Media
Media
Friday Five
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 05/05/2006 - 11:54Cinco de Mayo brings a special meaning to Friday Five. I’m not sure if this will really end up being five unrelated topics or not, but it will have a bunch of different tidbits, much of it follow up to various things I’ve written about recently.
I just got an email from the Media Bloggers Association giving me an update on the Maine Web Report case. It is great to see bloggers across the politics spectrum work together to defend free speech.
Peter Turner, whom I met at the New Organizing Institute training in DC back in February sent me an email about The Katrina Project. They are trying to keep the Gulf Coast tragedy fully in the public eye and promote a serious national conversation about poverty and inequality through helping rebuild the New Orleans Public Library. A very cool project. Please, check out their site and contribute a book or two.
The schedule for Personal Democracy Forum 2006 is up. I will be on a panel, The Rising Power of Local Political Blogs. Two of the other people on the panel are Liza Sabater, whom I’ve met at various events around CivicSpace, last year’s Personal Democracy Forum, and probably other events, and Juan Melli, whom I’ve met online several places. It should be a good conference.
I’m also gearing up for the Media Giraffe conference. With that, I’m spending a bit of time looking at various video sharing sites. A few quick comments on this: Apparently blip.tv has cleaned up its interface and is easier to use now. For example, you no longer need to create a separate thumbnail. DailyMotion and ClipShack allow loading videos from cellphones. Kim’s cellphone records videos, so I’ll give that a try. Unfortunately, neither of them have a nice feed into other blogs, although DailyMotion does include RSS feeds and group abilities. Grouper has moved out of the ‘Coming Soon’ category, and I should probably explore that a little.
Also, Kim uploaded this picture of Reilly resting in the sun yesterday. It fits nicely for cat blogging on Friday.
So, that’s a little bit of what’s going on with me.
Media Giraffe Grassroots Filmmaking Workshop and Festival
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 05/03/2006 - 19:23As digital video cameras become more popular, as people start taking videos from their cellphones, and as new sites emerge online to distribute these videos, citizens’ filmmaking is set to take off. Many people will be simply sharing home movies. Others, however, will want to create documentaries, political advertisements, and citizen journalism.
The Media Giraffe Grassroots filmmaking workshop and festival will celebrate noteworthy citizens’ filmmaking and provide workshops for those wishing to learn how to become more involved.
Okay. That’s the idea as it stands right now. Can I pull together this as part of the Media Giraffe Conference I’m helping with? I’m getting interest from various parties. Now, I need to see if I can find some good folks to lead the workshops, a good keynote speaker, people making good grassroots videos, and people interested in attending the festival.
If you have any ideas, please let me know.
UPDATE: Things are taking shape nicely for the conference. Details can be found here:
http://www.mediagiraffe.org/filmmaking/
The way life shouldn’t be
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 04/27/2006 - 16:34I haven’t written about the Media Bloggers Association in quite a while, which is probably a good thing. Their website describes the organization this way:
The Media Bloggers Association is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and educating its members; supporting the development of "blogging" or "citizen journalism" as a distinct form of media; and helping to extend the power of the press, with all the rights and responsibilities that entails, to every citizen.
While the promotion and education of its members is important, MBA probably makes its biggest mark in protecting bloggers against scurrilous lawsuits.
Today, I received an email about Maine Web Report. Lance, the blogger for Maine Web Report has been writing extensively the Maine Office of Tourism. Apparently, people haven’t taken well to his criticism, and an advertising firm involved has slapped him with a ‘3 count multi-million dollar federal lawsuit’. The MBA is will be acting as co-counsel in defending Lance.
I was born in Maine. I have friends in Maine. I still think of Maine as Vacationland and hope to move back to Maine one day. However, I must say, I am very disappointed with what I’m reading about those attempting to promote tourism in Maine.
This isn’t the way life should be. As much as I hate to say it, right now, I prefer New Hampshire and their motto.
Update:
Various bloggers that are writing about this include B. L. Ochman, Bill Hobbs, Tor Lindahl, Jason Clarke, James Joyner and Don Singleton
In the News (part 2)
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 04/26/2006 - 09:50Here is the article from The Stamford Times. They do not have the article online, but have granted permission for me to post it, provided that I properly acknowledge their work and copyright.
Blogging for Votes
By A.J. O'CONNELL
Staff Writer
STAMFORD - They come in all shapes, sizes, colors and fonts. Newsroom veterans, hobbyists, political hopefuls and high school kids post them. To some, they may seem to be nothing more than diaries written in cyberspace, but thousands of Connecticut residents are writing Weblogs, and a handful of these sites are changing the way our state does politics.
Understanding We the Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 09/15/2005 - 10:50This is a title I’ve always wanted to use. It is a combination of ‘Understanding Media’ by Marshall McLuhan and ‘We the Media’ by Dan Gillmor. We are at an interesting point in media convergence as I talked about a little yesterday.
Today, I want to write about when there are bumps in the convergence. As I was reading through my Bloglines subscriptions, I found this entry from BL Ochman’s What’s Next blog: Humorless Garrison Keillor Threatens to Sue Blogger for Parody. I followed the links to Trial Of The Century: Keillor V. MNspeak.com.
In that entry, the blogger writes about telling Keillor’s lawyer, "First off, your client has no legal basis for this, and it's clear you're just trying to bully me. Secondly, this is going to make your client look extremely out of touch. I'll even write the headline for you: 'Liberal Comedian Sues Blogger.' Do you really want that?"
