I decided today to have a peek into my spam folder in gmail, to see if I could find a password reminder gone awry. In amongst the cheap software deals and the medicine cabinet of must-have pharmaceuticals, I found... my Google Alerts! I'd forgotten all about them.
That's right, Google is spam filtering its own alerts.
I posted a couple more session notes and commentary on the Supernova conversation hub: One from the panelists discussing the Social Web and my strong feelings on the David Weinberger/Andrew Keen "debate" which I thought was one of the most interesting sessions. I actually think Keen is a sharp, fun writer and I can see how he would be "concerned" about the decline of culture and civilization. But it was so clear to me that there was something fundamental that he just doesn't get about what is happening with art and culture online.
Yes, there's a ton of worthless crap being published now. And yes, it's tough to sift through it all. But now, Andrew, Mozart's sister has a forum for her genius. And the garage mechanic who loves to draw, the airline attendant who loves to write, the teenage girl who wants to act, and the PR expert who moonlights as a photographer all have an audience. This means that great diamonds have a better chance to shine now, and that the little diamonds all of us occasionally come up with have a better chance of being worth something even though we don't dedicate our lives to following them up. There's more genius exposed now, not less.
Speaking of that PR expert, Renee Blodgett came up with some nice portraits of some of the more entrepreneurial Supernova attendees.
Well, I really enjoyed Tim Ferriss’ brief presentation, during which he sold us on outsourcing individual work. Tim just finished a book called The Four-Hour Workweek which suggests that we can each reduce our workload professionally by farming out the boring details. This twist on the classic "get rich quick" books interests me. Make the same amount of money, but work less hard, enjoy yourself more, and spend more time with family and friends. Of course this is technically a type of Ponzi Scheme because eventually there is no poorer person to turn to for service, but it will be a while before the iniquities in the world are worked out. I’m looking forward to scanning it for useful tidbits.
Now, you might think that someone who recommends we only work 4 hours a week, while paying other people micro-amounts of money to bust their butts on our behalf, would be lazy or demonic or both. In fact, Tim seems really energetic and friendly. He likes the idea of making a financial difference in the lives of the less fortunate by hiring them for his odd jobs. The only weirdness about him is the strange sense that he could so easily start a cult and enjoy the feeling of thousands of fans gazing at him in adulation. But how is that different from any other rock star?
Tim told the story of hiring, for a small sum, some freelancers to find single women and set up 30 dates for him in three days – with mixed results. I have friends that should farm out this task. It makes so much sense from a time perspective. Then, perhaps taking a cue from Seth Godin’s advice to be remarkable, he said he’d give a free trip around the world to the person in the room who sent him the most compelling story of a personal outsourcing initiative they’d undertaken as a result of his talk. It’s a good way to keep himself on peoples’ minds.
The most important thing he did though, was give his books away at the end of the session. Supernova attendees are early adopters, innovators and connectors. Some people think you come to a group of people and make some fans so you can sell some books to them. Wrong! You give your book to fans, they read it and recommend it, and you’ve exponentially increased your word of mouth capacity by eliminating the barrier that keeps powerful viral word-of-mouth spreaders from reading your book – the act of having to pay for it.
This might seem counter-intuitive for those with a profit-making mindset, but in fact it is only counter-intuitive if you don’t really believe in your product. If you have to sell as many copies as you can because you don’t think you’ll sell quite enough copies, then you’re right, you should do what you can to sell it to as many of the people who heard your talk as possible. But if you know your book is good, when you launch it you want to get it into as many hands as possible however you can. That is what is going to make it, and you, famous, and there’s no point in slowing it down unnecessarily by building a wall between eager fans and your fame. Tim knows his book is good. The only remaining question is: Do we agree?
I'm having lots of fun at Supernova. Check out another one of my posts from yesterday, full notes from the session "Virtual Life or Virtual Hype?" .
I've been bumping into all sorts of fun people. I'll talk about them, probably, one at a time here (if at all), because wireless coverage is spotty and I don't want to lose my posts.
Today I ran into the so-wonderful Gary Bolles - I am a huge fan of his. His company Microcast is running a conference in New Hampshire on 10/3/2007 during which major presidential candidates will be invited to discuss their positions on broadband Internet access in America, particularly in rural america. Gary's business partner Esme Vos and I spoke yesterday afternoon, and she told me that in Europe rural broadband access is considered a strategic priority to enhance economic development. In the U.S., rural areas are often overlooked by the commercial access providers because it's too expensive for them, so they are out of luck.
Sounds like an interesting event. Get more info from Esme's website, MuniWireless, by emailing nbbs2007 at that domain.
Karen Colbron, WGBH
Karen talked about their Open Vault project.
It’s an archive of free viewable videos they’ve produced for PBS, such as President Carter on Salt II Treaties and Afghanistan. (1300 videos in total, if I heard her correctly). They have strong social media features such as "people who liked this also liked – euro-strategic missiles" and "Top Picks". They have a keyword search – data is also shown alphabetically by person, and by series. Longer-format interviews are available for purchase.
Jane Johnson – Library of Congress
Jane told us about the LOC's media search tool, mic.llc.com mic.loc.gov(pronounced "Mike"). It’s apparently new at the LOC to be able to limit your search to pull up only moving images. They have an archive directory, advanced search. It’s an outcropping of film, television and video preservation acts taken by congress in the 90’s. They will tell you what videos are available, but from what I could see, you can’t view the videos. I asked a question about this later and, yes, they are not a repository, but in some cases there is a link to view the video.
I did a basic keyword search and saw lots of metadata, such as copyright holder and carrier type, along with this message: "Audio and moving image materials in the collections of the Library of Congress can be reproduced only when all rights and restrictions have been cleared and written authorizations have been obtained. While M/B/RS Reference staff can usually be of some assistance in determining what permissions are required, the onus is on the researcher to obtain them."
They also have an "archive search" that tells you the other archives that hold movies – I got three results using the keyword "New York": The Municipal Archives of the city of New York, the New American Cinema Group, and the Fales Library and special collections.
They can draw on records with certain metadata schemas and export them with different metadata schemas. They have a mapping wizard allowing you to match your "title" with their "title" and then you can import their data. [This feature seems useful for some new kind of mashup, to me. Maybe pull some of this data into Dabble?] The purpose is to incorporate all metadata needed for using the media. It supports non-textual indexing such as facial recognition.
Andrea Kales, The British Film Institute
BFI's got a bunch of stuff going on: Sight and Sound magazine, an archive that they argue is the largest in the world, the London Film Festival, the Gay and Lesbian Film Feestival which started early in the mid-eighties. ScreenOnline.org.uk, for people looking for information about British film and television. They have a new project, funded by the UK’s higher education funding body. The theme of the project is to have a curatorial perspective on moving images, and bring them online to juxtapose them.
They’ve done some co-production with the BBC. Jane showed incredible film footage from what’s got to be 100 years ago. The footage was almost lost. It was a novelty for people to go see at carnivals, made by two men who filmed people with signs saying "come and see yourself later at the carnival." The local films were the most popular thing at the carnival. It’s from a collaboration called "The Mitchell and Kenyon Program" which got 8M viewers - a lot in the UK. The films are beautifully restored and, I’d say, well worth buying.
During the Q&A session after this group, Frank Moretti, host of the conference, brought up a point that got him on the receiving end of a lot of active audience protest and agitation. He asked, "What about this video is interactive? How do you learn from it?" Now, I may be paraphrasing him dead wrong, because I'm not sure I understood his question. So I invite him to comment on this blog with his point in his own words.
All I can say is to report that the rest of the audience was taken aback - those who spoke up seem to view video as a natural educational material, when taught properly - which means, when teaching the student how to view and interpret the media. It seemed to some that Dr. Moretti was questioning this point of view, in particular that he was making the point that students are evaluated on their ability to read, write and do math, therefore most of the video we've discussed here is perhaps not relevant to their education.
Of course he's correct that video is inherently one-way media, and video that's not "teaching to the test" won't be that valuable to the test. But once you start tinkering with the video, and teaching about the video, this changes. You could make the same point about books - "how can people learn from them? They're not interactive!" It would be interesting to continue this discussion on this blog.
After the coffee break, we were treated to a quick demo of dotSub. The website hosts videos along with their translation, apparently created via a wiki-like process where users can translate from one language to another and others can benefit. Looks like a really cool tool.
I’m impressed by how well-connected Peter is; the quality of the speakers, the packed room and the lovely catering presentation (low-budget while coming across as expensive) attest to great conference planning. The audience started out a little dead, but by the afternoon there were not only lively Q&As with the speakers, but also active discussions among audience members.
Continuing on with a few notes - and please, errors are mine:
We heard from Margaret Drain from WGBH, which produces much of the PBS content. They designed "we shall remain" project to engage young native Americans. " The citizen storyteller." Give them new cell phones that you can record and edit on.
Name of the project comes from this touching quote, which practically brought tears to my eyes: "The Master of Life has appointed this place for us to light our fires, and here we shall remain" – Tecumseh.
We saw an attractive presentation, reviewing efforts on sharing climate and astronomy data online and making it interactive, showing simulations, etc. This was given by Thomas Lucas, an independent producer working with the NCSA.
Curtis Wong from Microsoft Research "Next Media" spoke next – runs a small group developing services 4-6 years down the line; in his spare time he does educational technology work. 20 years ago he worked at Voyager. Standard DVD stuff. Then Corbis. He shows a trail of his work at these places over time.
What is he working on now at Microsoft? Using the "world wide telescope", hopefully to be released sometime this fall, Curtis showed us how you can browse satellite pictures of the sky much the same way you would zoom in to satellite pictures of your neighborhood on Google Earth. The data comes from the Sloane Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble Telescope. Very cool.
The sessions before lunch at Peter Kaufman’s CCNMTL conference, given by folks from different universities, are pretty interesting. For Columbia’s portion, CCNMTL got all the footage from CNN to create a Vaclav Havel website when he came to Columbia. Diana Kleiner discussed some of the issues Yale needed to address as they put video online.
Scott Shunk from the Visualizing Cultures class at MIT spoke eloquently. The course is not only a class, and part of MIT’s open courseware, but also a platform for media and content that examines history through the images that were created at the time. I find it really cool stuff, where you take text and pictures and line it up in a manga-style way, like a graphic novel, or really, in the case of the Japanese art, a scroll. Read, in this case, from left to right.
Mike Cubit spoke from MediaVision, the video conferencing facility at Case Western Reserve – They have produced 250 projects in the past year. Encode 100 hrs of video per week with 13 full-time staff, 4 people dedicated to video production. They’ve made a content management system to do it automatically. Delivered 250,000 streams to campus community since July of 06. 450 MBpS connectivity.
93% of students at Case Western use laptops, 96% brought their cell phones, and they have high expectations regarding technology services.
They’ve produced telesurgery with 2 cameras and a laparoscope, to show the donors how the surgeon was performing the operation, and it was very effective. They webcast a premier into Second Life with 1500 avatars attending virtually.
They’re offering the content to alumni, they’re incorporating automated uploads for a live 24/7 webcase channel, and are doing a number of other interesting projects. 75% of students say they watch the videos to help clarify course concepts. The athletes who are traveling for their sports appreciate not having to go to class. 95% of students surveyed have watched a lecture online. 79% said they felt they did better in class because the lectures were available for review. And 98% of them would recommend MultiVision as a tool to other students.
More notes from Kaufman's conference at Columbia: Keynote speaker Rick Prelinger.
"Openness is not binary and content isn't simply open or closed. It's a broad spectrum. Not the just the image of the book page, but the text too, being able to manipulate it. The ascii text, that you can take, mashup, quote, paste into your own document. Not just watching a movie - being able to make your own cut. ..
"The BBC creative archive has been the focus of so many people's hopes. It's raised expectations tremendously. I hope we can support him. ...
"Not just the music but the midi - not just the freedome to consume, but the freedom to remix. In the digital world this means you really have to get your hands on the object itself. Freedom to annotate. Freedom to share the network experience with others. And interoperability. Think of quilting. It's an early form of sampling. ...
"We need to default to openness. Let's declare a period of letting some different ecologies flourish in educational video. Some of us will be about billable events. That can happen later after we've figured this out. Archives will be in trouble if people look at them as a place that blocks access.
"The UK lives under a rights regime that many Americans would consider Draconian. They are doing so much more than we are to mobilize archives and make them available, as long as you work in the education field."
I’m here at the Columbia University Law School at a conference put on by Peter Kaufman’s Intelligent Television, with help from Jeff Ubois: "Video, Education and Open Content: Best Practices -- Production, Distribution, Technology and Law". It's going on today and tomorrow.
The conference began with opening remarks from Frank Moretti, department head of Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning.
The challenge is then set for the audience by Cathy Casserly of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation:
"The world is changing quickly and dynamically. How are our institutions? We haven’t integrated what we’ve learned from YouTube and MySpace into the classroom in an exciting way. How do we begin to make this more pervasive?
"It’s not just about putting out great content, it’s about discoverability and use. People need to find it, this is a problem that has plagued the field. There are many gems out there, but they are difficult to find. The average teacher doesn’t have time to find this gem. We’ve been working with Google and other search engines to address this.
"CC Learn – Creative Commons Learn – 'seeks to create a single, standard licensing framework that can encompass all open educational resources (OERs).' They aim to compile a database of 5-10,000 URLs, we’ll have an OER (Open Educational Resources) search, sorting across multiple categories. If Yahoo or MSN wants to pick it up, we’ll be able to do that across the platforms. Please go in and populate some URLs so we have a full range of content in there!"
[Click to find content; or to license your work using this license. For more information about the Hewlett Open Educational Resources project: A PDF and a blog. Cathy has promised to send me the link to the OER collection when it goes live in a few weeks. Stay tuned for comments.]
___________________
Peter Kaufman:
Instead of a world where the US military is not limiting servicepeople’s access to YouTube and MySpace, where The Learning Channel does not get rebranded "TLC" and show "Miami Ink" and "What Not to Wear" -- Imagine a world where the producers are on the same side as consumers, and video is as easy to create and redistribute as email is today.
Demand for online video has exploded - 100+ million videos watched on YouTube every day. The opportunities to produce video have exploded, with iMovie, Jumpcut, Grouper, VideoEgg, etc.
In under 20 years, an Ipod will be able to hold all information ever created, in all media formats.
____________________________________________________
Peter Brantley from the Digital Library Foundation
Begins his talk by showing a brief clip [A Fair(y) Use Tale] using small slivers of animated Disney videos to argue against copyright – in Disney characters own words. The clip was made by the Fair Use Project at the Stanform Center for New Media.
"Libraries have become cafes, they serve muffins. Everyone has their laptop open and notes spread around, people are working together. They’re talking over their laptops. This is not the silent library I grew up with."
_________________________________________________________
Murray Weston, British Universities Film and Video Council
We’re a non-profit, but earn money and have subscribing members. We provide value to all universities in the UK, in particular things that need to be sustained and paid for.
Videos are very helpful in education, but their status in scholarship is not really a done deal. Unlike text. In the UK, there is no unified national catalog, poor research access, no inter-library loan, no arrangements for fair use (called fair dealing in the UK). There’s no culture for reference or review, rare integration with text sources, and poor to non-existent teacher training. Sadly.
They have TRILT – the television and radio index for learning and teaching.
They’re recording 44,000 hours a year of UK television, 7 channels 24/7. Would like to do more. It’s supported by subscription. You can set up a keyword search and our system will tell you what’s coming up on channels.
What if you breach rights? I have $10M worth of insurance from Lloyd’s, paid for by someone else. The UK government won’t take responsibility for anything.
We pay 100 pounds an hour for the rights in perpetuity. I don’t think that’s breaching any confidentiality. There’s a growing understanding of education’s needs. People’s careers are resting on this. There’s greater collaboration with owners. There are new licensing arrangements, and creative commons sharing licenses are coming forward. I see this as a patchwork quilt of delivery.
[Murray, who is a fine gentleman that I had dinner with last night, was hopefully not too taken aback when I interrupted his presentation to question the next thing he said. He said, after the patchwork quilt comment, that audiences could get free video wherever it was available, and the high-quality, high-value content from subscriptions and other paid venues. This implied that free video couldn’t or wouldn’t be as high quality as paid video, and I wanted to question that common assumption. I believe whether something is free or not should merely be a licensing decision on the part of the creator, and not a comment on the actual quality of the content. Too many old media companies are trying to position free content as bad content, and in fact, this need not be the case.]
________________________________________
Paul Gerhard, BBC Creative Archive
70% TV, 30% radio. Doing a closed trial right now streaming video to a broadband audience of 20,000. Showing 50 hours available to the public, out of 1000 hours [that presumably will be available for a fee?]
He brings up the episode of BBC reporter John Sweeny, who was captured on video having an outburst during filming of a Scientology documentary. When the video was captured and posted on YouTube, the BBC had to respond to this YouTube video on YouTube, before the documentary was even broadcast. The footage of the BBC’s program had to be changed to include this outburst.
Tried to get this up last Friday, but just didn't get around to it. Better late than never!
A few more speakers from the morning sessions at the Personal Democracy Forum. Again, apologies for any notes that aren't accurate.
Thomas Friedman: If an activist media has merit, it can have global impact. Readsa few new chapters from his book The World Is Flat, which he is expanding. TXU announced plans to build 11 new coal-fired power plans. President of Environmental Defense Fund tried to get in for a meeting, but governor of TX was on their side. Activists built a global constituency to establish how far out of the mainstream their plan was. The efforts paid off when KKR offered them $45B, the biggest leveraged buyout in history, but only want to go forward if they can work out the problems with EDF and NRDC, a climate-friendly deal. At the end of the day, this buyout rode on the approval of the 2 people at the table who had no money on the table. TF’s friend – we were operating under the old rules, and the rules have changed – where’s the roadmap for the new rules? People all over the world demand: "Who are you to play with my food?" Business school grads, environmentalists, philanthropists, all with a desire to make an impact. The internet makes this activism easier and cheaper than ever. TF: If it’s not happening, it’s cause you’re not doing it. Thows down the gauntlet. The next new chapter: "What happens when we all have a dog’s hearing?" This is the flip side to social entrepreneurship. The downside. Paris taxi was driving, talking on phone and watching a movie. I was working on my laptop, listening to my ipod. We never spoke to each other. Technology can make the far feel very near, but it can also make the near feel very far. He spoke with Linda Stone about what she calls Continuous Partial Attention. We’re everywhere except where we actually are, physically. And the woman driving with her handheld phone almost runs over the jogger with his ipod. What effects are these techologies having on our daily lives? Allowing us to interrupt each other. What happens when we can suddenly hear everything whispered about us? When we all have "dog’s hearing"? Someone is blogging about you right now. Just type your name into Google. People can make vitriolic and personal attacks. How thick is your skin? Are you ready for all your students to blog about you? We are all public figures. Court cases are already arising. Some kids made a Myspace page under the name of a hated assistant principal. Lawsuit says the parents are guilty of defamation. …It’s often the less benign sides of this flat world that get the traction. Friedman talked to some young women, who said that Al Gore was Jewish. The arab newspapers told them so. Large numbers of people outside this country think that the Jews were warned not to go to work the day of 9/11. They believed this "rumor" which was spread with malicious intent. When the world is flat, whatever can be done will be done. The only question is will it be done by you or to you? Friedman: The country with the most imagination, who lets it run free and supports it the most, will win. China will not necessarily win. They censor Google. Let’s not cede the century to them. If we don’t take the politicians and business leaders by the throat and say we need a carbon tax, it won’t happen – and the people most affected by this aren’t even born yet. So, where is the disruptive energy in this room? I don’t feel it! Where is it? Bring it on! ____________________________________________________________ "Companies think about how to make money, not how to engage with the people you meet there. Let’s look at this through the eyes of the people who live there. It’s a form of public life, they hang out there with their friends. What are these "friends" on the social networks? __________________________________________________________ Next speaker: Farouk Olu Aregbe, started the group One Million Strong for Barack, doesn’t work for the campaign. His own experience campaigning for college president gave him experience organizing groups of young people, and organizes student government for the U of Missouri. "Started as a group, then started getting advice about putting up videos, linking to other websites, sending out emails, and so forth. We ran into a threshold – do we want to spend money on becoming a PAC? No… we decided to form subgroups, solicited $15K from students, this is significant, college students don’t have money. We have challenges we’re facing. How to take these masses of volunteers, take them offline, channel this energy. Yes we want to reach a million, but we really want to get them to vote. And this means we have to somehow keep their interest. There’s a June 9th Walk for Change. We’ve centered ourselves around events. Taking people offline, getting things done. __________________________________________ "For me this is a story of betrayal. A failure of the political system. The people who did well online, Howard Dean. This is my crazy uncle theory. The guys who said things at Thanksgiving who said things that were true but uncomfortable. Kids like to hear them, but parents don’t. These candidates did really well online. They appealed to people who felt betrayed by the system. This is a good way to understand the politics of the left online. Open left. Organizing around a key set of principles. Each betrayal has opened up a space for people to innovate politically. The Clinton Lewinsky affair in the Drudge report led to MoveOn. Etc. "The sooner we quit something that has worked really well for 50 years, the sooner we will win. Ideas that spread, win. In the last hundred years, the system has evolved to spread the news. TV drove this – I can interrupt people to spread my message forcibly, even if it’s not true. We saw that this worked! People spend this money because it worked. Politicians did this. Get donations, buy ads, get elected, det donations, buy ads, etc. Now, the world is filled with noise. "As seen on TV" is broken. This doesn’t work the way it used to. Look how many choices of tofu we have! It’s not working – but candidates are spamming us again and again. It doesn’t work. We’re getting good at avoiding spam. Why are marketers still going to singles bars when they could be building a relationship with their customer? People on both sides of the aisle are doing it exactly wrong. 91% of real estate brokers never contact the buyer or the seller after the deal is done. What permission does is it lets you have a private conversation with your customer. Now they are in the fashion business. The core of greenpeace can’t be, how do we raise more money to interrupt people to tell them something they don’t want to hear? It must be, instead, let’s give them something to talk about. Seth: the message needs to get to the geeks. Stand for something. Something people will choose to talk about. Electioneers and marketers are still hunters. It’s time to farm. How do we create movements where, when you show up, there are other people in the room? Newly named idea, "cumulative advantage". People look at the best of YouTube to figure out what to watch. There’s a huge reward for being part of the "short head" – as opposed to the long tail. Don’t broadcast, network. Flip the funnel, that eats money and comes out votes, into a megaphone, where your customers tell each other about you. The new cycle is be remarkable, tell a story to your sneezers, they spread the word, you get permission from new folks…
I'm a strategic Internet consultant, specializing in social media, online communities and conversation marketing.
Recent Comments