informationcolony.blogspot.com

Take a step back

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:38:46 PDT

So many people are talking about real-time search and its integrity. Check out this chart from hthe AdMob Mobile Metrics Report (January 2009). AdMob serves ads for more than 6,000 mobile web sites and 400 applications around the world.

Suggest a look at the larger picture. While personal brands have their place, the above graph shows some interesting data. What's that dip in Chinese traffic?

Bailout Braggadocio

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Mon, 11 May 2009 10:33:33 PDT

Have you noticed that Bank of America has settled in, looking doe-eyed at us whilst spamming our home phones recently? And Chase brands itself "New to California but not new to banking."

What a relief, do you need a roadmap then? I moved my accounts to another large bank after having identity fraud wipe my accounts clean 3 times in 2008. Lew McCreary was up late pondering this post from the Harvard Business Blog, a post called Bailout Marketing -- the Wrong Way.

2:40 AM Friday May 8, 2009
by Lew McCreary

Tags:Branding, Financial crisis, Marketing

What sort of marketing message makes sense for the modern post-apocalyptic lending institution?

Probably not this: I received a slick, expensive, 20-page brochure in the mail the other day from Bank of America, promoting its home loans and other excellent attributes. It was thick, colorful, printed on heavy (unrecycled) paper, with only a single "impact" word on several of the pages; my favorite of these was "Confidence," a clear case of whistling past the graveyard. My wife (a marketer) grabbed the thing, sniffed at it, and said, "My tax dollars at work."

Per Neilsen Online last year, here represented the largest ad spend for financial services:

Businesses are blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 19:09:11 PDT

A report conducted by Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D., and Eric Mattson CEO, Financial Insite indicates a steady rise in Fortune 500 company's use of blogging.

"Each year Fortune Magazine compiles a list of America’s largest corporations. The list includes publicly and privately held companies for which revenues are publicly available. The Fortune 500 is a definitive list of the country's largest (by revenue) and most influential companies...

This study examined the 2008 Fortune 500 list in an attempt to quantify the adoption of social media by identifying those with public-facing blogs."

Social media = microblogging, multimedia blogging, podcasting and videoblogging, and participation in social networks like Facebook. Above image from the Neilsen Media blog.

"As social media becomes more integral to the business function, we should see evidence of it in the use of blogs, podcasts, Twitter or other tools. Given that the Fortune 500 stand as a model for business success, it is interesting to examine their involvement in the social media arena.

Eighty-one (16%) of the primary corporations listed on the 2008 Fortune 500 have a public-facing corporate blog with a post in the past 12 months. These early adopters include three of the top five corporations (Wal-Mart, Chevron and General Motors). The two remaining in the top 5, Exxon/Mobil and Conoco Philips do not have public-facing blogs at this time.

This study systematically examines the entire 2008 Fortune 500 list. Based on available information to date, the result is a higher percentage of Fortune 500 bloggers than suspected."

The Fortune 500 get it, follow along small and individual businesses. Social media is an effective way to distribute awareness about your business, service of product. It's also a way to gather customers.

Tide's Loads of Hope Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 20:53:36 PDT

Love hate relationships

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:35:38 PST

Rafe Needleman is one of my favorite reporters. I wonder instead of being hated, how he manages to stay relatively well-liked. The other ironic thing is that by writing about how much they are hated, those five people must like him even more. Ah, there's the real magic.

I interviewed Rafe a while back about his initiative at CNET called Webware. Some insiders at CNET tell me that it doesn't directly make money (sounded a little paranoid actually), but I would tell CNET that Webware is great for it's own brand awareness, plus it raises visibility for all those companies and software applications.

Google is hiring

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:58:30 PST

Google is hiring and here's what the ad on their web site said.

"Passionate about these topics? You should work at Google.

• algorithms
• artificial intelligence
• compiler optimization
• computer architecture
• computer graphics
• data compression
• data mining
• file system design
• genetic algorithms
• information retrieval
• machine learning
• natural language processing
• operating systems
• profiling
• robotics
• text processing
• user interface design
• web information retrieval
• and more!"

Lisa Padilla on Talenthouse

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 10:20:28 PST

I just discovered Talenthouse. Here is their blog. This is a place to showcase and collaborate on all kinds of media projects. Trying it out...what do you think?

Cinegrid 3rd Annual Workshop 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 12:10:38 PST

From La Jolla, CA...Fred Davis spoke at the 3rd Annual Cinegrid Workshop and I captured some pictures from the event.

I spot obstacles

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:00:18 PDT

Sad indeed, I just read this email from Eyepot.com.

From: noreply@eyespotcorp.com
To: lisa@informationcolony.com
Sent: 09 Oct '08 19:58
Subject: To Our Users and Customers:

We deeply regret to inform you that Eyespot Corporation will no longer be able to continue serving you.

For our users at eyespot.com, we're no longer allowing you to upload new videos. You can retrieve your uploaded video and mixes by going to your mymedia gallery and clicking the download link below the video thumbnail.

For our business customers in the eyespot video network, your site will continue operate unaffected for a limited period of time. We encourage you to migrate your video solution to one of our competing providers in the video mixing (e.g. http://corp.kaltura.com/) and video publishing space (e.g. http://www.fliqz.com/)
immediately. We'll soon be providing you with the means of downloading your community videos from within your dashboard at [http://eyespot.com/partnerDashboard].

We have spent three years providing over a hundred thousand of you with a unique video experience. We believed that by putting creative tools and rights-cleared media into the hands of influencers and connectors, Eyespot would enable social media and participation culture like no other company.

After playing over two hundred million of your video creations, we have to stop. After assembling possibly the most potent team in digital media ever, we're now moving on.

Thank you all for being apart of our community over the past three years.

Jim Kaskade
President & CEO

So what happened ? Isn't it a startup dream to be Eyespot? Demo your technology at Under the Radar in July 2006, raise a few million a couple of months later, that worked out to about a million per year.

Check out the site while you still can, users come and build libraries of copyright free video/etc material and the mash it up. Video editing, mashups, cool, yes? And evidently they have a business account (which you should make a backup of right away if you have one.)

Jumpcut was acquired by Yahoo! and now I wonder how they're going to do. I still see obstacles for video. You can read and listen to a couple of good interviews from other video-related sites like Voxant and ExpoTV on Lisacast.com.

The beta generation

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:23:19 PDT

Dangerous tools and environments were just a couple of the risks when the oil industry first started. That torturous first scene in the movie There Will Be Blood shows Daniel Day Lewis, the oil seeking maverick, injured and stranded with broken bones after a fall into the well he dug. There is payoff this time and his pain is outweighed by his joy when the oil shoots up from the earth allowing him victory. Of course there are many wells that don't pay off but one must keep plodding through each as if it would. Some wells seem to have more promise than others.

In my world of drilling and discovery, crude technology is the black gold sought.

New media technology has become so exciting in the past 3 or 4 years, even though it's played down by those sorely recollecting the 'Bubble.' Yet, it's rampant. Most TV shows have web sites and if the producer don't build it, the fans will. My daughter's orthodontist has her own radio show. You can order groceries, drugs, shoes, a wedding dress and your funeral casket -- all online. You'd need a wiki to detail all the opportunities for GPS and the technologies that use it for gaming, safety, military security, and finding a Starbucks close by. Gosh, that's hard, isn't it? Hey money gets there first sometimes. But don't worry, it's crowded, and the best software and service will rise to the top.

For example, rating and ranking systems are getting better because there is more data contained in them. Even if a restaurant owner gave themselves positive ratings, eventually those who rate their experience at the restaurant outweigh any biased rating submissions. Since polling technology has been around for a while now, it's becoming widely useful.

Video broadcast services are still young.

I ran into the director of business development from Ustream.tv last month at TC50. Hey great I thought, we are working on a high profile project and I told him I wanted to use the service to do private recordings. He said I would be better off with another service and rattled off a couple I didn't investigate yet. I was surprised he didn't want to work more closely and that the marketing department didn't follow up about redistributing the content, which is already proven popular on other networks. Other services? Well OK Ustream, but the thing was, I had three interviews set up and not one of them worked out, whether bandwidth issue or something we were never able to determine. Thankfully I was simultaneously recording the audio using either BlogTalkRadio or a home studio. BlogTalkRadio saved me (for the second time!) this summer as a redundant recording device when other technology failed. It will be great when video technology matures just a bit and we've over this hurdle. Please drop me a note if you know of a good video service I might try.

Talking with a board member from Greenpeace or the frustrated, English materials science professor, who arranged to let me interview him in the evening, made me feel a bit like Mr. Lewis in the well, before the oil came. Less messy, but equally horrific. Yet we, the beta generation, will continue to test the software, as technology is so much more valuable a resource than oil in the end.

Heartbreak to hero

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:14:43 PDT

It can be said that Alan Levy is a good business man, a direct and effective negotiator. He retooled existing, large telephony infrastructure technology into a free, light-weight web service anyone with a phone can figure out. He makes money on both premium services and advertising, as well as backend US numbers procured by the phone company he also owns. But the service, again, is free. And long distance is included with virtually every phone service these days.

I said "hero", because we'll all see heartbreak at some point, but few of us create a mechanism by which anyone can communicate, build community, share, connect with friends, family, paranormal psychologists, authors who write about paranormal psychologists, actors who play them on TV and activists concerned for the pet portrayals played therein. Smart businesses will take the technology, like Dave Winer did and build cool sub-services. They can use these privately like recorded conference calls, or on the fly via cell-phone only from the ballpark or town hall meeting. Podcast on-the-go.

While I don't work for the company now, I still love them and I respect what Alan did, coming back and building this for the world. He didn't need the money. He needed to give back and he did that for thousands of people. Listen to the discussion with Alan.

Social (Un)bookmarking

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 13:44:17 PST

Social media was made for me. I have always favored personal bonds among colleagues and more often than not found it to strengthen the work created together. I have accounts at over 30 social networking sites. I Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Flickr and Blip. I chat on over half a dozen instant messaging clients. I write 4 blogs and echo each of those in excerpt or comment on many other web sites. I have several feed readers and foster relationships with influencers I respect to keep up with anything I might have missed.

My attention touches a lot of things and I like it that way. Some people feel that there is no intellect in the village, especially if the village is filled with idiots, but I disagree. We can learn much from this knowledge, about the variety of individual beliefs and collective views and about problem solving. So I'm a big fan, you can tell. But I want to raise a problem with social networking yet unsolved.

What's missing is the ability to socially "(un)bookmark" a topic. Now there are some smart guys out there, please will one of you build this? Here's what I need.

This is Clipmarks. This morning I was supposed to interview Clipmarks' CEO, Eric Goldstein, on Lisacast, my BlogTalkRadio show. I twittered the show and posted it on Facebook. I emailed my friends who don't social network. Show time came.

But he didn't show up.

This happens even to the best of us from time to time with live broadcasting and I cancelled the show for rescheduling. But...this is my reputation. So I had to go pull all of those posts down, rewrite my main blog about Clipmarks and send emails to several people.

What I want is a smart tool that will find all of the posts or notifications I made 1) within a time frame, 2) about a topic, 3) on multiple sites (Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, etc.). And 4) if the post was in the form of an email, this tool would generate a second email with something I have submitted in a text field one time, like this:

"Hey, sorry my show was cancelled today today. I'm certain that the reason Mr. Goldstein didn't call into the show was because of a very bad case of food poisoning or he had some type of CEO emergency. Please stay tuned.

Yours truly,
Lisa"

A while back I narrated a video project with Dan Gillmor and JD Lasica about correcting errors that are made online. This is one scenario, making an outright mistake. Surely corporations and individual contributors alike would see value in a tool that would help them clean up online posts for which they would like to limit visibility.

I think a tool that accomodates this requests would help people embrace social media without as much fear. After all, the Web is ours. We do with it what we will and part of that should include "undoing."

The diminishing isolated populisms

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 12:28:08 PDT

This week on BlogTalkRadio I had the opportunity to interview John Battelle. You can read up on John or read his blog, Searchblog. He offered a good discussion on information availability, social networks and what he calls "conversational media".

Here's where you can listen to our talk.

John spoke on the show about how interconnected social groups were becoming. So, from a chapter called The Computer and the Counterculture in the book The Cult of Information by Theodore Roszak, I pulled this quote. I believe it describes a fundamental change in individual isolation which is very powerful as most of us imagine:

"Both the quantity and content of available information is set by centralized institutions -- the press, TV, radio, news services, think-tanks, government agencies, schools and universities -- which are controlled by the same interests which control the rest of the economy. By keeping information flowing from the top down, they keep us isolated from each other. ...Computer technology has thus far been used ...mainly by the government and those it represents to store and quickly retrieve vast amounts of information about huge numbers of people...It is this pattern that convinves us that control over the flow of information is so crucial."
Resource One Newsletter April 1974, Berkeley, CA

The beauty (and beast) of free speech

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 16:09:33 PDT

Robert Scoble, famed Microsoft blogger and current media executive of PodTech joins the recently launched Social Media Club talk show on Blogtalkradio, adding his name to the who's who of A-listers (and B, C, D, E etc.-listers) who seem drawn to Blogtalkradio.

Why? Because it extends and enriches the freedom of speech and audience connection elements of blogging, making it a live, interactive conversation.

Does this beautiful freedom come with some new challenges when letters to the editor become the editorial itself? What about credibility, fact-checking and authority. Who's authority? Exactly the topic of conversation on today's talk show:

Listen to: The Social Media Club Show, with guests from north to south and east to west, each of us with a firm opinion about the changing nature of editorial reach and credibility.

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/hostpage.aspx?show_id=50791

Twittergram tours

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 08:28:46 PDT

Very interesting implementation of Twittergram by Adam Green over at feedonomics. Twittergrams are short sound bytes you can point into the world of Twitter, "microbroadcasting" to your social network or community. The idea came from Dave Winer, whose band of vigilante developers continue to push media distribution as far as they can. BlogTalkRadio provides the call-in capability, which records the Twittergram or you can upload pre-recorded mp3s on the Twittergram site. The LAFD is also using BlogTalkRadio for some great civic services. You guys are on fire! ;)

Aloha Lisacast

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 11:04:28 PDT

Join me tomorrow at 10 am PST (or download the podcast later) for Evern Williams and Dr. Lynette Cruz, broadcasting with me live on Lisacast.com. Williams is the community media manager at Olelo television in Honolulu, HI and Dr. Cruz is a cultural anthropology professor and public access activist.

I have my own ties to this part of the world having lived for a time on Oahu. I first learned about co-located server infrastructures on the first ISP on the islands. The gentleman I worked for, an engineer, taught me about data storage, security and the business of moving information. This was the foundation for my subsequent interest in media management and publishing. and the changes we've seen for more than a decade surrounding our romance with all things digital. I also held other odd but interesting jobs and had the best meal of my life to date, right there in downtown Honolulu. The name of the restaurant is Chef Mavro, by the way.

Tris and Jim launch The Mediasphere Show

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 16:21:06 PDT

My boss Alan Levy of BlogTalkRadio and I had a great time talking with Jim Turner and Tris Hussey on their new talk show today, The Mediasphere Show.

Their site, http://www.blogonomics.net, discusses social media. Humble and inquisitive, these podcasters gone broadcast are a fine addition to the BlogTalkRadio network -- welcome!

You can hear the show in archive here.

Our discussion touched on BlogTalkRadio's role in the new media realm which was a good follow-up to the Future of Blogging panel I was on at NBC11 last week with PodTech and BlogHer. Some great questions came from the audience on community policies and supporting blogging within the enterprise. Speaking of new media, user-generated broadcasts and such...NBC11 just launched NBC11HomeTown.com, a local reader-contributed news site. Very cool. Big media steps its toe in the pool of democratized content. A lot more of this is coming as the tools to broadcast, podcast and videocast are made more available to everyday people.

As Jim mentioned on the show, you don't need to be technical to have your own broadcast these days.

-Lisa Padilla
"Prodcaster" of Lisacast, a BlogTalkRadio show

"Future of blogging" at the Social Media Club

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:28:49 PDT

If you're in the Bay Area and you haven't attended a Social Media Club event yet, this might be the one. I'll be on a panel with Elisa Camahort, Tony Bove and Jeremy Owyang discussing the future of blogging. If you missed it you can catch a slightly less than high-quality video Jeremiah took here.

Ever wonder how you can use a blog? Whether you're reading them, writing them, or aggregating them, blogs are a powerful communication channel that should be part of your media mix. This panel of 3-4 blog experts looks at blogs from a number of angles. We'll cover:

-> Mining the blogosphere for market intelligence
-> External enterprise blogs
-> Internal enterprise blogs
-> Aggregating blogs
-> The future of blogs

Date
Thursday, July 12, 2007

Time
6:00 pm PT - 8:00 pm PT

Location
NBC11/KNTV
2450 N. First Street
San Jose, 95131

Convergent business

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 08:55:31 PDT

NYC

I went to New York this week for the first time. It is a big, beautiful city filled with constant examples of the blur between consumers and businesses. This morning I interviewed Rafe Needleman of CNET's Webware on Lisacast, my weekly BlogTalkRadio talk show. I asked his views about the convergence of consumer software applications to those used in the work place.

You can listen here.

You can also listen to Hilary Leewong's 15-minutes of Fame show, where she interviewed me about Lisacast.

New Media Evolves to Radio

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Mon, 28 May 2007 13:36:12 PDT

Mark Frauenfelder has a captive print and online audience most journalists would envy. But he’s not stopping there. He joins thousands of hosts and hundreds of thousands of listeners who have discovered BlogTalkRadio’s free talk show service when he appears tonight on The Alan Levy Show to discuss his upcoming book release. Levy is the founder and CEO of BlogTalkRadio. To call in to the show and speak with Alan or Mark, dial +1 (347) 677-0649. Listen live at 9 pm EST tonight or download the show from the archive after it airs.

This marks a turning point in broadcast media. Blogtalkradio is empowering citizens worldwide to reach a greater audience and engage a two-way conversation – live.

Frauenfelder is founder and co-editor of the Internet's most popular blog BoingBoing (www.boingboing.net) which boasts 350,000 readers each month and 1 million subscribers. Frauenfelder is also editor-in-chief of MAKE (www.makezine.com) and contributing editor to Wired.com, Madprofessor.net. He has written several books, including the recently completed “Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet - Better, Faster, Easier.” Stay tuned for Mark Frauenfelder’s own talk show on Blogtalkradio coming this coming June.

About BlogTalkRadio

BlogTalkRadio is a social radio network that allows anyone in the world to host or listen to a live talk radio show, for free. BlogTalkRadio is inspiring a legion of citizen broadcasters around the world to express themselves through live, interactive radio for the first time.

Thousands of hosts in dozens of categories and hundreds of thousand of listener downloads a month include the Pentagon, the Los Angeles Fire Department, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Arianna Huffington, liberal political bloggers James Boyce and Taylor Marsh, conservative political bloggers Atlas Shrugs and Ed Morrisey, John Kerry, Bill Richardson, Tom Delay, Jennifer Hudson and Oliver Stone among others.

Unlike other services, BlogTalkRadio requires no software download or podcast equipment. All you need is a telephone or voIP connection to engage your community in real-time conversations. After shows air live, they are archived as podcasts and made available via RSS to iTunes and other services.

Visit BlogTalkRadio.com today for more information or contact Amy Domestico, amydomestico at blogtalkradio.com.

Innovation Journalism Conference May 21-23, 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 10:15:05 PDT

Last night I met with one of my favorite people in the industry, humble ex-physicist David Nordfors, now running the Innovation Journalism department at Stanford University. Next week marks his 4th conference on journalism here in the Bay Area. Keynoted first by Doug Engelbart, who I saw many years ago at Parc, and is speaking here about the societal collective intelligence of society, will be moderated by John Markoff. Next, by Curtis Carlson, on the discipline of innovation (insert whip sound here). Mr Carlson is the president of SRI International. Check out the rest of the speakers here, you'll even find some familiar locals.

Mr. Nordfors, a best practice communication advocate aiming consistently for a program which will allow us to get more out of the event, is changing the format of this years conference slightly by extending the length of breaks and lunches. This way people can connect, which is the whole idea in the first place. As David left our meeting last night to see his son play in a band at the Apple store, I felt very excited about next week and how this, the 4th conference from the department, would be the best yet.

I highly recommend reading the Innovation Journalism blog, where you'll find all kinds of interesting programs and a host of global participants dedicated to better journalism. And if you're interested in gathering post conference days with a surely interesting group of academic and journalist types, send me a note. The conference is May 21 - 23 next week.

A thorn in the nice, fluffy cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:49:26 PDT

At Netscape in 1999, I recall entering into the office one morning and being approached by reporters asking if I knew about the email scandal between the company and its competitor Microsoft. Having been briefed by a diligent human resources group, I had no comment but was well aware of its happening and the wave of damage control, present and future, it created through our organization. I think I can say that, generally speaking, can't I?

Perhaps more important than the legislation which followed that event was a lesson far greater. The Web offers vast opportunities, really, it's quite fantastic. But it's rapid growth and non-standardized services are more akin to a pool of pirahnas than the relatively slow-moving frontiers we previously conquered in print, radio or TV. Regulations are enforced by priority of the greatest threat, not based on wrongdoing. The whole Internet is a unsupervised free-for-all, where the bullies and the thiefs experience virtual nirvana.

There are pirates worse than those selling films illegally. And a ten year old child finding porn online is nothing compared to the potential information breeches we non-chalantly invite by sending our data over the ether. Who is in charge here? What is the percentage of policemen to citizens around the world? We need a global presence. In the meantime, we have to be vigilante, which is really irritating because not everybody has contacts at the big ISPs. We all have other things to do. It's like having to chase down a bankrobber for your bank.

Excuse my rant but let me pass along some advice. Change your passwords, now. Back everything up and if you aren't friends with someone who knows how to track down fraud on the Web, I hear they drink a lot of coffee those techies. Christen your new friendship with a double, non-fat, frappa-whateva-he-wants.

Participatory Media Supported

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 11:44:21 PDT

Many years ago I worked for a small multimedia company and one of our clients was Macromedia. We wrote documentation for Director 1.0, built interactive help and held trainings around the Bay Area. In my spare time, I used the software to put together a multimedia story for a family member celebrated an 80th birthday, splicing together music, pictures and narration. Sixty people gathered in a local restaurant and watched, it was very sweet.

Today, most podcasters, videobloggers, journalists turned new media (and vice versa) are keen on organizations that are supporting participatory media even though there seems to be a good deal of negative press scrutinizing the business model, quality and even safety. But that's not stopping people who have to tell stories, news to share, and feelings and creativity to express.

Here are three examples of people putting in the time, helping to make media higher quality and even getting paid.

1) Dan Gillmor, who I wrote about in my last post, and the Center for Citizen Media recently published this piece I narrated about accuracy and fixing mistakes in a new section on their site addressing "Principles of Citizen Journalism".

2) I briefly interviewed three attendees of the mobile technology conference at Stanford University: Reuters-sponsored Digital Vision Fellowship Program at Stanford University; a popular blog called onlinepersonalswatch.com; and Nokia's Convergence Products Business Program group.

Click to play this 5 and 1/2-minute video

Coincidentally, John Kuner is on academic leave from Nokia, and his Digital Vision Program focuses on three initiative areas: finance programs including m-commerce, payment services and microfinance; knowledge, as in education, government services and community building; and health and welfare which encompasses health science, public safety and disaster relief.

3) Finally, here is an example of financial support as the world begins to see real value in user-generated content, whether for entertainment, news or otherwise.

Related items:

Article on funding citizen media
Digital Vision Fellowship Program at Stanford
The N800 from Nokia.com
Online Personals Watch
Social Networking Watch
Citizen Journalism Principles at the Center for Citizen Media

"Messy and wonderful"

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 19:20:59 PDT

That is how Dan Gillmor charactizes the state of Citizen Media tonight at the Mid-Peninsula Community Media Center. The long-time blogger and ex-columnist for the San Jose Mercury News now runs the Center for Citizen Media.

Dan touched on the history of the newspaper industry as an example of the changing landscape of journalism and said that for the past 40 years it has been dependent on monopolization. "It was previously bad business to annoy half of your audience."

But the traditional journalism business models are quickly eroding. The product is no longer printed on presses that cost $50-75 million. The competition that previously existed in journalism is much less significant today than the present race for ad dollars. We are struggling to encourage local coverage, which is playing a very important role in the value of community knowledge. Investigative and in-depth reporting sites and those adding value to content like newassignment.net, Witness.org, and dotSUB.com are also key to keeping some structure in place and continuing quality journalism. This discussion on citizen media attracted its own "random acts of journalism," a term Mr. Gillmor uses.

I have been part of Ourmedia.org since last May, which today celebrates its 2nd birthday. Happy Birthday! Two years ago J.D. Lasica and Marc Canter approached Brewster Kale, founder of the Internet Archive, to open the Archive's media repository to user-generated content. This turned out to be a popular idea and Ourmedia.org now enables a widely-available library of deep-tagged media, hosted for free. The content is copyright-indicated so people can use them in their own works if you say so. Ourmedia.org's library includes articles about how to use materials.

What's okay to use and what isn't? What do the different licenses mean? How do you strip out or add audio to a podcast or video? Ourmedia.org answers these questions. Ourmedia.org also sports a peer-to-peer file sharing application from Outhink Media you can use to create all kinds of things called SpinXpress. With SpinXpress you can set up private groups and share large files from one computer to another (without uploading it somewhere else first or emailing large files). These image, sound and video files are almost always huge so it solves a big problem. Plus you can publish to multiple locations, including . The Internet Archive is a really nice clean place to showcase your media too. Here a few pieces I published there. Ourmedia.org is also about to relaunch it's site with a Drupal upgrade, which will improve the user interface and extensibility of the service.

What else to expect in the future from these new media experts?

Dan and J.D. are about to launch a project at the Center for Citizen Media centered around "principles of journalism" which includes topics such as story accuracy, fairness and transparency. Check out the media center for ongoing projects and courses you can take to learn more about video production and editing and more.
When tonight's audience was asked why they came to Dan Gillmor's discussion, a member with a philosophy background said, "I want to change the world."

Let's continue with a common goal of better journalism, encouraging the diligence of formal reporting and working too with the spontaneous, creative nature of citizen-generalted media. Some pictures courtesy of Jeff Schwartz are posted on Flickr.

Related items:

http://www.communitymediacenter.net
http://www.archive.org
http://www.ourmedia.org
http://www.citmedia.org
http://www.metacafe.com
http://www.wikipedia.org (my home page is currently set to this page on the Wikipedia.org site and learn something every day)
http://www.newsvine.com
http://www.blip.tv
http://parr.org

Captology: A pair of shoes or a cell phone?

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Padilla) — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:30:02 PDT

I heard a story recently of someone traveling to a poverty-stricken area of the world who said "they didn't have shoes, but they had mobile phones." As pervasive ownership is becoming evident, a question is begged. How will devices like cell phones can change the way we think?

When Justin Oberman of Rave Wireless and MoPocket.com calls himself a mobile evangelist, a humorous picture of a man dancing in a mobile phone costume in the mall comes to mind. But Mr. Oberman has some serious views on the use of the ever-growing platform. Here's Justin (and thank you kindly for the interview) with Jeff Schwartz of Disruptive Strategies at Stanford University’s Mobile Persuasion last month.

Stanford University has begun to examine a field of study, called "captology", in their Persuasive Technology Lab, to identify positive persuasive technologies in the areas of health, business safety and education. From the Stanford University Web site, here is a captology diagram:

Stanford hosts the Second International Conference on Persuasion Technology in April 2007 and you can find more information about it at http://www.persuasivetechnology.org.

Related items:

http://www.ravewireless.com
http://mopocket.com
http://captology.stanford.edu
http://www.persuasivetechnology.org
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3729247841790634072
http://www.persuasivetechnology.com
http://www.bjfogg.com/index.html
http://www.captologytv.com