Nov 09
Posted: under Digital Migration.
Yet again, I use this blog as something of a mad scientist’s laboratory, to show off how to use the latest social media tools.
This time around, it’s the social media aggregator/publisher Storify.
Oct 13
Posted: under Digital Migration.
A dark line descended over my Mac and all the programs froze.
Then the message came up on the screen, telling me that I should push the “Power” button on the front of the Mac, hold it down until the whole machine turned off, and basically do a hard reboot.
Not. Good.
When I managed to restart Doc Octocore, I immediately launched all the diagnostic programs I had.
Seriously, this is something you never wanna see on your computer… 
Now I begin to understand why my Mac has felt like it's trudging through slush the last couple of months. Apparently, ever since I toyed with Carbonite as a backup solution, then quickly rejected it because it was bringing the web connection to an absolute crawl - well, deleting Carbonite apparently never means that you're actually done with it. It's like Newt Gingrich ... the damn thing just won't go away. Just keeps hanging around, causing problems and contributing nothing useful.
To get rid of Carbonite, you have to start doing major surgery on the Library items on your Mac. It looks kinda like this:
Oct 05
Posted: under Digital Migration.
All your favorites are there … the “It” clown, little Drew Barry more starting the fire, The Gunslinger, the creepy little monkey with his cymbals.
I’m not sure if the pix here were meant to be some sort of ironic counterpoint to the message that I’m trying to spread here in Bulgaria — that despite the travails of the Traditional Media in the developed world, All Is Not Lost, and working journalists are not trapped in an unending horror show from which there is no exit.
Which is pretty much the prevailing mind-set amongst my friends who still work at newspapers and in the publishing game.
This is quite a nice little space, as you can see – a sort of American cultural outreach center, where they are touting the works of Stephen King. I’ve always felt that King, when he bends his back to the work, can capture something truly essential about the American character that few other authors working in the late 20th century were capable of. When I read The Dead Zone in my mid-teens, I discovered a voice that was writing about the kinds of blue collar, but not clueless hickabillies, that I had grown up with. Some deeply flawed and dangerous … others sad and lost … others (too few, really) quietly courageous and steadfast in their core human decency. His deep distrust of authority and ability to see through the post-Watergate b.s. was like a bucket of cold water to the face. I’ll always love him for that, even if in subsequent years, his discovery of the coca alkaloids tinged his writing with a lazy streak, and he rarely approached the kinds of insight and characterization that marked his work in the 70s.
Oct 04
Posted: under Digital Migration, New Media Strategery, Travel.
Tags: Bulgaria, new media. illuminated manuscripts, Rila Monastery
I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria, training journalists & others on how to use the various tools of New Media.
As part of the trip, we went into the mountains, to an ancient monastery. Yeah, I know — a trip up winding paths to a crumbling castle … bring your garlic, stakes and holy water, right?
Actually, the Rila Monastery (as I said in an earlier post) is one of the truly amazing places on Earth. Man, they really loved to decorate this place up.
So here’s a shot of me on the portico of the cathedral here — a quote I heard is that “this place is like the Jerusalem to these people. It’s their Holy Land.” To me, the symmetry of this place lies in the fact that the monks here, for centuries, preserved knowledge by laboriously hand-scribing illuminated manuscripts. Until they were supplanted by herr Gutenberg’s movable type technology.
I am here to teach people about the modern equivalent of that disruptive technology.
Sep 27
Posted: under Digital Migration, Multimedia, New Media Strategery, newspaper crisis, Online (Multi)Media, Viral Fame.
This is painted on the ceiling of the Rila Monastery in the mountains of Bulgaria, one of UNESCO’s World Heritage Sites.
I can’t help but wonder whose eye this ancient artist used as the model for the Eye of God. The history and beauty of this complex makes me feel like I’m about to embark on some sort of DaVinci Code-like adventure, only this one will involve online business models and the mysteries of HTML5. Heh. Hopefully, I won’t be pursued by some self-flagellating Newsroom Curmudgeon, bent on undermining my message about how there is actually hope for the future, that journalism will survive, even if it does take a form that is strange and possibly abhorrent to the practitioners steeped in The Old Ways.
I’m traveling to Bulgaria (and to this amazing historical site) to lead a series of panel discussions with scholars, students and the nascent digerati on the future of journalism in the digital age, hopefully continuing in my role as an international Digital Johnny Appleseed. The training session we did yesterday at the Institute of the Americas in La Jolla was amazing – one of the best groups we’ve ever presented to, and one where we could see already that journalists from all over Latin America were discovering on their own, ways that they could cooperate and help each other across the vast distances.
And once again, I shall be completely shameless and link to the recordings on UStream of the live sessions, featuring my wife Janine.
Jul 01
Posted: under Community, Design, Digital Migration, google, Google Android, New Media Strategery, Platform obsession, Uncategorized, Webconomics.
Tags: circles, friends, google, google plus, moats, smart, social media
In less than five minutes, I responded to an invitation (that is probably still in pretty high demand) and signed up for Google+.
Being able to add people to the circles is an absolutely frickin’ brilliant move! The little animations are absolutely killer. I have been wanting this and talking about this and boring the living shit out of my tech-dw33b friends about how the one big problem STILL with social media is that it’s damn near and all-or-nothing game.
No longer. Someone at Google “got it,” and this is a killer feature that Facebook DOES NOT HAVE.
Also: Google+ aggregates my information from all manner of sources, so I don’t have to go through that goddam tiresome “OK, let’s fill in all the blanks on this profile page yet again … wait, what? … it timed out? (long cursing session)”
Check out the screen cap below – this is after only a few minutes of cursory work:
I kinda disagree with this post on AllFacebook, where they focus in on how Google has made it “compulsory” to be part of Google+, and that the key to all this is “time on site.”
While tech pundits are widely praising Google’s new Plus product, I’ve found the one feature that could take away from Facebook where it’s most dominant: Time on the site.
Facebook users are known for staying on the site for over half an hour a day, something no other site could compete with… until now.
To be honest, my gut reaction after using Google Plus was initially, “Why on earth would anybody switch to this from Facebook?”
However, when I loaded up Google Finance as I do every morning, I suddenly realized that I was asking the wrong question. The reality is that users won’t have the option of not using Google Plus.
However, later on, they kinda stumble into something interesting, that’s also come up recently in the kerfuffle over the “Open Letters to RIM” – that is, that tech companies are starting to realize that what will really make them successful, is making it easy for developers & propellorhead-types like, well, us … to come and play in their sandbox.
Add to that this very insightful dissection of what was at the core of MySpace imploding – the same thing at work, i.e. pissing on indie developers – and you start to see something fascinating emerging in corporate thinking … for those intelligent enough to read the tea leaves (or Cheeto crumbs, if you will).
Jul 01
Posted: under Digital Migration, journalism, new media, New Media Strategery, newspaper crisis, Online (Multi)Media, Online Video, Travel, Video, Web Tech, Web/Tech, Webconomics.
Tags: addis ababa, developing nations, Ethiopia, journalism, journalists, mobile web, social media training, State Department
I’ve been in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for the last week, training the local journalists and government information officers (aka PR flacks) on how best to take advantage of the way that “New Media” is creating new ways of connecting with each other, and the world at large. I’m here as part of the same US Embassy program that has sent me to places like Chile, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Costa Rica, etc., to try to bring people the benefits of experience (aka the way newspapers & TV news has imploded in the U.S.), so they can start planning for the Great Digital Migration.
This is my class of TV journalists at Addis Ababa University (AAU). I tried to cram as much about online video and sharing into my short sessions as I could. Here, I'm showing how to use both professional tools like Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, as well as free alternatives like Windows Movie Maker.
The one thing that everyone here agrees on is that Ethiopia desperately wants to change its international image – c’mon, admit it. When you think of Ethiopia, what images come to mind? Deserts, starving people, vultures, Live Aid, right?
Well, it’s not like that any more. In fact, if you look around at the Addis Ababa skyline, you’ll mostly see cranes and highrise towers under construction. The real-estate bubble that burst and devastated the rest of the world never took hold here.
There are still many reminders that the ancient ways of living are still very much in existence here in Addis, but please also note all the other markers of modernity in this shot.
However, they are facing many of the same challenges as the rest of the world, at least when it comes to the emergence of the internet, and the struggles of newspapers, radio and TV stations to come to grips with social media, and the ability of anyone to become a publisher/broadcaster/internet troll.
The very first place I visited was Sheger FM, the one independent radio station in Ethiopia. This is the courageous owner, who is really struggling to walk the razor's edge here in Addis.
I’ve found many of the same behaviors and attitudes I’ve encountered in the other places that I’ve done web/online video/social media training sessions – stubborn insistence that things will never change, toxic skepticism, and even outright hostility.
After a bit of a rocky start, these guys really came around and appreciated the hands-on lessons I gave them on how to do live video stand-up reports and how to compress video into the best codec to upload to YouTube. The Nelson Mandela building is a challenge, though; between the thin air at this 8000-foot altitude, and having to haul my big carcass up 5 (five) steep flights of stairs, the first few minutes of every class were mostly spent huffing and puffing, and hoping that someone in the class had a particularly insightful comment.
Jun 24
Posted: under Blogging, Blogs, Digital Migration, Mobile Uploads, Online (Multi)Media.
Tags: Audio MIT media
Here’s a short audio file i recorded at the close of the Civic Media conference this week at MIT. I’d like to add my own thanks to the sentiments expressed herein; thus was a fabulous antidote to the general malaise afflicting so many of our traditional media brethren…
http://audioboo.fm/boos/395702-final-thoughts-and-thanks-at-civic-media-conference-at-mit-media-lab
Mar 22
Posted: under Conspiracy Theories, Digital Migration, New Media Strategery, Web Tech, Webscams.
Tags: deleting browser cookies, lazy developers, underhanded info-mining techniques, victimizing your audience, zombie cookies
Doop-de-doop, just adjusting the settings on Safari so’s it doesn’t keep opening up a new window every time I click a link. It’s one of the default settings in Safari that I really deplore. Maybe this made sense back when Safari first came out, and it was common to open new instances of a browser when you were doing something complicated like (gasp!) viewing two of the literally dozens of websites that were then in existence — at the same time! Wowee-zowie! It makes no sense for Safari to have defaults that make it act like Internet Explorer 3.0 or Netscape Navigator.
(Aside: have you ever tried to explain to someone younger than 20 what it was like to be “mousetrapped” back in the day? Do any of you remember what being “mousetrapped” on your browser was like? Hello? Is this thing on…?)
Anyway, I happened to click on the Security tab and then the Show Cookies button. Here’s what I saw:
This is a short list of the cookies on my Mac. I've expunged some of the scary-looking hexcode on the right. Pay attention to the dates in the column in pink.
Yeah, that’s right. Some of the cookies on my computer won’t expire until nearly 30 years after I hit my 100th birthday. Most of the others will (supposedly) stay resident and not expire for another quarter-century.
Who does this? I mean, really? Is it really sensible in any way to assume that this computer, as much as I love & use it on a daily basis, will still be alive and kicking in more than 10 years? Or even 5? Have these guys even heard of Moore’s Law? I’m not bumming specifically on Lynda.com, because there are many other offenders, different only in degree.
But really, this is user abuse. Why would you cram something onto my machine that is so obviously useless, unless
It is #3 above that really gets my goat. It exploits the users’ trust, relying on the same obliviousness that makes so many of us just click on the “I Agree” button when faced with these labyrinthine EULAs & suchlike. This is short-term thinking. And it is wrong.
This has changed the way that I look at the sites that have placed these kinds of hidden, ill-considered material on my computer. I pass this on in the hopes that other users voice their concerns as well — only if enough people start becoming aware of shady practices like this will companies start policing themselves.
Useful stuff: If you want Safari to stop acting like Internet Explorer/Netscape circa 1997, here’s what you do:
Oct 17
Posted: under advertising, Denial of Reality, Digital Migration, New Media Strategery, newspaper crisis, Newspaper Deathwatch, Online (Multi)Media, Online Video.
Tags: Dave LaFontaine, Michael Pranikoff, new media, PR Newswire, Serena Ehrlich
First in a series of videos taken during a panel discussion for PR Newswire at the LA Times building.
On the panel with me, the delightfully funny and plainspoken Serena Ehrlich, who knows more about how to handle media in the digital age than the last three Presidential Press Secretaries put together. Although there is a marked resemblance there to C.J Craig of the late, lamented Bartlett administration.
Anyway, this is a bit of an intro to what the conditions are like for the media, and what the big forces shaping the future are going to look like.
