're influential because of what they give back to the community.

Farai: We at News&Notes are trying to organize a way so we get input from the public at the beginning of the editorial process. You have to have a system that rewards good behavior. Rather than focusing on clamping down on disruptors, you reward those who help build the community. You give them status in the community, like Slashdot does.

Audience member; Muhammad Yunus one the Nobel Prize because of the Grameen bank and GrameenPhone, helping connect people in Bangladesh and Brazil with mobile phones. There's a subtle revolution of thousands of NGOs working with technology to revolutionize the world - and no one is talking about that here.

Rich Skrenta: The elephant in the room is economics. This is a room full of successful influencers. We want the new-found power of the Net to invite people into this process, but without it becoming an anarchic free-for-all. So how we organize it so people can become the best they can be?

Georgia Popplewell of Global Voices: GV aggregates bloggers from around the world. We're about to hire an advocacy director and an outreach director. We're in a situation where anyone here risks being endangered physically from what we blog. GV members around the world face that threat.

John Bracken, MacArthur Foundation: I wonder whether media is right word. If we're talking about community conversations, it's very different than traditional media. Do we need a new language for all of this stuff?

Lisa Stone: I think we should ask. Ask, don't tell. We need to go out and have a dialogue about this.

Jan Schaffer: The term citizen journalism is falling out of vogue, and now it's citizen's media. And that will probably change as well.

Shel Israel: We don't organize the media anymore. The community self-organizes it. So we need to join the conversation. There's an enormous human social revolution that's begun, but hasn't culminated. We need to look forward to 20 years when today's young power users are running things.

Ian Rowe: By 2012, we'll have a very different relationship with the audience. Who will be programming our timeslots? Will that even be the process anymore? Will we have long-form programs anymore? We're gonna have a lot more input from young people in the creative process. But it'll have obstacles: we don't want to reward people who become famous on youtube because they uploaded videos of them beating up homeless people.

Rick Skrenta: The only way we see being able to get into your community is by opening the doors to the individual. Most zip codes don't get news coverage on a daily basis, and we know that's just not true. It's just not being covered. There needs to be a means for this stuff to be seen online, and shared in a safe space, where people can bond with their neighbors and create positive social change.

Jan Schaffer: What's rising to the top now are new missed opportunities that people are turning into something and creating added value. It pains me to see an enterprising citizen media entity get superceded by the local media outlet. It'd be better to support the citizen journalist.

Lisa Stone: If you economically empower women, you improve the lives of their families and communities. We should be able to support their blogging habits and raise the profile of the news they want to create in their communities.

Posted by acarvin at 10:58 AM

Media Literacy as a Family Value

Last night I attended a blogger dinner at the We Media conference and sat at a table featuring Tish Grier, Jay Rosen and Robin Miller, among others. Tish and I talked about our childhoods and what we remembered about learning how to read, recounting our earliest experiences with newspapers. Both of us were taught to read news with a critical eye, something that has impacted us for the rest of our lives. This got us wondering about other bloggers, and whether media literacy was a "family value" during their formative years.


Tish blogged about our chat and offered some thoughts on the matter:


Andy and I thought that perhaps the best media literacy education actually begins in the home. Media habits, like many other habits, might come from our parents. It's the way both Andy and I were taught as children to consume media with the intention to understand, not re-enforce a preconceived notion-that has made us savvy media participants, not passive media consumers. Inquisitive minds, a passion for perspective and and a desire to participate in what we had been engaged with since childhood is what motivated us to become a part of media culture-writing and communicating with others through our blogs-not stand apart from it.


What about you? What are your earliest memories of becoming media literate? Is it something that was encouraged by your family? Was it a "family value" for you as it was for us? -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:43 AM

We Media conference Opens

The We Media conference in Miami is getting underway. Just as the hosts were about to open the event, a fire alarm went off, causing hundreds of people to debate whether they should flee for their lives or wait for their blogs to finish rebuilding. Personally, I hesitated. Turns out it was a false alarm, so we all sat down again, commenting on its auspiciousness.

The first panel should be starting in a few minutes. They're playing a video montage of photographs taken by citizen journalists. The panelists are doing their best to look over their heads to see what's on the screen behind them, but without much luck.

Posted by acarvin at 9:37 AM

Roblimo's Words of Wisdom


Click To Play
A brief discussion on humanity's two oldest forms of recreation, as told by Robin Miller, aka Roblimo. Robin is a former Vietnam vet and NYC taxi driver; he's also the editor of Slashdot. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 9:19 AM

February 7, 2007

Blogging the We Media Conference

Right now I'm en route to Miami for the 2007 We Media conference. It's an annual gathering of news outlets and leaders from the worlds of social media and citizen journalism. I'm hoping to liveblog some of the sessions and perhaps shoot some video as well, so stay tuned.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 1:10 PM

February 5, 2007

Bush 2008 Budget Would Cut NTIA Funds in Half?

President Bush has just released his proposed fiscal 2008 budget, and I can just tell all of you are just drooling to get your hands on it. It's not exactly great bedtime reading - okay, maybe it is depending on your bedtime goals - but if you want to get a sense of the president's spending priorities, there's nothing like going straight to the horse's balance sheet.

From what's been published on the Whitehouse website so far, one thing stands out from my perspective as an observer of things technology-related. If you take a look at the section regarding the Department of Commerce, it's hard to find a mention of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). They're the folks that advise the president on telecom policy issues, from spectrum management to US competitiveness in the technology sector. The NTIA was also home to the Technology Opportunity Program (TOP), which awarded grants on digital divide initiatives, and they still manage the Public Telecommunications Facility Program (PTFP), which helps public broadcasting cover the cost of its infrastructure.

If you look at the budget text related to the Department of Commerce, the NTIA is only mentioned once, and it's in the section that lists the line items for each division of the department. In this document, NTIA would get only $19 million, down from the $40 million appropriated to it in FY 2006.

Since the year 2000, there's been a back-and-forth fight with Congress over NTIA's budget, as has been charted by the Federation of American Scientists:

Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2000: $ 72.3 million
Appropriated by Congress: $ 52.9 million

Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2001: $ 423.0 million
Appropriated by Congress: $100.4 million

Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2002:$ 73.0 million
Appropriated by Congress: $ 73.0 million

Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2003: $ 44.0 million
Appropriated by Congress: $ 73.6 million

Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2004: $ 25.4 million
Appropriated by Congress: $ 51.1 million

Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2005: $ 27.6 million
Appropriated by Congress: $ 38.7 million

Proposed by the Whitehouse in FY2006: $ 23.5 million
Appropriated by Congress: $40 million

Given all the flak the White House has gotten from critics about US telecom infrastructure and competitiveness slipping further and further behind much of the rest of the developed world, I was surprised by the line item drop for NTIA. In contrast, just two weeks ago, Sens. Daniel Inouye (D-HI) and Ted Stevens (R-AK) introduced a bill that would give the NTIA some direction on how to spend more than one billion dollars appropriated to them for emergency communications measures around the US. (Yes, the NTIA does that too.) Meanwhile, the White House offers the same agency $19 million.

Is there more money out there somewhere in another budget document that I'm missing? No doubt the new Congress will have some interesting opinions on the matter. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 3:26 PM