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

Open Source Makes a Splash at NECC

2009-07-28T20:00:00.001-04:00

(This is a longer, unedited version of a my blog post "Open Source on the Agenda," which appeared earlier this month on Education Week's Digital Education blog.)

Open source technology displayed a growing presence at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) 2009. The Open Source Lab held popular sessions throughout the conference, while the Open Source Playground showcased various technologies and organizations – serving as a mini exhibit floor for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement. Nearby, NECC Unplugged held free-form sessions, and the Bloggers Café was a hub of spontaneous creativity. While still dwarfed by the exhibition floor downstairs, these features attracted sell-out audiences and an increasingly large and passionate fan base among NECC attendees.

Presentations and handouts touted numerous open source alternatives to traditional software, the best collected in a handout listing the Top 10 Free and Open Source Software in Education. Two speakers stood out among the many presenters who may be familiar to Digital Education readers:

Steve Hargadon of Elluminate, CoSN, and Classroom 2.0, and organizer of open source and EduBloggerCon events at NECC 2009, presented tirelessly on educational applications for open source software, social networks, and Web 2.0.
Award-winning Georgia educator and entrepreneur Vicki Davis gave presentations on educational use of wikis and social bookmarking groups, among other topics.

Ubuntu Linux was represented in both the Lab and the Playground, with a clustered distribution running 60 thin client workstations setup by Revolution Linux. Revolution’s Educational Services Director, Benoit St-Andre, led a session on avoiding common pitfalls of open source software deployments. He later told me of much larger thin client deployments they have carried out in school districts of up to 10,000 workstations and 40,000 students (which save both hardware and power costs). Local Ubuntu users group volunteers also highlighted for me custom distributions; such as the Netbook Remix (designed for small screens) and Edubuntu, which is targeted specifically at education users. The Wikipedia article on Ubuntu contains much more detail on the history and versions of this breakthrough version of Linux.

Curriki was well represented at NECC as well. Blogger and evangelist Anna Batchelder gave an NECC Unplugged talk on open education resources, covering Curriki and other offerings such as MIT OpenCourseWare, FreeReading, Connexions, and OER Commons — the latter can be searched directly from our Teacher Magazine home page. Executive Director Dr. Barbara “Bobbi” Kurshan touted the value and cost savings Curriki makes possible at a breakfast meeting that also featured Chicago Public Schools technology administrators outlining how open source infrastructure helped them leverage E-Rate funds to enjoy $1 million per year in network operations cost savings.

The other major “exhibitor” at the Open Source Playground was One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and its operating software, the affiliated Sugar Learning Platform. The OLPC project experienced a rocky start, featuring a slower-than-expected adoption and a very public split between the hardware and software projects, but has made strides recently in Latin America. I spoke with the exhibit’s organizer, Mike Lee, manager of the DC-based OLPC Learning Club and a director of the team that operates AARP.org. Mike told me about OLPCorps Africa, an effort to spread 100 teams of volunteers across the continent to deploy at least 100 laptops per team; blog aggregator Planet OLPC provides news updates on this and related efforts. While the OLPC project isn’t officially directed at the United States, there are volunteer projects in cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, and Chicago featuring significant deployments, and local high school students are involved in Mike’s Sugar Labs DC project team as well. One Laptop Per Child really represents a disruptive technology in the truest sense — essentially inspiring from scratch the creation of an entirely new category of computers, known as netbooks, that is becoming increasingly popular and influential.

Speaking at Online Marketing Summit Thursday

2009-05-12T17:17:00.000-04:00

I’m speaking at the Online Marketing Summit this Thursday, May 14, at the Key Bridge Marriott in Arlington, Virginia (Metro: Rosslyn). I'll be talking about online community/social media strategy and ROI, as well as touching on general web strategy for media organizations.

I'm appearing on the Big Brands, Big Plans Panel, along with some really sharp people — from the likes of AARP, Smartbrief, and the National Defense University. Other speakers throughout the day hail from BusinessOnine, Clearspring, Google, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), Kodak, ReturnPath, and SilverPop. Check out the complete agenda for the DC tour stop.

The Online Marketing Summit Regional Whistle Stop Tour also marks the introduction of the Online Marketing Certification Program, which is offered by OMS sister organization the Online Marketing Institute. I'm hoping to earn my certification shortly.

This year they are employing several social media outreach avenues for the first time, starting with the Online Marketing for Marketers blog that was rolled out in the wake of last year's tour. I have written a few posts, and plan to add one about this week's panel today or tomorrow.

They also have presence on numerous social media platforms:

and there will likely be even more. It will be interesting to watch this collection of organizations and projects continue to develop over coming months and years.

The Future of News & the Knight Commission

2009-05-08T23:00:00.002-04:00

I've been working on this post for a couple months, and it keeps getting longer and longer, so here goes - the Future of News:

In February, Walter Isaacson kicked off a flurry of commentary on the state of the news business with a provocative article in Time Magazine – How to Save Your Newspaper – which asserts that news media must start to charge for content to survive, and that micropayments a-la Apple's iTunes store offer significant promise. That month I saw David Bollier speak about his book Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. As he discussed the sharing economy of the Internet, he spent some time looking at the difficulties that the news business is having dealing with these new realities. Bollier also mentioned micropayments as a possible tool, but was more excited by a public model for funding that wouldn't threaten journalistic independence, but rather could be modeled on the early days of newspaper home delivery, which was subsidized by the Post Office.

Bollier referred to a recent article by Eric Alterman in the Nation "Save the News, Not the Newspapers," the writing of NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen, and the local citizen journalism project Spot.Us. The concept of micropayments also came up in an interesting Yi-Tan conference call I listened to that week on the Future of News — featuring Mitch Ratcliffe, Dan Gillmor, and Liza Boyd, whose blog is also titled The Future of News. Spot.Us founder David Cohn also stopped by for part of the call.

These were followed by the March release of the annual report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, State of the News Media 2009. It outlines economic trends that are rapidly worsening for traditional news media, while the adoption of online news offered by both traditional news operations as well as a growing variety of alternative sources continues to accelerate. This offers both challenges and opportunities for traditional journalistic entities to move as quickly as possible to migrate to the web and embrace new possibilities offered by interactive multimedia and participatory interfaces.

Later that month came two eye-opening pieces. Clay Shirky wrote "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable," which pretty much shredded the business-as-usual, digital version of what we were doing before solutions tried by newspapers to date. Dan Conover on the blog Xark wrote 2020 vision: What's next for news, which contained numerous provocative ideas for what's in store for journalism over the next several years. Along the same lines this month, CPSR colleague Andy Oram blogged about how we might obtain the important contributions we receive from journalism – expertise, diversity, and debate – without relying on the institutions that provide it today. A fascinating (and long) article in Vanity Fair details how the current publisher of the New York Times has made several strategic blunders recently, and thus the Times finds itself in more financial trouble than it might — in spite of publishing one of the best newspapers, with one of the best web sites, in the world.

At the April meeting of the Newspaper Association of America in San Diego, AP Chairman Dean Singleton declared war on news aggregators and search engines. Responses were fast and furious, from the likes of Jeff Jarvis and Danny Sullivan. Taking the side of the newspapers, Michael Moran wrote No Such Thing as Free News in the Nation. I saw a Tweet from Jay Rosen at the conference, asking what readers thought of a proposal that Google favor articles of "real newspapers" in search results. I say newspapers should liberally link to each other to boost their SEO, rather than Google favoring any content over any other.

Given the level of the crisis in the newspaper industry, and various proposals for government policy to assist newspapers, it was inevitable that Congress would get involved, first with House hearings in April, then with Senate hearings this week. Forbes has a nice summary of six proposals offered to the Senate explaining how they might save the newspaper business.

In my previous post, I explained how the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy seeks comment through today on the draft introduction to its report. I'm an informal adviser to the commission staff, and in my comments I say that I like a lot of what they see as possibilities for new funding models (public and/or nonprofit) and organizational structures, but there is too little about embracing alternatives to traditional journalism, about enabling citizens to take advantage of access to tools and data transparency, and of new forms of civic discourse springing up, enabled by new technologies. I believe that we need to figure out ways to help some version of the existing journalistic enterprise survive and adapt, but also encourage the development of these alternatives — only by pursuing both tracks to we hope to deliver the most information possible to enable communities to effectively govern themselves and prosper into the future.

Knight Commission Invites Public Input on Community Information Needs

2009-05-05T14:15:00.000-04:00

(I'm part of an informal advisory committee helping the staff of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy by providing ideas and feedback, and spreading the word about this public input period. I'll be blogging about this report and the future of news in general later this week, but please check out the draft introduction and provide your input as well. -PH)

What information do Americans need to accomplish the personal goals and to be effective citizens in our democracy? How are they getting their news and information? And what would they do to improve the quality of news and information available to them?

The Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy (www.knightcomm.org) has been conducting the first major study in the digital age to identify the information needs of communities in a democracy, assess how and whether those needs are being met, and recommend steps to improve the fulfillment of those needs.

Now the Commission, in partnership with PBS Engage, is seeking public input from citizens across the nation from Tuesday April 21 – Friday May 8, 2009 at www.pbs.org/publicinput. The site offers an interactive experience and includes a preliminary draft of the introduction to the Commission’s report, survey questions for the public to answer, highlight videos from some of the public forums and meetings held by the Commission, blogs about the Commission’s work, and a forum for citizens to express their thoughts and opinions.

During the public input period, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, and Co-Chair of the Commission, will answer citizens’ questions about the Commission’s work via Google Moderator, which enables participants to both submit and vote on questions they think should be answered

The Commission’s upcoming final report will include recommendations for achieving the news and information environment that democratic communities need in order to thrive. The Commission launched in June 2008 with an aggressive agenda to assess the information needs of citizens from a variety of different types of communities in order to make concrete recommendations to public policy makers about improving local information flow. The free flow of news and information in communities is essential to effective democracy. With the digital age transforming media worldwide, reducing traditional journalism in a number of communities, the Commission is focused on how Americans will get the news and information they need to make informed decisions for themselves and for their communities.

Over the past year the Commission held seven public forums and meetings in communities across the nation and heard from more than 100 speakers, including community organizers, educators, journalists from old and new media, labor leaders, technology engineers and strategists, entrepreneurs, futurists, public officials, policy analysts, economic consultants and community foundation representatives. The Commission has also received significant input from an informal advisory network of journalists, academics, and people involved in policy and community work.

The Knight Commission, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, operates out of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program in Washington, D.C. It includes seventeen respected representatives of journalism, communities and public policy with diverse perspectives, including Co-Chairs Mayer and Theodore B. Olson, Partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and former U.S. Solicitor General, and ex-officio members Alberto Ibargüen and Walter Isaacson, presidents respectively of Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute. The Commission’s executive director is Peter Shane, a law professor at The Ohio State University, who is advised by a committee of journalists, policymakers and academic experts from a variety of fields. For more information on the Knight Commission, visit www.knightcomm.org.

A project of the Aspen Institute and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation

Oxymorons Play Homeless Benefit Saturday May 2

2009-05-01T17:00:00.014-04:00

This Saturday, come see the Oxymorons AND help raise money for the homeless - at EagleFest 2009! We'll be raising cash for the Arlington/ Alexandria Coalition for the Homeless as well as the host Fraternal Order of Eagles in Old Town.

We'll also be drinking donated beer courtesy of Capitol City Brewing Company and munching on donated food, including Southside 815's amazing southern cuisine, as well as others from around the area. All the beers you can handle. Sorry kids, you must be 21 to enter.

Advanced tickets are $25 until April 30th, then it's $35 at the door.
Advance payments can be made via Paypal. (Payments will be directed to neil@Degeeked.com, one of the organizing eagles responsible for the event.)

The Eagles will also be raffling off $50 gift certificates donated by
businesses in the Alexandria area.

When:
Saturday, May 2, 2009
6:00pm - 10:00pm

Where:
Fraternal Order of Eagles
1015 Cameron St
Alexandria, VA
(View Map)

Sign up for our mailing list! See you Saturday! - The Oxymorons

Follow us on Twitter! Befriend us on Facebook or MySpace!

Continuing the theme of lastp-minute plugs, I have one more thing to share - please come out for the Hungry for Crawfish Boil next Saturday, May 9 from 1 to 5 PM at Fort Hunt Park. It's a benefit for music education charity Hungry for Music!

Viral Spiral: Digital Commons at New America

2009-02-25T22:29:00.009-05:00

Last Friday I checked out a talk by author David Bollier at the New America Foundation. Bollier is editor of OntheCommons.org, senior fellow at the USC Annenberg School of Communication's Norman Lear Center, and co-founder of Public Knowledge, my favorite free culture organization. He is promoting his new book, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. in which he lays out how the emergent "sharing economy" of the Internet creates content that increasingly competes with traditional media organizations.

He discussed creative commons (CC) licenses and how those have been successfully employed by author Cory Doctorow and the band Nine Inch Nails. Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was the first book published under a CC license, and he attributes the success of his career to freely sharing his work in this way. Nine Inch Nails released their latest album "The Slip" for free on the Internet before it's physical release, and it remains free alongside web communities allowing fans to share remixes and videos . Later they proceeded to sell millions of dollars worth of CDs, DVDs and vinyl records, without the help of a traditional record label, thus keeping a much greater percentage of the proceeds in the process.

Bollier also discussed the concepts of Open Education Resources, such as MIT OpenCourseWare, and the Science Commons project - both of which endeavor to make formerly exclusive learning and knowledge resources more open and accessible. There was a little discussion of issues with conflicting forms of free/open/sharing licenses, but on the other hand, Science Commons takes advantage of a novel approach to trademark law to loosen the copyright of scientific articles and publications. His book is freely available online as well.

Next Sascha Meinrath of the New America Wireless Futures Program and Open Technology Initiative, presented his new paper, Rise of the Intranet Era , where he describes a developing trend in local/community based, decentralized ad-hoc networks, which enable community participation and journalism, accessible access to the larger Internet, and an array of other services.

Finally, moderator Michael Calabrese, Director of the Wireless Future Program, led a wide-ranging discussion, covering challenges involved in rationalizing various different open license structures, as well as threats and opportunities presented to traditional journalism by new community news initiatives. An interesting thread concerned how community participation influenced politics. Mark Cooper of the Consumer Federation of America offered an interesting take, suggesting that the Obama campaign successfully utilized organized viral participation, in contrast with the barely-controlled anarchy of the Howard Dean campaign four years earlier — which had an impact but proved ultimately unsuccessful.

More details, video, audio, photos, and sharing options.

Document the Vote 2008

2008-11-04T00:31:00.005-05:00

With so many questions raised about the results of recent Presidential elections, along with the charges of "voter fraud" and counter-charges of vote suppression, it's really true that "sunlight is the best disinfectant." Luckily, there are more, better funded and organized, efforts every election cycle to encourage, enable, and publicize the monitoring of the election process along with any potential issues with access to and accuracy of the act of voting.

First I'll highlight the multimedia efforts. Video the Vote was started in 2006 by video journalists and documentarians, who, after watching what they considered to be egregious examples of voter suppression and election irregularities during the 2000 and 2004 election, vowed to use video technology in a attempt to document such irregularities in future elections. This is the first Presidential election to be covered.

From a more purely journalistic perspective, the New York Times has launched a citizen journalism initiative called the Polling Place Photo Project. While less overtly aimed at ensuring fair elections, this project nonetheless encourages more openness, and thus potentially exposes or deters acts that infringe on the exercise of the democratic process.

One of the coolest social media efforts going on is the Twitter Vote Report. Check out this short video tutorial, and report to twitter anything you observe regarding vote supression, long waits, problems you observe at polling places, etc. Use the Twitter hashtag #votereport and your tweet will be aggregated into their data collection system, with results displayed in real time and aggregated on a map and in a database. Follow this effort on Twitter.

In the typical everyone-pitches-in volunteer wiki fashion, another effort is the Voter Suppression Wiki, spearheaded by a small team of volunteers, hooked into and publicizing all the more organized efforts while providing the dedicated social media volunteers a place to pitch in.

One other new project I want to mention is Who Voted, which endeavors to show which registered voters actually cast their votes, providing another data point for analyzing elections retrospectively. Unfortunately only four states are tracked so far — for a variety of reasons, including the cost or availability of these records. This site was just launched by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) and funded by Google's Summer of Code program.

Finally, be sure to check out Our Vote Live to follow the election protection efforts tracked by all of these efforts and through people calling the universal 1-800-OUR-VOTE election protection hotline. It will be updated throughout the day (and the entire election season, as long as necessary), and you can follow up-to-the-minute reports on the Our Vote Live Blog. The site was set up by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) for the Election Protection Coalition. Follow them on Twitter too.

Edweek.org Sponsors Teachers College Debate, Produces Election Multimedia

2008-10-25T09:00:00.003-04:00

The web site I manage, edweek.org, cosponsored and facilitated the live Webcast of a debate Tuesday evening at Teachers College between the top education policy advisers to the Presidential campaigns — Linda Darling-Hammond, an adviser for Sen. Barack Obama, and Lisa Graham Keegan, Sen. John McCain's top education adviser. Education Week also organized a post-debate panel discussion featuring an array of education policy experts and moderated by Education Week reporter David Hoff, which we videotaped for later viewing.

In addition to the complete debate and panel discussion, we created several clips of discussions on policy issues of interest to our readers, and posted them to related blog. Our Teacher Beat blog discussed teacher preparation and motivation in At Ed Debate, Sparks Fly Over Merit Pay, TFA, and the Campaign K-12 blog posted their impressions of Keegan's and Darling-Hammond's answers to the question Who's Going to Be Education Secretary?. Finally, our producers performed a word cloud analysis of the debate text – In a Word, 'Teachers' Are Center of Debate – described in the blog NCLB Act II.

Elsewhere, our web team created a cool online trivia game – How Well Do you Know the Presidential Candidates? – where you try to guess which candidate uttered various statements about education policy. Also included is a Voter's Guide comparing and contrasting McCain and Obama's positions on various education policy issues. We've collected these features and more on our new Campaign 2008 Multimedia and Interactive Coverage page, along with running Twitter streams displaying "Tweets" about the campaign in general (we're Twittering as @edweek2008elect), and specifically about the Teachers College debate — we created the hashtag #tcdebate for the purpose, which actually spent much of Tuesday evening atop Twitter's Hot Election Topics. These presentations have enhanced our coverage of the election campaign, and exposed our work to new audiences.

Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty

2008-10-15T20:30:00.000-04:00

Today is Blog Action Day 2008, and the topic of action today is Poverty. Since I personally use the web for my activism and other forms of social action, I'll try to convey some ways that you can do the same.

Blog Action Day 2008 Poverty from Blog Action Day on Vimeo.

First, there are two extremely easy ways to do a little bit to help eliminate poverty. The Hunger Site donates the proceeds of site advertising to charities that fight hunger in the U.S. and internationally. There is also a store where you can buy cool gifts and donate to fight hunger, and there are related sites that donate to child health and literacy, two other causes that impact poverty around the world. A similarly easy (but addictive) initiative to combat hunger is Free Rice, a game that rewards correct answers in vocabulary, geography, and other subjects with a gift of 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program.

If you want to give more directly to initiatives that help poor people improve their lot, there are many online charities that accept donations. Two of my favorite are also partnering with Blog Action Day. Kiva is the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world; track your donations to Blog Action Day here.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria is accepting donations through Blog Action Day partner Change.org. I have an account on that social action network, which is in the midst of a facelift, but I see a lot of energy being expended there and all over the net today, raising awareness and money in support of ending poverty.

Finally, the Blog Action Day site is full of ideas, including answers to the question "What can one person do?" Let's all try to do something today and into the future to end hunger, improve sanitation, fight disease, and everything else necessary to fight poverty around the globe.

ONA08 Day Two - Tina Brown, Semantic Web

2008-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00

The main sessions of the Online News Association 2008 Annual Conference were held September 12 (my birthday:) and September 13. First up was a keynote address by Tina Brown. Some may have wondered why Tina Brown – former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and author of a book on Princess Di – was speaking at an online news event, but she made it plain to see, offering an interesting take on what's missing in the online news space, and announcing her latest venture. This month she launched the Daily Beast, a news aggregation service that features content selected by 20 or so live editors, rather than utilizing automation to pick stories — offering content designed to appeal to "the news junkie who wants a speedy scan of the zeitgeist.” She was coy about details, but opened up a little more to Jeff Jarvis the night before. Not the most insightful talk, but it was interesting to hear the perspective of an old-school magazine type trying to navigate the waters of Web 2.0.

The first session I attended was a presentation by Marik Bide, project director of the Automated Content Access protocol (ACAP), a new European initiative that would provide the ability for news stories and other content to specify what uses are permitted. It's aimed particularly at search engines, but as Jeff Jarvis pointed out, seems to violate the basic tenets of the "link economy" that enable the Web to thrive. He was even harder on ACAP in his conference wrap-up, also directing criticism at ONA for emphasizing old-school news and its approach to the web rather than actively seeking our new types of news organizations and companies. Even though I work for an old-school newspaper, I've worked in the web and online space much longer, and I can see where he's coming from to a point. However, there were exceptions to his critique.

The next panel I attended, The Next New Metrics, tried to divine coming trends in audience measurement, beyond the page view. The most interesting presenter was Matt Cutler of Visible Measures, which specializes in measuring the consumption and distribution of Internet video; he stated emphatically that advertisers want more video – it consistently commands the highest CPMs and sells out inventory – so our charge is to create more video content, and presumably the money will follow.

Finally, I watched presentations of a couple interesting new developments in the Semantic Web space, first from Tom Tague of OpenCalais, a tool from Thompson/Reuters that enables automated tagging of content with rich semantic information — more semantic, but less of a "wow" application, at least yet, and available for free to all users. Then we heard from Tristan Harris of Apture, which gives publishers the ability to quickly link key concepts or details in their stories with a variety of multimedia and background information, all without leaving the page — less purely semantic, but with a more immediate payoff. This tool is available for free to bloggers and nonprofit publishers.

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.