Paul's Web Space 2.1

Blue Beanie Day

Today is Blue Beanie Day 2007 — an effort to increase support for the notion of designing sites and applications using web standards and accessibility guidelines. It is being celebrated on Flickr and Facebook, and is organized by the Facebook group named after the book Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman — the "bible" of web standards web development using Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS).

Another, perhaps more serious, long-term effort to promote this cause is the Web Standards Project. The movement toward improving the accessibility of web sites is embodied in the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative.

I'm a long-time supporter of these efforts, both by providing vocal support and by practicing these methods myself and in projects that I manage to the greatest practical extent. For the festivities, I took my first self-portrait with my Treo 750 last night (using that little fisheye mirror), sporting the spiffy blue baseball cap given out at the last Freedom to Connect conference in Silver Spring, organized by David Isenberg.

Labels: bluebeanieday2007, browsers, standards, webstandards

   Link: http://www.flickr.com/groups/bluebeanieday2007/

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BeatBlogging.org Launches; EdWeeek Reporter Participating

Jay Rosen has just launched BeatBlogging.org, the third project undertaken by his organization NewAssignment.Net, as an experiment to test the concept of “beat reporting with a social network.” I saw Jay present this concept a few weeks ago at the Online News Association Annual Conference in Toronto. After hearing his presentation, edweek.org inquired about taking part in the project; as a result, Michelle Davis from Education Week's Digital Directions will be one of thirteen journalists taking part (so far).

NewAssignment.Net has undertaken two other projects in sixteen months:

• Assignment Zero, a partially-successful attempt to employ citizen journalists^* to cover the story and history of crowdsourcing, in partnership with Wired.com. Assignment Zero took a little while to gel, to organize the unexpected infusion of volunteer reporters and editors, but it ended up producing a handful of excellent stories and dozens of high quality interviews.


• OffTheBus, a collaboration with the Huffington Post to organize citizen journalists to report stories not being covered by the conventional media (those who ride "on the bus"). It appears to be very active, publishing several pieces daily, ranging from blog entries to larger collaborative journalism projects, news stories, and interviews. Arianna Huffington and Zack Exley have already described the project better than I ever could; read also the first project assignment.
  

Jay announced BeatBlogging.org on November 14, posting identical entries on his blog Pressthink and on IdeaLab, the blog set up for winners of the most recent Knight News Challenge, which is funding the project. He postulated:

Maybe a beat reporter could do a way better job if there was a “live” social network connected to the beat, made up of people who know the territory the beat covers, and want the reporting on that beat to be better.

Education Week's Digital Directions is taking part in BeatBlogging.org alongside such news organizations as Houston Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, ESPN.com, MTV News, and Chronicle of Higher Education. I look forward to watching the adventure unfold. We are currently expanding the online presence of Digital Directions – a relatively new publication – and this effort should mesh well with other social media initiatives currently underway at edweek.org.

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^* Some news professionals don't like the term "citizen journalism," preferring "citizen media" or something similar. They believe that real journalism is practiced by trained professionals, according to strict standards — a description that they claim doesn't always fit the crowdsourced alternative. I'm undecided on the issue, and at any rate, "citizen journalism" is the term employed by NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen to describe the various projects that make up NewAssignment.Net; I'll defer to the mastermind.

   Link: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2007/11/14/beat_reps.html

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OLPC - Give One Get One

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project yesterday launched the availability of production models of the XO laptop to citizens of US and Canada, but only for a short period of time. I'm buying one for my daughter Fiona under the Give One Get One (G1G1) initiative. I'm pretty excited about this myself; I've seen a pilot model, and I thought it was very cool if a little clunky (and I understand that a lot of that clunk has been worked out by launch). Actually, I've already had my picture taken with Fiona using the built-in camera. The reason for this program is to raise the money to send more laptops to deserving children in third world countries than their governments were willing to pay for today.

I participated in a very interesting conference call yesterday organized by Jerry Michalski (former editor of Release 1.0). He holds the weekly Yi-Tan Tech Calls for technology analysts, investors, and other interested parties to discuss the forces of change that are all around us. This call was entitled "You Buying an OLPC?" and it contained some very insightful analysis and commentary, kicked off by Jerry, with no particular guest but lots of participants. I learned, for example, about the Sugar operating environment and Squeak development environment (built in), and more on the built-in WiFi and mesh networking, video camera, etc. One common opinion was that while the OLPC might not last as a technology, some of the building blocks like Sugar and Squeak do look like they have legs. I've also seen with my own eyes the ruggedness of the machines, resistant to shocks, water, dust, etc. Read more about the technology and the environment.

One thing to think about (and a caution I have heard) is that these machines are meant for small children, and as we all know, the Internet isn't necessarily a perfectly safe place for small minds. Tellingly, the G1G1 Terms and Conditions contains this paragraph, which parents should heed:
   Link: http://www.laptopgiving.org/

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NPower Technology Innovation Award Luncheon

On Friday, I attended the inspirational 2007 Technology Innovation Award (TIA), which "recognizes nonprofits in our community whose innovative use of technology is enabling them to more effectively fulfill their mission." The event itself was very nice, presented by NPower Greater DC Region and Accenture and held at the National Association of Homebuilders headquarters in downtown DC.

There were 32 applicants, and the work of three finalists was featured during the ceremony; each of the three finalists received some award. The finalists included:

• Fairfax Symphony Orchestra, a local orchestra that provides many educational opportunities through programs at Fairfax County public schools and a free concert series. FSO recently introduced video podcasts to promote its work and stay connected with its audience.


• GlobalGiving, an online marketplace for global philanthropy that enables donors to find and support worthy grass-roots projects that help the needy in developing countries. Their new product, Give Certificates, enables you to donate money on behalf of another, allowing the recipient to direct the donation to the charity of their choice.


• RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), operator of the first national rape crisis hotline. RAINN recently introduced the National Sexual Assault Online Hotline, an innovative service that reaches young rape victims through the medium that they use to communicate with their friends. (Over half of sexual assault victims are under 18.)

After seeing short films detailing the mission and project of each finalist – all of whom were worthwhile – the work of RAINN really stood out, and I was happy to see them take home the top prize. This was reinforced when Scott Berkowitz, RAINN's President and Founder, related that this award would help them to achieve the goal of expanding the already-popular Online Hotline from 12 hours/5 days to 24/7 coverage, so that this invaluable service will be available whenever its vulnerable clients need it.

I want to thank Ben Hendricks, NPower Senior Technology Project Manager, for inviting me to this event. I'm a long-time fan of NPower, and I've been a regular attendee of their IT Working Group lunches, where I've met some very cool people. The only award judge I knew personally was Jack Daggitt, now a private consultant and investor, who was one of my managers at AOL when I started there almost 15 years ago as an education producer.    Link: http://www.npowergdcr.org/events/technology+innovation+award/index.htm

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Power Shift 2007 Conference and Lobby Day

In what's being described as the largest lobbying effort yet surrounding global warming, students from around the country are converging in College Park this weekend to discuss global warming.

Tomorrow they hit the Hill with ads on Metro trains and and lobbying in support of Energy Bill 2007.    Link: http://powershift07.org/

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Eventful October - Part 2: ONA, UPI

If October started out being all about Internet Policy, with a little web analytics thrown in, it ended up firmly in the camp of online journalism and community media.

Two weeks ago I returned from the Online News Association (ONA) Annual Conference and Award Ceremony in Toronto. Pretty cool meeting, although not everyone was satisfied. That said, there were definite hightlights:

• CITMedia: Citizen Journalism Workshop - all day Wednesday, lots of inspiring panels and stories.
• Becoming a Community Evangelist panel with JD Lasica, Rob Curley, Jay Rosen, and Dan Gillmor — the thought leaders.
• The Legal Panel covered all aspects of legal issues, from DMCA takedowns and trademark issues to differences between the US and Canadian laws.
• Pretty good keynotes from Yahoo and IHT executives.

Edweek didn't win any awards, but we were a finalist for the second year running, this time for our beat coverage of the Supreme Court.

Then the following week I attended a conference with the pretentious name The Power to Change the World, a global leadership summit, media for the next 100 years. This meeting was hosted by United Press International (UPI), and organized by iFocos, the people who do We Media confernces. It was a really interesting meeting - certainly somewhat full of itself, but a fascinating opportunity to see contrasting views from thought leaders in new media business and journalism, alongside entrpreneurs and organizations pushing these technologies in bold new directions. Keynotes from Martin Luther King III and Dr. Hyun Jin Moon, Chairman of UPI's parent NewsWorld (and son of Sun Myung Moon). Dr. Moon praised journalistic objecctivity while complaining of his father's treatment by the media. Some other money quotes:

Traditional media projects authority, but it is also authoritarian. - Oh Yeon-ho, CEO, Oh My News (South Korea, paraphrased through an interpreter)

Micah Sifry, Co-founder and Editor, Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident.com, pointed to the development of Open Source Politics, noting the importance of Voter-Generated Content such as the Hilary Clinton spoof of the 1984 Apple ad.

"Social media is a braintrust." - John Todor, Managing Partner, The Whetstone Edge

"The information we have, the less knowledge we gain." - Tom Rosenstiel, Director, Project for Excellence in Journalism

"People under 20 hate the word 'consumer.' - Dave Sifry, Chairman, Technorati

Dave also referred to the "people formerly known as the audience" but that quote was attributed to Jay Rosen (and he traces it back even further on his blog.) ¶ 1:01 PM | Permalink | | | Links to this post
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Google + MySpace = OpenSocial

Mashable has more detail than the BBC story I saw last night. Google's new social network API suite has quite a line-up of partners - besides MySpace, partners include LinkedIn, Six Apart (MovableType/LiveJournal/Vox), Ning, Friendster, Hi5, and many others. Application developers already signed up include NewsGator, iLike, and Flixter.

Pretty impressive! I especially like the openness of it, not only saving application developers (and potentially users) from the pain and agony of supporting countless networks, but potentially giving users more control over their information. Or taking more advantage of user information to sell to you. Take your pick - benevolent Google or its evil twin.    Link: http://mashable.com/2007/11/01/myspace-google-2/

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