Plenty of public media types here already. Most of the WGBH staff it seems. Nice wander around Harvard Square and Harvard Yard with Andy Ihnatko. Quick coffee with Dan Gillmor. Good dinner talk with Jamie Boyle, Susie Lindsey, Peter Armstrong, and others. Back to hotel. Much of the talk will be about community involvement. A lot on measures and rewards, like trust ratings, from others in a community plus behavior rewards from the software scheme ala eBay, Slashdot, and the like. Perhaps too much of the capital side of social capital being focused on in fact. Are all social interactions measurable so quickly and in quantifiable terms? Likely not. More tomorrow at the conference I’m sure.
Month: May 2006 (Page 4 of 5)
Peter Denning and Robert Dunham have an intriguing article in the May 2006 issue of Communications of the ACM, “Innovation as Language Action.” Getting to the conclusion, which is not entirely fair to the authors, we find these points:
- Innovation occurs when a group or community adopts a new practice
- Invention and innovation are different skill sets
- The language action framework helped identify seven practices that constitute the innovation set
They are briefly:- Sensing possiblities
- Envisioning new realities
- Offering new outcomes
- Executing plans and actions
- Adopting new practice
- Sustaining integration
- Leading
- Anyone can lean the innovation skill by mastering the seven practices.
RSS feeds can be your friend or your enemy or your downfall. I’ll let you decide on this one. I saw a posting on the music blog at the News and Observer asking who the 5th Beastie Boy is — according to the Beasties. I remembered that when they bought/stole/borrowed a lot of Billy Joel for “Pass the Mic” that Mark D said famously that Billy Joel is the 5th Beastie. The curse and blessing of being a geek who’s hooked on intellectual property issues. I sent that in.
Now I am a winner (or a loser) of this!
Carrboro just declared a project and put up a website and businesses that wanted to play set their WiFi ids as the same and presto they had a nice little ad hoc network, but Chapel Hill is all grown up and stuff so we’ll have meetings. Here’s the info about the first big one:
Community Forum on Municipal Wireless Services
———————————————————————-
The Chapel Hill Town Council invites you to participate in exploring the issues surrounding establishing free or low-cost wireless Internet services. We will discuss a range of opportunities and challenges surrounding the deployment of broadband-wireless services and establishing municipal-area networks. Please join the conversation.
When: 7 – 9 p.m. Thursday, May 18
Where: Chapel Hill Town Hall 405 Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Moderator: Dr. Shannon Howle Schelin, Center for Public Technology, UNC-Chapel Hill School of Government
Presenters:
Casey Lide, Baller Herbst Law Group, Washington, D.C.
Lynda Goff, WinstonNet, Winston-Salem, N.C.
Ray Reitz, Chapel Hill-Carrboro Public Schools
Chad Johnston, The Peoples Channel
Questions or Comments?
You are invited to participate by attending the forum at Chapel Hill Town Hall, or by watching live coverage on Government Cable 18.
Call in questions during the forum at 968-2888 ext. 368 or email tio@townofchapelhill.org
[links later – 2 o’clock meeting]
Tim Halle writes to tell us all that registration for Beyond Broadcast will close TODAY! There will be no on-site registration. Soooo if you’ve been thinking about going, get on over and registrate.
On related fronts, the Birds of a Feather dinner that I’m hosting at Cambridge Commons on Friday night is also filled and have a waiting list. Other fine dinners are still available tho.
Mark sends these images of Khartoum via Skype. It looks like Mars there.
The Warren Wilson alum are discussing tales of good mothers. Phil Boiarski suggests revisiting the classic “I Remember Mama”, the movie based on the book “Mama’s Bank Account.”
If we are going back in time to those days of yesteryear, we could look at how some mothers were portrayed in media. say African-American mothers in the dreadedly racist Amos and Andy — but beloved by blacks and whites as Henry Louis Gates notes in “Colored People” — where the Kingfish is in constant fear of not only the wrath of his wife Sapphire but even more the wrath of the Momma. See also this update of the classic as a piece of theater
Less far back in time, the lovely and talented Skeletor returns from a blind date to confront his parents including his talkative mother in this remix of the non-human cartoon on YouTube.
Then there is Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. Much to be mined there. Perhaps too much.
But my favorite mother is that of Grendel. now there’s one mother!
Brian Risk, musician composer and rap star, writes to let us know that tonight the It’s Carrboro video will be shown for the first time at the Flicker Film Festival. Details in his note below:
Spread the word!? Tonight @ the Cat’s Cradle the It’s Carrboro video will be shown for the first time!? It will be in conjunction with the Flicker Film Festival, so bring $3.? Doors are at 8PM; show is 8:30PM.
Note: Brian fesses that because Flicker is about film and digital doesn’t quite count there that It’s Carrboro will likely run after the festival films have been screened.
I’m doing an online chat on iBlogCom tomorrow a 3 EDT with Sudha Jamthe. We’ll be talking about “Participatory Media Communities” and whatever else comes up. They have a good description of what’s up on their site at the link above.
Please join us this Tuesday, May 9, at noon Pacific Time (3 PMEastern Time) at http://iblogcom.blogspot.com/
When you arrive at that blog, click on the diamond on right to join the chat. It will be green when the chat is open.
You can savor my poor typing and spelling in real time there ;->
Last night my collegue Gary Marchionini pulled a great trick. He set up a blind BBQ taste test. He purchased Q and brought sauce from two different, but very good, BBQ joints. One that cooked in the Western or Lexington style and one that cooked in Eastern (or that found near Wilson). I was sure that BBQ A which was moist, rich, chunky, smoke flavored and lean was from my favorite local Allen and Son. The sauce for A was of the thicker Western variety but didn’t overwhelm the Q. Q B however was dry, not as rich, not as smokey (in fact I suspected that it was cooked over gas instead of coals) , and a bit fatty. Sauce B while of the vinegar and pepper variety was hot and took over the taste of the Q. Bare, that is sauceless, Q B was good but not as good as Q A in the same state. Gary had already abandoned the idea of using his surveys when those of us who take Q seriously were chewing over the results. Many of the experienced Q eaters prefered A over B. Our Aussie collegues liked B.
To my surprise, Q A was from the A and M Grill in Mebane. Q B was from Allen and Son. I had always thought of myself as more of an Eastern style Q eater and then as a snob for Allen’s slow cooking over hot hickory coals.
Even though the News and Observer’s Greg Cox doesn’t much like it, I had a conversion experience and hope to follow up with a trip up to Mebane to check out the A and M Grill in person.
Here’s what I’m up for in the scheduled portion of the Berkman Center’s Beyond Broadcast conference on Friday:
Panel II: What the emerging participatory web media services are doing
* This is a panel of ‘web-only media’- emergent participatory and social media entrepreneurs. This is a vibrant and growing field with new entrants seemingly coming ever day. From Our Media to YouTube, Odeo to BrightCove, Conversations Network to Global Voices – people are using new media to facilitate citizen participation not just through text and blogging but now with digital audio and video. Is this the future of public media? What are the opportunities for cross-pollination with public broadcasting? What is the nature of this ‘third zone’ of media that is not quite commercial or noncommercial, public or mainstream?
Panelists include; Lynne D. Johnson (videoblogger), Bill Gannon (Yahoo!), Paul Jones (ibiblio).
Moderator: Peter Armstrong
I’ll be up in Cambridge MA at the end of the week for the Berkman Center’s Beyond Broadcast conference. If you’re going to be there, let me know and consider signing up for the Birds of a Feather Dinner Discussions.
The one with me as convener is:
“What technologies and practices will define the next media revolutions?”
Some of this discussion will come from the discussionn by the panels, but other ideas might not have had time to gestate and will need to be made clearer in discussion with others who are passionate and imaginative. Not just tech. Not ideas without tech. But the interaction of personal, social and technical. But what? Bring your opinions and your guesses and your visions
* Cambridge Common – 1667 Massachusetts Ave. and Lizard Lounge
Some interesting folks have already signed up, so’s we’ll have a great discussion I’m sure. I want to learn more about dotSub and about SecondLife’s future thinking (for example).
UPDATE: All the seats at my table are now filled up. There is still room on the waiting list tho and on other BoF dinners.
Tidbits include:
Editors are more assertive and have more influence on the business side today, while publishers are interfering less with news coverage.
72 percent of newspapers have an anonymous source policy, and 54 percent have recently revamped their policy. 81 percent of anonymous sources are used when there is a ‘clear and overriding public interest in information that cannot be obtained in any other way.’
16 percent increase of female editors since 1982.
Blogs are becoming more influential in newsrooms and editors are much more willing to experiment.
There is little indication that the drive for profit has led to a general decline in ethical standards.
Fred Stutzman has been on a West Coast tour from Canada to San Jose. He writes a bit about his trip on his blog, but I want to point you in particular to his talk at the Googleplex on FaceBook.
Issue Number 1 of Chapel Hill Magazine showed up in the mailbox uninvited but not unappreciated today.
I was immediately confused. The cover is not of Chapel Hill but of Carrboro (“Where it is always 1 degree cooler” says Ron Stutz who is profiled in the magazine). Those who have lived here and those who have only heard “It’s Carrboro” will identify the Weave and the hula hoopers right away.
Flipping to the cover article “15 Ways to Love Your Summer” or “A Summer Place: It’s hot, but it’s cool” — the article is not sure of its own title — the confusion continues. Of the 15 wonders, only 5 and a half are in Chapel Hill. The rest are in Carrboro and in Hillsborough. All of the special days are shared by those two towns — no special summer days are in Chapel Hill it seems.
Note to Chapel Hill Magazine: the Carrboro Poetry Festival has been cancelled this year according to the link you provided and the Festival site.
No wonder people are confused about where they live if even the town magazine isn’t sure what is what. It is possible to have a Chapel Hill mailing address, have kids in Chapel Hill High School, and to live not in Chapel Hill or in Carrboro but in the planning area for Carrboro (meaning you will be annexed by Carrboro one day but for the moment you pay no Chapel Hill or Carrboro taxes).
The Magazine is published in Chapel Hill. Its offices are on Market St in Southern Village where Weaver Street Market, a Carrboro company, has an outpost which we call Market Street Weaver. When Carrboro High opens in 2007, the kids in Southern Village will go there. The Southern Village homeowners are paying Chapel Hill taxes. The tower for WCOM, Carrboro’s community radio station, is there not far from the Magazine’s offices. In fact, you get better reception in Southern Village than in parts of Carrboro. Market Street is just about as close to Carrboro Town Hall (3.4 mi or about 6 mins) as it is to Chapel Hill Town Hall (3.1 mi or about 6 mins) according to Google Maps.
Luckily for the Magazine, confusing Hillsborough is much more difficult.
Nasdijj can’t stop being other people and making up new stories about himself — and Equire can’t stop buying them.
At least once burned News and Observer Book Page editor, Pater Zane is bitter and confused by Equire, but Equire keeps on the Nasdijj stories as if in an odd uncritical puppy love with him (them?).
Sitting in a School of Information and Library Science faculty meeting at the EPA. We just had a tour of the greenness of the building complex here by Ben Scaggs. A number of nice features that are both cost effective and green such as connecting buildings by atria. The carpet is all Interface carpet (just like we have at home in our house)
Rick Smith sends this report from comscore about world-wide Internet use.
Among the interesting findings is that
[Of] the top 15 countries ranked by average hours spent online per visitor for March 2006, as a measure of engagement[,] Israel led the list, with the average user spending 57.5 hours online during the month — twice as much time compared to the average person in the U.S., which did not rank in the top 15 countries. Rounding out the top 5 were Finland, South Korea, the Netherlands and Taiwan — all countries with high broadband penetration.
Failure to pursue a national policy on broadband access has cost the US much of our lead in world-wide Internet services. A variety of nation policy directions in the top 5 countries (and in China) has created economic and social benefits to their citizens.
On other findings, MSN, Google and Yahoo! lead in both unique access and in page views. MSN being first in accesses. Yahoo! leading in page views. Google is second in both categories. But Wikipedia has shown the greatest growth in both areas.
comscore’s site version of the press release “694 Million People Currently Use the Internet Worldwide According To comScore Networks” is on their site.
I wrote about the self-heating coffee from Wolfgang Puck back in December 2004. Now there is a recall on that product. According to BevNet, here is some discussion whether the problems are problems with the can technology or with the financial situation of the company selling the coffee.
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