Returning to my little universe after the Beyond Broadcast conference in Harvard this weekend, my take-away is that we all face the daunting challenge is how to re-invent our institutions in a digital age. For public broadcasting, this means incorporating new technologies to better serve their communities with relevant content and to better invite them…
Activist Tech: from listservs to virtual worlds
I went to a workshop on “Technology and Social Activism” at the Beyond Broadcast conference this weekend. I suppose it was ambitious to expect anything other than a quick fly-over of interesting initiatives in using technology for activism, since this could have easily been the subject of a three-day conference. As one participant Sean Coon…
Virtual Darfur: Civic Engagement or Fake Activism?
There has been an interesting debate going on between Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices and Hamlet at New World Notes. It’s a discussion centered around the Second Life virtual Darfur Camp built by several activists to highlight the plight of refugees from the conflict in the Sudan. Ethan’s contention is essentially that while it might…
Charles Nesson’s closing remarks at Beyond Broadcast
Charles Nesson, Weld Professor of Law and Co-founder and Faculty Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School gave some closing remarks to today’s panels at the Beyond Broadcast conference. Here’s some flavor of it: We face large questions. We have the net in our hands. We are all capable…
Mark Cooper: “You can’t speak truth to power on Power’s nickel”
Mark Cooper, Consumer Federation of America, spoke this afternoon at Beyond Broadcast about creating new business models to support social media. He noted that everyone is presenting a business model based on charity or advertising. Mark contended that social media has to be based on civil society. Distribution is not the problem, attention is the…
Pathfinder Linden speaking on Second Life
Notes from presentation on High Order Bit: Second Life and Collaborative Drama at Beyond Broadcast conference. John Lester (aka Pathfinder Linden) of Linden Lab gave an overview of Second Life as a virtual world space. He noted that the fictional analogs to SL are Neal Stephenson’s metaverse and Vernor Vinge’s otherverse from “True Names.” He…
Beyond Broadcast: Community Dimensions of Media
Just arrived at Beyond Broadcast. Here are some notes I’m taking as I go along: Panel II: What the emerging participatory web media services are doing I walked into my first panel on “Emerging participatory web media services” with Paul Jones from ibiblio and Skip Pizzi from Microsoft. The conference room was packed by several…
The UN as a Massively Multiplayer Game
The United Nations recently put out a press release on the one year anniversary of the launch of their first video game entitled “Food Force.” I reviewed “Food Force” in June 2005, noting that it was actually pretty fun to play and reasonably educational. In the free-for-download game, you are assigned to a team of…
Ninjas like Net Neutrality and Hot Dog on a Stick
Ask a Ninja has weighed in on the Net Neutrality debate, presenting it as a comparison between the girl at Hot Dog on a Stick and Robin William’s brother. Not particularly intellectual rigorous, but hilarious nonetheless. Produced by Kent Nichols and Douglas Sarine of Beatbox Giant. Great, now I have to go get a corndog…
What I do in under 1,000 words
I have this constant problem of finding really, really interesting work that is almost impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t work in my field. The only job where that wasn’t true was my brief stint as a 911 dispatcher in Los Angeles. Other than that, it’s been a lot of awkward pauses at dinner…