Last week Hari Sreenivasan the Director of Digital Partnerships at PBS and at PBS NewsHour correspondent appeared at a special event hosted by Seattle’s KCTS 9 public television station.  Held a stone’s throw from the Space Needle–Seattle’s iconic architectural monument to progress–at the small station’s studios, this was a special event for students in the University of Washington Master of Communication in Digital Media program and was followed by an interview and event with station donors.

A video of highlights from the conversation with MCDM students and a complete transcript are available on the KCTS 9 website.

According to Sreenivasan, who is a proponent of the growing “slow news” movement, “The value of breaking news is going down faster than you can post it.”
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In my last post, we got a glimpse into the way new digital media may affect our interpersonal relationships in the future, through Aritifical Intelligence and conversant robots. This post explores another potentially game-changing technology: digital currency.

We are all familiar with digital payments, from PayPal to iTunes accounts, direct deposits and online bill payment—but all of these are tied directly to actual fiat currency, or governmentally regulated, internationally compatible money. In Second Life, players use Linden dollars in daily activities, but these are also for purchase through US dollars. Digital currencies such as Bitcoin, however, operate independently from any national government. Bitcoin is “a currency by the people, for the people,” according to NPR’s Planet Money reporter Jacob Goldstein. It exists only digitally, essentially a computer program designed and implemented by a reclusive and mysterious man named Satoshi Nakamoto—which may even be a psyuedonymn for the actual creator.

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Earlier this year, Corey posted about Qwiki, a startup whose investors include Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky, and YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.

Qwiki has opened its alpha release to the public since January. With its stated objective to “deliver information in a format that’s quintessentially human – via storytelling instead of search”, Qwiki has generated great interest, even hyped by media as the “next Google.”

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Advice to aspiring bloggers often sounds like the advice commencement speakers invariably give to graduating high school seniors:  ”follow your passion and sucess will follow.” Anyone who has ever started a blog knows that trite aphorisms and simplistic content formulas like the “80/20″ rule don’t replace hard work and constant attention to quality.

Abbey Simmons and Josh Lovseth started the hyper-local Sound on the Sound music blog in 2006 and over the last five years, there work has come to define several exciting aspects of a burgeoning Seattle music scene.   Sound on the Sound was one of the first publications to draw national attention to Seattle’s “Ballard Avenue” roots/folk revival and bands like The Head and the Heart and Drew Grow and the Pastor’s Wives. Through hard work and seeing lots and lots of live music,  Abbey and Josh have taken their passion for music and turned it into a highly influential cultural voice in Seattle and beyond.

Recently FTM had a chance to sit down with Abbey and have her give us a history of her work at Sound on the Sound and a behind the scenes look at music blogging in general.

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Much has been written about Google’s attempts to tweak their vaunted search algorithm recently, but the results might take awhile to become apparent. Ostensibly, Google changed the page rank code that is buried within their super-secret search architecture in order to make results more meritorious.  More merit in a user’s search would be measured by the usefulness in the top-most (un-sponsored) links and supposedly less prone to the technological gerrymandering that we have collectively come to know as S.E.O.. While this is potentially good news for end-users, it is very bad news for firms that have invested time, money and intellectual capitol into manipulating search results. In the years since S.E.O. became the Holy Grail of online marketing, one class of content developer has emerged as the bête noire of search: the content farm.

Content farms are essentially clearing houses for cheaply created or “linked-out” content that are tagged and curated around popular search terms.  The growth of metadata tagging (which will only grow more sophisticated in HTML 5) within web pages and discrete assets (like video) embedded in pages has made the gaming of search results very successful for some marketing strategists and virtually transparent to the end-user.  The implications for small changes in search algorithms have potentially deep consequences, but the stakes are rarely discussed in technology and MBA programs that have invested in strategies aimed at the status quo.  These issues go to the heart of much of what we think about how the Web works and what value web searches actually have.

Within a decade, the ubiquity of content online has significantly eroded the publishing industry’s longstanding print-based revenue model. Newspaper, print book, and magazine sales have all experienced steady declines as people turn to the internet for its surfeit of free and instant information. Internet technology expert Clay Shirky frames the dilemma like this: “The core problem publishing solves —the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public— has stopped being a problem.”

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by Cheryl Lowry

Picture your last meeting or classroom experience: was everyone staring at a digital device? Despite the wishful demand for multitasking skills found in most job descriptions, none of us are actually that good at it.  There’s been a lot of media focus on the cognitive cost of digital distractions, but we don’t need another web article to tell us that checking Tweetdeck at work or in class makes it harder to pay attention.

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Following last week’s graduation ceremony, MCDM students, alumni, recent graduates and well wishers gathered in South Lake Union for the first annual MCDM Screen Summit.  With an address by Director Hanson Hosein, the program awarded two “Make the Change” awards to regional disruptor’s Dan Savage for his “It Gets Better” Project and Starbucks for their new online/in-store media presence.  The night also featured a statement from MCDM founder and award namesake Anthony Giffard.  Here is a video of his statement:

While Dan Savage could not be at the ceremony to personally accept the award, he did send along this video that was shown to attendees:

Adam Brotman VP of Starbucks Digital Ventures was on hand to accept his award on behalf of Starbuck’s and Yahoo’s Digital Network initiative:

On Friday night, students in the MCDM program presented their work in the first annual MCDM screen Summit.  The video below features a few of the highlights of some of the work that MCDM students have been doing over the last year.

A hearty and sincere congratulations from all of us at Flip the Media to this year’s graduates.  Go forth and make the change!