Archive - Oct 2006
October 9th
Media Education
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 10/09/2006 - 08:32(Cross posted at MyDD)
This weekend, I participated in the Action Coalition in Media Education Summit in Burlington VT. We spend a lot of time complaining about the media, yet what do we do about it? This is a group of educators that are really doing something about the media.
The first plenary speaker was Diane Wilson, author of An Unreasonable Woman and co-founder of Code Pink. If you haven’t read her book, you really should. The first evening ended with a viewing of The Ad and the Ego. Everyone who comments on Ad Watches, should really watch this video. It has changed my thinking a lot about where political advertisements should be going. When I get a chance to decompress and to watch the movie a few more times, I hope to put up more concrete suggestions.
I attended a session on the portrayal of gifted girls in the media. This is an issue that is close to my heart and I wrote a personal blog entry about this.
On Saturday Morning, Jerome Armstrong was a keynote speaker, talking about Crashing the Gate. Of course I hope and expect everyone has already read the book, and perhaps even heard Jerome and/or Markos talk about it. His talk was one of the few intersections between the media educators world and the blogging world, and we need to see much more of that.
At lunch time, I spoke on a panel, Beyond the Dean Scream. Kate O’Connor, Zephyr Teachout, Tom Hughes, Amanda Michel, and myself spoke about experiences of the Dean campaign and what it means for future campaigns as well as for media education. You can listen to an audio of our talk.
The conference ended up with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! delivering a great closing plenary session, and a viewing of Robert Greenwald’s Iraq for Sale.
It was a great conference. I came away with a lot of ideas that I hope to expand upon in coming blog posts. I encourage everyone concerned with media reform to get involved with the Action Coalition in Media Education and other media education organizations.
October 7th
Unreasonable Women
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 10/07/2006 - 16:11It is a beautiful autumn day as I take a few moments off to sit and write about the ACME Coalition Summit in Burlington, VT. The first speaker in the opening Plenary was Diane Wilson, author of the book “An Unreasonable Woman”. It is a great book that I encourage everyone to go out and read. She spoke well, as did Bill McKibben after her and Jerome Armstrong this morning. However, the session that really jumped out at me was “Expecting to Fly: Giftedness, Girls and Women, and Media”.
Lisa Goldman spoke about the paucity of positive role models for gifted girls. Being the father of gifted girls, I was particularly interested in the subject and sat in on the talk. There were a couple other sessions at the same time that I was really interested in as well, so I thought I would pop into Lisa’s session and then maybe catch a little bit of some other sessions as well. That wasn’t to be the case. Lisa had a great presentation that really grabbed me.
October 5th
Rolling down the hill
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/05/2006 - 18:05
Fiona rolls down the hill as Miranda plays field hockey in the background
Here are a few clilps from Miranda playing Field Hockey
Event Central
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 10/05/2006 - 12:26Yesterday, I learned that a volunteer had set up an event on DFA Link for the Lamont Campaign. Already, 46 people have signed up for the event. It is a great idea and I’m very glad the event will happen. However, as the technologist for the Lamont campaign, I wish that it had been set up on Lamont website. As a person who has recently started playing with Facebook, I thought, maybe it would be good to set up the event there as well. How about on the Democrat Party’s PartyBuilder, or on more general calendars like Google Calendar or Yahoo!’s Upcoming.org?
The plethora of options reflect, what I think is a need as more people put more events online, some set of Events Central tools. One tool that would be really nice would be something like is something like Pingoat. With Pingoat, you can ping a large number of blog tracking services to let them know that your blog has been updated. There is a checklist of sites that can be pinged. It would be great if a similar tool could be built for setting events. Fill out the necessary information, check which sites should get a listing of the event, and off you go. For that matter, if I were a major campaign vendor, I would consider adding options to my event system so when I add an event to the system, I could also add it to public systems like Upcoming, Facebook, or Google Calendars.
Another thing that would be nice would be better sharing of events between systems. Some events systems, like Blue State Digital’s which powers the Lamont campaign and the Democratic Party, and Upcoming.org, allow you to subscribe to events as RSS feeds. Other’s like Google and Drupal support iCal. Some allow export, some allow import, some allow both. Currently, I’m subscribing to several different calendar feeds via Bloglines. It would be great to see more systems support both iCal and RSS both for incoming and outgoing.
These are the easy parts. Where it gets more complicated is how you deal with RSVPs. Besides trying to get people to events, campaigns use event tools to build mailing lists. As noted above, the people who signed up the DFALink event are added to DFA’s mailing list, but not to the Lamont mailing list. It would be great if a secure and authenticated protocol could be established so that if a person signs up for a DFALink event, they could optionally let their information be shared with other events RSVP (and mailing lists systems). This of course is a Holy Grail that I doubt we’ll see anytime soon, but some of the other tools could easily be built.
Anything else interesting going on?
October 3rd
Getting videos online quickly
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 10/03/2006 - 14:21Recently I was asked about the quickest, easiest and cheapest way to put video content online. I really like sending videos from cellphones that can record video. Unfortunately, Cingular has proven unreliable and the video I tried to submit this morning still hasn't made it. However, you can look at a video I sent from Kim's cellphone here (BlipTV) and here (Clipshack).
I also wanted to kick around recording straight from a webcam to a video sharing service. Here is what Hipcast posted to my blog.
(Note: I have a 7 day free trial. It will be interesting to see what happens to the video after 7 days if I decide not to spend the $10/month. My guess is the video will disappear.
This is my first test of the Hipcast Video Blog Recorder. I hope to be posting this as a test to several blogs that I use.
Hipcast is nice. I posted this to several test blogs:
Livejournal, Wordpress and Blogspot.
So, if I want a nice way to record from a webcam and post it to many different formats of blogs, Hipcast is a good way to go. However, at $10/month, it seems pretty high priced.
This is a webcam video recorded on Clipshack.
I tried the same thing with Clipshack. Clipshack's interface seemed a little easier to use. However, it didn't give me the ability to automaticly post to various blogs. I needed to cut and past some HTML to get this to work.
Another nice aspects of using Clipshack is that it is free.
I will continue kick around these tools and figure out the best tools to use for different purposes. Any feedback about different programs or services would be appreciated.
