Meanwhile, radio DJ and TV Personality Mo Twister also posted on his Twitter account that he will be doing interviews with star on Monday. For more updates, stay tuned on TV5 as they are the media partner for the event. …
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Rain spotted in Manila! Photos and Interview not allowed? « OH! KPOP
AP – The former television producer who tried to blackmail David Letterman was freed Thursday after four months in jail for a plot that put a spotlight on the comic icon’s office affairs, city Correction Department records show.
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Man in Letterman blackmail plot freed from NY jail
(AP)
AP – They wanted a law book to help them understand the jury instructions, and wondered why the judge wouldn’t give it to them. Bunched together, with the restroom so close, they got to know each other intimately. And the nonsmokers groused when the others were allowed a cigarette break.
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Ryan jurors know what Blagojevich jury is facing
(AP)
Recently, a discussion came up amongst organizers of PodcampCT about different sessions ideas and what makes for a good session. I’ve always felt that a good podcamp is one where everyone learns something. It is one where there are not sales pitches or presentations. Instead, everyone is an equal participant. Everyone is a rock star. One submission particularly caught the attention of a few people. Title: You Are The Media & The Message Summary: Whether you are an experienced social networker or just getting your first blog or podcast off the ground, you can be as influential as any media outlet in the state. Learn how to leverage “the brand of you” through various media, both new and old, to get whatever you want to get done from some media mavens who will share some secrets to help you to use the new trust agents to grow your tribes, make it stick and crush it. Various members of the organizing group felt that this sounded a bit like a sales pitch or presentation. It would probably be a winner on a social media buzz word bingo game card. It talked about ‘media mavens sharing secrets’. Others noted that the person who made the submission is very keen and progressive about social media, but that it did sound a bit like a presentation which might cause people to not attend, or to exercise the rule of two feet. For people not experienced in Podcamps, the rule of two feet is that if you are in a session that just isn’t doing it for you, you should use your two feet to walk out and find a session that fits your needs better. You will get more out of the sessions this way, and people in a session may have a better session than they would if people are resentfully sitting in the session. When I am at a session that smacks of a presentation, I check to see if there is a chance to turn it into a conversation, and lacking that, I use the rule of two feet. Yet actually, the session idea might not be as bad as it looks on first glance. If anything, it seemed to have the problem of combining many great potential session ideas. Key session ideas that I picked out of the one submission included: How to brand yourself. Participants will explore the idea of what it means to have a “personal brand”; why you might want one, and how you might establish one. Building audience and influence: Participants will share ideas about how to get more followers and readers, especially followers and readers that are most likely to act on and/or repeat messages sent out via social media. Citizen journalism: Participants will explore what it means to be a citizen journalist; how to cover stories that are being missed by others, how to get press credentials, how to tell the story in a way that people will be interested in. I also suggested an idea to encourage people to suggest sessions that are not presentations. It seems like a good idea submission form might include a question something like What do you hope to learn from this session? Every session should be one that everyone attending is hoping to learn something from. If there aren’t things you are hoping to learn from this session, then perhaps someone else should moderate it. That said, I also had a snarky suggestion: Title: How to avoid pitches and presentations at podcamp Summary: Podcamp is an opportunity to share ideas. Unfortunately, some people view it as an opportunity to make a sales pitch or presentation. They miss great opportunities to learn. This session will help participants recognize potential sales pitches and presentations to avoid, use the rule of two feet when they find themselves in such a session, and think about how they can promote sessions that will be meaningful discussions instead of presentations. Podcamps are wonderful chances to share ideas and learn new things about podcasting and social media. PodcampCT will take place in New Haven on October 16th. If you live in the Connecticut area, please consider attending. If you live further away, please check out the main Podcamp website to find a Podcamp near you.
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#pcct – What Makes for a Good Podcamp Session?
Reuters – Republicans and some moderate Democrats in the Senate on Wednesday began picking apart a new energy bill that they complained goes too far in holding oil companies responsible for accidents like the massive Gulf of Mexico spill.
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Senate energy bill draws widespread criticism
(Reuters)
Tuesday morning will see the second meeting of those interested in establishing a Social Web Task Force for the City of New Haven. I’ve written a little bit about this in #swct Social Media and Civic Involvement Redux and Embracing the Untaskforce, Social Media and Civic Involvement – #swct . Andre Yap wrote about this in The New Haven Project: 100 Common Visions in 100 Days and Brandon Jackson has written about this in New Haven 2.0 . Now, we need to start fleshing out what this really means. To some, this seems like a brave new idea. To me, it seems like a continuation of e-democracy work that has been done since the mid-nineties at sites like e-democracy.org . On an e-democracy mailing list the other day, I received an email about CityCamp . CityCamp is an “unconference” focused on innovation for municipal governments and community organizations. As an unconference, content for CityCamp is not programmed for a passive audience of participants. Instead, content is created and organized by participants and coordinated by facilitators and participants are expected to play an active role in sessions… The first CityCamp was held in Chicago, Illinois, 23-24 January, 2010. CityCamp is inspired by Transparency Camp and Gov 2.0 Camp. (For more information on GovCamp, check out my posts about Gov 2.0 Camp in Boston last March: #gov20ne pregame and New Government Meets New Media .) Yet CityCamps, Gov 2.0 Camps and related camps are often just for a day or two. Some interesting ideas and projects may spin off of them, but they are not ongoing efforts that make significant use of the social web to bring in people who are not already interested. This, I believe, is where the Social Web Task Force can innovate. How do we create a perpetual virtual CityCamp? It seems like there are two parts to this. One is the technology. Barcamps, which include CityCamp, Gov 2.0 Camp and so many other gatherings, often use Wiki’s for their organizing, in particular, PBWikis . It works very well for geeks and people who get online collaboration. It may be that a Wiki, either using PBWiki, or a hosted MediaWiki would be a good backbone for the Social Web Task Force. Often barcamps have their own websites frequently, they use WordPress for ease of use and attractive designs. Sometimes they use Drupal or other platforms that are better suited to collaboration but lose some of the ease of use or attractive designs as a trade-off. This includes the ability of members to form their own groups and to allow wiki style collaboration within these groups. Ning has also long been a favorite of people working on collaborative groups. Unfortunately, Ning is proprietary and has been going through difficulties as they attempt to find a revenue model that works. Elgg is an open source competitor to Ning, but I do not know of anyone using Elgg for barcamp related sites. (If people know of examples, please let me know, I’m very interested in seeing them.) This leads us to the other part of establishing a perpetual virtual CityCamp; community building. This includes reaching out to people that are already online using sites like Facebook or Twitter. It includes reaching out to organizations that already have established online presences, the way existing non-profit, advocacy or government organizations already have. It also includes reaching out to people that are not already using social media or already aware of various organizations’ existing websites. In addition, this needs to be an ongoing effort. So, how might a perpetual virtual CityCamp work? In a typical barcamp, participants arrive. The way barcamps work is explained. There is an initial session where ideas are presented, and then the time and place for different sessions based on these ideas are posted and people head off to the sessions. For a perpetual barcamp, there needs to be a constant introduction to how barcamps work for new people as they come along. The introduction could be a simple, fairly static page. The sessions need to be ongoing, and not just an hour in some breakout room. There needs to be the ability to continuously create new sessions. In many ways, this could be handled by a website that enables new groups to be created, such as with Drupal or Elgg. The question becomes, as more and more ideas get floated, how do newcomers find the sessions that are most interesting to them. Brandon suggested having some sort of voting mechanism. However, voting mechanisms are faulty in several ways. Perhaps the biggest problem is that too often online, people vote, and don’t get involved. What is necessary to make a perpetual virtual CityCamp work is a doacracy mentality. Votes don’t matter, actions do. On top of that, voting will tell new people what most of the people who bother to vote are interested in. It doesn’t help people find what they are interested in. To a certain extent, this could be handled if people saw vote totals based on how their friends are voting instead of how everyone is voting, and if there was a time decay on the voting. A vote three years ago by someone with diametrically opposed interests is of little value. A problem with this is that a newcomer often won’t have friends whose votes they trust. Related to this is the issue of moderation. To the extent that moderation keeps out spam, it is necessary. However, relying on what moderators think is most important has the same problem as relying on what the population as a whole thinks is most important. Instead, it needs to be made easy for visitors to find what they think is important. One final issue which Brandon brings up is how centralized a site needs to be. At a barcamp, there is the central location where people gather to determine which sessions are interesting. Important discussions take place in this central location. However, most of the barcamp takes place in breakout rooms away from the central room. In a virtual barcamp, these breakout rooms might more logically be in completely different virtual spaces. People may want to use an existing website belonging to a non-profit organization or a government website. This should be encouraged, while at the same time, providing the means for people to create their own virtual space as part of the perpetual virtual CityCamp website. In addition, for any session I am working with, I would want to have as many outreach options as possible, including Twitter, Facebook, as well as other more specific tools, such as SeeClickFix or Intelliblast. A good perpetual virtual CityCamp website should be a hub that people connect to and pass through, yet it should not try to be a be all and end all. It will be interesting to see what comes out of the New Haven Social Web Task Force meeting on Tuesday morning. If you have ideas to share, please let me know, and if you’re interested and in New Haven, please consider coming to City Hall at 9:30.
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#swforce A Perpetual Virtual CityCamp?
AP – Sam Adam Jr. made his name with a fire-and-brimstone style at Chicago’s grim, gritty Criminal Courts Building, where his decisive closing arguments once helped acquit R&B singer R. Kelly on child pornography charges.
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Ex-R.Kelly lawyer to deliver Blagojevich closing
(AP)
AP – Elderly Russian immigrants lined up to take kickbacks from the backroom of a Brooklyn clinic. Claims flooded in from Miami for HIV treatments that never occurred. One professional patient was named in nearly 4,000 false Medicare claims.
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94 charged in Medicare scams totaling $251M
(AP)
A long holiday weekend is a great time to consider staying in to create your own fireworks. For as much exhibitionist sexuality that floods our media sources, many couples are hard pressed to find the time and attention that a healthy and vital intimate life demands. The sad truth is that many people do not know how to have sex. We presume that it …
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Lighting the Spark: Making Your Own Fireworks
Television is the most popular device in the home, and with the addition of interactivity, it’s serving up the next wave of killer apps. Â New research conducted for FourthWall Media reveals that consumers are ready for their TV to do more, resulting in less reliance on their computers.
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TV’s Killer Apps: New FourthWall Media Research Predicts TV to Take Market Share From Online
AP – Tehran said Monday it had banned two U.N. nuclear inspectors from entering the country because they had leaked “false” information about Iran’s disputed nuclear program
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Iran bans 2 UN nuclear inspectors from entering
(AP)
#pcct #cttu #googlehaven Typically on Follow Fridays (#FF) I list people that I’ve been following. I try to tie them together into a theme; people I’ve met at some conference, people I know from some online group, and so on. This week, I’m doing things a little bit differently. I am focusing on hashtags. For those who don’t know what hashtags are, they are tags frequently used in Twitter that begin with the hash mark to get them to standout. #ff, #swct, #getitdone, #doacracy, #pcct, #cttu, and #googlehaven are all examples of hashtags. The theme is focused on Social Web Week Connectict, #swct . #swct is an event bigger than any of us, so my perspective on how it got started will be different from other people’s perspectives. It is also hard to say exactly when and where it really started. In my mind, it probably started at the New Haven Social Media Club in May. As we talked, I asked about how Social Media Club’s activities related to other social media activities in the state. I talked about the Tweet Crawls (#cttu) and the Podcamp (#pcct) plans. When it was decided to have the ShareAThon in July, we talked about trying to have a Tweet Crawl in July in New Haven as well. It turns out that Suzi Craig was already in talks with Bun at Miya’s Sushi about having a Tweet Crawl in New Haven in July and I wrote: Sounds like New Haven Social Media Week 2010 is starting to take shape. Will GoogleHaven, Ripple100, or other groups arrange events? I’ll see if there is the possibility of a Drupal Meetup sometime that week in New Haven A few days later there was ‘Twushi’, a gathering of Twitter aficionado’s at Miya’s Sushi. A few of us talked more about the idea of a Social Media week in New Haven. A few weeks later, the idea was discussed at a meeting of people in the Left to Right movement, #l2r, Andre Yap sent out an email inviting people to the swct Google Group, I set up a draft website, and things were well on their way. Here is where the genealogist in me takes over as I look at some of the ancestors of this. Social Media Club started in 2006 in San Francisco and has grown to chapters around the world. At one point, I received an email about a Social Media Club meeting in New Haven. I sent out a message that I would be attending, and about half a dozen of us gathered at a New Haven Restaurant. It turns out that the person who had initially set it up had a conflict and couldn’t attend. She had sent out a message saying the meeting was cancelled, but several of us didn’t get the message and we had a good meeting nonetheless. It was there that I met Amy Desmarais, who at the time still had a day job, but was working to help get Ripple100 launched. Another important ancestor of #swct is #googlehaven. Like #swct, #googlehaven has its own history, and my views will probably miss important aspects. I first heard about #googlehaven, the idea of bringing Google Fiber to New Haven from Jack Nork. I’m not sure how Jack and I originally connected. I believe it was via Twitter and we ended up deciding to meet in the Woodbridge Starbucks to talk about Twitter and other social media. Google is looking for a testbed to launch their fiber network, and municipalities around the country have put together proposals. Jack, together with Andre Yap of Ripple100 and others have done a great job in promoting #googlehaven. #googlehaven developed a life of its own. At one of the #googlehaven meetings I noted that there were many municipalities trying to get Google to chose them and I wanted to know what would happen to all the great #googlehaven energy after the application was completed and after the decision was made. This idea resonated and has fed into the #swct effort providing great energy. There is also the Tweet Crawls. I mentioned how Jack and I had met via Twitter and our talk at the Woodbridge Starbucks was, in many ways, a very small Tweetup. I’ve been to many Tweetups over the past years. Joe Cascio has done some great work in pulling Twitter Aficionados together. Later, Suzi Craig took this to a whole new level with monthly Tweet Crawls at different locations around Connecticut. Some of the people involved in Tweet Crawls also attended Podcamp Western Mass 2. At discussions at the end of that Podcamp and at subsequent Tweet Crawls, the idea of having a Podcamp in Connecticut was discussed and slowly emerged into a core group of people trying to organize PodcampCT. The first PodcampCT is now scheduled to take place in New Haven in October. The Podcamp planning, which overlaps nicely with the TweetCrawlers has been brought in as part of Social Web Week. At this point, I would like to dig back to the very early roots of Podcamp. Podcamp is a derivation of Barcamp, which was a response to Foocamp, and all of them are based on Open Space meetings dating back to Organizational Transformation meetings in the 1980s, about the same time that I first got on the Internet. As far as I know, the early OT meetings did not use the Internet, but Internet tools are very well suited to Open Space meetings. In this aspect, there are key ideas about barcamps, podcamps and related camps. Everyone is a rockstar. Whoever shows up are the right people to show up. Whatever are gets discussed are the right topics to be discussed. This fits nicely with Social Web Week. Somewhere along the way, a fleeting idea of New Haven Social Media Week has evolved. I don’t know the details of the evolution and it probably doesn’t matter. What does matter is that a great group of people have come together. They are people that #getitdone. They are connectors. They are people focused on a #doacracy approach to things. Organizational structure, meeting agendas and such only matter in so much as they help get things done, and if they get in the way of getting things done, they get passed over. What will Social Web Week CT turn out to be like? It is hard to tell. It has evolved a lot since the discussions over sushi and it still has several weeks to continue to evolve. Whatever it finally ends up looking like, #swct, and related efforts like #cttu, #pcct, #googlehaven, and related efforts are well worth following this Friday and throughout the coming days.
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#ff #swct #getitdone in a #doacracy
When you write a blog post or an article for some online site, how aware are you of your intended audience? It seems to be the sort of question that would lead to a great discussion on the weekly #blogchats on Twitter, the sort of question that various readers of this blog who are struggling with their own blogs grapple with, and was recently explored a little bit in Are Page Views Meaningless? and Journalists Won’t Report on News Unless it Drives Pageviews . Many people have many different reasons to write. There is the profit factor and the desire to be heard. The audiences vary considerably as well, depending on whether you are writing for friends and family, for a business, or as part of a news organization. Beneath all of this are the questions of how many readers do you have and how engaged are they. For individuals writing for family and friends this becomes a fairly simple issue. Do your friends know about your blog? Do they find it interesting and come back? For political bloggers, there is a different question. Are you preaching to the choir? Most political blogs I read end up writing in such a way that people who already agree will read and agree and people who don’t agree will simply skip over it. This may be useful in strengthening the bonds amongst people of similar political viewpoints, which may result in additional action by these people, but does little to expand the dialog and find new friends, ideas, or coalitions. Yet the biggest issue is for those who are seeking to monetize their writing, either through their blogs or by getting their articles read more frequently on the news sites they write for. The article about journalists being driven by page views quotes Sam Whitmore saying if you want to write a story on an interesting but obscure topic, you had better feed the beast by writing a second story about the iPad or Facebook or something else that delivers page views and good SEO. The article about page views questions whether writing for page views really makes sense. The author focuses on the effect tabbed browsing has on people’s reading habits. With billions of advertise impressions sold each month, more impressions coming, and more impressions selling at remnant prices or not being sold at all, trying to get a few more impressions may just be a losing strategy. As advertisers become more savvy in targeting advertising, it is important to attract demographics that will be interested in your content and to get people to link to your content. Ads targeting attractive demographics sell for much higher prices than remnant ad prices. The best way to do this is not to simply write about whatever the hot topic du jour is. In doing so, you are following the pack, and you are more likely to get lost in the pack. Instead, write about your interests, your passions. Step out where there isn’t a pack. If you write something good and compelling, you’ll get followers and lead a new pack. This will make your ads much more valuable than ads of random people in the large packs. Whether you are writing for profit or to be heard, you are more likely to be successful writing something special, something unique that will capture people’s interest than writing with the pack. Pack journalism is nothing new. It was around before the Internet, and will probably be here for years to come. I do not believe that the Internet will result in journalism becoming more pack following. Yes, some people may follow Sam Whitmore’s advice, and managed to continue scraping by as journalists. Others will follow their dreams and passions and write interesting copy that improve their lives and the lives of others. Every writer needs to choose how they approach their intended audience.
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Writing for An Audience
Tiger Woods spoke to the media for 30 boring minutes Tuesday, so at least his verbal game is back up to par heading into the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach Golf Links.
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Candid Cam: Tiger Woods up to his old tricks with reporters at U.S. Open
I recently read an email on a mailing list asking about “different ways of measuring blog readership/audience for a broad range of specific blogs”. There are lots of different ways of measuring blog readership and audience, depending on what you want to measure and what sort of access you can get to the statistics. There are various sites that gather data about websites, and the first few that were mentioned on the mailing lists were Quantcast, Compete and Google’s Adplanner. They have different means of gather data and as a result different levels of accuracy. Quantcast uses a pixel to gather data for participating sites and makes estimates for everyone else. For large sites and for participating smaller sites, I’ve always really liked Quantcasts reports. If you take a look at the Quantcast report for Orient Lodge you can find a lot out about my readership. They also provide very up to date data. Compete uses panels to gather data and do not seem to be quite as reliable as Quantcast. They use tracking code to gather audience profile information. However, they are pretty expensive to get to the interesting data. Here is the Compete site analytics for Orient Lodge . I haven’t played with Google Adplanner much, but they tap into data gather from Google Ads. If you authorize it, they supplement the data with Google Analytics data. They provide information about other sites that people visit. Here is the Google AdPlanner data for Orient Lodge . I hope to explore the affinity calculations in a later blog post. What was not mentioned in the list was Alexa. They’ve always seemed a bit random and while some people claim they are getting better, many people don’t trust their data. If you can get more direct access to a sites traffic data, either through Google Analytics or server statistics, you can get much more interesting information. What percentage of the traffic bounces, or visits one page and leaves without visiting other pages? For those that do stick around, how long do they stick around? Where are the readers coming from? What are they using for browsers? How did they find the site? Direct links? From where? Keyword searches? What keywords? This leads to the next question about what you are trying to measure anyway. I’ve often suggested that for my site, I’m not concerned with bounces. I want people to find what they are looking for on the first page they visit. If I were running an online store, I would be more concerned about bounces. I hope that people spend time reading and thinking about what I write, so for people that don’t bounce, I hope to have a high time on site. Related to this, people on the mailing list suggested that other metrics, such as the amount of engagement is what really matters. How often do people comment, link to the site, retweet messages about an article, save a page in a shared bookmarking service? RSS feed subscriptions were also mentioned as well as Feedburner and their email option. Personally, I haven’t used my RSS reader accounts in ages, although I’m still subscribed to hundreds of blogs. Messages on Facebook and Twitter get a much higher priority for me. So, why are we concerned about these metrics anyway? The biggest issue is probably advertising. Much of the focus has been on getting an increase in page views or impressions, so you can sell more impressions. This has raised a concern about journalists trying to write article that will get the most impressions. However, not all impressions are created equal. Writing more esoteric articles may result in fewer impressions that reach a much more desirable advertising demographic. Journalists writing simply to get the most impressions may end up doing themselves a disservice as more and more advertising inventory goes unbought or sold at remnant prices while high quality impressions from specific audiences become more valuable. There are a lot of different tools for measuring readership, and the best answer to which is best is that it depends on what you’re trying to measure, why you’re trying to measure and what sort of access to data you can get.
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Measuring Blog Traffic
In the never ending contest to be digitally hip, we have come to expect announcements out of San Francisco and sometimes Boston or Austin. This is where the innovators and early adopters reside. Yet it is foolish to overlook New York. New York might not be the hotbed of innovation that San Francisco is. Instead, it is a city that excels in promotion and commercialization of the great ideas that come out of San Francisco and beyond. Thursday morning provided another great example of this. New York City Media launched The City at Your Fingertips . At 11:15, the large Reuters Screen in Time Square began showing a series of QR Codes. “Quick Response” or QR Codes are nothing new. They are two dimensional barcodes introduced in Japan in 1994. They have been used to share data, send text messages and access websites. One of my favorite examples of the wise use of a QR code is taxi stands in Japan where a passenger can scan a QR code with her cellphone which will automatically send a text message to the dispatcher requesting a pickup. They provide great opportunities for people to create hyperlinks in the real world. Just put a QR Code up at your business to make it easier for customers to follow your company on Twitter or like your business on Facebook. Unfortunately, we’ve had a little bit of a chicken and egg problem with QR codes. Not many people have downloaded QR Code Readers for their cellphones; there just aren’t enough QR codes to scan. Companies have been reluctant to start using QR codes because there just aren’t enough people with QR Code Readers on their smartphones. New York City Media, by placing QR Codes in a prominent place in Times Square has the potential to jumpstart the adoption of QR Codes. It is the sort of thing that New York always does well, helping ideas cross the chasm from the innovators to the early majority. Various city officials were on hand for the QR Moment in Time Square. Commissioner of The New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting Katherine Oliver, who announced the moment at the Internet Week New York, #IWNY, kick off press conference was there as was Commissioner of the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Carole Post. The QR Moment at Time Square illustrated how New York’s focus on film, theatre and broadcasting is leading the way into the digital world. It also provided a new way for people to find out about important information about what is happening in the city. I scanned the QR codes with my Nokia N900 and it worked very nicely. As I looked around, I saw a couple New York City Police Officers holding up their smartphones to also scan the QR codes. Will the QR Code Moment in Time Square be what it takes to get wider adoption of QR Codes in the United States? We will have to wait and see. Whether or not it does, it clearly illustrates the leadership that New York City is seeking to establish as being the city that can take great ideas and make them successful in the broader world.
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#IWNY – A #QRCODE Moment in Time Square
“If you can’t afford acid, watch TV”. It was a mantra of some of my college buddies, but back in college, I couldn’t afford acid, and had already developed a dislike of television. We had gotten our first television when I was in elementary school. It was a small black and white TV with two mechanical dials, one for VHF and the other for UHF. The VHF dial gave the choice of twelve channels, from 2 to 13. I never figured out what happened to channel 1. UHF added around 70 more channel options. However, where I lived, we only had three VHF stations. Acid, I was told, was like sitting down to watch a nine hour show, which you were the star of and which you couldn’t turn off or change the channel. It was liked being trapped inside a your own bizarre movie. For years, I had been trapped inside my own little world. I was socially inept and had a speech impediment. Sure, I was mobile and verbal, but I had problems establishing friendships. Yet for those trapped in a more socially responsible world, acid was an opportunity to look at things from a very different angle. Perhaps that is some of what makes Hunter S. Thompson so interesting. His acid crazed mind looked at Los Vegas, political campaigns, and so many other aspects of American culture from a drastically different viewpoint. This viewpoint resonated with many, thanks to his masterful wordsmanship. I’ve been reading Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas on the trains to and from New York during Internet Week this year. Even without the acid, it seems to be helping me look at all of this from a much different viewpoint. It would be too easy to either fall into Internet Fanboydom on the one hand, or some sort of cynicism about the same forces that brought so much crap to the airwaves of my childhood now bringing it to the Internet. Yet there is an interesting middle ground. The Internet can be a tool that enables people to authentically and creatively connect with other people. Yes, I realize I scored several buzzword bingo points with that sentence, but there is some truth to it. The first hint of this interesting middle ground was my discussion with the guy from the Not Impossible Foundation who was showing the Eyewriter . This is a cheap do-it-yourself project where you can take parts of a standard pair of sunglasses, a webcam and a few other components and create a pair of glasses that track a persons eye movements. For a person who has lost all ability to move, and perhaps even speak, this is an incredibly enabling project. By moving ones eyes, a person can control a computer and connect with the people around the world. I talked about how this could be used in virtual worlds, like Second Life, and about the acessibilty projects friends of mine who are mobility challenged have done there. Another toy that caught my eye was the makerbot project. This is essentially a three dimensional printer. If I recall properly, for about a thousand dollars, you can build a printer that will ‘print’ three dimensional objects. There are a group of people sharing things they have created. Moving back closer to the field of television, there were a couple people pushing their Augmented Reality wares. Zugara had a couple great demos up. They have built their Augmented Reality code into Flash. The Flash code connects with the webcam and you can have games or shopping experiences on any Flash enabled computer with a webcam. Unfortunately, it seems to use Flash 10, and my Nokia N900 phone only supports Flash 9, so I haven’t been able to test it on my phone. Total Immersion was another augmented reality player at Internet Week which apparently had a great Iron Man augmented reality game. Unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone at the booth when I sstopped by, so I haven’t had a chance to check it out. The other vendor that particularly caught my eye there was Innovid . They provide interactive preroll for people creating advertisements for online videos. Their authoring language is very ‘flash like’ and it seems like an inspired video artist could do something very interesting by adding Zugara’s Augmented Reality to Innovid’s interactive preroll. This could be used for more than just the crass commercialism of online advertising, it could be part of a toolkit for a highly interactive video art form. This weekend, many of my old college buddies will be gathering for a college reunion. They might trot out their old mantra about acid and television. On the other hand, if they’ve been following Internet Week, they just might come up with ideas even more creative.
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#IWNY – If You Can’t Afford Acid, Watch TV
AP – Rod Blagojevich’s fiery attorney will assume center stage at his corruption trial Tuesday, when both the defense and prosecutors are set to give their version of events that saw the former governor charged with trying to sell or trade President Barack Obama’s former Senate seat.
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Star attorney to take stage at Blagojevich trial
(AP)
How do you keep a story fresh? Now that the great health care reform effort is overor just beginning, depending on your point of viewthe media face a challenge: How to keep the health care story alive and more important, fresh?
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A Conversation with KQEDs Sarah Varney
After a bunch of political blog posts, I’m on a roll of technology blog posts. Perhaps it is just part of my way of decompressing. Anyway, today I am writing about IPv6. IPv6 is Version 6 of the Internet Protocol. Currently, most people use Version 4 of the Internet Protocol. The way this works is each device on the Internet is assigned a special number. Often these number are represented as four numbers between 0 and 255 and there are special rules about what numbers can be used which way. Essentially this limits the number of devices that can connect to the Internet to around four billion. While four billion might sound like a lot, keep in mind that every year more and more cellphones get connected to the Internet and in 2007 over a billion cellphones were sold. Unless something is done, we will soon run out of internet addresses. One thing that has been done is to use Network Address Translation, or NAT. Certain Internet Addresses are reserved for special uses. For example, I suspect many people reading this blog post are using the Internet Address 192.168.1.100. That is an address that many people use on their home networks. Then, using NAT, the address gets translated when it goes out to the Internet. For most people, this is sufficient. It does make it more difficult from people on the Internet to access the home computer. In most cases this is a good thing in that it provides an added layer of protection. But, in some cases it isn’t so great. To make it so that more addresses would be available, people came up with Version 6 of the Internet Protocol. The problem is that it isn’t widely used, or even that widely supported. My internet connection does not natively support IPv6. To get IPv6 connectivity, I run a tunnel to Freenet6. This provides me with a large block of IPv6 addresses I can use on my home network. I’ve been using IPv6 for a while for various tests. People who want to test IPv6 are welcome to visit a test blog I have with IPv6 . If it doesn’t come up, you probably don’t have working IPv6. The Nokia N900 does not support IPv6 out of the box. However, there is an enhanced kernel you can run that does support IPv6. By loading the kernel and restarting my N900, it came up with a valid IPv6 address. By running ifconfig from a command prompt with root privileges I could find the IPv6 address. Using ping6 I could ping to make sure that IPv6 was working. In my case, the first thing I did was ping ::1 which is the default local IPv6 address for any machine. This worked without a hitch. Then, I tried pinging ipv6.google.com . This is a Google server that only runs IPv6 and has worked nicely for me. Unfortunately, after about eight packages were sent, ping6 stopped responding. I brought up the default browser on the N900, and could not get to any IPv6 sites. However, Google Chromium and Firefox on the N900 both support IPv6 and I could connect to IPv6 based webservers. I also tested ssh and sshd. From my N900, I could connect to other servers with ssh over IPv6. I could also connect to my N900 with ssh over IPv6 from machines around the Internet. I also did a little testing of MediaTomb, a uPnP service on my Linux server. Unfortunately, it does not appear to support IPv6. I am curious about whether some of the other uPnP programs I’ve been experimenting with can do anything interesting with IPv6. Around the same time, I found a very interesting application. IPv6 Over Facebook . It is an example of RFC 5514, IPv6 over Social Networks . I haven’t been able to do anything particularly interesting with it yet, other than some simple tests. However, it serves its goal of being a good educational tool about IPv6. ipv6 , originally uploaded by Aldon . To complete the process, I have tried to ping the N900 from my Facebook IPv6 address. Given the very high latency of the network, I don’t know yet if the pings will make it. So, that’s my geek activity of the day. Are you playing with IPv6? On the N900? On Facebook? On other interesting devices? Got other ideas for fun experiments?
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#IPv6 on the Nokia #N900 and #Facebook