Social Media

Some takeaways from the Future of Civic Media conference, showcasing Knight News Challenge winners, that ended yesterday at the MIT Media Lab in Boston: • All in all, it was a fascinating gathering of some of the real thought leaders who will be driving new media forward in the coming years. The program grew stronger as it went along. • The Media Lab setting was inspirational. This was my first visit here, and the mix of astonishingly bright students and faculty meshed well with us ruffians from the outside world. One suggestion for future gatherings: Invite student and members of the university community to take part in the underattended breakout sessions. Certainly a wide range of students would have found our session on citizen media thought-provoking. • I was blown away by some of the student demos I saw, including Say What? (which uses interactive storyteling as a path to youth civic engagement) and Buy It Like You Mean It, and some of the more mature projects, like Speakeasy, Selectricity, iCue and IBM's ManyEyes. • The project Cameras of the Future made me want to fast-forward five years, when this technology will be incorporated into many commercial cameras. The subject you shot is slightly out of focus? No worries! If it was shot with one of these gizmos, you can reorient the focal point — weeks after you took the shot. (It doesn't work with the fuzzy shots from the current generation of cameras, and no algorithm will likely ever be able to change that.) • About 16 of us had the best time tooling around Central Square while part of a Street Media posse guided by Rekha Murthy. Excellent tour. I'll never look at signage and graffiti quite the same way again. • One of the secrets I'll be taking back to Silicon Valley is Backchan.nl, a clever Web-based program that enables conference-goers to participate in a backchannel conversation with the most timely and relevant questions voted up to the top. Citizen media on international stage • Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices described the progress of the Knight-funded Rising Voices project, run by David Sasaki and Georgia Popplewell. I've been impressed with the citizen media project from the start but hadn't known about its scope and depth. Ethan briefly outlined these 10 Rising Voices projects: Nari Jibon, a new media skills training center in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A Calcutta group called Neighborhood Diaries that provides creative writing and citizen media tools for marginalized children. Iran Inside Out, a group in Teheran that uses videoblogging to open doors to Iranian perspectives. FOKO Club, which pursues, environmental issues and poverty in Madagascar through citizen journalism. A street theater group called Repacted in Nakuru, Kenya, that documents post-election violence and refugee issues. A journalism project in Freetown, Sierra Leone, called Think Build Change Salone. Young people exploring the prison system in Kingston Jamaica in Students Expressing Truth/Prison Diaries. A project in Uruguay called Blogging Desde Infancia. An effort to bridge cultural differences in La Paz, Bolivia, called Voces Bolivianas. And, perhaps most remarkably, HiperBarrio, where teenagers in the public libraries in the poorest neighborhoods of Medellin, Colombia, practice video journalism chronicling the lives of local townspeople. In all, the project has created 300 new bloggers in 21 communities in 10 countries. If you think this stuff can't be done, you're wrong, Zuckerman said. Anyone can author media. • Brian Sholin's ReportingOn helps journalists collaborate with each other by exchanging information about stories they're working on. • I did a number of video interviews, so look for them here in the coming days and weeks. • During our session on citizen media, Amy Gahran had some good advice for journalists (amateur and pro) trying to pry public information out of government agencies like the EPA and Department of Energy: don't identify yourself as a journalist (at least unless you have to). You're a citizen, too, and citizens who ask for government reports aren't usually shuffled off to a press office whose chief goal is to stiff-arm the media. • Two fun quotes during our session: You don't want to crowdsource your brain surgery. So crowdsourcing has its limits. And: I play guitar. You don't call me a citizen guitarist. • From George Patton, publisher of Paulding.com: Now — what people are talking about right now — trumps the me on discussion forums. • Cool educational site designed to engage and empower youths: Scratch News Network, where 145,000 projects have been uploaded and a new one comes in every two minutes. • I knew that SixApart's blogging service LiveJournal skewed young, but didn't know it skewed that young. The most predominant age group among LiveJournal bloggers: 18, followed by 19 and 17, with a heavy dropoff after age 24. • Factoid shared by Knight Foundation's Gary Kebbel: 1.5 billion internet connections worldwide and 2.5 billion cell phones. • More Kebbel: During its first two years of the Knight News Challenge, Knight received few applications from newspapers because they were not comfortable with developing open source tools that would help them but also made available to their competitors. One more reason newspapers are on the way to irrelevance, in my view. • Students at the UCLA Daily Bruin are creating a digital newsroom to allow staffers to report on the fly without having to be in the office.

Social marketing expert Ayelet Noff talks about the social media and Web 2.0 scene in Israel during this 9-minute video interview I conducted with her during our blogger posse road trip to Israel. A former New Yorker, Ayelet is a rising star in Web 2.0 circles in Tel Aviv and helped us with all phases of our trip. (Apologies for the lighting — this was the first interview I did on my Samsung hi-def camcorder.) Watch video in H.264 MPEG-4 on Ourmedia Watch in Flash on Ourmedia Watch video in Flash on Veoh (with ads)

I had been hoping to spend more time with NPR's new site, GetMyVote, before I left, but can't. In any case, it's certainly worth showcasing here. Says NPR's Andy Carvin: The purpose of the project is to ask people to upload audio, video or text commentaries in which they explain what it'll take for candidates to get their vote. We've designed the site around a collection of widgets, so local NPR and PBS stations can create their own local Get My Vote projects for state and municipal elections, as well as participate in the national version of the project. As users post their commentaries, NPR staff curate some of the more interesting ones on the homepage, though all of them can still be accessed via the tag cloud, search and various sorting mechanisms. Our shows plan to feature commentaries on air throughout the election cycle. They're now in public beta and have begun discussing the effort on air. If you have any feedback, leave it here or email Tom at NPR. It's now in public beta, and we've just begun talking about it on air. Most of the bugs have been fixed, though there's still a lot of fine-tuning going on

At the Tech Policy Summit in Hollywood the other week I had a chance to sit down for a few minutes with Ellen Miller, co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, which fights the good fight in Washington, DC, trying to bring transparency to the nation's legislative hallways and public policies. They launched the Congresspedia and PublicMarkUp.com efforts. Sorry for the bad lighting, this was pulled together very quickly. Watch MPEG-4 video | Ourmedia page Watch Flash version on Internet Archive

I've been astonished, though probably shouldn't be surprised, at the prominence that news organizations — chiefly the cable networks — have given during the past 10 days to the flap over remarks by Barack Obama's former minister, to the exclusion of all the pressing issues facing this country. The video above provides some context to explain how the Fox News virus has infiltrated other news outlets. MoveOn is offering people a chance to sign a petition urging news outlets to stop this nonsense:This week, Barack Obama gave one of the most honest and inspiring speeches on race in American history after weathering days of the media's relentless, divisive, and racially charged attacks. But have you wondered where these attacks came from and why they dominated the news? Reporters like NBC's Tim Russert focused on the Reverend Wright controversy only after FOX and other right-wing media did. It happens over and over: FOX airs a right-wing smear and the mass media repeat it. Film director Robert Greenwald just released a short video called FOX Attacks Obama: Part 2 which shows how it happens. We are launching a petition demanding the big networks stop parroting FOX and distracting Americans from real issues. We'll hand-deliver your signatures to major media outlets next week. Watch the video, and sign the petition, here: http://www.moveon.org/r?r=3495 FOX is a Republican mouthpiece, not a legitimate news organization. Real news organizations must reject FOX's smears of Barack Obama, not parrot them and distract Americans from the pressing issues of the day. The more signatures we deliver, the bigger the impact—so please tell your friends. Media watchdog group Media Matters has chronicled how FOX spent months trying to smear Obama by associating him with Reverend Wright's words. Greenwald's new video shows how the attacks successfully migrated to the mass media—Tim Russert repeated Sean Hannity's smears virtually word-for-word! Meanwhile, the big networks all but ignored Pastor John Hagee, whose endorsement John McCain was honored and proud to receive. Hagee says Katrina was God's punishment for homosexuality, Jews are to blame for anti-Semitism, and Catholicism is the Whore of Babylon and a cult. It gets worse. At the same time they relentlessly reported on Obama's pastor, most network journalists also ignored Rick Parsley, a televangelist who McCain called his spiritual guide when accepting his endorsement last month. Parsley has said: I do not believe our country can truly fulfill its divine purpose until we understand our historical conflict with Islam. I know that this statement sounds extreme, but I do not shrink from its implications. The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion destroyed... Ignoring McCain's spiritual advisers while going after Obama's is what we expect from FOX, which is more a Republican mouthpiece than a real news organization. But when real news outlets follow FOX's lead, we have to hold them accountable. Otherwise, FOX will continue to elevate smear after smear against Democrats into the mass media in 2008.

I've been doing an informal series of video interviews with people about the issues on their minds during this pivotal election year. Recently I caught up with Kate Aishton, a resident of Washington, DC, who's a staffer at the Aspen Institute's Communications & Society Program. Kate talked about the lack of representation in Congress for residents of DC. Here's our 2-minute video interview: Watch video in MPEG-4 | Ourmedia page Flash version on Internet Archive

Here's a 5-minute video interview I did recently with Mircalla Wozniak and Katie Muehlenkamp. co-founders of Good O' Girls, a poliitcal, professional and social network for women in the San Francisco Bay Area. Watch MPEG-4 video | Ourmedia page Flash version on Internet Archive

Think Progress: The Iraq/Recession Campaign kicked off today. It's a $15 million nationwide effort to end the war and refocus our priorities here at home. The campaign will raise awareness of the domestic costs that have been neglected due to Bush and John McCain’s singular focus on Iraq. The coalition of progressive groups supporting the effort includes MoveOn, the Center for American Progress Action Fund, US Action, SEIU, VoteVets and Americans United for Change and former Sen. John Edwards.

Here's a 3-minute video interview I conducted with Joaquin Alvarado, director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University, on mobile technology and education, following a conference organized by the Aspen Institute on mobile technology and civic engagement. Watch MPEG-4 video | Ourmedia page Flash version on Internet Archive Flash version on Blip.tv

A 2-minute video interview with Michelle Mills of DataPilot, which makes products that sync your cell phone to your computer. Conducted on the exhibition floor of Macworld Expo 2008 in San Francisco. Watch QuickTime video Flash version on Internet Archive

The grassroots politics site MoveOn.org today endorsed Barack Obama for president, after inviting its 3.3 million members to vote on their preference. Final tally: Obama: 197,444 70.4% Clinton: 83,084 29.6%

At the Good Ol' Girls gathering in San Francisco last Thursday night, Jeff Soukup, California co-chair of the John Edwards campaign, gave a 6-minute talk about why John Edwards is the most progressive and most electable candidate running for president. Watch MPEG-4 video Watch Flash version on Internet Archive Cross-posted to Real People Network.

On Thursday night I attended a political gathering, sponsored by the group Good Ole Girls, at the Blue Space art gallery in San Francisco. Speakers from three of the candidates for president — Phil Ting, co-chair, California Asian Pacific Islanders for Hillary Clinton; Jeff Soukup, California co-chair of the John Edwards campaign, and a spokesperson for Barack Obama — gave short presentations to a crowd of about 30 women, and then answered questions. Here's a 6-minute video of the talk given by Margaret Richardson, director of California Women for Obama Watch video on Ourmedia (MPEG-4) Watch video on Blip.tv Watch Flash version on Internet Archive Cross-posted to Real People Network.

PBS's NewsHour tonight featured Larry Brilliant, the head of Google.org and, long ago, co-founder of the WELL (and someone I'd like to meet one day). Google unveiled plans Thursday to expand the company's philanthropic work. Here's an mp3 of the interview with Brilliant.

Last month the Aspen Institute brought 29 thought leaders in the mobile space together during a three-day event, Mobile Media and Civic Engagement. On the final day I interviewed Charlie Firestone, executive director of the Aspen Institute's Communications and Society program about the conference and the broader program. Here's the 4-minute interview, captured with my new Canon HV-20 high-def camcorder. I apologize for the less than optimal lighting and sound.