insights from the digital future (blog posts 2005-2011)
where I discuss new technologies, “web 2.0,” and everything cool
By turning to the public personally via Yahoo! Answers, Hillary Clinton exemplifies how emerging applications of new media can help to foster and strengthen participatory democracy.
Check out Clinton’s question and the tens of thousands (and counting) of user-submitted answers: “Based on your own family’s experience, what do you think we should do to improve health care in America?”
Read SearchEngineJournal’s blog post about this.
Without warning, I was forced to select a new design and mold it to my liking today after upgrading from WordPress 2.0.7 to the new and improved WordPress 2.1 (for the record, I was using 2cDarkGrey1.1 from GFX, slightly modified. You’re now looking at an altered Andreas Viklund template).
This is hardly an inconvenience as I’ve been waiting for a kick in the ass to lighten up the dark background here at netZoo. The BEST feature about WordPress 2.1 — posts are auto-saved… I can’t tell you how many times I’d mistakenly close the tab I was posting in, or open a new window, only to find the post that I was working on entirely unrecoverable. Thanks Matt and the WordPress team!
I’m rather excited about a few upcoming releases — 2007 really may turn out to be the best new music year ever, before Q1 is even out. And, once again, NYT is reporting the imminent demise of DRM-protected music (“…in the next two to five years,” says Real’s Rob Glaser).
Here’s a glance at some of the brilliant record drops for Tuesday, January 23, 2007, with some audio samples provided for your educational use only.
The Broken West — I Can’t Go on I’ll Go on
listen to “Down in the Valley“
Clinic — Visitations
Deerhoof — Friend Opportunity
listen to +81
Julie Doiron — Woke Myself Up
listen to You Look So Alive
The Good, The Bad & The Queen The Good, the Bad & the Queen
Listen to Kingdom of Doom
Menomena — Friend & Foe
Listen to Wet and Rusting
Of Montreal — Hissing Fauna Are You the Destroyer
Listen to Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider
The Shins — Wincing the Night Away
Six Parts Seven — Casually Smashed to Pieces
The Huffington Post opened its social bookmarking community site HuffIt today. Similar to Digg, HuffIt is a great concept that enables the (progressive-leaning) Huffington Post readership to aggregate and posts of interest from around the Web and recommend them to the community. Still VERY new — and potentially a little too 2.0 for most HuffPo readers to grasp at first — the most “Huffed” articles still have less than ten total “huffs.”
Very interesting to see such a prominent blog and news site take this approach. It will be interesting to see if any newspapers or other dominant webzines like Slate and Salon take a similar — or alternatively community-building — approach.
On the turning away suggests that we’re approaching the point where Journalism 2.0 emerges as perpetuated by the Long Tail:
More than 3,000 people came together for NCMR2007 in Memphis this weekend and though I wasn’t able to attend, I would like to channel the messages and motivation expressed at the conference. The Free Press Action Center, which organized the event, is hosting some video and audio of all sessions on its conference page. More on the conference blog
Additionally, they’ve released calls for action regarding stopping big media, saving the internet, and promoting media reform and justice.
Part two of the above video of Bill Moyers‘ opening plenary is available here.
More from Nieman Watchdog, BuzzMachine, Memphis Commercial Appeal, SavetheInternet. Photos here and here.
Mark at News Corpse provided a brief summary:
Continue reading “Nat’l Conference for Media Reform w/ Bill Moyers Video”
Gone are the days of cruising the streets with friends and rendezvousing at midnight at the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot to see what’s up.
55% of online teens use social networks and have created online profiles. Girls moreso than boys (70% of girls aged 15-17), according to the results of a Pew Internet & American Life Project poll released this week (summary | full report [.pdf]).
As today’s high school students grow up in an age where everything that pops is born and manifests online, the results of the study indicate a teenage culture where friends are made and maintained via MySpace (85%), Facebook (7%) and the like. But increased caution is being practiced (if it’s not forced by parents or the generally tasteless spam friend requests from MySpace) — nearly 60% of the 12-17-year-olds surveyed restrict the visibility of their profiles to friends only.
Also of note, no big discrepancies between teenaged social network users based on race or differences in household income. But only 17% admit to having ever used these sites for “flirting,” however that’s defined.
photo by dogseat via flickr.
