LA CAMIONETA – Life and Death on the Road

Our friend, the talented and resourceful Mark Kendall, is almost done with his documentary film, LA CAMIONETA.

After 10 years or 150,000 miles on the road, many school buses in the United States are deemed no longer usable and often end up at one of the country’s many used bus auctions. From there, a sizable percentage of these buses end up in Guatemala, where they are converted into camionetas. Beginning at a used school bus auction in the States and following one bus and its new owner on their 3,000 mile journey across two borders to the highlands of Guatemala, LA CAMIONETA will document the entire process of how a school bus is bought, sold, exported, re-equipped and, ultimately, reborn. This film will explore the personal, social, and economic realities that fuel the trajectory of a school bus’s life.

Kara and I both witnessed Mark’s determination, skill and just plain hard work last year as he was filming in Guatemala. It’s pretty incredible what that skinny gringo captured as he made the trip from a used school bus auction in the States and followed one bus and its new owner on their 3,000 mile journey across two borders to the highlands of Guatemala. Check out the trailer and visit Mark’s Kickstarter page to help him complete this awesome movie!

Mobs, Media and Mobilizing Action

Brower Hub Members
Description of Hub Spaces And Community

Kiva, Change.org,
Regina O’Connell – Moderator, founding member of the hub.

Join Matt Flannery of Kiva.org
Steve Newcomb of Virgance
Ben Rattray of Change.org

Regina and her introduction to action and activism
Focus on the Family
This is social activism and enterprise 201
We want to drill down about how to make this happen, operationally and day to day.

What do you want to know about these organizations?

Speak about your organizations
-What was the inspiration, the big idea, how did you start out and where are you going.
-Democraticization of publishing online
-Rapid dissemination online
-Build a modern media work around people making actions happen
-They reach almost 1 million people a month
-They have the opportunity to network across the web and to mobilize people everyday around a news item in a news cycle to take collective action.

How many people consider themselves entrepreneurs and how many consider themselves as activists?

It’s incredible important that people consider themselves both as activists and entrepreneurs

What was the 20th century about? It’s about innovation.
The 21-century is about building all the crap we built in the 20th century.
Haven’t we built everything wrong, don’t we have a lot to do?
When we characterize what our lives are about we’re going to call this generation the next greatest generation, the same way as the people from the Great Depression and made humanity turn on a dime.

We need 500 Apollo projects, not just one. He is an entrepreneur turned into an activist.

He’s a serial entrepreneur; he created a little over 3 million dollars in those companies.

The fundamental question isn’t how do we build one power project, how do I build an Apollo project factory. So Vergence is an Apollo project factory.

Each is for-profit.

The interaction that we will see is between for and non-profit.

Kiva – Matt Flannery

They were in this weird space between for and non-profit. They found out a way to stay in business, but not become wildly profitable.

-They started with this blogger on the site in Uganda and some goat herders. They got a lot of press.

-They have 100 partners and sent $80 million dollars back and forth.

-They have Kiva fellows all over the world travelling and fighting a lot of fraud.

Inspiration, Aspiration and Operation

The concept of mobilizing people for good. What is the secret sauce of mobilizing people to different actions?

-Matt: We haven’t found the secret sauce. A few things have worked well, giving people a sense of feedback. People want bite size pieces of feedback, which makes for small bits of money. We’re trying to create an addictive experience for them.

-Steve: Get shit done. There’s not time for dreams and rainbows. Be honest. You have to be passionate. Everyone that joins our company has to work for one month for free.

Everyone knows everyone’s salary and equity position. Every Thursday it’s “Naked Lunch” and they go into the park and invite the public and we invite the employees. Two rules: Anyone can ask any question and the second is that they had to answer it. They had to make a bold point of being 100% transparencies whether in public or private. That’s when you create trust in a for-profit.

What’s the secret sauce: For many people you would go to church on the weekend and then go to work and pollute all week.

When you are building a team, when you say we are building well, building the team is everything. All you have to say is look we’re building well and we’re doing it.

Trust is the secret sauce.

Ben from Change.gov

-If you can’t mobilize 5 million people every month than you will fail by metrics.

-You don’t want the Obama team’s tools, you want that community. The tools are the underlying plumbing.

-The tools enable, but it’s the content that makes is possible.

-You’re competing against a lot of people trying to do the same thing.

-The answer is what is your really compelling message. What’s the most effective thing they used? Email and a sense that each person is connected to something bigger.

-Most people don’t want to start their own community, they want to be part of something powerful, where the message and tools are compelling.

-Obama set a framework for feeling empowered.

-Rainbows and unicorns vs. making people angry as two ways to mobilize or spark people to make change.

Kiva:

-Making people feel powerful is important

-subtle of collecting things, getting feedback, competing with others and being a little better, but always framing it in a larger social message.

The impact they had is not on Rockstar energy drink, we said we’ll ruin their brand if you don’t support Gay Rights.
Brands are remarkably exposed. If you’re a consumer brand you’re an undifferentiated product. If you piss of 10,000 people they will find each other and they are going to amplify that message and other people will hear it.

The carrot in this lawsuit and Rockstar agreeing to do this is:

We will promote you and defend you with you do all these things.

We want to see as a fair broker.

5 goals to be in a power project:

(There’s a role for the stick and a role for the carrot)
1. measure real change
2. involve as many people as possible.
3. use the carrot and never the stick.
4. a common model and technology for all
5. sustainable profit model where you earn your own keep

For example a business to get all members to go solar.

Right now even if we do business with the largest solar installer, we represent 1/3 of their LPNL.
They entered New Orleans 3 weeks ago. They have 300 people signed up in New Orleans right now, that’s change you can measure and that you can do as people all as one.

There’s a role for the watchdog to rapt the company on the wrist when companies do wrong. We have a deadline to the things we need to accomplish in the sustainability company. If any company wants to change their stripes, we are happy to work with them. So we will not protest Chevron.

Example:

One Block Off The Grid

The behavior of the average customers is not us.

They don’t require people to be activists to do things with us. Most people will do things if they’re cheaper, not to save the world. Just make it cheaper.

What’s is like to actually get your organizations to get stuff done and to make it work everyday.

-Giving people a sense of ownership. You need to institutionalize the things that used to make you special.
What’s the ugliest challenge you’re facing?
-They launched the US loans part and a lot of people don’t seem outwardly poor. I’m trying to find the right balance between listening to our users and doing what they say. You have to learn to balance that feedback. People just want to give a sense that they’re hurt.

They have 42 people involved at Vergence

-Being a social entrepreneur you will be faced with different challenges. When you have 40 people in their 20s having identity crisis. You have to find a balance between having a identity crisis and say get over it.

-Success- keeping it small no matter how big you get. The biggest trick of all is choosing the office space, everyone else sits at table scattered about. They took over Twitter’s old office. Choose a spot that has feeling and passion in it. Don’t just put your company in a place that is blah. A good spot is that if you choose an office space you know that during an earthquake you’re going down. Keep it small, keep it rea
l.
Advice about keeping things real and getting shit done.

Ben:

It’s taken them 4 years to get 1 million users.

All I do right now is work. It’s aspiration and shooting for the highest possible. It’s a lifestyle, ti’s what I do.

-He’s found a way to work, that’s focused, but not as intense.

Matt:

-You have to have a health skepticism.

-listening to advice and knowing which pieces to take and which ones to question.
Steve:

Team is everything. When you’re buildng your team only have those types of people that were the killer people. Don’t let incompetence come into your tram.

A level people bring in A level people

B level people bring in C level people

Do the big thinss right and everything else gets easier.

My wise is writing a book called “My Husband is starting a company, have you seen him?”

Piece of advise you would give Ben (each to each):

Take your time, you have something really special, don’t forget to smell the roses along the way. Take it all in as you go.
Don’t do domestic. Brand is all you have. The brand is loans to entrepreneurs in development.
Open Questions Period:

No Pitches

No Solilqueys – how you feel about the state of the world, blog about it, tell your therapist.

(1) Revenue model for Change.org. They work with big brand nonprofits and help them syndicate campaigns. They do cause marketing and syndicate. They have a jobs for change social enterprise social jobs that are paid jobs.
(2) How do you discipline your team when shit is not getting done?

If someone is not working out then you fire them. An interview is an incredible poor way of determining if they’re good at a job. That one month try before you buy period has been absolutely important.

The acquired One Block Off the Grid. He fired the founder of the company. He does not mess around with firing people, we will fire them in a dime. If you make after that month of try before you buy period.
Some of the best people have jobs, so it’s hard to sustain the policy, asks Matt.

Steve: they have lost people but it’s passion that drives.

Try before you buy, but you pay them for the month is an option. Ideally you would pay them as consultants.

How do you build your initial community?
How do you get people to come to your Web site and then get them to come back?

How do I build a sufficient amount of community so they come back.

Cites Flickr as an effective way.

Sustainable distribution strategy and when you get people there how do you get them excited about them.

Blogging and getting press and P2P referrals.

How did you give up the for-profit to change the world?

-Looking at money is a narrow version of compensation.

It shocks me to no end how many people hate their jobs and go through iterations of it so they can buy 600 thread sheets.

100 years ago you had no choice in what you do. With the education and resources we have phenomenal choice. You not doing about what you care about ask yourself why not? The easiest time right now, it only gets harder. Look at yourself right now and what you really want to do.

Enlightened self-interest.
Did you take money from other people and how do you keep stakeholders from taking over your mission?

-Choose your investors wisely. Steve, he raised money from all sorts of places. For Vergence they weren’t write for venture capital, we were like a misfit choice. They went to a group of billionaires who felt there was a space between this for-profit and activism space. They are not raising from traditional Tier 1 VCs.

-Creating a marketplace to seed enterprise is hard. They went to socially minded angels.

-Revenue models are essential from the beginning.
Kiva – 80% is paid by their users.

-It’s never easy whether your for profit or nonprofit.

– When they first got coverage on television, they put a picture on their Web site with their employees saying: “Would you be willing to pay the rent?”

How do you reach the marginal customer?

-Moveon is 5 million people.

-Change.org their goal is not to go for everyone. Rather than trying to get all -300 million people in the country is all you need.

-The notion that old people aren’t online is a myth.
If Facebook were a country it would be the 5th largest country.

The largest growing demographic on Facebook is seniors.

They create a facebook game, they get half-a-billion pageviews a month. One of the things we will see as a constant is the power of social networks and what comes after democracy and what comes after capitalism.

Ben’s advice to Steve:

Idealab was considered a failure because they had too many companies.

“I just read the internet, I don’t listen to it.”

Expanding more and more is hard to do everything well.
Cards from people about what they want to hear next.

Write down the people you want to hear from and you think should be members of the hub.

Social Marketing Conference

They are opening up a second hub in the city.

Bring your work into the hub space.

Tell all your friends.

Open Video Conference NYC

Open Video Conference, NYU Law School
http://openvideoconference.org/

http://openvideoconference.org/about/
twitter: #openvideo

Opening statements and introduction
Yochai Benkler

Summary:Keynote: Yochai Benkler – (10:15 AM – 10:45 AM)

Description:Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society, as well as the organization of infrastructure, such as wireless communications. His work traverses a wide range of disciplines and sectors, and is taught in a variety of professional schools and academic departments. In real world applications, his work has been widely discussed in both the business sector and civil society. His most recent book, The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom (2006), is considered a seminal peice on peer production and the power of networked socities. His work can be freely accessed at www.benkler.org.

What we’re talking about is democracy and innovation.

The possibility of anyone to be effective in their ability to express themselves and to participate.

Industrial Information Economy

-stark bifurcation between porducerse and consumers

• passive large audiences

• professional, commercial producer Market based or government owned

In the Networked Information Economy

• Radically decentralized

• physical capital

o computation, communications, storage

o sensing and capture Human capabilities

o creativity, wisdom, insight, perspective

o presence

o socialization

-people get organized and not around formal structures, but that directly allow us to work with each other as human beings.

-Distribution action provides distributed possiblities for action, solutions, experimentation, adaptation.

? From mountain bikes to free software.

Ownership was a process rather than a reference to an authority

• A new kind of democracy is based on an economy to act and allows a more transparent and diverse culture

• a larger set of people can express themselves

• as people become creators they become better leaders
Political democracy

• The creation of the 5th Estate It’s the fact that people are around everywhere with their devices and able to capture things at they happen.

• Where will news reporting come form? People forget is the role of humanity to capture what it suffers and to make it known around the world.

• Remixing messages: Bomb Iran song from John McCain’s joke

• If we’re talking about being there this s an important component.

It’s not the same to say things in text and not in video. Cultural democracy

• Participatory definition of cultural meaning

o Wikipedia Tompkins Square Parkway

• Participatory cultural practice as artists/fan exchange

o Coulton, “Code Monkey”

• Appropriation and reworking

Distributed innovation

• The smartest, most creative people, with the most pertinente experience, inutiiton or associations wit present problems and solutions never work in the same company.

• Open innovation platforms allow innovation without asking anyone permission

• Commons: No “May I innovate” conflicts to retard or prohibit any given innovation, by anyone

o –a proprietary regime trades control and a more widely accepted incentive structure for diversity of innovations and innovations

o –it’s not an opposition between market and nonmarket but an alliance between market, nonmarket and government.

• Battle over the institutional government

Standards

• standards: well specified, open to all, common codified elements that form the boundaries between differently implemented approaches to solve common problems

o TCP/IP

o etc

o

o locate a capacity to act

Human creativity in loosely coupled systems may lead to a faster innovation environment, but it’s under threat by legal battles, telecomm,s copyright, paracopyright (DRM0, Trusted Systems) broader copyright; internationl harmonization as ratchet.

Push back: legal/political, etc
He shows a study on how much fair use is used.

We’re seeing the development

Fair use tookit for documentary filmmaking

centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse
Can we create a new social cultural spaces in the overlap of maket and culture?

Distributed innovation in the serve of distributed democracy.
Open video

Summary:Mozilla: The Future of Open Video – (10:45 AM – 11:30 AM)

Description:Description Needed

Everyone everywhere would be empowered to speak with video.

The big but is that we don’t the world of online video to be just television.

Distribution

Technical

• -creative -legal

-distribution

The future of online video could be open, could be closed.

• Right now most of video is closed.

• By 2013 online video will account for 90% of all traffic.

Questions to ask ourselves and that will determine the future of online video

• Is the technology transparent and open?• Can people participate in a meaningful way?

how far does that go? Are there levels of quality that art impactful for participation?

• Is what we’re looking at allow people to innovate and remix without permisson?

Mozilla’s answers to all the below is yes whenever it develops new products.

Mozilla is about to demo Firefox 3.5 which is trying to push the market towards online video.

-What do we do when we evolve and put video in a structure that the web is used to?

Pad.ma

PAD.MA – Public Access Digital Media Archive – is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, http://pad.ma/ #openvideo

These choices matter in this early stage. We are an open stage where we either choose platforms that require licensing or we pick a path where we have open video and open innovation. This is a decision we need to make as a group. We can’t force this on people and we have to make it explicitly.

Using YouTube as a baseline for quality is interesting.

Shows mpeg4 version.

In real world situations it means that the quality choices is not one we need to worry about anymore, it’s most about getting these tools into people’s hands and how to do you show their content.

Markets, technology and standards.

Technology choices matter.

New 3.5 Firefox components:
Video tag
Exposure to the rest of the web
Codecs:

There’s a video tag now that is part of the HMTL 5 specification. It’s not the player itself, but the video.

There is information that can interact with the video which is now raw material that you can interact with.
The codec is open for innovation.
Mozilla is an organization that is not afraid to do things that take time.
It will take a long time for open video, too.

Summary:Fair Use Battles: Discussion – (11:30 AM – 12:10 PM)

Description:Falzone will discuss his experience defending Shephard Fairey in the much-discussed Obama Photo case, and McSherry will talk about her groundbreaking work in Lenz v. Universal, a case fighting for the acknowledgment of fair use in issuing DMCA video takedowns.

speaker: Anthony Falzone — Executive Director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School
speaker: Corynne McSherry — Staff Lawyer, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Anthony Falzone

Stanford Law School

Corynee McSherry

Electronic Frontieer
Foundation

Shows video for The Search for COunt Dante a film by Floyd Web

Floyd was sued for infringing copyright because Dante’s heirs have sued.
Fair uses’ protections are expanding.
Lighting tour focusing on court cases
2 Live Crew’s remake of Pretty Woman.
Questions that fair use asks:
-creativity
-new meaning
-new expression
The type of creativity that the court focused on in the 2LiveCrew case is parody which is a type of criticism.
Which is why many people think that as long as you’re criticizing something that you’re covered under fair use. That’s wrong.
Example: Bill Grahams archive case about the Grateful Dead book and its use of Dead posters
-The courts ruled that despite the fact that the book wasn’t criticizing things of themselves, the book was creating an artifact of the Grateful Dead posters to tell the story.
That’s good news for documentarians because it means you can use “artifacts” to tell you story or the raw material for something new and creative.
-Korean War Memorials Stamp
The sculptor sued the postal service because the sculptures were his.
An objection to the expansion of fair use protections:
-you should be able to use someone’s copyrighted work without paying them.
-The fundamental purpose of copyright law is to encourage creativity and new expression, not to reward the authors.
Electronic Frontier Foundation presentation
The bad news is that it’s easy to get your work taken down.
Fair use online: some notes from the frontlines
You need intermediaries to distribute content like video.
Digital Millennium Copyright Act Takedowns
-DMCA safe harbors to avoid liability for copyrighted material that you facilitate
-limit injunctions
-To stay in the safe harbors the ISP MUST:
-Expeditiously take down material if compliant notice
-Restore only after counter-notice and 10-14 days to file suit
Question: how well does taking others terms of service help us?
It’s easy for the system to be abused because the ISP doesn’t have to go to court to take down content.
There isn’t a lot of incentive to keep stuff up, there’s a lot of incentive to take stuff down quickly.
People do fight back:
Example of video taken down
Mom recording her child with song of Prince in the back. Prince’s lawyers sued.
Stephanie Lins got mad and sued Universal for false representation.
Youtube has setup Content ID to filter videos.
She shows examples including the sign language video of “Crazy”.
Warner Music – thousands of video taken down in beginning at 2009
There’s no reason to believe anyone at Warner is even looking these videos.
If your video is taken down:
If filter: consider submitting dispute
If Terms of Service violation: Request a review
If DMCA: Request copy of notices: who’s complaining? What about?
-Try hotline, if available (e.g. Viacom)
-Consider counternotice
-Consider lawsuit under 17 U.S.C. 512 (f)
Eff.org
Trademark disputes
What is protected: words, symbols, colors, etc. used in commerce to designate the source of goods and services.
Infringement: using a mark so as to cause likelihood of confusion as to source.
Common “speech”defenses to trademark complaints
-noncommercial use
-nominative fair use
-first amendment balancing.
Tips for avoiding/mitigating trademark complaints
-be noncommercial
-find a service provide with backbone, see their white paper.
don’t use mark alone in domain name
-disclaimer
-don’t borrow more than necessary
-don’t offer to sell domain name
-don’t use marks in metatags
Fair use doesn’t get protected unless you push back.
Attribution is a great way to avoid these fair use disputes. DUH!

Summary:Lizz Winstead: Featured Talk – (12:10 PM – 12:30 PM)

Description:Online video can be a powerful tool for satire and commentary, enabling independent voices to challenge the way the news is presented. Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show and co-founder of Air America Radio, will share her vision for a world where connected citizens keep an eye on those who are supposed to be keeping an eye on elected officials. Winstead is currently involved with Shoot The Messenger Productions, an independent comedy group that performs a weekly satirical news summary in the form of the Off-Broadway show, Wake Up World.

speaker: Lizz Winstead — Co-creator, The Daily Show and Shoot the Messenger

Summary:The Pirate’s Dilemma: Keynote – (1:15 PM – 1:45 PM)

Description: Piracy can be a business model, argues bestselling author Matt Mason. Rather than battling pirates, producers should learn from them. Instead of chasing lost revenues through expensive and contentious litigation, or locking down content with intrusive access controls, producers should leverage this new cultural phenomenon. As a consultant, Mason helps firms understand how pirates light the way: they create markets, signal trends, and develop innovative ways to reach these markets.

speaker: Matt Mason — Author, The Pirate’s Dilemma

Summary:Lightning talks – (1:45 PM – 2:35 PM)

Description:Earth-Touch

Earth-Touch is a new type of wildlife filmmaking company. Earth-Touch’s mission is to celebrate the beauty of nature and to reflect what happens in the natural world truthfully and instantaneously to a global audience. Earth-Touch is different to other mainstream wildlife production companies because it is making high quality wildlife media free, accessible and available to the online video watching community.

Critical Commons

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports fair use of media for learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students and creators. Our aim is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments. This presentation highlights some key features of Critical Commons including the ability to upload and share media, tagging, annotating and commenting on video clips, and the creation of playlists to share with students, members of your community and the public at large. presented by Steve Anderson — Assistant Professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts

Blender

A brief showcase and demo of Blender, a powerful free and open source 3d modeling, rendering, and video composting software. presented by Bassam Kurdali — Director and Animator, Elephant’s Dream (2006)

Reframe (Tribeca Film Institute)

Brian Newman is the president & CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) where he leads the Institute’s innovative programs in support of filmmakers, youth and the public. Brian conceived and launched the Reframe project of TFI, a unique initiative that is digitizing and make available thousands of films for DVD, streaming and video on demand.

Uncensored Interview

Uncensored Interview creates high-quality open licensed interviews with musicians, connecting fans and artists. They are pioneers in the industry, and have recently been transcoding their videos into the Ogg Theora format.

Description:Earth-Touch

Earth-Touch is a new type of wildlife filmmaking company. Earth-Touch’s mission is to celebrate the beauty of nature and to reflect what happens in the natural world truthfully and instantaneously to a global audience. Earth-Touch is different to other mainstream wildlife production companies because it is making high quality wildlife media free, accessible and available to the online video watching community.

Critical Commons

Critical Commons is a non-profit advocacy coalition that supports fair use of media for learning and creativity, providing resources, information and tools for scholars, students and creators. Our aim is to build open, informed communities around media-based teaching, learning and creativity, both inside and outside of formal educational environments. This presentation highlights some key features of Critical Commons including the ability to upload and share media, tagging, annotating and commenting on video clips, and the creation of playlists to share with students, members of your community and the public at large. presented by Steve Anderson — Assistant Professor, USC School of Cinematic Arts

Blender

A brief showcase and demo of Blender, a powerful free and open source 3d modeling, rendering, and video composting software. presented by Bassam Kurdali — Director and Animator, Elephant’s Dream (2006)

Reframe (Tribeca Film Institute)

Brian Newman is the president & CEO of the Tribeca Film Institute (TFI) where he leads the Institute’s innovative programs in support of filmmakers, youth and the public. Brian conceived and launched the Reframe project of TFI, a unique initiative that is digitizing and make available thousands of films for DVD, streaming and video on demand.

Uncensored Interview

Uncensored Interview creates high-quality open licensed interviews with musicians, connecting fans and artists. They are pioneers in the industry, and have recently been transcoding their videos into the Ogg Theora format.

If you want to control your content, be the best provider of it. So people have to come to you to get your content.
The old media are vicious mean, bloodsucking beasts. Trying to come up with business models to keep their business models in control. ouch!
How can we build business models that sustain open video models.
As a filmmaker this giving it away for free has been the best way to give money.
Sunday at 2 pm
Sita Sings the Blues

Summary:Open Video in the Developing World: Discussion – (2:45 PM – 3:15 PM)

Description:Two leading figures from Brazil and Nigeria will highlight the role that open video has to play in the vibrant culture of. Igwe, a prominent Nollywood producer, one of the world’s largest film industries, will explain the new models that Nigerian film producers have adopted. Lemos, a professor and renowned free culture leader in Brazil will explain how people in developing countries have innovated and created their own models for video and cultural production.

speaker: Charles Igwe — Principal Consultant, the Big Picture

speaker: Ronaldo Lemos — Director of Center for Technology and Society, Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) Law School, Brazil

The public sphere and how it’s been

Brazilian officials have prohibited the use of digital tools to do political campaigning. Next year is Brazil’s election.

It is important to see how working class Brazilians are going to use these tools for shaping the public political discussion.

Approximately 80% of the Brazilian population has access to cellphones.

The most famous social network in Brazil is Orkut. There are more than 80 million Brazilians that subscribe to Orkut. People from the middle and upper middle class are fleeing Orkut and going to Facebook.

His entire life has been to oppose this legislation that has been approved by the Brazilian Senate.  Wiretapping is out of control in the country. There is an absolute abuse in the part of the authorities on how they use wiretapping. They are opposing this legislation and this is a very important issue and it needs much more discussion in Brazil. Right now it’s out of control.
Questions:
Security through SMS.
What kinds of changes do you think will happen when there’s more internet access in Brazil?
Summary:Human Rights and Indigenous Media: Dilemmas, Challenges and Opportunities – (3:15 PM – 4:00 PM)
Samir and Sam with Witness
Leah Shafer
-Video is a powerful to promote human rights, but open video is more powerful.
Story for this week is Iran elections. It used to be the big media would bring in other folks, not so now the big media is linking out and fact checking information from citizens.
Ex. NY TImes linking out to Iran election protests
Pittany’s Liveblog was the 11th live blog in the world
This slide to play the Mousavi video pending technical help on how to convert Flash video format to MPG
You can’t do this with the ordinary tools you use, except everyone in the audience suggests streamclip.
Technology allows playback only.
Licensng fees make it pay to play.
Adanced editing tools are hard to use and expensive.
Open video promotes human rights into two ways:
Human rights is everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right included freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart info and idea throuh any media dn regardless of frontiers.
Open content is about democractic culture.
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life.
Open video enable broader participation, inclusion and equality.
Human right orgs, journalists academic and artists should use open video for content that is openly funded and openly needed.
Sam Gregory speaking on Human Rights and Witness
Witness was created from the Rodney King moment.
What happens when every citizen has a video camera in their hand to capture human rights abuse.
How does open video relate to human rights?
What if we had the values of human rights written into a terms of use?
Dan McKillon
Questions regarding material:
Safety consent and retailiation risks.
Re-victimization.
documentation => consequences
What are the risks with circulating video?
Integrity of an image
Metadata is important so we know the what and who and the privacy concerns around each.
Examples of other projects:
-Student chapters to create videos to lobby and mixed with particular audiences.
-what ethical frameworks we need to share within the open video and the broader online video moment?
“Manufactured Landscapes”
http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=manufacturedlandscapes
There’s a movement for the repatriation of indigenous populations
Archive of repatriated work
http://www.irititja.com/
Isuma Tv

Summary:Institute for the Future’s People of the Screen and the Global Lives Project – (5:15 PM – 5:45 PM)

Description:David Evan Harris will present preliminary results of People of the Screen, an Institute for the Future research project on the future of the medium of video and the role it will play in our lives over the next 5 to 10 years. David will also present a progress report on the Global Lives Project, a growing video library of human life experience, which now includes 24-hour video recordings of daily life of individuals from Lebanon, Serbia, India, China, Indonesia, Malawi, Brazil, Japan and the US.

presenter: David Evan Harris — Executive Director, Global Lives Project and Research Affiliate, Institute for the Future

Forecasts
Montage for the masses
-remix and participatory video culture will enter the main stream”
The whole world is making
-user-made video will be a transfomative political tool.
Swimming upstream
-real-time video will enable networked lifestream
ex. Onion
The Susan Boyle Effect
-video culture will encourage bottom up creativity.
Re-educating our senses
Video Tsuanami
Model:
Starts with Creation:
-animation
-cameras/capture
-CCd
-CGI
-Creation/production
-editing
-effects
-optics
-rendering
Collection:
-archiving
-indexing
-metadata
-managing of these large collections.
-video search
DISPLAY
-form factor
-small projectors
DISTRIBUTION
-networks
-aggregation
Every mobile device will have the capabilities to edit and to do Full-Hd.
We will not longer come to assume that video is a linear format.
There will be interaction and moving things around.
Obscura Digital in SF demonstrating new video technologies.

From limited to ubiquitious

bendable display technology
Imagine a display on the back of your dog.
Ex .MIT’s wearable 6th sense
WHAT NEW POWERS DOES VIDEO CONFER AND TO WHOM?
Some of their projects:
An artifact from the future.
There’s new levels of literacy and storytelling in the storytellers themselves.
-Witness Hub
-Burma V.J.
Video Voice New Orleans
Channel 19, India (Video Vo
lunteers)
Political engagement
Technology is power
www.peopleofthescreen.org
way to research video with a video platform.
They used the Kaltura platform.
“assymetrical bandwidth”
Our bandwidth is skewed towards the receiving of content.
He is thinking through French Philosopher
Anil Le Fete  and his study of pixels.
Everything under People of the Screen is under a Creative Commons license.
Research conclusions are not public yet, they will become public domain and they will be delivered in a public way.
Any research done on the so much interaction being done through screens.
ex. Stanford professor doing counselor/therapy through virtual life.
24 hour, 10 countries and a group of 10 core people will document life
globallives.org
Why?
It’s about provoking people to rethink their relationship with the world.
Selection Criteria:
59% of the world lives in Asia so …
how many people live in rural and urbran….
They have a subject selection status
Relaunch the Web site so anyone can edit.
.DotSub
Google Maps and Google Earth
Mediaspace Potentials
Kari Hans Kommon

Summary:Mediaspace Potentials and Mapping Open Video – (5:45 PM – 6:15 PM)

Description:

In the first part of this session Kari-Hans Kommonen will discuss the broader context of digital media evolution. As all media is becoming digital, the media environment is changing from media specific devices and rigid, corporate controlled channels into a flexible, software designable open space, the Mediaspace, where anyone can produce and distribute, a shift that is also the fundamental force driving Open Video. What new potentials does the emerging Mediaspace present for society, media and for Open Video? The second part, hosted by Sanna Marttila, discusses the concept of openness and its various characteristics, and maps different definitions and dimensions in open video. The aim is to shed light on some of the current understandings and emerging practices of open video through online video clips. The mapping is conducted collaboratively online during the conference where everyone is invited to share their videos and views.

presenter: Kari-Hans Kommonen — Director, Arki research group in the Media Lab of University of Art and Design Helsinki

presenter: Sanna Marttila — Researcher and Project Manager, Arki research group in the Media Lab of University of Art and Design Helsinki

Meta-medium, because the computer is a programmable device you can make it function like any device. You can program it to function like any device so you can embed and include the functionality of those devices within the computer.
Key characteristics of the Mediaspace:
-hard boundaries => soft boundaries
-one to many = one to many and many to many
Media is our nervous system. We negotiate our beliefs and designs in the various media that its members share.
Mediaspace potentials:
open
-Everyone has a access to the Mediaspace as user and creator, as editor and distributor.
unbounded
-Due to digital flexibility, media is freed from tis containers and packagin.
Available
-The medispace is a memory system that keeps media available if we can identify it, either with identity or metadata.
Addressable
-Media of interest can be identified witha n address that makes it available and linkable.
Structured
-Media entities have intenernal structures tha tmake it possible to address and refer to their parts.
Changing
Programs can cahgne and evole dynamcially; creators and communities cna design their emdis for managina nd exploting such change.
Reconfigurable
-media can be reconfigured by anyone.
Interconnected
Navigable
Organizable
Individual
Shareable
Designable
As a new form it is not designable in content, form and function to failitate complex practices.
Examples:
Digital television
-none of these potentials, expect when media is captured and moved to the mediaspace
-P2p file sharing
YouTube
-the clip is the limit.
Centralized services:
-What happens to my media, my community, my history, my social network if the service Y:
-goes out of business
-changes their terms of service
Designability as openness
-try to make the media space as designable as possible to make new tools, new standards
Saturday
Opening Remarks
Here Comes Everybody

Where is here?

-The cloud

-How to access to the cloud

Examples:

One Laptop Per Child uses mesh networks

fon – share wifi at home from everywhere

Couch surfing

COMES

It’s the verb.

Youtombed

Oink

Please leave me alone code for google bot

robots.txt for www.uchicago.edu

We should provide metadata for video.

We should consider all video live streaming and people can tag things like a robots.txt

We should have the infrastructure so that if people want to be blurred then they can pick what they want blurred.

EVERYBODY

People can be nicer than you think under the right circumstance.

Casey’s experiment with tween box.

It’s a moving carboard box that says I’m trying to get here and people move them. 40 people moved the box.

Innocentive

Liveops

who knows what you’re being harnessed to do.

Captcha sweat shops

-spam companies hire humans to solve captchas all day long.

-Everyone is a potential livestreamer.

Summary:Crowdsourcing an Open Government: Using Distributed Video to Hold the Elected Accountable – (10:45 AM – 11:45 AM)

Description: The Sunlight Foundation is working to allow citizens, bloggers and journalists become their own best watchdogs by improving access to existing information, digitizing new information, and creating new tools and web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency. Thus far, as the Transparency Movement has developed, transparency has meant a primary focus on data sources for budgets, votes, earmarks and other such data that is—or should be—available online. As we move forward, though, it will be crucial to incorporate the work of citizen videographers, photographers and others in townhalls and state legislatures around the country, to hold elected officials accountable for their words and actions where mere data does not reach. Join this workshop/brainstorm about how we move forward building a citizen-video infrastructure for the Transparency Movement that touches every community in the United States.

presenter: Jake Brewer — Engagement Director, Sunlight Foundation

presenter: Robert Millis — Capitol Hub

presenter: Abram Stern — UCSC/Metavid

Creating a Mechanical Turk for transparency

How far as a government body should we go? Should we be installing metavid?

8 principles of open government data

Having an interest-based view of the internet and have an appriopriate mesh
Maybe we have an open id for videos on the Web.
Using the same Mozilla 3.5 pop up metadata for campaign donors.

Summary:Keynote: Xeni Jardin – (1:30 PM – 2:00 PM)

Description:She’s the co-editor of Boing Boing and host/executive producer of the daily internet video program Boing Boing tv—she’s Xeni Jardin!

In addition to her work at Boing Boing, Xeni also contributes to WIRED, National Public Radio’s “Day to Day,” and hosts NPR’s “Xeni Tech” podcast. She has been published in online and print versions of publications including the Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, WIRED News, Playboy, Popular Science, Gotham, Nerve, Grammy Magazine, Make, and more. Xeni is a very uniqe mix of journalist, unpop-cultural commentator, geek, and video producer.

Xeni will relate her recent experiences in Guatemala, where serious political and social unrest has been spreading through social networks and other citizen driven media.

speaker: Xeni Jardin — Co-editor, BoingBoing.net

They held
They are launching a new UI for Boing Boing video, access this from BoingBoing.com and links to open video friendly distribution networking including Miro and Plex.
They are launching a co-branded video player with Miro.

Virgin America is giving
BoingBOing their own video.

If you want this project to be
a success you have to play to your center.  They have been around for two years. There’s 500-600
episodes and they’ve survived and still producing video.

There’s no more gold in the hills.

How do independent video startups survive.
They are sustainable by partnerships with Federated Media and Youtube.
They used Creative Commons license for all their content.
The content on the show is diverse.
The international documentaries are one of the areas that mean the most to her. She wanted to produce stories that editors didn’t feel were important. Making the global/local and making news about social change and produce something true and not glammed up.
BBTV World:
She shows the Guatemala video.
She teaches young people in Soloa to use Flip cameras and let’s them capture their lives.
Doni Turyano is using cameras to document life in Guatemala
These cameras are not magic wands, but maybe the power of technology is one step towards opportunity.
When we launched this project I had no confidence that people would watch this.
This is a different medium than television.

Seminar 2 Calendar

Summary:FOSS Editing Showcase – (2:05 PM – 2:45 PM)

Description:In this session representatives from various free and open source non-linear video editing solutions will present their projects.

PiTiVi is an open source video editor, written in Python and based on GStreamer and GTK+.

Lumiera is a Free/Open Source Non-Linear Video Editing (NLE) application project for GNU/Linux developed by the CinelerraCV community.

Cinelerra is the most advanced non-linear video editor and compositor for Linux.

Blender is an open source, cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation.

presenter: Scott Frase — Cinelerra

presenter: Edward Hervey — PiTiVi

presenter: Tom Judge — Lumiera

presenter: Bassam Kurdali — Blender

presenter: Fateh Slavitsky — Blender

presenter: Raffaella Tranitello — Cinelerra and Lumiera

Summary:Public Media, Open Content, and Sustainability – (2:05 PM – 3:05 PM)

Description:How is public media being supported today by foundations, government agencies, and the public? What could be produced or funded differently? What strategic interventions—from producers, funders, technologists, the public—could help public broadcasting now reach more of its potential? In this panel a group of funders and practitioners look to jump-start the conversation and explore the future of public media.

moderator: Peter Kaufman — President and CEO, Intelligent Television

panelist: Jack Brighton — Director of New Media & Innovation, Illinois Public Media

panelist: Alyce Myatt — Executive Director, Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media

panelist: Joel Pomerleau — Head of Interactive Services, National Film Board of Canada

panelist: Eirik Solheim — Project Manager and Strategic Advisor, NRK (Norway’s Public Broadcaster)

panelist: Vince Stehle — Program Officer, Surdna Foundation

We’re went from a system where media was dominated by political elites where elites are irrelevant.

public library vs. shopping mall model

Embracing participatory media and helping to make it better using our community standing which we do have and using that role to support community standards and open source. Facilitate conversations between communities. Reflecting the full diversity of communities we wish to engage.

Public media needs to find a way to sustain itself in those ways.

Could PBS use a transaction channel.

Avoid creating walled gardens. Where are people and how can you deliver content to those platforms.

People are watching long formats on the Web, states Joel Pomerleau  of National Film Board of Canada.

But what about content.

We need to lead the way to creating a rights framework and digitizing information.

Question: how do we get people to equate quality to free creative commons content.

Is there a natural demand where public media is stronger?
There needs to be a broader definition of what public media is.
When Radiohead released their album using a voluntary payment strategy, they took part in something public media has been doing for decades.

Who has control of the attention data.

Question and answer:
In a democracy you get the government you deserve.

Summary:Perspectives from Traditional Media – (3:05 PM – 3:50 PM)

Description: While online video presents new opportunities for new media creators, it has shaken many of the foundations of traditional mass-media. This panel opens a dialogue with traditional media players, asking how the quickly evolving open landscape can be engaged with productively, and exploring the economic and social imperatives that drive decisions.

moderator: Anita Ondine — CEO, Seize the Media

panelist: Peter Flood — VP, Business Development at GCluster America, Inc.

panelist: Tracey Barrett Lee — Vice President, Bridge Media Systems

panelist: Glenn Moss — Adjunct Instructor, School of Management at Binghamton University

panelist: Tania Yuki — Senior Product Manager (Video Metrix), comScore Networks

Summary:Amy Goodman: Keynote – (4:00 PM – 4:30 PM)

Description:Amy Goodman, host and executive producer of the news program Democracy Now!, often asks questions nobody else will ask, bringing her viewers and listeners the sort of information you can only get from independent media. Goodman believes that journalists should serve as a check to the powers that be. Democracy Now! is currently aired on over 700 radio and television stations. The program has proven the power of grassroots analog media, and has also been a pioneer in online publishing. The show streamed live audio over the internet as far back as 1997 and they currently offer the program in full-resolution over bittorrent. While the technology has never been the focus, Goodman is a strong advocate for more open and decentralized forms of publishing; she spoke on related issues at the National Conference for Media Reform in 2008.

Goodman will relate her experience as an independent journalist, and how a more open future can bolster the efforts of people working in similar grassroots capacities all over the world.

speaker: Amy Goodman — Host, Democracy Now!

We need  a media that builds bridges between communities and doesn’t advocate the bombing of those bridges.

A freeflow of information is what saves a democratic society.

History of Pacifica

-NPR

-PBS stations

-Communities started demanding that TV and other media put the public back in public media.

They are live streaming, they are doing video formats, they are getting video out on as many sites as possible, use open source tools and technology, providing tools for users to embed and use the whole show and segment.

They are moving into a new LEED certified studio.

All the technical know how is about breaking the sound barrier.

The Exception to the Rulers is what all media should be.

Static is the title of their second book because amid all the media, there is this distortion and misrepesentation. We need to go back to the original meaning of “static” –

criticism, opposition, unwanted interference. we need a media that is the 4th Estate not for the state.

Someone asked me what I would think of the mainstream media, I said it would be a good idea.

In Iraq alone there are more than a million people that have died in Iraq alone. You think about the power of the images, which is why video is so important.

We represent the sword and the shield; the sword is the sword we wield on others and the American people represent the shield.

We have a decision to make, whether to represent the sword or the shield.

The entire country of East Timor had one T line to send media out.

It is absolutely critical for journalists to be protected all over the world because of the power of the lens.

We talk about a free media, but we have to talk about freeing the media.

Our job was breaking from the convention.

It’s great to hear her version of the convention story.

Crimes for committing journalism.

If only there was a peace officer in the house!

We were arrested for committed the crime of journalism.

what protected us was the video of our arrest and it going viral.

what protects us and what will protect people in Iran is the videos and us watching.

it is shedding a spotlight, redirecting that spotlight to really what’s important.

90% of life is just showing up. We shouldn’t have to get a record to get things on the record.

We have to break the sound barrier everywhere.

Maintaining the secrets and saying no to showing the images, there is a force more powerful than the position on the United States.

People working together that is the greatest force and that can change everything.

Amy calls for Obama to whow the pictures, show the images from the Iraq war. “Imagine if we could see the true images of war?”

REMIXING

Summary:Who Owns Popular Culture? Remix and Fair-Use in the Age of Corporate Mass Media: Panel – (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM)

Description:Our shared popular culture is driven by Hollywood movies, television shows, video games and the latest musical hits. Due to its ubiquitous nature, it is entrenched in our everyday lives, becoming part of the language we speak to each other and also shaping how we see the world around us. Since pop culture is largely created, distributed and owned by a few major media corporations, copyright laws restrict its public use. Given the tight control of these powerful institutions, how can remixers, artists, educators, youtubers and filmmakers find ways to speak using our shared pop cultural language? How does fair-use intersect with copyright regarding our artistic rights to create, criticize and build on the past? This panel will attempt to demystify fair use and re-imagine what a truly public popular media culture might look like.

moderator: Jonathan McIntosh — video remix artist and activist, rebelliouspixels.com

panelist: Francesca Coppa — Director of Film Studies and Associate Professor, English at Muhlenberg College

panelist: Elisa Kreisinger — Remixer, writer, and video artist, elisakreisinger.com

panelist: Karl Fogel — questioncopyright.org

panelist: Neil Sieling — New Media Fellow, The Center for Social Media at American University

It’s important to comment what’s on the dancefloor now!

It’s bout taking a storyline and making it relatable.

minority voices may not have enough influence in the marketplace.

The public needs to demand the space it’s going to get.

Who should not have the right to have shared culture.

Question and answer:

So long as people have access to it, means you don’t have to worry about competition. Make things a possible to make it available as widely as possible.

The internet is the digital greenspace.

Unless all this stuff gets concentrated where all this open video can do some good political work, then it’s going to stay this way.

Making art is a political act.

Insyncerator:

How about creating something that streams video and audio streams separately. This will allow remixers to distribute videos that get around synclicenses.

The DailyShow recontextualizes.  They bring a different talent to it.

It’s a pyramid, what echelon are you talking about whether it’s about citizen journalism and more legacy media. For people who do have a experience there’s no attribution and accuracy issues in practice.

It’s what news does is adds commentary to a story.

LinkTV does remix the news.

They record satellite feeds and put a commentary on how one issue was covered by various newscasters. It’s very clear in the voice over and has very clear attribution.

They haven’t transferred the complexity of their dialogues to video from text to video.

Peter Pierce from Pirate Bay Party in Sweden

-sentenced to a year in jail and $3.6 million fine

-There are three people who are part of the Pirate Bay including their ISP

-They trying to get their verdict revoked.

-Are you stressed out about going to jail for 1 year and paying a lot of money. “Not really.”

-I don’t think anyone is going to pay anything.

-Did you see yourselves in this light. We didn’t set off to be something like this. We thought it was a good thing to stay up, that is everything for us. It’s weird when people talk about us in the media. But it’s good to inspire people.

-How have things changed for you?

I don’t care about people that don’t care about me, so it’s no problem.

-Are there practical solutions for getting paid when media is largerly free?

Most of those people [media] are stuck with the idea that they have to get paid the way they used. So they don’t look at other possibilities. It’s not my job to come up with the financing deals. I fix things and they need to come up their own business.

It’s the freedom of exchanging cultural ideas and so on. Without distributions no one would see these things.

Where do you see yourself in 5 or 10 years?

-Are you a judge?

Do you see the entertainment industry compromising with you?

Only when they don’t have any choices left.

What form would such a compromise take?

They need a solution that’s free. We’re not going to charge people.

So maybe they should pay the seers.

The impact of the Pirate Party in European parliament.

In a couple of years he sees not needing the party. That’s the point.

It’s going to be so huge that you’re going to be like “fuck.”

In like two days maybe three.

He hopes the Pirate Party and Green Party grows in the US.

We don’t know where our servers are because the govt’ seized them.

That’s the end!

WORDCAMP

WORDCAMP
May 30, 2009
Mission Convention Center
I. Tim Ferris, author The 4-Hour Work Week
A. Writing: How I write

The important thing is not being a good writer, but having a voice.

People most often are quite bad at predicting what they would like. 
when in doubt, write about things that make you angry but never attack your readers.
Write about the problem and not the person.
He does his best writing from 1 am to 5 am. 
Find your best writing or synthesis period.
Put on music – Federico Arebelle
He drinks wine and a cup of yerba mate.
Edit by hand
Ignore SEO for the first draft. When you start off with the objective for optimize for search it’ll be awful.
Write your post and then if you want to go to Google keyword tool then you can search by those and make your choice. 
B. Video and Photos
1.Nothing travels faster than text and text gets indexed.
2.Having someone come to my site is more valuable to me than going to YouTube
3. If he offers video then he adds
4. StumbleUpon is the cheapest source of traffic, it works extremely well. It provides a slow trickle of high quality traffic. 
5. He doesn’t chase the news, it’s a tireless, not fun job. If you’re not having fun, your readers will know.
6. Finding good photos go to Flickr, go to event search and find most often
 
C. Comments
1. The livingroom method
2. He sets guidelines at the top of the page.
3.
D. Playgrounds and Labs:
1. Longform: www.fourhourblog.com – Encourages people to once in a while throw something ridiculuous into a content heavy site.
2. Shortform: http://blog.timferris.com
3. Microform: www.twitter.com/tferris
Your blog should not be a source of stress for you. 
Think big, but play often. Take sun seriously!
Questions:
-He doesn’t use an RSS reader because unsubscribe often. He has taken 1-3 weeks often and using other social media he can take long periods off.
-There’s some impressive, incredible critiques of 4-hour work week that I don’t recommend, such as being idle. In the book work is defined as something you do less of.
-The blog doesn’t run his life, there are times when he spends a good deal of time on it and he enjoys it.
-What other plugins do you use?
    -redirection
    -popularity contests
    -share this
    -nothing too fancy
    -he tries to minimize the number of plugins because sometimes they don’t play so well.
-How do you integrate Twitter?
    -He does not use a desktop app
    -some people might enjoy seismic desktop or tweetdeck
    -he minimizes his time on twitter
    -generally speaking he will look at his @ replies everyday and otherwise he doesn’t try to follow everyone.
-The sure path to unhappiness is trying to please everyone. 
    -the complaining doesn’t stop, so just tune it out.
    -if you go into Twitter like it’s an all you can eat buffet then you will get nothing. 
    -Greasemonkey script allows you to view multiple pages at the same time.
    -open each link in a new window.
    -Go into Twitter with a specific purpose in mind. 
    -If you’re wasting time, but having fun, it’s not a waste of time, it doesn’t need to be productive. You need to at least be aware of not being productive. 
-He doesn’t prioritize non-content over content.
How can I add the Tim Ferris to my lovelife? Turn into the kleenex of lovelife animation.
He did an experiment to outsource his lovelife. He did a performance contest to see the number of dates the different outsource teams could create for him.
Why don’t I try to batch my dates like I batch my email. I had all my dates set for one day. He decided to do 20- 20 minute dates in one small area and jump from cafe to cafe.

He ended up with a longterm girlfriend from it.
Uses Mediatemple on his longform blog.

Straight from Google: What you need to know

Matt Cutts
mattcuts.com/blog

He is head of web spam or anti-web spam team at Google.
90% of blogs don’t even change their template,

Why do you blog?

Fame, access, attention, money, rankings?
Some people are just doing it for fun. And if you’re doing it for fun, I totally support you using WordPress to post cat pictures.
It’s ok to cat blog.
Most people want something from their blog.
Wordress is a great choice.
WordPress solves a ton of self-promotion; it takes care of 80-90% of SEO
There’s a few things you can do to optimize it

My plugins

-Akismet
-cookies for comments
-Enforce
-Feedburner FeedSmith
-WP Super Cache

How does Google crawl?
-We crawl roughly in decreasing order of Page Rank.
-It’s named for Larry Page.
What’s page rank? It’s really simplicity itself. The number of people who link to you and how important those links are.
So it’s not number, but how important they are.

Don’t have a Back Link Disorder
-don’t get lost in the number of backlinks, keep a larger perspective.

-How does Google rank pages?
You want to be relevant and reputable.
Relevant is what’s on your page and reputable is what people say about you.
You want both relevant and reputable.

How can you be relevant and reputable?
Ex. Google wave – don’t just put up the press release.
Try to write often
Seo tips: keywords
-think about the keywords tha users will type. Include them naturally in your posts.
-ALT attribute are handy (3-4 relevant words)
-don’t forget image search, videos, etc.
-If you are a blogger think of ways that different people would describe something.

PERMALINK SETTINGS
He likes to do a custom structure on his URL.
 If your blog has p=123 then you’re missing out a lot. Put a few words in your URL.
Google uses things in the title and URL.

Tweaking Titel, urls, contents
If you’re doing a post then think about SEO and what people would search for.
Make your Categories cool stuff like Linux, search
Keywords in url paths: example.com/my-keywords. USE DASHES.
-dashes are best
-next best is underscores
-no spaces is worst
-someone should ask me: what if I’ve already done my site, should I change things?
-Spend your time on making better content, it’s just something to be aware of.

Don’t Overdo It

Being relevant: summary
-Find something you’re passionate about
-Write often!
-Pay attention to the mechanics, don’t over do it.

Gaining a reputation: how do you get to be more known

-Be interesting.
-Blog called Fake Bill Gates blog
-blog called Fake Carol Bartes
-Update often

Apply Katamari Philosophy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katamari_Damacy
The philosophy is to start small, in a niche that you do well, but then build up and up.
You’re always reaching trying to reach bigger and bigger things.
Then you can imagine “enbiggening” to quote the Simpsons to bigger things.

Gaining reputation
there are so many other ways you can get links
-Eric Goldman – Law professor blawger about legal issues and search
-Do original research or reporting –
    -Danny Sullivan – compared spam on Gmail and Yahoo

Give great information
    -Louis Gray – watched his referrers and where people from coming from. Looked
at the bots looking at his site.
Find a creative niche
    -icanhascheezburger, on sentence
    -Penny Archade, xkcd
Write some code
    -write a good project people will use it
Lifehacker – high-quality tutorial and guides, you spend more time reading about productive than actually being productive.
Live blogging.
-Videos rank higher.

Google tools can help:
-webmaster console at google.com/webmasters
-google analytics
-Feedburner: my brand for free
-google website organizer

Slow Sunday

Sometimes sleeping less feels better these days. I missed church/zendo this morning when my eyes opened shutters around noon. I pored over the SF Chron and NY Times while chowing down on oatmeal pancakes and Brad avoided large chunks of food now that his wisdom teeth are gone. Then it was mad dash to clear the inbox and continue the moment on CabbieTalk by responding to some cabbies who had emailed me. Check out the posts, particularly the one of my conversation with Yi Tang who’s been a cabbie for 20 years in Chicago.

Try as I might to go running, there was no chance because my first day of long form improv was upon me and the Parkway in Oakland was closing its doors and I wanted to drive by and shoot a quick video on it. By 6 pm there were two lines that wound around the building and people patiently waited like they would any Friday evening for a the “Rocky Horror Picture Show.” It saddened because the Parkway is home to me as well and these days I, like Oakland, am feeling beaten up by everything happening in this community ravaged by gun violence (the four police officer shot last night just died) and the economy (hundreds are losing their home to foreclosures). If a city can be encapsulated by one word, “hard” would be the one I would use for Oakland. In every sense of the word.

Speech Launching Intro on Flickr – Photo Sharing!

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.799381&w=425&h=350&fv=offsite%3Dtrue%26intl_lang%3Den-us%26div_id%3Dstewart_swf3375303106_div%26flickr_notracking%3Dtrue%26flickr_target%3D_self%26flickr_h%3D375%26flickr_w%3D500%26flickr_no_logo%3Dtrue%26onsite%3Dtrue%26flickr_noAutoPlay%3Dtrue%26in_photo_gne%3Dtrue%26photo_secret%3D383169a9d4%26photo_id%3D3375303106%26flickr_doSmall%3Dtrue]

Just finished listening to these awesome …

Just finished listening to these awesome Ischool presentations: NUJJ

I. -What is a location -based service for mobile device users?

Chart of different types of interactions

Synchronous Asynchronous

Face to face communication Flyers, fridge magnets
Graffiti, historical plaques

II. Local questions and answers

You want to eliminate time sensitive questions

III. Travel Planner

-There are a lot of things you might do to prepare for a trip. It doesn’t really make sense to leave those notes in backpack. What if you could leave yourself a note at the entrance to the louvered, a personal note you wrote for yourself, and a travelogue that is location sensitive? It will be delivered right to your mobile service as you arrive.

IV. Recommendation service

-You can leave notes to people who care about it. You get it at the spot where it helps.

V. Lost & found

1. Allows user to tie locations to their notes and allows for location patterns
2. Users may only retrieve public notes from their phones.

DEMO

NUJJ refers to a service they describe which is platform agnostic.

They are using the iphone to demo.

One of the main problems of the application is scarcity.

When a user sends out a message it goes out through the twitter stream. NUJJ has a special database that stores all event date. It sends out a query for all nudge data.

Uses

Trusted superusers
Better question classification for local Q&A
Etc

VI. Questions

Is this geo-located twitter? Is this all within network? Can my parents see what I’m doing without being a member?

Security

Scarcity and having an ability to filter.
Requiring it to be social to begin with will be flawed because of the scarcity issues. Delicious works because it benefits me first and there’s a byproduct of helping others. You can’t be all things to all people. Do you find yourself go towards a certain direction?

Buy Music, Make Money

I want a song

Option 1
Itunes..
Price $1
But the song’s under lock and key

Option 2
The pirate bay…
Price $0
Might feel guild, might need a lawyer
It’s a no brainer
Copy music for friends and earn social incentives, for free.

Current Fixes?

Existing approaches to fix theses incompatible incentives:
So-called affiliate models. Think Tupperware.

Good: Buyer has a steak in how well a song does. It’s nagging.

Where else can we see economic incentives out in the wild?

Social incentives to be ahead of the curve: Be cool.
Financial incentives: Make a killing on Wall Street.
It’s the same curve as the sale of music.

They wanted to buy a store that…

rewards fan for buying the music they love: an incentive to buy legally.

Appeals to trendsspotters and trendsetters. Give fame in addition to fortune.

Gives buyers a sense of urgency

And encourage buyers to be promoters.

They designed a store where…
1. a song is sold.

2. part of the revenue comes from promotion of that song

Allocating the dollar

50 cent to the artist/music label
50 cent goes to all previous buyers

we want to give early buyers a cut.

You can make sure that once you buy a song you can keep that cut size. Your income growth is linear.

Example:

A new song just came out. Say you’re the 5th person to buy it, so you get the 5th largest slice, which is below a 20th of a cent. It will be 50 cents after 1,000 sales, $5 after 10,000 sales; $50 after 100,000 sales.

Make your dollar back after 235,000 copies sold. etc.

How does this compare to a baseline model?

Baseline is Itunes, Amazon etc.
Their model has a network effect.

More value for buyers wit more buyers.
There is a social effect.
Tremendous potential value over baseline for good trendspotters.
There’s fame and fortune for someone who’s good at this.

What we built:

Designed to address the usability of such a model?

Can we make this experience compelling and very simple to use.
Is this model economically feasible? Is the allocation model adjustable to create incentives. What’s the optimal solution.

We did this so can easily test things.

Separation of data, business logic, presentation

Data model – swappable SqLite “stores”

Logic – cut allocation engine

we can swap the allocator and the allocation function.
if we don’t want to allocate things for music anymore you can allocate slices for this engine and it still works for major changes.

Economic feasibility and simulation framework

Simulator
-works on an actual store instance

Agents

simulated customers
decision-making modules

Challenges

performance issues with Django implementation
Useful framework during next steps

User interface

user-driven design

we conducted competitive analysis
prototype tests

Key questions:

Do they get it?
Does it work well?

A store should be fun to explore

Portal page

on left, column of new songs
middle section, songs selling well
right column has social layer. they show the people who perform best and give them some visibility on the site.

Page for one song

description of song, amount, if you buy this song now and performance on the site.

There is no way to compare how a song is doing on the site
they experimented with showing the trend of a song. They did a performance indicator using line graphs to make sense of the numbers. When you’re dealing with the small numbers people have a difficult time imaging what it means and what it means over time.

Break-even point. Buy now and get 0.0475 cents per future copy sold.

Ex. bipod. They didn’t market it as a four-inch box, they said 10,000 songs in your pocket.

The Future

They think they found a way to align the incentives they talked about
A mode that benefits all stakeholders
A marketplace where new music is discovered and takes off.

It encourages legal buying and discourages illegal music sharing and piracy.

The project started as a page on a notebook.

they received some feed investment and will make it a startup and launch it as product.

micro payments
08:00
and incentives for news
08:34
they are incentivizing jumping on board and taking a risk on music in this case
it’s a crowd-sourcing model monetizing music
09:05
why not news?

Question and answer

Music has people can set trends and they are interested in having the economic model flushing out these people with disproportionate influence.

MD Notes:

One application that supports multiple points of entry.

Doctor’s information management
Hospitals are information rich environment. They are only focused on note capture and retrieval

They built a mySql database

Request/response to MD:Notes (PHP), my SQL database (emulates EMR)

patient modeled in XML
Schema to map force HL7, mapping transform

It’s driven by the schedule when someone logins.
They have different inpatient settings and the services that are available in the hospital. They are ordered in level of acuity.

once you get the patient level is when you start presenting the patient as xml

One of the reasons we’re using xml is that we need to be able to have the present not just live in our system but interact with automatic hospital system

A healthcare messaging standard for system interoperability
Must be ale to send progress notes fro the EMRI

Future Work

integration
templates
security
extending the patient model
supporting model devices

Questions:

It’s a web application
Why didn’t you look to some kind of mobile application to begin with. They built a voice-prototype and mobile application.

The possibility of a threaded conversation between doctors. Will there be an ability to comment or thread.

Getting into Google News

Presentation by David Meredith at Newstools and Drupal Day

Held at Yahoo in Sunnyvale
Each site is evaluated by a moderator
What do we look for?
Original content
Multiple authors
Proper Attribution
Response time
Not all sites make the cut, but most legitimate news site do.

How do we get our data

once in the site database:
we crawl the content
figure out which pages are articles

Use a SITEMAP!

sitemaps are essentially feed of semi-structured data for crawlers to
ingest.

I cannot express to you what a boon sitemaps have been to us! It’s a basic
designed to be ingested by a crawl. A list of all articles you have
published, dates, names, etc. It’s an open sic and Google uses it. Saves
Google time in crawling your site.

What does this have to do with Drupal?
–Drupal builds sitemaps.

There is a google site module for drupal

That’s getting your data into google news, now about making your data
searchable.

II.  Now about search

metions “co-op” program for search

A. Syndicating from Google News
1. feeds are offered for every section or query that you can access as a
webpage
2. if you can construct a query to get the result you want, you can get a
feed of the data.
3. feeds are offered is RSS, Atom and XML

B. google news facebook applications
1. we built one entirely on top of public feeds
2. newsmap, uses static data

C. News Data API
1. more interactive API is in the works
2. many unanswered questions:

-what data do publishers need?
-what data do developers need?
-Can we give it to them?

What do you want to know about your own content do you want to know (as a
publisher and publisher?)

Clear Forest API, Reuters is starting to use it.

New approaches: trying to approach synethesized news.

NewsKnight (?) scrapes the content

Google is more clustering based, not classification based.

Very fine grain taxonomies are expensive to maintain and don’t work well.

Google doesn’t publish their process because it comes down to spam.

site: your domain name to check if your site is being queried by Google

in the site map label things that are news and things that are not news.

we like timely good upates. A good update is when the article has a
substantial change to it. But what it will appear to the system is a stream
of duplicates.

Press releases are not useful to users, but they may be useful to
journalists.

authenticated response is still there and is still going for google news
articles

how would you categorize education essays?

How could are newspapers in general at search optimization.

SEO doesn’t make sense for news. It’s not something people spend a huge
amount of time on unless they are trying to subvert the index.

There are two tiers, NY Times, Washington Post.

Is Drupal adding micro-formats?

Google in general but google news does not.

“We are not journalists, we don’t have a single journalist on staff, we just
build the technology to help the news.”

Just posted this: INNOVATIONS IN JOURNAL …

Just posted this: INNOVATIONS IN JOURNALISM EXPO 2008
“Creating a Brighter Future”

KQED TO TAPE KEYNOTE PANEL

NOTE TIME CHANGE: Saturday, May 3, 9:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m.
A showcase for breakthroughs in business, technology, media and democracy

Venue: The Domain Hotel, 1085 East El Camino Real, Sunnyvale, CA
Online: http://artsandmedia.net/expo/journalism/
Phone: 415-677-9877

Just finished reading a NY Times article …

Just finished reading a NY Times article and it makes me feel live I’ve been doing it all wrong. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/fashion/17fitness.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5124&en=7d72893aa47831a7&ex=1366171200&partner=facebook&exprod=facebook

Reading this from Bradelectro: BART ( …

Reading this from Bradelectro:

BART (observations from a former pick pocket)
Reply to: pers-647355287@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-04-18, 1:05PM

It’s about time that something is done about ingorant people in the bay riding BART. How aware are you when you are riding BART? I know that a lot of you move here all confident thinking that your just “all together” EEEEHHHHH! WRONG!!. I am a former pick pocket that rode BART for years and looted the hell out yall. Here are some tips and stories:
1) Alway aware of what is going on behind you. I cannot stress this enough. So many people in the bay are locked in their own world (ipods, texting, blackberryies). You all never pay attention to what is going on behind you. I love this. I have actually taken peoples wallets while they are on the phone standing on the platform by literally just walking up behind them and doing a blatent bumb and lift. They had no idea that I was behind them. This goes for on the streets also. I can walk ride up on your heels, and you have no clue. Wake up cause that guy that your not aware is behind you, could be a rapist.
2) Dont put your bags under your seat. Suit cases either. I love sitting behind someone heading to the airport, having them slide there duffel bag under their seat, and I reach down, unzip the bag slightly and take what I want. I actually took someones boarding pass once, just because he was being mean to his wife on the train. Karma fucker.
3) Be careful when you sit on the benches and round seats in the stations. I have taken wallets right out of blazer pockets without even looking. Once I took an ounce of herb from a teenagers backpack while he was playing with his sidekick. He left his backpack behind him.
4) Rolling bags for work? I am not even touching that one its too easy. Let just say that if you require bringing half your apartment with you to work and you dont care about getting in people way. I am not going to care about getting into your bag.
5) People in the bay area are pussies. Even those who act tough back down the second they think that they are going to have to fight and get their designer clothes dirty. Anytime someone tries to stop me I act like I am going to punch them with the angery of a convict and they leave. NEVER been caught suckas!
6) Bicyclists – thanks for wearing those messenger bags with the velcro flap. I love that when the velcro get old and dirty there is no noise while its being opened. Where is my ipod? I probably either gave it to a deserving poor kid or a fish is listening to it.
7) Anyone who worships their possessions so much dont deserve to keep them. And if you saw me in a room with other people, you’d never in a millions years be able to pick me out.
Wake up! Cause you been asleep for most of your life!

it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
Original URL: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/rnr/647355287.html
————————————————-