Wrapping up BlogHer 2008 from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Here's a quick video interview I did with Jory Des Jardins, co-founder of BlogHer, on Saturday night as the fourth annual women bloggers' conference was ending. Jory talks about some of the highlights of the gathering, which drew about 1,100 attendees.

The lighting at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco is poor, so apologies for the subpar lighting here.

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At the Future of Civic Media conference at the MIT Media Lab in June, one of the best presentations came from the co-creator of ManyEyes. Here's a 7-minute video interview I did with Fernanda B. Viegas, research staff member of IBM's Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge, following her talk.

Fernanda describes some of uses of this visualization tool. For example, during the Congressional testimony of then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a visualization Word Map graphically showed how often he used the phrases "I don't know" and "I don't recall."

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Here's a dataset I just uploaded to ManyEyes on civic engagement and mobile media. You can see it as a tag cloud, as a word tree, or in other ways.

I met Cie Probst, a fellow resident of Pleasanton, Calif., just a week ago, when she came by to pick up a rocking chair I was giving away — for use on the set of The Music Man.

Then I swung by for a few minutes yesterday as her group of young actors were putting on their final performance of the musical. (The clip contains a short singing scene from the show.)

Cie talks about the nonprofit Tri-Valley Young Performers Academy, which she founded a year ago with another mom and two directors. In this 7-minute video on the set of The Music Man, she talks about "the magic of performing arts" and watching the development of young people — in terms of social skills, not just acting ability — in such a short period of time. The academy is a wonderful addition to the San Francisco East Bay's cultural scene.

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I've been under the gun with the upcoming relaunch of Ourmedia.org so I have a backlog of video interviews to get online. Here's the first one:

At the annual NetSquared conference for nonprofits and social change organizations in San Jose in May, I interviewed Michael Litz, CEO of the US edition of OneWorld.net. In this 4-minute interview, Michael talks about the mission of OneWorld, its global scope, the kinds of organizations that participate, its growing role as a citizen media news aggregator, and its plan to implement social networking capabilities.

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In this 5-minute hi-def interview, Sarah Austin talks about her popular new pop culture site, Pop17.com, which launched in February. It chiefly focuses on Web sensations — grassroots efforts that make a splash — without the trashy, celeb-worshipping aspects of TMZ.com or Perez Hilton.

I'll be working with her as part of the Intel Insiders program at Intel headquarters in San Jose, Calif.

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At the first meeting of Intel Insiders at Intel HQ in San Jose the other day, I finally had the chance to meet Justine Ezarik, better known by her online handle, iJustine. She gained instant Internet fame (she now has thousands of friends on Facebook and Twitter) when she began "lifecasting" her life 24/7. Yep, wore a webcam, just like Justin Kan of justin.tv. She has no regrets (turned her into an Internet celebrity) but wouldn't do it again.

In this brief 4-minute video she talks about the downsides of total transparency, and about her upcoming new Internet TV show, The Really Big Internet Show. Here's a recent announcement about the show with another photo of Justine. For more, read her blog at Tastyblogsnack.

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Sean Tanner, research director of MAPLight.org, talks about how the organization provides transparency to the political donations system through widgets that tap into pubic information databases. We spoke at the NetSquared conference in San Jose, Calif., in May 2008, where MAPLight won top honors last year.

Here's the current Presidential Money Race Widget, one of several widgets you can customize:

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Here's an 11-minute video interview I conducted with Nicholas Reville, co-founder and executive director of the Participatory Culture Foundation, maker of Miro at getmiro.com.

Miro's a cool application that lets you watch and subscribe to millions of channels of content created by us (any video with an RSS feed, for example). You can browse through more than 4,000 channels in its directory listing. I've been using Miro for almost two years now (free, open source, what's not to like?).

I interviewed Nick as the NetSquared conference in May in San Jose, Calif., was winding down, which accounts for the distracting noises in the background. (Apologies for the lighting; the aperture kept closing and opening due to a bright object in the distance. Live and learn.)

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Dania Gerhardt, co-founder and chief of finance and operations for Amazee.com, discusses "the world's first social collaboration platform." Her company, based in Zurich, Switzerland, launched 10 months ago and the platform went public in May 2008. She discusses Amazee in this 7-minute video interview conducted during Supernova 2008 in San Francisco two weeks ago. I'll definitely be following Amazee's progress in the months ahead, since I'm working on a couple of other media collaboration ventures right now.

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I liked the quality of the video, helped my natural lighting and fill lighting from an LP-Micro Litepanel, so i encoded it at 800 bps and at 480 pixels wide. (We're working on a new embed player, but see it at its original size and in its original format at Ourmedia.)

Leah Culver on Pownce from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

At Supernova last week I caught up with Leah Culver about her way-cool file-sharing tool, called Pownce (at pownce.com). It's a way for friends and co-workers to simply share their digital stuff in a social network environment.

As it happens, Pownce celebrates its one-year birthday — today! I can't make it, but the Pownce birthday party is in San Francisco tonight.

When I interviewed Leah, I got a tweet from  Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, telling Leah thanks for posing for the magazine's July-August cover. It's now out, with a cover story on social networks.

Social Networking Is Not a Business.* Web 2.0--the dream of the user-built, user-centered, user-run Internet--has delivered on just about every promise except profit. Will its most prominent example, social networking, ever make any money?

Here's our 6-minute interview on Vimeo.

The Internet Archive seems to be having issues, so the version on Ourmedia won't play right now.

And here is a Flickr set of Leah taken from the interview with my Canon HV20 hi-def camcorder.

Here's a 5-minute video interview I did with Hayden Black, the mastermind behind the Internet video comedies Goodnight Burbank and Abigail’s X-Rated Teen Diary. He also stars in both series.

Hayden also offers some tips for anyone who wants to produce webisodes or just a simple series of videos. We spoke at poolside at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel during the Digital Hollywood conference last month.

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Interestingly, Kara Swisher of All Things D and the Wall Street Journal just did a similar 7-minute video interview with Hayden (though I suspect Kara uses a small video production team to put these up). Contrast and compare (the audio turned out a bit better on mine):

At the NetSquared conference for nonprofits in San Jose on May 27-28, one of the most intriguing projects I heard about was Social Actions, a project to tie together disparate cause movements through an open API that would aggregate information about dozens of different campaigns and allow users to take action to further a cause. "Our mission is to put actions in front of people who are most likely to take part," Peter told me.

It's an ambitious undertaking, and one that ties in with the new direction Ourmedia.org will be taking shortly.

At lunchtime I pulled aside Peter Deitz, founder and project lead, and we spoke on Cisco's campus about where the project is today and where his team will be taking it. (He lives in Montreal; his team is scattered across the U.S.)

Alas, I was paying too much attention to the funky lighting and so didn't do a sound check with the SC HMX10 hi-def camcorder that Samsung graciously loaned me, and I'm embarrassed by the choppy sound quality. The wind was whipping around something fierce.

I need to buy a lavalier mic (aka lapel or tie pin microphone). Any recommendations?

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One of the people I had the best time bonding with on our Innovation Israel trip to Tel Aviv in April was tech journalist Sarah Lacy. Sarah has a new book out: Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good, a narrative-driven look at the rise, fall and resurrection of Silicon Valley's startup culture, from Mark Andreessen to Mark Zuckerberg.

In this 11-minute video interview conducted on a windy beach in Tel Aviv, Sarah talks about startup CEOs and her phenomenal access to get some insidery info about the people driving the Web 2.0 revolution.

This is also the first time I've used the video sharing site Vimeo, which is aiming for producers creating higher-quality works. I liked the experience.

Watch video (in H.264) on Ourmedia
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Watch video in Flash on Vimeo (they do a better job of transcoding; their embedded Flash player is above)

At the Digital Hollywood conference last month I appeared on a panel with Jessica Steel, vice president of business development for Pandora, and afterward she spent a few minutes talking about how Pandora's music recommendation system works.

Pandora is my favorite music site (Last.fm is another), and they're constantly serving up artists that I hadn't heard of and now like. It's all about personalized radio and serendipity.

Here's our 5-minute conversation:

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In this 8-minute video interview I conducted Wednesday at the NetSquared conference -- notice the venue: Cisco, not a media company -- founder-CEO Michael Schnuerle discusses Louisville-based YourMapper.com, a young startup that hopes to make a business in part by helping the public gain public access to public records. The company has already licensed its mapping technology to at least one news publication.

Central to YourMapper's plan is an open API, which can prove incredibly powerful when paired with the proper datasets. Schneurle even waged a months-long battle with Kentucky officials wielding only the Freedom of Information Act before the state attorney general came down on his side.

As I said in my new post at the IdeaLab, it's time to give the public true access to public records. Oddly, that rarely happens now, with media organizations playing a gatekeeper role and releasing stories through the editorial process -- but rarely releasing the raw data itself.

News organizations ought to create their own open APIs that give users access to public records in their communities. And this is the important twist: Instead of just making the data available internally, for its staff to analyze and reinterpret, news publications ought to bring readers and users into such efforts.

As I said in Tuesday's post, this is all about enlisting users in a collaborative effort to tap into rich sources of information about what's happening in local communities. Political contributions, birth records, neighborhood crime, housing sales -- data is cool and interesting when interpreted and presented in an engaging way.

Call it data jockey crowdsourcing. I'll wager we'll see scores of such efforts in the coming years.

At the NetSquared conference in San Jose this week I met Ephrat Bitton, founder of iCare, a new peer-to-peer initiative that enables people to offer material donations for disaster relief. iCare pairs donors & victims in the aftermath of a disaster.

Here's a 3-minute video, conducted with my Nokia N95 cell phone, of Ephrat outlining iCare's mission:

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Here's a 9-minute video interview I conducted a couple of hours ago with Marnie Webb, co-CEO of TechSoup and NetSquared, at the close of the third annual NetSquared conference in the conference center at Cisco in San Jose, Calif. (This year's theme was "remixing the web for social change." Here are links to the sessions and attendees, and here are the 21 featured projects voted on by the community out of hundreds of nominees.)

Marnie talks about the kinds of community and corporate contributions to these groups that NetSquared and TechSoup (160 employees) help enable. NetSquared has become a huge event in the nonprofit and social change communities, drawing dozens of speakers and 400 participants over 2 1/2 days.

My partner at Ourmedia.org and I will be meeting with management of TechSoup in the coming days to discuss how we might be able to collaborate.

Apologies for the noise in some parts of the interview.

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I have a big backlog of videos I need to get up soon. Here's a video I took on my Nokia N95 cell phone of tech entrepreneur Jeff Pulver during our blogger/citizen journalism tour of Israel in April. Jeff threw a breakfast at the start of the Marker conference showing off elements of social media -- such as tagging -- taking place in the real world, and says in this two-minute video that he plans to patent the method. Jeff's tech breakfasts have become a must-attend event.

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Here's a 6-minute video interview with AJ Tesler, founder of the Independent Television Festival, that we did poolside at Digital Hollywood earlier this month. The Independent Television Festival is a showcase for independent producers who produce video for the Web or television.

The deadline for this year's festival is Wednesday, so get those nominations in!

Here's a quick video I did today with Prof. Edward Felten of Princeton University (famed for his opposition to black box voting) about the Future of News conference I'm attending (speaking tomorrow). He also mentions his new Center for Information Technology Policy. The video was conducted with my Nokia N95 cell phone.

Ourmedia page

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

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

Watch MPEG-4 video | Ourmedia page

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I've been doing an informal series of video interviews with people about the issues on their minds during this pivotal election year. Recently I caught up with Kate Aishton, a resident of Washington, DC, who's a staffer at the Aspen Institute's Communications & Society Program.

Kate talked about the lack of representation in Congress for residents of DC. Here's our 2-minute video interview:

Watch video in MPEG-4 | Ourmedia page
Flash version on Internet Archive

Here's a 5-minute video interview with Mircalla Wozniak and Katie Muehlenkamp. co-founders of Good O' Girls, a poliitcal, professional and social network for women in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Watch MPEG-4 video | Ourmedia page
Flash version on Internet Archive

Cross-posted to SocialMedia.biz.

Here's a 3-minute video interview I conducted with Joaquin Alvarado, director of the Institute for Next Generation Internet at San Francisco State University, on mobile technology and education, following a conference organized by the Aspen Institute on mobile technology and civic engagement.

Watch MPEG-4 video | Ourmedia page
Flash version on Internet Archive
Flash version on Blip.tv