Celebrating Those Who Blog the Vote

Posted on October 30, 2006 by Phillips Academy

This afternoon, we’re welcoming all those who are covering the 2006 Massachusetts campaign cycle to a reception in your honor at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. The reception, totally informal, will run from probably 5 – 6:30 p.m. or so at 23 Everett Street, Cambridge, MA. No matter if you’re for Healey/Hillman or Patrick/Murray, or if you want yes or no on 1, 2, or 3, of if you’re still undecided, please join us! To contact the Berkman Center, click here.

Readers, Reporters

Posted on October 14, 2006 by Phillips Academy

Dave Winer: “It’s easier for readers to become reporters than it is for reporters to become readers.”

Congratulations, Global Voices Community

Posted on September 18, 2006 by Phillips Academy

As Rebecca MacKinnon reports, Global Voices today won the Knight-Batten Award for innovation in journalism. It’s quite an accomplishment, for which literally hundreds of people can take credit. GV has been a runaway success since RMacK and Ethan Zuckerman kicked it off not so very long ago. I’m so happy for everyone whose hard work has made this recognition possible. Thanks are also owed to those loyal, trusting souls who have supported GV and the Berkman Center through funding and high-level guidance for this project, including Chris Ahearn and Dean Wright at Reuters, John Bracken at the MacArthur Foundation, Hivos, and others. The best still lies ahead for the GV community, and the GV experiment, I have no doubt. (Here’s more, from NZ).

A few new firsts at the Berkman Center

Posted on September 12, 2006 by Phillips Academy

Charlie Nesson and his daughter Rebecca Nesson are hosting the Tuesday lunchtime session at the Berkman Center today.

– One first is that this is the first video webcast lunch event. We’ve regularly webcast these lunches audio-only. This week, with the help of Indigo Tabor, we are offering a live feed with video as well as audio. (The real-time webcast is 12:00 – 1:30 p.m. EDT today, Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2006.) So, too, is it being offered in Second Life, where 24 people are tuning in at the moment from Berkman Island, we’re told.

– The other first (actually, I’m certain there are more than two, since Becca and Charlie are involved) is that the class that they are talking about, Cyberone: Law in the Court of Public Opinion, is being taught IN Second Life, a first for Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School, anyway. If you haven’t seen the promo video for it yet, it’s a must.

It remains to be seen if these firsts will stick. It remains to be seen if these firsts will lead to other good things, as the establishment of Creative Commons by Prof. Lessig or the first podcast series hosted here by a combination of Dave Winer, Chris Lydon, and Bob Doyle. But it’s fun to be sure. Charlie and Becca keep the Berkman Center young and just a bit hip, and the likes of Rodica, Dean, Gene, and John Lester from Linden Labs keep giving things like these experiments life.

(John Bracken called this first first, way before me, and added more about a Berkeley example.)

Bloglines, RSS privacy problem

Posted on August 23, 2006 by Phillips Academy

A call to action: the security infrastructure for RSS is not where it needs to be for the mainstreaming of this technology to work and to be adequately protective of user privacy.

I was resetting my Bloglines account this morning, adding some new feeds, taking out some that I don’t read, and so forth. I searched on a friend’s web moniker (“Whirlycott”) to find whatever feeds he might be offering. Up popped a feed related to a web-based invoicing service he uses entitled (“[His Name] Invoices”) to which I could subscribe in Bloglines. I am not sure what it would have rendered — I did not subscribe! — but I thought it worth mentioning to him. It turns out he has been mad about this privacy problem for months. His initial post, worth reading and reviving as an issue of public discussion, is here.

I credit the fact that this may not be (just) a “Bloglines issue” but rather an “RSS industry” issue. But it’s a real problem if we are to continue to express ourselves via these citizen-generated media tools that offer RSS feeds, and moreso if we move into the promising realm of using RSS feeds to support other productivity-type tools. The privacy problems that already exist in cyberspace are enough to tackle; we need to get in front of an RSS privacy problem before it grows into yet widespread issue. After this morning’s experience, it’s clear to me it’s already a problem.

(Following the thread a bit, there’s another post in the series, including, some months ago, a note from someone appearing to be with Bloglines saying that they know it’s a serious problem. How can we fix it, gang? If it’s not a Bloglines-only issue and it’s a community issue, what has to get done?)

Cool intersection of MSM/blogginess/reporting

Posted on August 22, 2006 by Phillips Academy

The Boston Herald‘s Kimberly Atkins i s promising to take questions from citizens for the three candidates for the Democratic nomination for Governor of Massachusetts. So, if you have something you want to know about Tom Reilly, Deval Patrick, or Chris Gabrieli, please get in touch with her via her blog.

Hao Wu released

Posted on July 11, 2006 by Phillips Academy

Remarkably good news coming out of the GV community and beyond: the release of Hao Wu after five months in prison in China. (See Rebecca MacKinnon’s op-ed from April 20 in the Washington Post for more background.) Congratulations to his family and to the international community of supporters who have been pulling for him all this time.

Farewell, Robert Scoble

Posted on June 11, 2006 by Phillips Academy

I am one of the many who have benefitted from learning about Microsoft through the work of Robert Scoble, who has announced that he’s moving on to his next gig. I will miss his take on things from Redmond, and/but look forward to listening to his clear, resonant voice from another perch, at PodTech. Microsoft, indeed, was “lucky to have” him. Good luck, Scoble! Keep writing and, no doubt, podcasting.

The "How to Make Money" Session at Bloggercon

Posted on June 8, 2006 by Phillips Academy

Dave Winer has kindly (or, well, maybe…) offered me the chance to be the discussion leader for the “How to Make Money” session at Bloggercon IV. I’m delighted and honored to be taking up this challenge with the help of the rest of the unconference attendees later this month in San Francisco. Here’s a framework for the discussion:

During every conference about ~~Web 2.0~~ (oops — did I say that?) blogging, the conversation gets around, one time or another, to “how to make money.” It’s obvious there’s money all around this space. The simple proof: the venture capital world salivates at the prospect of a hot new company in this space, bidding up valuations and fueling the trend with not just their capital and attention but big-time connections and leadership. Somebody, definitely, is making money related to blogging and related technologies, or is pretty sure they will make money on it, but it’s not obvious that bloggers, in fact, stand to make much money from blogging.

If you are a blogger, how do you go about making some money from your work? One obvious answer is the classic approach of throwing BlogAds or Google ads or whathaveyou ads on your blog. That works for some people, but it generates more than beer money only for a select few at the left-hand side of that famous power law distribution. Some, like Mike Arrington at TechCrunch, have added premium sponsorships to the mix; then again, Mike’s plainly in the select few. Others contend that a blog is itself an advertisement. You don’t make money on the blog itself, but rather you make money on other things (as in the artist who gives away his or her content on a p2p service and makes money on other things to pay the rent). I trust that we’ll kick around these ideas, but also get into some new possibilities: shouldn’t really simple syndication allow for some new thinking around getting people to pay for the content you create? And are there ways for bloggers themselves to get on the bandwagon of making some of the money that the venture guys are planning to make? How could that work, exactly? Put another away: lots of people have spent lots of digital ink (sound and images too) on the general problem of “how do you monetize the long tail?”

In classic Bloggercon/unconference style, though, this is just a starting point. The beauty and the thrill is in where the conversation may go.