Just winding up a good and long visit with Dan Gillmor. Not only was it great to meet Dan and to spend time with him, but I also managed to catch up with some old friends and to meet some new neighbors and to get a peek inside the experiment at creating and maintaining an online town square at the News and Record.
I’ll be spending most of today catching up with the work that I set off to the side while spending the good time with Dan and others. But that is a a small cost.
The folks that work at ibiblio really made the whole, occassionally complex, visit a delight by digging in and helping out often above and beyond the call and by being creative and smart about it all.
We should have Dan’s talk online shortly and the bloggers con as well.
Dan’s ideas about how to help organize citizen journalists and how to make news more of a conversation are world-changing, but built on close observation and exerience reporting on technologies in Silicon Valley.
Category: Information Commons (Page 24 of 26)
Information Commons, Copyright, Censorship and/or withdrawal of public information, Libraries: Digital and other
It all came off rather well despite having grown to over 5 times the size of attendance that we had originally anticipated. Good discussions. Good behavior. Good people meeting good people. Props to Anton for getting this going and making it happen. Props to Fred for being on top of the wireless access and much more. Props to Jen O’Bryan who made it possible for us to know each other’s names and sites. Props to TJ and John for taping the event. Special thanks to Ed Cone and to Dan Gillmor for leading discussions. Thanks to the folks at lulu.com for providing the drinks and donuts.
What was it like? There is a nice collection of live-blog postings on the conference wiki. If you have notes, pictures and/or live blog entries, please add yourself.
I’m learning what went on from the wiki myself. When you are in the middle of things, you don’t get to pay the attention that you’d like to –especially if you are me and the laptop that you brought ends up being the one projected for folks to see the blogs in question and then it starts dropping the wireless at random intervals –grrr. my ancient T-book needs to be traded in.
Sally Greene took some pictures.
First here’s what Murphey Hall looks like from the outside and what the room for the conference looks like. You enter from the middle of the building and go behind the Ashcroft-offending status. Do not show these statues on televisions during the Super Bowl. Dave Winer is here blocking David so that he will be decent for viewing.
Anton reports news coverage on WCHL, this morning in Chapel Hill Herald. I did brief interviews for the Daily Tar Heel and for WUNC. Blogomania continues.
Jen O’Bryan is printing name tags based on the sign-ups on the wiki, so sign up or look like a luzer with a hand written tag tomorrow.
Nice story in the Chapel Hill Herald about the Triangle Bloggers Convention tomorrow! Arrgh! We need signage and more. But all will be great in time. The room is very high tech and very nice. Power outlets are built into every seat. The place is covered by a wireless mesh. There are cameras. There are projectors. There are cushioned seats. This is uptown.
Lulu.com is bringing coffee and pastries. Don’t bring them in the auditorium tho.
Dave Winer writes that he will be in Chapel Hill Friday thru Sunday of the Triangle Bloggers Convention. That’s tomorrow for the Friday and the day after for the TriBlogCon.
Dave’s organizing a Sunday brunch at Crooks.
Dave also writes that his talk at the News and Record will be podcast thanks to Brian Russell.
Larry Lessig writes that he will be portrayed by actor Christopher Lloyd tonight on West Wing.
The West Wing site describes the show like this:
THE WAKE UP CALL
9pm 2005-02-09 ALL NEW!IRAN SHOOTS DOWN PASSENGER JET AND IGNITES CRIES FOR RETALIATION; ROGER REES, CHRISTOPHER LLOYD GUEST-STAR —
On Valentine’s Day, an Iranian fighter jet accidentally shoots down a British passenger plane — killing 100 people — but C.J. (Allison Janney) is reluctant to awaken the President (Martin Sheen) even as the hawkish British prime minister considers bombing Iran’s nuclear reactors in retaliation. After learning that the passenger jet was mistaken for a U.S. spy plane, Bartlet calls in British ambassador Lord John Marbury (guest star Roger Rees, “Cheers”), as they debate whether a strike is the perfect excuse to wipe out the atomic sites or if it will set back reform movements in the rogue nation. Elsewhere: Abby (Stockard Channing) and C.J. war over the President’s schedule for rest; Toby (Richard Schiff) and a legal professor (guest star Christopher Lloyd, “Taxi”) try to pound out a new democratic constitution with representatives of Belarus — and everyone keeps dodging the traditional White House appointment with Miss Universe. TV-PG
A friend writes that he is tired of old recordings he made and digitized sounding like crap. The problem is that they were digitized using early versions of RealAudio when doing any sound at all that you could receive over dial-up was a welcome accomplishment. Now we expect more. Much more. At least MP3.
But so many of us, including collections on ibiblio, went straight to .ra files that much of that information will be lost soon as technology improves and our demands for quality increase.
Saving sounds and pictures in proprietary formats like .ra wasn’t brilliant but it seemed the only way at the time.
In the Internet Poetry Archive, we have rare readings by Czeslaw Milosz and Margaret Walker for example. You will hear them in .ra, but I have tapes hidden here in a safe place. But not safe enough. They need to be in an atmospherically controlled archive. A few more years and the tapes will be sticky.
While I’m at it: Does anyone know a a way to migrate from .ra to any other format? I know the quality will be terrible, but to have the sound at all would be great.
One idea is to take the audio out from a computer playing the .ra and route it into the audio in of another computer capturing the audio.
The upcoming Triangle Bloggers Conference has grown far beyond what we originally invisioned. And this is a good thing. The new room in Murphey Hall (aka the Classics Department where you are greeted on entering by Ashcroft offending statues) is one of the best small auditoria on campus. If you had been in 166 Murphey before the renovation, you will not recognize the room now. It’s a padded seat odium full of techno-magic.
The good folks at Bob Young’s new company, lulu.com, are bringing the coffee and pastries.
George Morgan of the Bull’s Head will have plenty of Dan Gillmor’s books to be signed and sold.
We have very very good folks signed up including, Dave Winer, John Robinson, Ed Cone, Ruby Sinreich and more.
Please come to any or all events and please repost as appropriate. Also if you or folks you know would like to help out, please contact me, Paul Jones (jones at unc.edu) and/or Anton Zuiker (anton at zuiker.com)
The Triangle Bloggers Conference has grown to nearly 100 registered participants including representatives from local and regional presses.
Three Blogger Events are coming your way in the next week. Triangle Bloggers Conference in Murphey Hall (Saturday 2/12), Dan Gillmor talk in Carroll Hall (Monday 2/14) and in Greensboro Dave Winer at the News and Record (Wednesday 2/9). Details and links below.
Triangle Bloggers Conference
Saturday, February 12
9 a.m. – noon:30 (and beyond) Murphey Hall 116
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Learn more
Dan Gillmor public talk
We the Media: Grassroots Journalism for the People, by the People
Monday February 14, 3:30
Freedom Forum Conference Center
Carroll Hall, UNC
Learn more
Dave Winer, community journalism discussion
Wednesday February 9, 7 p.m.
200 East Market St., Greensboro
Learn more
One of the joys of working with the Folkstreams Project, in which we are digitizing nearly 40 documentaries shot mostly in the mid to late 20th century, is that I get to watch and listen to a lot of wonderful music and stories that I have managed to mostly miss out on or only pay scant attention to.
Right now, as I’ve cleaning up some smaller tasks and getting ready for a doctor’s appointment, I’m listening and watching “Jumpin’ in the Garden of Eden” about the rebirth of klezmer music in the USA. Shot in 1987, the film focuses on two bands major to the klezmer revival, Kapelye and Boston’s Klezmer Conservatory Band.
Everyone in the lab is excited about the Firefox tweeks as described at TweekFactor. I’ve had my Fox themed for sometime, but I am thinking of adding a few of the enhancements mentioned there. Thanks to Fred and Adi.
Microsoft announced their long anticipated Google Killer today. Announced as Beta, the search’s has several small innovations — you get to search your desktop and Encarta from the same bar the way on Google you can search for text, images and news (which you can also do on MSN Search).
I ran a little search, singing of myself as Walt would, for paul jones (no quotes). Below are the results.
Paul Jones | MSN Search | Yahoo | |
web | 14,288,684 (0.19 seconds) | 14,700,000 (0.21 seconds) | 9,510,000 (0.08 sec) |
news | 1,982 (0.10 seconds) | 8,010 (0.34 seconds) | 6,822 |
images | 840 (0.68 seconds) | 16,000 (0.08 seconds) | 13,069 (0.08 sec) |
encarta | 150 (0.01 seconds) | ||
groups | 677,000 (0.23 seconds) | ||
froogle/products | 7,590 confirmed / 223,000 total results (0.19 seconds) | 1,424 | |
video (test) | 110 (0.02 seconds) | 44 (0.32 sec) |
I’m all reved up to head out to San Diego in a little over a month to go to O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference. I lined up all my various discounts and got Tim to swear to his staff that I’m a faculty member so’s I don’t have to go through the hassle of faxing a bunch of verifications. (Thanks Tim I wasn’t really asking for that but I appreciate it). I got lined up to visit with Cory and with Tim and was chatting with Doc on AIM as I was trying to register at the Westin Hotel where the block of rooms for the conference was supposedly being held til February 18. The big word in the previous sentence is “supposedly.” I got back a message saying the block of rooms was entirely taken! Must be a broken reservation program, says I. I tell Doc who opens another AIM with Sara W of O’Reilly. Who tells us sure enough the conference is filling up fast and the hotel filled even faster!
There is no room for me or for Doc or for anyone registering after today. The good O’Reilly folks were surprised too and promise to have a list of alternative hotels on the website tomorrow.
The question is less whether I’ll be booked in a dive, but whether where ever I stay will have wireless, broadband, or any net.connections. Anyone familiar with the Horton Plaza area in San Diego? Or the Gas Light area?
Lulu.com, Bob Young‘s latest venture, has agreed to supply coffee and morning eats for the Triangle Bloggers Conference upcoming on February 12th. Thanks to Stephen Fraser for working on this from the Lulu end.
Just back from the Scholarly Communications Convocation. A whole day in one building is no fun, but the discussion which followed the lines that I am intensely interested in — open access, new ways of looking at copyright, service to the citizens, digital repositories and digital curation — made it all worthwhile.
Jeff Pomerantz, who was one of the conference organizers, has a summary at his blog. Not sure I agree with everything Jeff says tho ;->
Other SILS folks were very involved. Dean Griffiths as a reporter on the institutional repository session which was facilitated by Gary Marchionini. Much of the discussion involved Helen Tibbo’s ideas about digital curation. Brad Hemminger was there to talk about his experience with digital dissertations and his NeoRef project.
The whole of the faculty was well represented with good folks from many disciplines. Almost all expressed exasperation with commercialization of scholarly publishing and in particular with Reed-Elservier. This should be no surprise, but the extent of the exasperation was much greater than I had thought.
Additionally people seemed genuinely interested in open access and in the Creative Commons licenses in particular. The Science Commons was less well-known but since it was announced officially this month that’s to be expected. The overall good news is that the Commons idea seems to have broad support.
The need for an institutional repository was also widely recognized as a common need and a common good. Moreover the idea of digital curation was easily accepted as an obvious important step.
ibiblio got some very nice attention and props from folks like Vin Stephanitis, Lollie Gasaway, Judith Wagner and others there.
Let’s hope all these good things become action items.
Unfortunately there is a history of hollerin’ and not really acting that goes back over 20 years. Henry H. Barschall published a study called “The Cost-Effectiveness of Physics Journals” in Physics Today’s July 1988 issue (page 56) in which he showed that not-for-profit journals were consistantly a better economic bargin than commercial ones. This resulted in Barschall being sued by Gordon & Breach in a series of lawsuits in the U.S., German, Swiss, and French courts in an attempt to chill the discussion and to discredit him.
A decade later, the US courts finally found in his favor. But Barschall had died 6 months earlier in February 1997.
The University of Wisconsin conducted a 1998 study using Barschall’s methods and found them still to be true.
By the measures employed here, commercially published journals in all three fields [physics, economics, neuroscience] are significantly less cost-effective than journals published by not-for-profit enterprises.
References:
Among the meetings in yesterday’s meeting-rich day was a send off for Larry Alford who is on his way to Philly. It was wonderful and touching — as is Larry — and made sad only by the feelings of hope and pride combined with a feeling of loss.
The evening began a discussion of Scholarly Publishing at UNC which was in turn kicked off by a talk from CNI‘s Cliff Lynch. We (John, Fred, and Megan) taped the talk and will have it available on ibiblio for streaming in the Speakers section soon.
[more here after a full day of scholarly publishing discussion today]
Old friend, Brewster Kahle, did a recent talk at the Library of Congress which is now online. Brewster is exuberant and ready to digitize the entire Library of Congress using perhaps his 300 page per minute digitizing scanner which is already in use in Toronto. He’s also talking about the Internet Archive’s Bookmoblie which is a print on demand van. Cost per book from the van is about $1. Harvard says it costs $2 per book to loan it. So why not print from the van?
Brewster discusses the problem of books that are out of print but still covered by copyright. These constitute what he calls “orphan” books since you cannot access them in any way.
Brewster is exuberant about the tape-trading groups like eTree.org having offered his “unlimited disk space online forever” to them and to about 700 bands for concert tapes.
A bit about the Archive’s video/music collections and the bandwidth they require. Especially Rick Prellinger’s archive. Rick saw a 40% increase in sales and eventually sold his collection to the Library of Congress after giving away movies on the Archive. Brewster is excited about Lego movies too. Lectures etc.
This is Brewster at his very best. A lot to tell and he tells it well. Each visionary musing is tied to a real ongoing and possibly do-able project at a fairly large and international scale.
The series, which has a link to the talk, is called “Digital Future” will also feature Ed Ayers, Larry Lessig, Brian Cantwell-Smith and others.
Although the Yahoo! Video Search has gotten less press than the more limited Google Video Search, it’s different and better in many ways.
While Google has a very limited number of videos — all from recent Bay Area TV — indexed by transcripts, Yahoo! uses www page contexts and file names (ala Google Image Search) for their database. This means you get a huge collection to search. It also means that you can actually watch the video once you’ve discovered it. With Google, you only get images snapped at about 30 second intervals.
Frankly the two searches attack very different problems. Yahoo! is about resource discovery and not much about the content within the video at any level of granularity. Google is much more about mining the content within a video stream — but mostly by using closed captioning as a transcript (or so it seems).
You can submit your videos to either system. Yahoo! tells you to use RSS enclosures:
Enter the full URL, including the http:// prefix (for example, http://www.yahoo.com/mymedia.xml) of the RSS feed (either with Media RSS or RSS 2.0 enclosures) you would like to submit to Yahoo! Video Search. Dead feeds will be automatically detected and removed on an ongoing basis. For additional information about Media RSS feeds, see the Media RSS specification. Your RSS feed will be crawled soon. After your feed is crawled, please expect a delay before your content will appear in Video Search results
Very cool and very clued.
Google uses only a web-based form for inquiring about adding your collection.
A great benefit of being “Paul Jones” is that you can seek and find many of your name-twins’ videos. All these and more found using Yahoo!’s Video Search.
- Paul R Jones, a philanthropist and art collector in Delaware, has a nice introduction to his gift of art to the University of Delaware.
- The USS John Paul Jones is toured in a military video.
- Led Zep’s John Paul Jones is interviewed in 1972 kept at a Russian site.
- Paul Wine Jones plays some dirty blues to a poorly lit but appreciative crowd.
- Wrestler Paul Jones throws it down in a historic video (I would hate to have been Dusty Rhodes).
- Rodeo rider Paul Jones takes a dive (but that’s nothing to be ashamed of, we are told).
Google video search for Paul Jones returns nothing.
ibiblio will host author, journalist and blogger Dan Gillmor for a public talk on Valentine’s Day.
- Who: Dan Gillmor author of “We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People” (O’Reilly, 2004)
- When: 3:30 – 5 Monday February 14
- Where: Freedom Forum Conference Center, Third Floor, Carroll Hall, UNC
- How: Directions, Maps and more
- Why: Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media Inc., is working on a project to encourage and enable more citizen-based media. This weblog is devoted to the discussion of the issues facing grassroots journalism as it grows into an important force in society.
- Sponsors: MisterSugar.com, ibiblio.org, School of Journalism and Mass Communication
Google just made their video search engine available today. Even though the database is made up only of the past month’s offerings from ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-SPAN, it’s very impressive — and as of this morning very fast.
The results are an image and a snippet of the transcript for each hit.
Downsides include no final video results; you get a 5 image story board with text instead and a small very small database.
Google has a high overview description on the about pages.
The Help/FAQ pages also give you a lot of insight into the transcript-oriented search. Nice features like title: and channel:
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