On June 9, 2011 I did something I didn’t expect to do a few years earlier: I officially graduated from the University of Washington with a Master of Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) degree. The reason I didn’t expect to do it is because of how I thought of myself and what I thought I was capable of, up to that point in time.

Off the top, though, I have a huge number of people to thank for “holding me up” when I was ready to fall and for joining me on the journey.  The two primary people I want to thank are my spouse and partner, Carol, and Hanson Hosein, director of the MCDM program (pictured here handing me my diploma). My journey would have been impossible without them. Read more…

After turning off all site comments on Tuesday, AOL-owned Engadget today flipped the comment switch back on, ending a two-day hiatus resulting from its editors seeing too many comments that were “mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations.”

Engadget columnist Michael Gartenberg expressed his discontent with the comments that followed his recent iPad editorial in a Tweet: “Amused. Bash me on @Engadget column. Suggest my parents were not married prior to birth, suggest I be fruitful & multiply. enclose your CV.”

With traditional news outlets declining and enthusiast blogs like Engadget on the rise, the implications of closing comments reflect how the stampede of online discourse can sometimes be too much for even mature, full-time blogs to endure. According to Alexa, Engadget today ranks 195 in the nation and 384 in the world for Internet traffic. It recently launched mobile applications for iPhone and Blackberry. It produces its own weekly podcasts and monthly TV shows (Edited per Zack’s comment). This is a full-time media company in all respects and an influential one at that – The AFP wrote a story on Engadget’s comment disabling.

Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky explains why things got out of hand in a Tweet: “I don’t think it’s about the class of the readership, it’s about scale.”

Scale is certainly an issue, but it shouldn’t excuse community behavior. Especially for a technology site like Engadget, you’d think that its die-hard community would be populated by primarily educated (either by trade or academically) and at least civil readers. Surely most are, but what caused Engadget to call “time-out” demonstrates how online media-enabled free speech can unveil the worst in us. Read more…

“Revolutions happen when society adopts new behaviors.” – Clay Shirky

“Us Now” is a British video and website about how people come to each other on the Internet from a place a trust.  Ostensibly, people online are more willing to collaborate, become self-organizing, develop communities easily, volunteer more information and time, are more productive and startlingly innovative. The film’s main premise is that, if given the option, online life brings out the best in people. It’s relatively revolutionary premise is that by coming to this world from a position of trust, individuals can “game the system.”

The film uses several real-life examples:

• The Ebbfleet United football team is owned by 35,000 fans who belong to My Football Club. Fans get to, among other things, select the starting lineup.
  

  Ebbsfleet United football team is owned by the fans.

  Read more…

If you have heard about #AmazonFail, #Oprah, #HudsonRiverCrash in the past few months, you probably fall into one of these categories:

• Taking the leap onto the Twitter bandwagon
• On the cusp of joining Twitter but don’t want to manage another social networking site
• Maybe considering it, but still too much effort to tell if I’ll be onboard
• Twitter still sucks

Haters, don’t say I didn’t warn you. But thanks for keep me motivated.

Read more…

What you are about to see here is a week-old, mind-blowing example of data mining and passion. A talented young man by the name of Ophir Kutiel, a.k.a Kutiman, poured through the countably many videos on YouTube of people playing music, practicing instruments, jamming, or showing off their mad skills and love of music and created beautifully lyrical mash-ups that musically surpass most of these performances by a few miles.  

John Peters, in his book, Speaking into Air, claims that “in the age of electronic media, [communication] has become the art of reaching across the intervening spirits to touch another’s body (p.225),” and I could not agree with him more.  

As the talented Erin McKeown sings: “there is hope in poetry, comfort in fiction.” There is, indeed, pleasure in the physicality involved in creating something heartfelt, even as simple as a webcam video of you attempting to sing, and then sharing that with others. That pleasure is only surpassed at the moment it generates a physical response in another, the moment were the bodies in the medium are moved to action. The soaring popularity of Kutiman’s videos clearly attest to that. Kutiman was moved to create an amazing project in six movements joining lots of people in their private act of music creation and connecting their efforts.  

We all want to feel a sense of connectedness and belonging. Even when we are singing loud in the shower, we are hoping someone is listening. What Kutiman created here is an extraordinary moment of someone from the apartment next door joining in your shower-singing in a duet across the walls the separates you. 

While there is comfort in ambient presence, the real potential for social media is when the electronic connectedness finds a way to generate a visceral response. 

The crowd was not wise on its own, it needed a human filter to cut through the noise, see a potential, and realize it.  I encourage you to check out the full project with links to the source videos at Thru-You.com.

crossposted at armyoffools.net

Stock photography is a global industry, which manufactures, promotes and distributes photographic images for use in marketing, advertising, editorial purposes, and increasingly for multimedia products and digital platforms. Worth an estimated US$2 billion annually, the leading corporations of the stock photography are heavily involved in this complex media industry sector. Collectively, they own important historical photographic archives; manufacture and market stock film footage, and compete with traditional sources of photojournalism.

“With the introduction of digital technology, our sector, the markets we service, the rights we grant, and our workflow have dramatically changed.”

- BAPLA – British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies

I want to discuss about the dramatic change on this industry with the advent of digital technologies from 1990. The apparent two changes are the workflow and the product of stock photography.

Read more…

You have labored over your film concept (the one you just came up with an hour before you had to pitch it), you have poured every emotion in your soul into the storyboards (mostly fear), and now you scurry about in the last two weeks of Winter quarter, squeezing whatever creative juices (and hard-earned cash) left in you to put out a story you can call your own into this cyberworld.

Visually, things seem to be falling into place (historically known as the crapper), and now it is time to find that perfect minor chord to send your audience weeping after they view your piece.

The musicscapes are vast and this post (in three parts) will only attempt to provide some guidance for those creating audio-visual projects to navigating the creative commons music territories (or swamps).

Read more…

In his timely book, CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World (Wiley, 2008), Tom Watson tracks the growing trend of activists creatively using online media to generate new forms of involvement, support, and fundraising. Watson presents a series of case studies and anecdotes from his personal experience to analyze networked activism and provide a set of principles, as well as a few words of caution, for effective online organizing.

Watson’s overarching theme revolves around the proposition that online philanthropy, and social, political, and charitable activism is turning into a movement and a sector of the U.S. economy that he terms ‘CauseWired’.

Read more…