Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

Tags: BPP | community | conversation | journalism | liveblogging | London | news | NPR | The Guardian | Twitter

Posted by acarvin at 2:14 PM

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May 1, 2008

Public Broadcasting and Twitter? Engagement and Authenticity!

Yesterday, I saw a note from the WBUR Twitter account pointing to a blog post about their recent experiments with Twitter. For those of you who don't know WBUR, it's an NPR member station in Boston that's been doing a lot of tinkering in the social media space as of late, so I follow their work pretty closely.

In his blog post, WBUR's Ken George talks about some of their social media projects, and how they're now heading into unknown waters with Twitter:

Now our media giant lumbers head first into the world of Twitter.

After dusting off the mostly dormant WBUR Twitter account, and fortified with copious amounts of coffee, I managed to accrue a modest following (hey its quality, not quantity right?). But in all honesty, I remain uncertain - to the point of apprehension - about what I should "Tweet" about. Do you want WBUR news updates? Irreverent musings? Programming information? Personal trivia? Shout-outs to my peeps? A running chronology of my day?

An excellent example of Twitter's utility is public radio station KPBS using it to receive updates on wildfires then consuming swaths of southern California, information they then could relay over the airwaves. My own personal "ah-ha!" moment came yesterday afternoon when someone Tweeted me about a misspelling on the site. It just then dawned on me that WBUR too now has a potential army of researchers and fact-checkers at its disposal. The cranial cavity expanded six inches yesterday... cue "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

So maybe the right question is: In what ways can we help each other?

Lemme spin that question another way, if I may: What would I expect of WBUR - and any other public broadcaster, for that matter - as far as Twitter is concerned?

Above all else, I would expect two things: engagement and authenticity.

Since I first started encouraging NPR folks and shows to use Twitter last year, I've seen us try a lot of things: Twitter accounts like nprnews, which is just a rehash of our primary headlines RSS feed; bpp, the Bryant Park Project account used to chat with their community of users on a wide range of topics; and accounts like nprnewsblog, which blends automated blog updates with occasional comments from Tom Regan or me, particularly on primary nights.

Which of these work best? Well, it depends on your perspective of course, but for my money, BPP is the best thing we've got going on Twitter right now. It took a while for it to reach critical mass - it averaged less than two tweets per day in October - but as Bryant Park staffers saw the number of folks replying to their tweets, a rolling conversation erupted. They began incorporating it into their work routine, and kept the tweets going after work as well. Now, they're averaging upwards of 20 tweets a day. And looking at their tweet stream, you'll see that just over a quarter of their posts are actually public replies to others, either answering questions or participating in multiple conversations simultaneously. The team has gotten very good about signing off each tweet so you know if it's Laura, Allison, Matt or someone else writing the message. And it doesn't take long to recognize who's who - they each have their own style, even though they're compressing their thoughts into 140 characters or less.

Meanwhile, they're using these conversations as sources for on air dialogue as well. BPP staff regularly ask users questions via Twitter for topics they're trying to cover on air. Sometimes Twitter users will suggest stories or guests - and in some cases, they become guests themselves. One of my favorite examples of this happened when BPP began chatting it up with redsoxcast, a twitter account that offers play-by-play coverage of Red Sox games. It didn't take long before the conversation blossomed into a radio story as well as an online slideshow. Conversations generate coverage, which generate more conversation - a virtuous cycle that's a win-win for show producers and their community of fans.

The BPP Twitter strategy is beginning to rub off on nprnewsblog as well. When we first set up that account in the fall of last year, it was just an automated rehash of blog posts, with a headline and link for each new post. That in itself was perfectly okay for a while, but it didn't exactly generate much interest. By the time we got to Super Tuesday in this past February, it had only attracted a few hundred followers. But that night, we shifted gears in a big way. While Tom concentrated on posting new blog entries, I manned the Twitter account, writing summaries of precinct results as they came in from the AP, asking Twitterers about what was going on in their precincts, and passing along the calls when NPR's election unit called a race for a particular candidate (sometimes beating our on-air coverage, much to the amusement of our Twitter fans).

Since then, the nprnewsblog account has grown to nearly 4,000 subscribers, making it one of the largest news services on Twitter. While most days the bulk of messages are still automated summaries of blog posts (63% of them, for those of you keeping score), Tom's gotten comfortable in chatting and answering questions much more often than he used to do it. "It's a great tool," Tom told me earlier today. "I often get story ideas from the folks on Twitter. It's like having a whole lot of people looking for stories or passing along interesting ideas."

Meanwhile, I still chime in as well from time to time, along with Michael Olson of our election unit, particularly during major political events. Even if we're not physically present at an event like a caucus or campaign rally - and personally, I'm never present at these things - there's a good chance that other Twitter users are there, so we're able to use Twitter to track these folks down, find out from them what's happening on the ground and join them in a conversation as the story unfolds.

In each of these cases, I've pushed really hard for our Twitter experiments to embrace authenticity and engagement. Tweets from NPR folks need to be written in their own voice. Public relations-speak on Twitter is the kiss of death; you just don't get the medium if you're using it to spew talking points. If other Twitter users don't have a sense of the human being behind the Twitter account, they're gonna lose interest in you real fast.

Even if you're being true to yourself when you're posting your tweets, you can't ignore the fact that there are all sorts of people who want to interact with you. That's why I'm trying to get us away from feeds like the nprnews Twitter account where we just publish, and embrace feeds where we converse. Even though the Twitter tag line is "What are you doing?" the heart of twitter is really "What do you want to talk about?" And it doesn't take long to notice that Twitter users are serious news junkies; they want to talk about what's going on in the world and in their lives. Twitter is helping my NPR colleagues tap into these conversations for ideas and inspiration, while providing users with even more things to talk about. Creating a more informed public is at the heart of NPR's mission, and Twitter is an emerging tool for us to accomplish that mission.

So as far as WBUR is concerned, here's my advice. Don't publish - converse. Use your Twitter account to start new conversations in your community and learn about what people are saying. Get some of your colleagues using it, though if you do it all on one Twitter account, be sure to sign your tweets individually so users know who they're talking to. Follow as many people as you can manage, even if they're not all following you back. Whenever possible, answer user questions publicly. Organize local tweetups, or attend ones that others have organized. Become a part of the local Twitter community. And above all, explore ways of using these conversations to improve the quality and diversity of your journalism, whether it's on air or online. There's a huge community of people out there rooting for you and eager to help. Open the doors and invite them in. -andy

Tags: community | conversation | journalism | news | public broadcasting | public radio | Twitter | WBUR

Posted by acarvin at 2:40 PM

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April 19, 2008

Utterz Demo at PodcampDC

Tags: mobcasting | mobile phones | PodcampDC | Utterz

Posted by acarvin at 2:40 PM

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April 12, 2008

Social Networking and Education: My Keynote at the UMB School of Nursing

This week I gave a talk at the University of Maryland/Baltimore's School of Networking Nursing on the role of social networking in education. I took a look at the history of online communities and the role educators have played in their development, as well as what tools are being used by teachers today - in particular, do-it-yourself social networking tools like Ning. I also talked a bit about new tools like Twitter, Qik and Utterz. Here's the Powerpoint:

You can also download an MP3 of the audio.

Tags: Cleveland Freenet | community networks | education | Ning | Qik | social media | social networking | Utterz

Posted by acarvin at 8:29 AM

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April 4, 2008

Mobile Phones, Human Rights and Anonymity

I've been playing around with my new Nokia N95 for the last couple of weeks and quite amazed with its ability to stream live video from the phone to the Internet. Like last weekend when I streamed from the Smithsonian Kite Festival; for around 30 minutes I gave a tour of the festivities and took questions from users as they watched the stream over the Internet.

I've also spent some time talking it up with colleagues at NPR, brainstorming the possibilities of what would happen if reporters used these phones - or if their sources did. The example that keeps coming to mind regarding the latter scenario is the rioting in Tibet. While some video has leaked out, it's been limited and often delayed. Imagine if the protestors were able to webcast their protests - and the ensuing crackdowns - live over their phones using China's GSM network? The video would stream live and get crossposted via tools like YouTube, Seesmic and Twitter, spreading the content around so it can't be snuffed.

But that raises an obvious question - how long could protestors or dissidents get away with such activities before getting caught? If you were running software on your phone to send live video over a 3G network, like I've been doing on my N95, you'd think it wouldn't take too much effort on the part of the mobile provider and/or government to figure out which phone was sending the signal and its precise location.

So that got me wondering: is there a mobile equivalent of Tor?

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, TOR is a software project that helps Internet users remain anonymous. Running the TOR software on your computer causes your online communications to bounce through a random series of relay servers around the world. That way, there's no easy way for authorities to track you or observe who's visiting banned websites. For example, let's say you're in Beijing and you publish a blog the authorities don't like. If you just used your PC as usual and logged into your publishing platform directly, they could follow your activities and track you down. With Tor, you hop-scotch around: your PC might connect to a server in Oslo, then Buenos Aires, then Miami, then Tokyo, then Greece before it finally connects to your blogging platform. Each time you did this, it would be a different series of servers. That way, it's really difficult for authorities to trace your steps.

As dissidents and protestors embrace mobile devices for conducting civil disobedience or recording human rights violations, it would make sense for Tor and projects like it to adapt to their needs. That way, if that hypothetical protestor in Lhasa tried to stream live video over Qik, post a photo to Flickr or record a mobcast via over Utterz, they'd lessen the chance of getting caught so easily.

Does anyone know if there's a mobile equivalent of Tor, relaying voice connections or data from one network to another, anonymizing the user of the phone? If not, is it technically feasible? How might one go about creating one?

Tags: anonymity | human rights | mobcasting | mobile activism | mobile phones | Nokia N95 | protests | Tor

Posted by acarvin at 3:37 PM

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January 28, 2008

Twitter: Nighthawks at the BPP Diner

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Rob Paterson wrote a blog post about the new NPR show, The Bryant Park Project, and its use of the community messaging system Twitter. With the subtitle "My Diner in the Morning," Rob's post talked about how he's experienced the show via Twitter - in particular, the slow progression of observing, and then interacting with BPP staff. And it really got me thinking about the role of Twitter in developing community around radio programs.

BPP has had a Twitter presence since just before the show launched on October 1 of last year - a feed of all of their blog posts and radio stories, for Twitter users who wish to be notified each time something new is posted, and a BPP staff account. My thinking behind the staff account would be that the show's producers, editors and hosts would use it to post quick updates about what was going on behind the scenes, as well as to develop a more personal rapport with the audience. They were already doing a great job interacting with the public over their blog, but those interactions always had to be on topic for each particular post. A Twitter-based conversation could be more free-form, spontaneous and immediate.

At first, not much happened. BPP online producer Laura Conaway jumped into the fray, posting notes via Twitter from the beginning. Over time, other BPP staff began posting over the Twitter account, too. But not many people were paying attention; it was tough getting other Twitter users aware of BPP. So I convinced Laura to add a Twitter feed directly to their blog, so users could see their notes right there, and hopefully be enticed to follow them.

Meanwhile, as Rob notes in his post, Laura began to find her voice. For a while, her posts were more like notifications - what was going on at the show and so on. But Rob and others began to reply to Laura's posts - and Laura started replying back. Rob likened it to visiting a diner. The first time you go, you may not interact much with the waitress behind the counter. But after a few visits, you develop a rapport, develop a routine. Next thing you know, it's an essential part of your community life.

I've struggled for a while trying to come up with the right metaphor for Twitter, but Rob's diner metaphor pretty much nails it. As people begin using Twitter, there's often hesitancy, a sense that it's just an absurd broadcasting of the banal. That's not surprising, for when you first join Twitter, you need to build up a list of friends and acquaintances, then begin to read their tweets to get to know them. Otherwise you're just talking to yourself. And it's only when you start opening up - soliciting their ideas and replying to their comments, that Twitter transforms itself from a simple microblogging medium to an ongoing conversation. For users of IRC and other chat media, this may seem obvious, but if you're new to these types of conversations, it takes a while to get a hang of it.

And that's what's happened with BPP. From October through December, Twitter was mostly a notification tool. Since the beginning of this year, you can really feel how it's evolved into an ongoing conversation between BPP staffers and its community of participants. (I'm trying hard to avoid using the cliché of "listeners" and "audience" since they really don't apply to BPP in the same way they do to traditional radio shows.) Now, the tweets fly back and forth between Laura and other Twitter users - and it's a marvel to watch.

Laura recently invited Rob on air to discuss the phenomenon, and in their conversation he suggested we find a way to make it easier for followers of the BPP Twitter account to communicate with each other as well, and not just with BPP staff. They spontaneously started collecting the account names of other Twitter users and encouraged each other to follow each other. Meanwhile, I decided to create yet another Twitter account - named BPPdiner, in honor of Rob's analogy - that would automatically aggregate every post within Twitter that mentioned the word BPP. That way, users could simply follow the BPPdiner account and include BPP in any tweet. This would allow them to keep up with each other's BPP-related tweets. Think of it as an email list, but over Twitter.

It's not a perfect system - I'm using the Twitter search tool Terraminds and the rss-to-Twitter tool TwitterFeed, which can only process a maximum of five posts per 30 minutes - but it's a start. Every time a new person joins the group, it's like another person climbing onto the stool at the diner. You may not know if and when they'll open up and have a conversation. Maybe they'll just sit their and talk to themselves while reading the paper. But you can be sure that the waitress, short-order cook and their fellow customers are ready to chat. -andy

Tags: BPP | Bryant Park Project | community | conversation | diners | NPR | Rob Paterson | Twitter

Posted by acarvin at 10:06 AM

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January 15, 2008

Widget Fest: CPB Grant to Foster Public Broadcasting Collaboration & User Engagement for Election 2008

Earlier today, NPR and its partners announced that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is awarding more than $1.3 million dollars to a consortium of public media organizations to expand our coverage of election 2008 across multiple platforms. The consortium, led by NPR and including American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Capitol News Connection, KQED, PBS, PRX, PRI/Public Interactive and The NewsHour, will work together to produce election-related content and interactive tools available to the entire public broadcasting system.

"By pooling content produced locally and nationally -- for radio, television, and online -- we will discover new ways of doing business to better serve the public," said NPR CEO Ken Stern in a note that went out today to the public radio system. "We are pleased to have succeeded in coming together to deliver on the commitments made at the 2007 Annual Meeting."

"This grant underscores CPB's support of innovative projects that move public radio and television into the digital future so they can help individuals better connect with their communities wherever they are," added Pat Harrison, CPB President and CEO. "This ambitious project will provide us with new ways of looking at how we serve the public on existing and emerging media platforms."

The basic premise of the project was built around a simple reality - many public broadcasters were planning to create on air content and interactive modules for their websites, but we didn't have a structure in place to work together during the election cycle. Around a year ago, NPR and PBS began conversations around editorial partnerships for the election, including the creation of an interactive map that would work on both of our websites, as well as on the TV show NewsHour. While that conversation was taking place, I co-organized a group discussion at the February 2007 Integrated Media Association conference for public broadcasters to talk about the Election 2008 social media plans and how those activities might be replicable across the system.

The conversation kicked into high gear at NPR's annual meeting last April, where you may recall I blogged about some of the ideas that were brewing among those of us present at the event. We organized breakout conversation in which we laid out what was at stake and how we might collaborate. It didn't take long to realize that we had an opportunity that might quickly slip through our fingers if we couldn't get our act together. We needed to pull together a SWAT team and get to work.

At the encouragement of CPB, we organized a May meeting at NPR laying out all the possible ways we might collaborate, and get that SWAT team going to pull together a plan. By the end of July, we submitted our plan to CPB, which today has been christened with this $1.36 million grant.

So what exactly are we doing? For one thing, we're going to take all of the cool online election activities we've got planned for 2008 and we're going to make them available as widgets, including:

• An interactive election map from NPR and The NewsHour;

• Localizable news modules from Public Radio International's Public Interactive;

• A curated collection of election audio and social media content from PRX;

• Election-related video from PBS;

• An archive of broadcast materials covering New York-based presidential candidates from WNYC;

• A collaborative content initiative entitled "Global Perspectives on Election 2008" from PRI;

• User-generated political commentaries curated by NPR;

• Capitol News Connection's interactive 'Ask Your Lawmaker' widget, enabling citizens to directly question their lawmakers and listen to answers obtained by CNC journalists;

• Election simulations and thought-provoking interactive activities from American Public Media and KQED.

Some of these tools, like the NPR/NewsHour map and CNC's Ask Your Lawmaker widget, are all ready up and running. Others, such as NPR's user-generated political commentaries project, will be launching in the coming months. (You have no idea how excited I'm am about this one. We're working like gangbusters to get this puppy launched - more soon.) In each case, the projects will exist wherever they originally resided, but they'll have widgets, too, so stations can take these tools and localize them for their own uses. Some of the projects, like our user-generated commentaries, will be embeddable on blogs or wherever else you'd want to place them.

Meanwhile, underlying all of these projects will be an experimental social network - a "knowledge network" for public media entities to share election resources and data, find tutorials and best practices for utilizing these tools and other social media activities, and coordinate their election coverage. It's basically an extranet for PBS and NPR stations, along with other public media partners. Last but not least, PBS will be creating curricular materials for some of these online modules so they can be used in classroom settings.

I am so glad to see this project announced publicly. I've been working on this for the better part of the last nine months, and it's so gratifying to see so many entities across the public media system coming together to improve our election coverage, while providing the public with interactive tools to help them make a more informed decision when going into the ballot box. This year is going to be a total blast. -andy

Tags: Capitol News Connection | collaboration | CPB | election 2008 | grants | journalism | KQED | Minnesota Public Radio | NPR | PBS | PRI | PRX | social media | widgets

Posted by acarvin at 6:19 PM

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November 17, 2007

Radio Open Source is Back!

They're back!

Yesterday, Radio Open Source host Chris Lydon and producer Mary McGrath circulated an email announcing the return of the cutting-edge radio show, one of the first to weave blogging and social media into the core mission of the program. After going on an indefinite hiatus this summer because of funding cuts, Radio Open Source has moved its operation to Brown University.

Here's the text of the email:

Dear Friend of Open Source:

The summer is over, and so is our hiatus.

The Open Source conversation is reborn at the Watson Institute at Brown University.

Please check in on what we've been up to at http://www.radioopensource.org .

Thomas Watson of IBM fame, who'd been Jimmy Carter's ambassador to Moscow, founded the Institute in 1981 to address the most urgent global risks of that day: nuclear hazards of the Cold War. Today the mission of the Watson Institute encompasses poverty, hunger, war and culture. My fellowship here commits me to keep exploring and innovating in the interactive new media - at the intersection of pod- and broad- casting where the new discourse of a global age is taking shape.

Brown and Watson overflow with blessings for Open Source, starting with the brilliant Rafael Vinoly building that both nestles and goads us to think anew. Nikita Khrushchev's son Sergei is upstairs writing, as is the exiled Zimbabwean novelist Chenjeria Hove, and former presidents Ricardo Lagos Escobar of Chile and Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil. Geoffrey Kirkman of the Watson Institute was right when he told me years ago: the same swath of visiting stars that pass through New York and Harvard come also to Brown, but here they stay longer and they talk more. Brown students keep knocking on my door - this new rainbow generation of "millennials," most of them with digital media skills and native confidence in the expanding universe of the Web.

Not least, my Watson fellowship and the combination of avid Brown students and first-class recording facilities have let us cut radically into the "nut" cost of producing Open Source. So, not for the first time in human history, adversity has forced us into a precious opportunity to get lean, cheap and experimental again.

"An American conversation with global attitude" could be the motto of the revived Open Source. As always, we need your partnership here to locate the topics, guests and angles that will keep it richly distinctive. All we want to be, as we keep growing up, is - as many of you suggested, and producer Mary McGrath distilled the message - "the best damn podcast" on your computer or your Nano. But how long should the conversation run? And how often? What new features do you want on the site? How do we keep it making it more interactive with "the people formerly known as the audience" and with the world beyond our shores?

What we learned in two years on the last round is that "open source" works as well for public conversation as well as it works for advancing software. We announced a "conspiracy of the curious," and people joined it - with an unending flow of show suggestions and witty, critical, often impassioned extensions of the on-air conversation.

We learned also that podcasting works. The proto-blogger Dave Winer and I claim together to have done the first podcast in human history just a little more than four years ago. Between us, at Harvard's Berkman Center, we were the Neil Armstrong of the podcast moon, and now everyone's going there. For good reason. Podcasting is the cheap, democratic, speedy, listener-friendly universal means of sharing and archiving original sound files of every kind. Can we keep it new, or newish?

To begin, we've fired up the podcast feed of our summer gab which went from the Oscar Wao novelist Junot Diaz to the late John Coltrane, from the cyber prophet William Gibson to the unheeded prophets of our quagmire in Iraq. And there is tasty talk ahead with another of the "global" novelists, Ha Jin, on his first fiction set in America - with "The War" documentarian Ken Burns, and with the canonical critic Harold Bloom at Yale, among many others.

Let us end by saying again: Thank you. We couldn't and wouldn't be embarking in these Open Source conversations without the community of you -- that is, without the yeasty, resilient, generous, hungry, faithful, world-wide community that built and sustained Open Source from the beginning.

As always, coming and going, Emerson speaks to a great deal of what we're feeling. This comes from the end of his marvelous essay "Circles."

"Nothing is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them."

Thank you for passionate, engaged, listenership and commentary these last two years. Now let us all together keep this "community of the curious" alive and growing.

So send us your news, your dreams and expectations, please, for the next ride on Open Source and reload your podcast here: http://www.radioopensource.org . Are you aware that you can subscribe (free) to the Open Source Podcast at the iTunes store? Go to iTunes, then the store, enter "open source podcast" in the search box, and then click on the Open Source icon and "subscribe" to get every episode.

In the spirit of Emerson: Onward, ever onward!

Christopher Lydon and Mary McGrath

Mazel tov, Chris and Mary! -andy

Tags: Brown University | Christopher Lydon | Mary McGrath | podcasting | public radio | Radio Open Source

Posted by acarvin at 2:02 PM

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June 8, 2007

Change.org: Using Social Networking to Raise Money For and Against Politicians

This week I had the chance to chat with Ben Rattray, co-founder and CEO of Change.org, one of the most interesting up-and-coming social networks on the Internet. They're using social media tools to bring together like-minded people to raise money on issues they care about. And thanks to a recent relaunch of the site, users can now work together like an informal political action committee (PAC), targeting their collective donations to support - or unseat - politicians.

Originally, change.org was set up to allow you to band together with like-minded people and raise money for causes, like pooling together money for a targeted donation to an organization specializing in malaria eradication or supporting public broadcasting. With the relaunch of the website, change.org lets you connect with people to give money to politicians to influence specific policymaking.

For example, let's say you want to work with other citizens to tell politicians you favor network neutrality on the Internet. (There's already a change.org group working on that goal.) Prior to the relaunch of the site, that group could raise money for nonprofits representing this particular interest, like Free Press. Now, though, users can actually target their giving to specific politicians, or against politicians that oppose their viewpoint. Supporting specific politicians is straightforward. First, you identify who the politician is and manage an online campaign to raise the money. Then change.org sends that politician a check with a letter saying that the money is on behalf of a group of citizens, showing who gave what and why.

More interesting, though, is that the site lets you give money against politicians. Continuing with the example of network neutrality, supporters of are often critical of Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska because of his stance on the issue. Change.org lets users target their money to Stevens' eventual Democratic opponent in the next election, even if that person hasn't been selected yet. Until his opponent is nominated, change.org will hold the money in escrow. At that point in time, a check gets cut for the candidate opposing him. And if your group identifies any politicians opposing your policy - in this particular example, Sen. Stevens - they too will receive a letter saying that X number of dollars have been raised for their opponent because of their position on that policy.

Ben explained that influencing politicians doesn't necessarily take hundreds of thousands of dollars. "Spend just 10 or 20 thousand - or just threatening to spend it - is usually sufficient to shut them up," he said. "It may seem counterintuitive, but it works as out countervailing force."

Because Change.org allows users to behave like a PAC, it raises questions as to whether they would be held to the same financing rules. Ben noted that his website is simply working as a vehicle for people to organize and transmit money that they would otherwise give as individuals, so users aren't forming actual PACs in the literal - and legal - sense of the term. This made me wonder whether he was concerned there would be a political backlash of some sort, with people arguing the website lets people get around current campaign financing rules. "I think that could be the most interesting outcome we could get," he said, laughing. Howeer, they've designed the features on the site with current campaign financing laws taken into account. "We're playing in the game that's available," he continued. "these are the rules."

When you look at the site, Change.org appears to be dominated by causes that one might describe as left-of-center. So I asked Ben if the site had any partisan aspirations. "We are agnostic and people could provide whatever content they please," he said. "Right now, the name [Change.org] may turn off some conservatives.... But lots of Republicans want change as well. But the left is often an early adopter of social media, if you look at MoveOn and that kind of stuff. Though conservatives are catching up."

"What we're trying to do," he said, "is doing [political giving] in transformative ways, changing the world of philanthropy and politics - literally. The system is very broken.... The experience of giving is not the rich experience it can be. It's not that it's hard to give - it's actually really damn easy. The problem is that it's not engaging. You want to get people more engaged in social issues, participating in the process."

Taking the conversation in a different direction, I asked how Change.org might interface with other social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace. "We're about to launch our facebook app soon," he said, without committing to a specific date. "It'll basically be a build of our entire app. Facebook apps have become truly transformational - forward-looking. If you take Facebook at their word, it's not a platform for little features, but full-fledged applications. We want to be the nonprofit, political social activism feature in Facebook. Not an add-on, but a seamless experience."

"Myspace has a limitation in that it has a more distinct culture," he continued, "while Facebook gets used more openly, for a broader variety of activities." Having said that, he wouldn't rule out integrating with them if the opportunity became available.

Ben also described a new widget-based tool they plan to launch in a few weeks. The widget could be embedded in any website, from a personal blog to a politically-focused online community. Users would type in their phone number into the widget. The widget would then activate a call to your phone, then connect you to your member of Congress. That way, the widget could be used to facilitate contacts with members on Capitol Hill in connection to whatever political cause you assign to the widget. Meanwhile, the widget tracks the number of calls generated to each member of Congress, so the people running the campaign can get a sense of how much the public is using it to make their voices heard.

Despite the fact that Change.org is designed as a social network, Ben doesn't see it replacing online political sites. "It's not about replicating the political communities on the Web. It's about translating the passion of the people on those sites into real political power."

"I don't want to diminish what [Daily] Kos has done," he continued, "but the translation [of online discussion into political influence] is clearly limited. If you get 500,000 uniques a day, and then raise around $1 million. That's not a lot of money, in terms of conversion of readers to donors. If I want to donate, I have to go there, then go to a third-party site.... And I don't have a profile of my political influence. So we're building a suite of widgets to empower bloggers and blogging communities to more efficiently translate their passion into real political power."

"We're not about fundraising," Ben reiterated. "Giving to politicians is not exciting. People want to change the world, stop global warming, undercut the influence of the NRA, whatever you issue might be."

"People want to be a part of a community who come together, engage, and have collective decision-making" to impact the political process through donations, he said. "It's really unexciting to give 25 bucks to your local politician. It's hard to give to a single politician. We've transformed that into, 'I'm giving to save network neutrality.' It's an important psychological shift - not about getting someone elected, but getting my personal issue taking seriously." -andy

Tags: Ben Rattray | Change.org | DailyKos | election 2008 | Facebook | fundraising | MySpace | PACs | political action committees | politics | social networking

Posted by acarvin at 1:58 PM

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June 1, 2007

Do You Lug Your Laptop on Vacation?

According to a new AP-Ipsos poll, one in five people bring their laptop with them on vacation:

Sun block. Beach umbrella. Laptop. One in five people toted laptop computers on their most recent vacations, an AP-Ipsos poll released Friday said. Along with the 80 percent who said they brought along their cell phones, the survey shows going on vacation no longer means being out of the electronic loop.

Sizable numbers are interrupting their unwinding time to check in at the office and, even more so, to keep up with the social buzz.

About one in five said they did some work while vacationing, and about the same number checked office messages or called in to see how things were going, the poll showed. Twice as many checked their e-mail, while 50 percent kept up with other personal messages like voice mail.

Color me guilty.

From the looks of this poll, they seemed to be fishing to see if people were bringing along laptops as a way of keeping tabs on business while they're on holiday. Some examples they cite:

"I'm the final guy, so I make sure my customers are happy," said Don Schneider, 43, a plumbing contractor from Buena Park, Calif., who also runs an online business that supplies video equipment for plumbers....

... "It's like a cloud hanging over my head until I get it done," Lee Ann Harrison, 37, a third-grade teacher from Halls, Tenn., said of the work she did on a family trip to Southaven, Miss., for her young son's baseball team. She said she found herself grading papers "between games, somewhere in the shade."

I'm sure that none of you is surprised I bring along a laptop when I'm on vacation. But it's not for why you'd think. If I merely wanted to keep up with email, I'd use my phone for that. I bring along my laptop so I can make media. I want to be able to post photos of Kayleigh playing with her cousins. I want to upload some audio I recorded of traffic in India. I want to blog about the amazing dinner we had last night. I want to create a video montage of all the cool places we visited that day. Forget work - I want my laptop with me so I can be creative. Because being creative is integral to how I relax - whether at home or on vacation. -andy

Tags: creativity | laptops | polls | relaxing | travel | vacation | work

Posted by acarvin at 1:30 PM

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The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Tomorrow is Kayleigh's first birthday, and what happy little one-year-old wouldn't be delighted with her very own 128-bit integer? I certainly can't think of any - except perhaps that suspicious-looking kid who hogs all the rubber balls at Gymboree. So I decided to take the plunge and get Kayleigh her very own integer:

39 83 49 F4 12 4E 36 B6 0A 49 A2 C7 08 A2 CB CA

Now please understand this number is hers and hers alone. None of you can have it. Yes, I'm talking about you. If you use it, share it, make t-shirts of it, make songs about it on YouTube, create a Flickr group about it, send it via Twitter or create a Facebook app about it, you will receive a take-down notice from my army of attorneys, not to mention a few sudden jabs from the voodoo doll of you I'll be giving to Kayleigh. She's currently going through a bit of a biting phase. That, and our cats might pounce on it.

Along with filling her with pride and joy over her father's good taste in birthday gifts, I'm hoping that her own integer will teach Kayleigh the importance of respect. Respecting rules, no matter how arbitrary. Respecting encryption keys, DRM and other tools that rightly prevent things from being free, even when such controls make no sense whatsoever. And respecting the simple truth that anything, including something as simple as a string of numbers, can be owned by someone and thus made inaccessible to everyone else.

Enjoy your integer, Kayleigh - you've earned it. And be sure none of your toddler friends ever get their grubby little hands on it - they can get their own integer - if their parents are as generous as I. Now blow out the candles and have some cake, sweetie. -daddy

Posted by acarvin at 12:56 PM

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YouTube to Re-Encode Videos to Support AppleTV and iPhone

I've had a love-hate relationship with Flash video for a long time. Yes, it's the dominant video format on the Net, largely thanks to YouTube, and it certainly downloads quickly. But the quality of Flash video often leaves something left to be desired, particularly compared with the crisp, clean resolution of MPEG-4 H.264, which I and many other video bloggers use for our own vlogs. Plus, H.264 is a cinch on Macs, which makes sense, because it's the preferred format of Apple's AppleTV technology.

So perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise that Apple's Steve Jobs has worked out a deal with YouTube to re-encode their entire catalogue of video into H.264 so it'll run on both AppleTV and the new iPhone.

First word of the news broke via iLounge:

... the YouTube update will take place in stages, beginning with the free software update for Apple TV owners in mid-June. At launch, "thousands of videos designed for Apple TV" will be available, with additional thousands added weekly until the entire YouTube library becomes accessible to Apple TV users this fall. When asked what "designed for Apple TV" meant, Moody said that YouTube will soon be encoding videos in the H.264 streaming-efficient compression format preferred by Apple TV, and that all new videos submitted to YouTube as of the mid-June launch of the AppleTV update will be playable by the device. From then until fall, YouTube will be encoding its entire back-catalog in H.264 format, adding videos in chunks until everything is accessible to Apple TV users. Direct links and the on-screen keyboard-based search engine mentioned in our previous update will bring you to current and old videos alike.

What I'm wondering, though, is if YouTube keeps an archive of all those videos that have been submitted to them in H.264 in the first place. If so, that'd be great, because those videos won't have to be re-encoded - and will thus look at lot better on the Apple devices. The other big question is whether AppleTV or the iPhone will bother to support Flash at all, now that they've bagged the biggest gorilla in the user-generated video market. Don't be surprised if lots of other video sites follow YouTube's lead and offer H.264. This doesn't mean Flash is in trouble by any means, of course, since almost every PC on the Internet can display Flash video, which can't be said by any other format at the moment.

But the big winner here is all of us who like to have a choice in video formats. Cross-compatability is always a good thing. Let's just hope it's DRM-free and we'll be good to go. -andy

Tags: Apple | AppleTV | formats | Google | H.264 | iPhone | MPEG-4 | transcoding | video | YouTube

Posted by acarvin at 11:12 AM

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May 30, 2007

Mash This, Lucas

In honor of the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, the good folks at StarWars.com launched Star Wars Mashups, a tool that lets you remix a select number of scenes from the six Star Wars films. So far, the featured mashups I've looked at have been rather underwhelming, perhaps due to a preponderance of young Anakin Skywalker footage. Frankly, I think the whole exercise would have been a lot more fun if Lucas had cut loose and release the source footage from the Star Wars Holiday Special and let us remix those amazing scenes with Bea Arthur, Art Carney and Jefferson Starship. Yes, I kid you not. Princess Leia even sings a song to the tune of the main Star Wars theme. Just thinking about it is giving me vertigo.

I've never seen all two hours of it, but this five-minute summary on YouTube will you give more than enough to get the gist of it - disturbing, embarrassing, yet deliciously hilarious. -andy

Tags: disasters | George Lucas | LucasFilm | mashups | mistakes | Star Wars | Star Wars Holiday Special

Posted by acarvin at 10:05 PM

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May 2, 2007

The Digg Revolt

The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

The runaway social news site Digg found itself under siege by its own members, as they rose up in revolt against the site owners. A couple of days ago, Kevin Rose and his team had decided to remove a digg story containing the encryption key required to crack HD-DVDs after receiving a take-down notice. The person who posted it originally posted it again, and got booted off of digg. His friends then re-posted the story, and they got booted. Digg's Jay Adelson tried to calm things down with a post on the Digg blog, but that only made things worse:

Whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the intellectual property holders and consortiums, in order for Digg to survive, it must abide by the law. Digg's Terms of Use, and the terms of use of most popular sites, are required by law to include policies against the infringement of intellectual property. This helps protect Digg from claims of infringement and being shut down due to the posting of infringing material by others.

Our goal is always to maintain a purely democratic system for the submission and sharing of information - and we want Digg to continue to be a great resource for finding the best content. However, in order for that to happen, we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down.

It was too late. Faster than you can stand and shout, "I'm Spartacus! I'm Spartacus!," countless digg members were posting stories with the HD-DVD encryption key. Digg simply couldn't keep up with the revolt as it spread like wildfire. Someone even started making the key available on a t-shirt. Eventually, Digg founder Kevin Rose decided to back down in a blog post that actually included the encryption key in its title, despite the potential legal backlash.

In building and shaping the site I've always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We've always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

The prisoners have stormed the keep. Here's hoping that Digg doesn't get sued into oblivion. Viva la revolucion. -andy

Tags: community | Digg | encryption key | HD-DVD | Kevin Rose | lawsuits | revolts | revolutions | social news | take-down notices

Posted by acarvin at 9:37 AM

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