Paul's Web Space 2.1 - Politics, Culture, Technology

Press Intimidation at the National Political Conventions

2008-09-12T15:46:00.002-04:00

There were disturbing examples of police trampling on press freedom at both the Demcratic and Republican national conventions in recent weeks.

First, at the DNC08 convention in Denver, an ABC News producer was arrested outside the hotel where a private breakfast was being held for Democratic party leadership and VIP donors to the party. Nightline was in the midst of a series called "Money Talks," reporting the continued influence of big money donors on the political process, and ABC News correspondent Brian Ross opined "We're getting under their skin, I think."

Then the following week brought many incidents of harassment of independent journalists covering the RNC08 convention in St. Paul. In perhaps the most infamous, Amy Goodman or Democracy Now!, along with two of her producers, were arrested while trying to cover the police response to a demonstration, even though their press credentials were plainly visible. As Goodman recounts the arrests were somewhat violent — her producers were stomped and bloodied and Goodman's press pass ripped from her neck when she protested that they were credentialed journalists.

What possible reason exists for these arrests other than to intimidate journalists interested in covering the dissent – and not just the spectacle – surrounding the conventions. It's a chilly day when freedom of speech is infringed and diverse voices are deliberately silenced and marginalized in conjunction with these highly visible manifestations of our democratic process. And for the most part, mainstream media stood silently by as these events transpired, and for the most part concentrated their coverage on the packaged spectacle.

My ONA08 Day One - Like Minds, Jeff Jarvis

2008-09-11T14:40:00.007-04:00

As I walked up to the registration desk at the Online News Association Annual Conference (ONA08) at the Capital Hilton in DC, I received a warm greeting from conference co-chair Amy Webb (I helped out a little on the social media subcommittee).

I then walked into the Like Minds workshop, where Neil Budde of DailyMe.com was discussing the issues and ideas involved with editing a stand-alone news site (rather than one connected to an existing newspaper or broadcast media outlet). In reality a lot of the issues are the same, just dealing with different audiences (or entrenched editorial staff). He pointed out that our site, edweek.org, doesn't have to deal with the same sort of noise and invective as many media sites, partly due to the civility of our audience; this is starting to change, however, as we wade into the world of politics (but our readers are still more well behaved than many).

It can be difficult to impart ethical or journalistic standards to people in the technology world rather than journalists. It can help if you ask them to look at readers as users — strive to provide a satisfying user experience, and you will be doing good journalism. This actually sounds similar to my prior blogging that good SEO can lead to good usability.

He discussed the utility of measurement, page clicks vs. time on site/length of impression. It can be tough to convince advertisers that a lasting impression might be better than a fleeting click, but one way is to demonstrate the difference visually. Metrics can also help determine most valuable content/tasks based upon traffic/audience response; through a show of hands, we saw that some in attendance actually follow and react to metrics in real time.

Finally, it is the job of the editor to ensure that technologists help productivity, not make production/reporting staff jump through hoops to fit some software/technology imperative. At edweek.org, we operate much like this, with many of our projects aimed at labor saving and automating repetitive tasks.

Then Dale Steinke of KING5.com discussed the challenges facing ediotors of broadcast sites. In the area of video, he stated that raw video most popular, showing a funny clip they posted featuring ping-pong car crashes after an ice storm in Portland OR that was subsequently shared on YouTube many thousand times. Compelling produced video samples included a documentary of suffering in Africa, and a very funny video mash-up of the movie Election with Hillary Clinton produced by Andy Bowers & Bill Smee, guys I knew from Yale who are now with SlateV.

Hillary's Inner Tracy Flick

He then launched into a discussion of newsroom integration, for which I had submitted some comments that I was asked to relate. Here are some of the notes that I had sent in:

Newsroom integration – we have some successful strategies, mostly by involving editors and reporters in as much of our web operations as possible. Specifically, we introduced staff-written blogs a couple years ago, and over the past year, increased the pace of introductions, so that now a significant number of reporters and editors actually write (or lightly edit) blogs. Likewise, with our online chats, we have involved the newsroom in scheduling and moderating them, and our e-newsletters are edited by newsroom desk editors. Also, over the past year, we have assigned a rotating reporter to sit with the web editorial/production team for three months at a time, learning all the tools, and participating in production to the extent that is practical for such a temporary “producer.” Lastly, we sent two reporters to each political convention over the past two weeks, and they were equipped with laptops, smart phones, and flip video cameras, and trained in video shooting and in using our Twitter account. They were blogging, twittering, shooting video to post in their blogs, and even writing an occasional news article. Mojos if only just for special events (so far).
Going viral – we were plugged in to the C-SPAN convention coverage, our blogs were included, we used the hashtags so our tweets were included, but really, the biggest rush of traffic comes from our own e-newsletters. We also use Facebook, MySpace, Social Tagging, YouTube, etc, but with little payoff yet.

I also attended the J-School Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, and heard various people connected with schools of journalism discuss projects they have undertaken that involve more creative use of the web, which is a tremendous development. The dinner keynote speaker at this event was Jeff Jarvis, Directory of the Interactive Journalism Program at CUNY and author of the blog BuzzMachine. Jeff described his Entrepreneurial Journalism program, starting with why that is not an oxymoron. He rather believes that business thinking is becoming more and more important in the world of networked journalism, and the only way to create a "sustainable journalistic enterprise." He described an evolution of journalism that is necessary in today's business environment, including these steps and more:

Survival
Stewardship
Innovation
Good Management
Opportunity

Jeff described how the curriculum covers many business topics that are increasingly important for journalists to understand, from elevator pitches, to advertising models, to subscriber acquisition and churn, and the way that these projects eventually were pitched to real angel investors, and the winning ideas will eventually be tried as real businesses. He also briefly described some of the ideas, imploring us not to shear these ideas in our own blogs invoking the novel (to me) concept of "FrienDA" – a play in NDA, or non-disclosure agreement among friends – a seemingly risky concept in other contexts, but probalby low-risk in the world of journalists familiar with news embargoes.

Online News Association Conference: 9/11-13 in DC

2008-09-10T07:02:00.006-04:00

Tomorrow the Online News Association 2008 Annual Conference kicks of in Washington DC with a series of workshops and a reception at the Newseum. It promises to be a fabulous conference, featuring keynote speeches by Tina Brown, Robert Scoble and Devin Wenig, more panels than ever before, and the Annual Banquet featuring the Online Journalism Awards Banquet.

I'm looking forward to sessions about everything from audience measurement, video and multimedia, and social media in the newsroom. There will be a town hall style panel covering online ethics, which has created an online ethics wiki to get the conversation started ahead of time. Then on Saturday afternoon, the conference closes with a Super Panel as usual, but this time addressing how to save a struggling media company. Read the case study (pdf) and join the conversation on the conference discussion forum; super-panelists will incorporate some of the ideas posted in this forum.

I'm on the conference organizing committee, participating primarily social media subcommittee headed by Chrys Wu. It's been an amazing group, and we've come up with some really cool (if not absolutely bleeding edge) social media tools to assist those at the conference as well as those who cannot make it:

A pre-conference podcast series featuring interviews with conference speakers, organizers, and student journalists. This series is available as an RSS feed and an through iTunes. There are now six interviews available;
- A Twitter feed that's the "control tower" for all things ONA08 online; if you're twittering, please be sure to use the hash tag #ONA08;
A Tweet widget that collects all Twitter messages tagged @ONA08 and #ONA08 provided by at Widgetbox (see below);
A public bulletin board for discussing panels and workshops, making last-minute announcements, and arranging meetups;
A Flickr pool where you can upload conference photos; join and tag your photos with ONA08;
Last but not least, the ONA08 Facebook Group, where we've been discussing the conference for a while.

ONA 2008 Conferencegreat free widgetsWidgetbox

Several people have asked who's coming to the conference. Post a message in the "Hang Out in the Lounge" forum to find out and meet in person.

We still need bag stuffers. If you know of people in who will be in Washington on Wednesday, let them know we'd like their help. Have them email Tiffany.Shackelford@gmail.com to volunteer.

ONA08 as much about community as it is about industry. And this year promises to offer more information and ideas than ever before from all sorts of people interested in the future of online news. I hope you’ll join the conference online and in person.

DNC Convention 2008 Excitement

2008-08-28T19:20:00.001-04:00

The DNC Convention has certainly been an interesting event, made even more so by the role I've played in exposing edweek.org's expanded coverage, and by my friend who spoke there.

First, I was Twittering about Edweek's coverage and Campaign K-12 blog using the #DNC08 and #RNC08 hashtags. Leslie Bradshaw sent me a Tweet in response describing the coverage that she was setting up for C-SPAN. Her social media agencies New Media Strategies and JESS3 created this site, picked the blogs, and made C-SPAN video embeddable by bloggers for the first time.

On the bottom of this page, there are local and national blogs, including ours; there is also a page compiling all #RNC08 and #DNC08 tweets, including many from Education Week. Not only are we using blogs and tweets more actively than ever before, but we managed to have our coverage picked up by C-SPAN and Frank Rich in the New York Times.

Then on opening night, my friend Margie Perez spoke at the convention. Margie was great — she talked about the impact of Katrina on her and on New Orleans, the lame response by the Bush Administration, and the help she got from Habitat for Humanity, and her smile was a mile across. She then introduced a video narrated by Jimmy Carter with more about the project. Her blog posts describing the experience are priceless (part 1) (part 2). Another friend, Armand Lione, posted the YouTube video you see above.

An electrifying week, and it's not over yet!

Transparency in Government Act of 2008

2008-08-03T13:39:00.004-04:00

The Sunlight Foundation just released a revised version of the Transparency in Government Act of 2008. This bill is an direct result of recommendations by Sunlight's Open House Project, which sought to examine the way that the U.S. Congress integrates the Internet into its work, and how the net might be used to shed more light on its operations.

You can view this latest revision of the Transparency in Government Act of 2008 and read about its background and reason for being at PublicMarkup.org.

New Blog - Online Marketing for Marketers

2008-07-31T20:33:00.002-04:00

As I wrote last week, I just completed two speaking engagements for the Online Marketing Summit – Summer Tour 2008, in New Jersey and Boston. These were great conferences, our panels featured good experts answering interesting questions, and the other speakers were top-notch. I'll write more about that experience shortly.

In the course of events I was invited to be a blogger on the associated blog Online Marketing for Marketers, and I can only guess that the invitation results from my years of experience with online technologies and social media, versus my much more brief and improvisational experience with marketing. That said, I will do my best to find interesting things to say in this new forum.

My first post on the new blog, SEO Basics for Content Sites, contributed to last week's discussion topic, Search Engine Optimization. I've blogged about SEO before (see my guide to SEO resources), and even gave a shout-out to lead topic contributor Ray "Catfish" Comstock, but I missed a couple crucial SEO resources before:

Ray's own SEO Blog at BusinessOnline typically digs a little deeper into important SEO concepts, and provides a great birds-eye view of SEO consulting;
John Battelle's Searchblog keeps a very close watch on technology and business developments among the companies that provide us with search and related technologies.

While I'm at it, I might as well mention that I've also signed up as a blogger at Social Media Today, a cool group blog featuring numerous social media marketing types (several of whom I know), but I have yet to see a post of mine make the front page — maybe tomorrow, maybe some day....

140-Character Book Review Contest

2008-07-22T07:00:00.001-04:00

I fortuitously followed a tweet from Cool Cat Teacher about a contest to write book reviews within the 140-character limitation imposed by Twitter. The deadline is this Wednesday, July 26, and there are prizes.

Here are my two entries, plus one for a movie that's technically not eligible (you could say my review is of the comic book, but it's really not):

1984 - Winston Smith tastes freedom and steamy sex. Big Brother comes crashing in. Status quo: perpetual war on terror; same war, new enemy.

Crime and Punishment - Raskolnikov plans and executes the "perfect crime." Guilt gnaws, he confesses, goes to jail, falls in love.

Iron Man - arrogant-jerk arms merchant Tony Stark: kidnapped by terrorists, turns peacenik, stomps baddies. He is Iron Man.

Internet for Everyone

2008-07-20T23:00:00.001-04:00

I recently received a Facebook Group invitation to join an important campaign - Internet for Everyone. It is essential that we provide high-speed Internet access to everyone in the U.S. — to enhance fairness and close the digital divide, to enhance learning and freedom to communicate, and to enable more innovation and more widespread participation in the global information economy.

Tim Karr's article on Huffington Post, "America's Next Moon Shot: Internet for Everyone," introduced the initiative, and the Internet for Everyone Brochure lays out the specific goals of the campaign and provides copious evidence of the shortcomings that exist in U.S. broadband implementation today.

The announcement at last month's Personal Democracy Forum featured (among others):

Jonathan Adelstein, FCC commissioner
Jonathan Zittrain, Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Tim Wu, Columbia Law School
Vint Cerf, Google (and author, RFC 3271)
Larry Lessig, Stanford Law School
Van Jones, Green For All

I've been following efforts like this for some time, in venues such as the Freedom to Connect conference. Other involved organizations have programs and information worth checking out. The New America Foundation's Wireless Future Program is working hard to free up underutilized wireless spectrum to enhance broadband opportunities. EDUCAUSE has proposed a Blueprint for Big Broadband. The technology CEOs of TechNet also call for rapidly accelerated broadband deployment.

If you believe in the importance of Internet freedom, equity, and innovation, I encourage you to join the Facebook group or sign up here.

Speaking at the Online Marketing Summit

2008-07-15T07:00:00.000-04:00

I thought I would drop a quick blog to let people know that I'm speaking at two stops of the Online Marketing Summit Summer Tour 2008 in the next nine days, this week in New Jersey (outside New York), and next week in Waltham, MA (outside Boston). Then I visit with parents and family in Connecticut for my only extended vacation this summer.

I'll be part of the Top Brands panel, and I'll be discussing how we're using social media at edweek.org to engage our readership and extend the reach of our message. I've been told that my panel is mostly Q&A, but if I do have time for remarks, I'll probably give an abbreviated and updated version of my talk at the Digital Velocity conference.

They might not be sold out, but I think they're close — check out the web site, and come on down if you can. It looks like a stellar cast of presenters and respondents; I'll definitely blog more about this after it's over.

Interactive Narratives 2.0 Launches

2008-07-11T19:31:00.002-04:00

The Online News Association (ONA) has just relaunched Interactive Narratives, a very cool showcase of multimedia storytelling, now with new contribution and rating functionality. Interactive Narratives was originally created by Andrew DiVigal to keep track of interesting multimedia storytelling examples for conference presentations and courses he taught at SFSU and for the Poynter Institute. He started out by creating a database to maintain a list of bookmarks he used in these presentations, then he made this database available to everyone through the original Interactive Narratives site.

When he was hired to be Multimedia Editor at the New York Times, he found he no longer had time to maintain the site all by himself, so he worked with ONA to relaunch Interactive Narratives 2.0. The site now relies on members of its community to both contribute new content, and also to rate, tag, and review all of the content it contains, to make it easier for people to locate what they are looking for, or just to find the best storytelling examples as chosen by the crowd. Site participation is open to all; ONA members are already registered, others need to sign up.

Read more:

ONA President's Letter - Interactive 2.0 Launches by Jonathan Dube
Interview on Poynter Online with site founder Andrew DiVigal
Guidelines for posting content

Additional tools and resources:

BlogPotomac - June 13, 2008

2008-07-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending BlogPotomac at the State Theater in Falls Church, VA, hosted by Geoff Livingston and Debbie Weil. I thought it was a great (un)conference, filled with interesting talks, lively Q&A, and great networking opportunities. On her blog, Debbie recapped the event, linking to varied social media coverage; she also highlighted two of my favorite talks (but all the presentations were interesting).

Dan Beyers, the Local Business Editor for the Washington Post, recently spearheaded the launch of the WashBiz blog. He spoke about local business blogging at a newspaper, and how social media is affecting the Post and the newspaper business in general. (Read the preconference interview with Dan.) Then Maggie Fox, founder and CEO of Social Media Group, one of the world's largest PR agencies helping business navigate the world of Web 2.0, spoke about the impact of social media on traditional PR.

Frank Gruber, gave the post-lunch keynote talk. Frank is principal product manager for AOL in the social networking & platforms group, and is responsible for the recently launched myAOL suite, and spoke about social media efforts underway at AOL. He then led a lively discussion on "Bright, Shiny Objects" — his favorite social media tools, ultimately a fairly comprehensive list of the most interesting and useful social tools available today.

KD Paine is author of "Measuring Public Relationships: The Data-Driven Communicator's Guide to Success" and is the publisher of KDPaine's Measurement Blog and The Measurement Standard. She presented a methodology of measuring engagement in social media, and later sent me numerous presentations and links, most of which are catalogued at her company web site, Measures of Success. In an interview conducted by conference co-chair Debbie Weil, Katie states that measuring engagement goes beyond counting clicks or visits, but rather should seek to determine the quality of the interaction.

Kami Huyse closed BlogPotomac by leading an interesting discussion of ethics in PR and marketing; she posed hypothetical cases involving creating fake campaigns, and discussed a real fake campaign by Coach, astroturf (fake grassroots political movements conducted by lobbyists and trade associations), and even mentioned The War of the Worlds (different media perhaps, but many of the same issues). They opened the State Theater bar for this last speaker, which may have enlivened the conversation.

I also met up with several people I know from the local social media marketing scene; for the first time in person: Chris Abraham, George Brett, Suki Fuller and Helen Mosher. Social Media Swami Shashi Bellamkonda was among a raft of Flickr shutterbugs, Shireen Mitchell, and Jill Foster bent my ear about the BlogHer conference and blogging the Democratic National Convention; Jill also captured many attendees using Utterz .

Social Rockstar/Now Is Gone/No Personality

2008-07-02T07:00:00.000-04:00

I've recently been at total slacker in writing up conferences and events, but I'm starting to make up for that. I'm blogging late Spring events now, and I have a few dusty drafts that I'll drop occasionally while I catch up — as I want endeavor to create a more complete record of interesting happenings I've stumbled upon. (Warning: shameless networking/blog-dropping to ensue.)
On May 16, I caught part of the Social Rockstar Workshop at Busboys & Poets in DC. I met Nick O'Neill, creator of AllFacebook.com and the recently launched Social Times, but unfortunately, I missed his talk; I met Frank Gruber – co-founder of TECH cocktail, a principal product manager for AOL in the social networking & platforms group, and is responsible for the recently launched myAOL suite – and heard him speak about ways organizations can effectively use social media technology; and I saw Justin Thorp, Developer Community Manager at Clearspring Technologies, speak about widgets (we had already met). I also ran into Jonny Goldstein of Jonny's Par-tay (shows on Wednesday's at 9PM ET), and workshop organizers Paul and Kady, who run the DC-area Social Web Meet-up.

Then June kicked off with a DC chapter of Social Media Club book discussion at Barnes & Noble in Clarendon, featuring the authors of Now is Gone, Geoff Livingston and Brian Solis. They spoke and answered questions about PR and blogs and social media, and had a lot to say about thoughtfully engaging the conversation on the Web, rather than indescriminately blasting your message, and how a lot of PR firms don't currently get it (Solis coined the phrase PR 2.0). I met the authors and got them to autograph a copy of their book. I also met Rohit Bhargava, Senior Vice President, Digital Strategy & Marketing at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, and had him autograph his new book Personality Not Included; I had missed a book event at Busboys & Poets the previous evening, but caught the webcast (archives are here, if hard to find).

After the event, at Tandoori dinner and drinks next door, I again ran into Frank Gruber and Nick O'Neill; reconnected with Jennifer Consalvo, Director of Personalization at AOL, and Shashi Bellamkonda, social Media Swami for Network Solutions; met Jared Goralnick of AwayFind and SET Consulting; and met Aaron Brazell of social media business blog TechnoSailor.

Paul's Web Space 2.1

2008-06-26T06:37:00.003-04:00

There, I've gone and done it. I just released the latest version of my blog. I thought I was going to use the new Blogger templates for this, but then I discovered that these only work on blogspot.com hosted blogs, because of some dynamic code behind them; since I host my blog on my own web site on a friend's server (thanks Alec!), this technology isn't available to me.

No worries. My main goal was to enable labels or tags on my blog posts. I found code to display all the label links on the sidebar, and also fixed some settings so that the label pages would display properly from those links and the ones in posts. (Thanks, phydeaux3!) Then I added labels to all my posts from this year, so that the label pages would be more complete. Maybe I'll get them into the meta keywords eventually too.

While I was at it, I tweaked a few things that had been nagging me about the layout, linked headlines to posts, etc. I tried to add backlink code, but I think the settings screwed me up again; I'll take it out if it refuses to work for new posts too.

Finally, I figure that numbering this 2.1 will dispel any notion that I'm riding on Web 2.0 coattails. I hope you like the changes; either way, leave me a comment or blog about them (then I can see if backlinks will work going forward). Peace.

Steve Cisler RIP

2008-05-17T01:57:00.006-04:00

Steve Cisler passed away this week. He was an early pioneer in the community networking movement, and our paths crossed in the early 1990s, while he was working at Apple Computer and collaborating with CPSR on its Local Civic Networks initiative, and I was on the CPSR Board of Directors, contributing what I could to the movement.

I found this page from our old web site, which contains pieces he wrote for CPSR. It was funny to see a grad school paper of mine appear beside two that Steve wrote for CPSR; may a small bit of his genius have rubbed off on me. Actually, the first is a very good overview of the space as of 1993, and the second is his report from a 1992 CPSR roundtable meeting. Reading that report really brought back memories - I was lucky enough to have been at the meeting Steve described and hung out with many of the people who's work he chronicled.

A true leading light has rambled on.

Paul Jones from ibiblio broke the news on Twitter, and posted a thoughtful tribute on his blog. Andy Carvin tweeted confirmation, and later posted a link to a condolences blog set up to commemorate Steve's life. I'm still trying to figure out the significance of the fact that I learned of this loss via my new community of social media geeks on Twitter, where Andy Carvin's tweets provided a vivid, real-time commentary on the unfolding story (and are the extent of his public posting on the topic that I've seen). Then, digging deeper, I found other fellow travelers using the Tweetscan search engine.

Community networking meets Web 2.0? The light burns on.

FCC Hearing on Internet Practices – April 17

2008-04-16T20:30:00.001-04:00

On Thursday afternoon, all five commissioners from the Federal Communications Commission will be attending a hearing at Stanford University on the future of the Internet, sponsored by the Stanford Law School Center on Internet and Society. This promises to be a very interesting meeting, especially considering the controversy surrounding a similar meeting they held at MIT a couple months ago.

The hearing is scheduled for 12-7 PM PT / 3-10 PM ET, on Thursday, April 17, and will physically take place at:

Stanford University

Dinkelspiel Auditorium

471 Lagunita Drive

Stanford, CA, 94305

United States

See map: Yahoo! Maps

With only 150 seats available to the public, you'd better get there early to get a seat. Luckily, there are a number of other ways that you can follow the event via the very same Internet:

VON TV will host a free video webcast of the entire proceedings.

The FCC Web site will stream live audio of the hearing as well.

The Free Press Action Network will host live blogging coverage for the duration of the event.

The Cairns blog posted a thoughtful piece explaining the background, with lots of references to the players and the history of this process — Can the FCC Fix the Internet? — so I don't need to repeat it here. I'm hoping to tune in myself, maybe blog some more; I hope you can join me.

Job: Online Community Intern at edweek.org

2008-04-09T06:00:00.006-04:00

Do you use multiple social networking services, write for a blog, or lead discussions on web forums? How would you like to apply those skills as an intern for an online journalism operation, and gain valuable job experience at the same time?

Edweek.org, a national non-profit news Web site covering K-12 education, seeks an online community intern to help manage our online community and contribute to viral marketing and social networking campaigns on behalf of the organization.

Responsibilities include:

monitoring comments and forum posts for inappropriate content;
managing one or more social network profiles or channels;
performing outreach to bloggers and social bookmarking sites;
promoting a sense of community through participation and feedback;
occasional web design or production tasks in support of these activities.

Qualifications: The position requires experience engaging with several social media applications and web communities, good writing and editing ability, basic HTML skill, a strong work ethic, and a highly developed sense of humor. Must be able to meet deadlines and work under pressure. Experience with CSS, graphic or multimedia editing, or blogging or content management system software a plus.

We welcome interns with an interest in social media, journalism/communications, education news and policy, and/or multimedia production. We are metro-accessible, a short walk from the red line in downtown Bethesda.

Please send resume, cover letter and samples/links via e-mail to: WebIntern@epe.org, and tell us where you saw the ad.

Spottiswoode Makes More Enemies on NPR

2008-03-29T11:58:00.007-04:00

I had the distinct pleasure of listening to my good friend and former band-mate Jonathan Spottiswoode on NPR's Weekend Edition this morning. It was an entertaining and thoughtful interview, conducted by Susan Stamberg, the original host of the weekend edition of the most popular show on radio. He sang and played two of his songs live in the studio, and they played cuts from the two CDs that his band Spottiswoode and his Enemies recently released as part of their 10th anniversary celebration — it was awesome exposure for Jonathan, his band, and his music. (All four songs are available on the NPR Web site.)

Jonathan is truly a gifted songwriter; he wrote all the songs on the first CD by my band, the Oxymorons ("Meet the Morons," which Jonathan also co-produced, was released in 1993). Around that time, he co-founded the Zimmermans, which shared two other members with the Oxymorons, but soon after split off in its own, more serious direction. (The first Zimmermans music video, "Portuguese Woman," also received its premiere at the "Meet the Morons" CD release party.)

The Enemies share most members with the final line-up of the Zimmermans, and have been together now for ten years. In the interview, Jonathan mentioned that he considers himself lucky to have been able to work with such good enemies over the last ten years, and to have been able to make a living writing, recording and performing his music, regardless of his spotty success with the so-called "music industry." To celebrate their ten years of existence, the Enemies recently released not one, but two new CDs: "That's What I Like" and "Salvation." Watch the video of the title track from the first CD, directed by Andrew Blackwell:

When Susan asked Jonathan how he managed to put out two CDs simultaneously – the band recorded 33 tracks in six days in the studio, of which 28 were included on the released CDs – he remarked that five CDs would be too little, were it not so difficult to press, package, and distribute the music once it was recorded. Several years ago, he remarked to me that he had five new fully-formed and sequenced CDs all worked out in his head; all he needed was the money, label, record deal, or whatever it would take to pay for it. The enemies are on a bit of a media roll these days: Paste Magazine gave them a rave review for a recent show in Atlanta as they worked their way back north from South by Southwest, and the New Yorker made their 10th Anniversary show last weekend at Joe's Pub the lead pick in last weeks listings.

F2C: Freedom to Connect

2008-03-28T13:07:00.004-04:00

I'm looking forward to attending F2C: Freedom to Connect 2008, next Monday and Tuesday, March 31 and April 1, 2008, at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, MD (where I just happen to live). F2C always brings together the most interesting people and projects, all with one goal in mind, making the Internet more useful and powerful for everyone, making it a tool that people can use for whatever purpose, with the maximum capability, while not being limited by business rules set by telecommunications providers nor short-sighted government regulation.

I just received the last pitch email for this conference, so I want to pass along that after tonight, registration cost goes way up. So if you want to experience this stimulating and thought-provoking event in person, sign up today. They will have major WiFi capability, and a live chat online and on screen powered by 37 Signals CamfireNow.com, as well as a webcast for those who wish to simply watch remotely. (But then you also miss out on the truly killer networking that happens there as well.)

The names of the speakers this year are as good as ever, including Susan Crawford, Brad Templeton, Micah Sifry, Tim Wu, Bruce Schneier, Danny O'Brien, Gigi Sohn, Clay Shirky, and many others. As was the case last year, Howard Levy will provide the musical background to program breaks, this year accompanied by Chris Siebold. Should be fun AND informative.

Social Media Presentation at Digital Velocity

2008-03-26T00:00:00.001-04:00

On March 4, 2008, in New York City, I gave a presentation at the American Business Media conference DIGITAL VELOCITY 2008: Real Experts, Real Applications, Real Time. Here is the combined PowerPoint of my entire panel – Engaging Your Community in a Web 2.0 World (warning - large PDF download).

In my talk, I described social media efforts at edweek.org, including both community features that we are adding to our site, as well as Web 2.0 features that integrate our content more completely with the Web at large. Here is my favorite slide, which attempts to depict the feedback loop created by the social media "conversation":O'Reilly to the rescue (reprise) - the O'Reilly Digital Media Center page "Mac OS X Screenshot Secrets" helped me out when I was creating this presentation on the road, and it comes in handy again helping me to grab my favorite slide from the same presentation and save it as a GIF. Thank you O'Reilly!

Finally, in the Winter/Spring of endless conferences, I just returned from the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, and next week I attend David Isenberg's Freedom to Connect a mile from my house at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring MD. Look for blog posts covering each of these as soon as I can get them together.

Colbert Report on Protect America Act

2008-03-17T11:32:00.001-04:00

Stephen Colbert once again hits the nail on the head regarding the power of telecommunications companies. This time, he skewers their request for retroactive immunity from prosecution for illegally wiretapping an unknown number of Americans in the aftermath of 9/11.

The House Democratic leadership must stand firm on their commitment to leave this clause out of the renewal of the Protect America Act. This would set a bad precedent, by essentially letting the administration and telcos off the hook for widespread disregard of privacy rights. If we give up our rights in the name of security, we've lost the war on terror.

It looks like they are holding fast for now. Read more on FISA.

SEO Resources, Events, Consultants, Blogs, Etc.

2008-03-16T23:30:00.003-04:00

At edweek.org, we're fixin' to crank up our Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts, a roughly biennial effort, but always worthwhile, because best practices are always improving, and the search engines we're targeting also continually tweak their algorithms to prevent gaming and other distortions.

There are many blogs and other information resources available, often totally free (sometimes with a pay "premium" level of service as well). Anybody who understands the basics behind search engines, as well as concepts such as information architecture, taxonomy, and maybe a little semantic web, can get a good head start simply by consulting free resources and applying a handful of best practices to their site. One principle to keep in mind, though, is that applying SEO to a web site should not distort the presentation of information to make it less understandable by humans in the service of search engines — rather, you should only make changes that enable readers to understand and find information more easily as well.

A. Information Resources — the best news, tools, and information services, some free, some paid, and sometimes with consulting services also offered:

1. In 1996, Danny Sullivan founded the granddaddy of information services that track search engines, SearchEngineWatch.com. He sold it in 1997, but remained associated with it and the related conference series Search Engine Strategies, until 2006, through a couple more mergers and sales that left him with less of a stake in its success. It is still a major resource in the space, along with the affiliated interactive marketing service ClickZ.

2. Danny Sullivan has since started a new company, Third Door Media, which I believe has quickly become the premier resource, and certainly contains the most vibrant communities, in this space.

First there is the blog and information service Search Engine Land.
Then there is the growing series of SMX — Search Marketing Expo conferences.
It offers Search Marketing Now, a series of free webcasts and webinars.
And finally it operates Sphinn.com, a social news/discussion site for search engine marketers.

3. SEOmoz.org, founded by Rand Fishkin in 1994, provides many free and paid services. They have a daily blog and member blog; and publish more detailed articles (both free and paid/PRO), and provide an extensive set tools for free. Their PRO Membership includes more tools and more features in free tools, a dashboard, premium guides and paid articles. They also provide high-end consulting services.

4. Search Engine Roundtable is a group blog featuring forum leaders from many leading SEM forums around the web, a search engine that searches these selected forums in the aggregate, as well as its own Search Engine Roundtable Forums where anyone can contribute. The primary editors are Barry Schwartz and Tamar Weinberg of RustyBrick, a web design and SEO consultancy based in NYC. Their blog posts are very informative, but the forums covered seem slightly dated (Danny Sullivan is still listed with SearchEngineWatch, and his newer Sphinn forums are nowhere to be found.)

5. Check out this list of seven SEO News Aggregators from TopRank Online Marketing, who also maintain the much larger BIGLIST of SEM and SEO blogs

6. Then there's the mostly-paid SearchEngineNews.com service from Planet Ocean. The few select articles available for free are presented mostly to pitch the paid subscription service; I don't know what's behind the paid curtain, but other people at edweek.org have obtained useful information from this service.

B. Consulting Firms — firms that provide consulting, perhaps conferences, and some free information mostly to support their services business:

1. BusinessOnLine specializes in SEO, usability, and web strategy. Managing Partner Aaron Kahlow also chairs the Online Marketing Summit — I've seen him speak several times, and worked with him on social networks devoted to online marketing. I also attended a class on SEO taught by Ray "Catfish" Comstock, their Search Engine Optimization Manager — his fascinating lecture at a VisualSciences conference drove many of the changes we have made over the past couple years, giving us a great start that we're now looking to build upon.

2. Enquiro, founded by Gord Hotchikiss, specializes in B2B SEM/SEO, as well as testing/usability. They are located in British Columbia, and are said to be remarkably smart, easy to work with, passionate, and reasonably priced; they also publish articles, blogs, and case studies.

3. I've also seen Gary Angel, President and CTO of SEMPhonic, speak at a VisualSciences conference, and was suitably impressed. SEMPhonic offers various services related to Web analytics and SEM, and publish articles and blogs demonstrating their expertise, and describing their methodology known as Functionalism. They also sell a product to automate SEM tracking, and host conferences on analytics.

As with lists like this that attempt to be comprehensive, I will likely update this post from time to time; I will either repost it, or post an update notice with a link. I hope you find this helpful.

We Media Miami

2008-03-10T11:24:00.010-04:00

Two weeks ago I attended a pretty cool conference, We Media Miami, with Craig Stone, a colleague from work. There were plenty of interesting sessions, including preplanned large and small breakout sessions, and a closing unconference, but most importantly, there were also many good opportunities for networking. This meeting serves a relatively small group, maybe a couple hundred, but included senior executives from almost every major news media outlet in the US, as well as interesting thinkers in the fields of web technology, social media, social entrepreneurship, the future of media, and future in general.

At the final plenary session, they demonstrated a cool new technology (embedded below) which enables very interactive slide shows that appear like panoramas, courtesy of VUVOX - check their site for more examples. See this and more on the main We Media Miami page a smörgåsbord of event coverage via a dizzying array of social media windows and widgets, such as live on-site blogging and twitter hash tags I tweeted with.

The conference agenda included several panel sessions which were quite interesting, as well as an incomprehensible sidetrack into the area of medical informatics taking up a large chunk in the middle of day one. Highlights among the programmed presentations included: The Power to Change the World, and break-outs Search World, Nonprofit World and News World — I'm sure I missed as many good presentations as I caught.

Following the pre-set agenda was a self-organizing unconference, during which I attended two very interesting sessions - a presentation on the social cloud and OpenSocial by Google Developer Advocate Kevin Marks. The slides are great, but it's a big download; email me if you want the link. That was followed by NewsTrust salon, in which they first described the system (which is like a social bookmarking/tagging site with a serious news criticism component). We then spent several minutes dissecting and reviewing one article as a team on their site.

Finally, the networking opportunities were brilliant as usual, as I was able to connect with folks I was looking to meet, who were looking to meet me, or who just turned out to be cool people. The first night, Craig and I met Mark Blafkin from the Association for Competitive Technology, who travels in some of the same policy circles I do. Then as the conference progressed, I ran into David Cohn, whom I had known through NewAssignment.net; only later did I realize he also worked for NewsTrust. I later met Susan Mernit – recently of Yahoo! Personals, Blogher blogger, and connection via various social networks – who had pinged me on Facebook to meet. Finally, for lunch on the last day, I met Carlen Lea Lesser — who had connected with me via the conference social network. She was looking for insights and information about the education marketplace (arguably my domain, coming from Edweek), and could offer some expertise in social media metrics and ROI - my current obsession. A win-win.