Today's Citizen Media

Post ImageThere was obviously lots to talk about in this session hosted by David Geller, John Battelle, and Dan Gillmor, but I took one specific thing away from it. Dan Gillmor, in answering a question posed by Darren Barefoot about how the average citizen can become important enough when big media is around, said that what we’re talking about is “mass media” and NOT “mainstream media”.

For some reason, that statement really resonates. Mainstream is quite relative when you think about it. If you read a dozen different publications every day, that’s mainstream for you, even if no one else reads the same publications. Mass media is a much better way to describe the organizations that normally come to mind – the big newspapers, television and radio stations, and websites.

When you think about it, the defintion makes a difference when you try to figure out how joe average can make a successful podcast. It doesn’t matter if that podcast becomes “mass media”, what’s more important is that it becomes “mainstream media” for a group of people. If you’ve got something you’re passionate about and something you want to say, and there are people who want to listen, I’d define that as success.

Podcasting will almost definitely become another technology used by mass media. What will truly decide whether or not it has staying power, is if podcasting becomes mainstream media too. And based on the growth we’ve seen so far, I think it’s a safe bet.

Read: Gnomedex

Tomorrow's Education

Post ImageHere are some notes on Kathy Gill and Paul Vogelzang’s session on tomorrow’s education:

  • The premise here is that students at the University level are still working with newspapers, and old media, and don’t get the connection when someone says “Flickr.” Maybe in the US it’s different, but in my experience, University students are pretty cutting edge.
  • Of Kathy’s students, juniors and seniors in Communications at the University of Washington, 11% had never heard of a blog, and only 7% had heard of Flickr. Only 11% were regular blog consumers.
  • According to Kathy, the most common place to find blogs in education today is in English classes. This is not surprising to me, the fit is so natural.
  • Blogs give instant gratification, something that “cannot be undersold” when you’re talking about University students.
  • How are blogs being used in education – media literacy, managing course content, helps make sure students have read their readings, can be used for collaborative editing, facilitates user-centered learning.
  • Some tips: use common tools for all students, specifiy a minimum post size, provide guiding questions so that students have a starting point, make sure comments are enabled, make sure a marking guide is well defined.
  • Kathy says that online education (distance learning) 2.0 is coming, and it will shake up the current educational institutions.
  • According to Paul, the US federal government is looking at blogs and podcasts as a potentially useful technology. He was forced to read at the start of his talk however, a small paragraph explaining that the government does not current do any blogging or podcasting.
  • RSS makes a lot of sense for government, the biggest reason being cost savings. RSS allows rapid information dispersal at relatively low cost. And, it fosters good social interactions with citizens.
  • In particular, the Treasury Department is trying to get more stuff online, and RSS will be key in that effort.

A bit of a shorter session, and definitely felt a little rushed.

Read: Gnomedex

Tomorrow's Syndication and HiveCasting

Just
listened to the “Tomorrow’s Syndication” session here at Gnomedex,
hosted by Steve Gillmor, Dave Sifry, and Scott Gatz. Here’s a couple
notes:

  • Dave Winer made the point that no one uses attention.xml, so what’s
    the point for Yahoo to support it ? (It does support attention.xml in
    myYahoo)
  • Actually this session was kinda funny because Yahoo was made out to be “the old Microsoft”
  • Basically, a major vendor won’t play ball with a technology like attention.xml on a small level simply because of economics

Yeah I didn’t take too much away from this session, but it appears
that some people did, so that’s good. As I am writing this, B.
Honeywell (dressed in a bee costume) just took the stage to explain
“HiveCasting – the Future of Communication”. Some details:

  • HiveCasting enables hive to hand communication
  • Bee communication is improved by outfitting bees with radios and antennas (some funny pictures on the screen now)
  • Then communication went one step further, by integrating a circuit board into a bee hive
  • Now there’s just a barrage of slides, I can’t keep up, but this is pretty funny 🙂
  • Ah now there’s two audience members dressed as bees, asking questions and making comments. Priceless!

Ah that was refreshing, and good call Chris, a little humor goes a long way!

Read: Gnomedex

UPDATE: Podbot @ Gnomedex

Post ImageThings are going quite well with the Podbot! The wireless network here has been kind of spotty, so at times we have lost control. We only had one problem though, someone accidentally hit the side of the Podbot when it started moving after receiving a delayed command. The Podbot survived, but one of the side panel screws popped out, so we’ll have to fix that later.

We were able to record something at the start of lunch and get it uploaded, but it’s been quite difficult to be connected long enough and well enoungh. We’ll keep trying though!

The Podbot has been featured on Engadget today, and the Channel9 team from Microsoft was here at Gnomedex recording some video, so you should be able to see it there later too.

Read: Podbot

Microsoft: Browse. Search. Subscribe!

Post ImageHere’s some notes I took from the keystone by Dean Hachamovitch from Microsoft:

  • Longhorn *heart* RSS
  • Microsoft is betting big on RSS for Longhorn. They want to “RSS everything”.
  • They are using IE7 to show off the RSS experiences in Longhorn. This is the first public demo of IE7. IE7 now supports auto-discovery of feeds much like Firefox, an icon lights up on the toolbar. You can also view a preview of the feed, complete with search-in-page functionality. You can then subscribe to the feed in much the same way as a user would add a Favorite in IE today.
  • Now they are using MSN Search to search for Gnomedex, to display that it has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.
  • Longhorn has the concept of a “subscription store” called a “common feed list”, so that all applications can hook into the same collection of feeds using the Windows API. This is the killer RSS feature for Longhorn, IMO. They are showing how this works with a new build of RSS Bandit.
  • They just thanked Dave Winer for inventing the enclosure tag. Was that necessary? You can only beat a dead horse so many times…
  • Now they’re showing how the Outlook calendar works with the whole Subscribe mentality. They visited the HTML schedule page for Gnomedex, and created an RSS feed from it. Now they have a special program that looks in the common feed list for feeds with calendar objects, and then adds them as appointments into Outlook.
  • Wow, someone at the front made a comment and just got chopped.
  • Oooh, pretty little demo of a photo blog being downloaded and the photos displayed in a screensaver complete with captions and descriptions. Very neat way of visualizing a photoblog.
  • Now they’re talking about the extensions to RSS that they are proposing. One of them allows RSS to work better with lists. Another allows a publisher to describe the content of the feed. They worked with Amazon.com to create RSS feeds out of the Amazon Wishlists as an example.
  • The specification for the Simple List Extensions is going to be released under a Creative Commons License. They played a video from Larry Lessig welcoming Microsoft into the CC family.
  • As of noon today, there will be an architectual overview document on RSS in Longhorn and specs for the Simple List Extensions avaiable on the web.
  • Schedule: Longhorn Beta 1 is set for PDC05, and will contain some of the envisioned RSS experience.
  • “This is the start of the conversation.”

All pretty cool stuff. I can’t wait to see the first beta of Longhorn, it should be pretty awesome if all of this stuff is implemented and working well.

Read: Gnomedex

Notes from Dave Winer's Keynote

Post ImageHere are some notes I wrote down during Dave Winer’s keynote:

  • Both Marc Canter and Dave agree that the web allows multiple little islands, instead of big continents
  • Dave remarks on the Microsoft announcement expected later today – “we can all participate, but none of us get to be the platform vendor”
  • According to Dave, technology control is behind us, and doesn’t think that the W3C has been effective, mainly because there was a single vendor that had the power to decide what lived and what died on the net
  • RSS is great at sharing news, but it doesn’t do a very good job of distributing information that isn’t news
  • Dave says that outlines and similar structures are the future of the web, and may be just the thing to supersede the HTML web
  • Shared a demo of the open source OPML Editor
  • To Dave, a blog is a document, that’s his perspective
  • The song they chose is Yellow Submarine, and the entire auditorium sang along! Definitely find a podcast recording…it’ll be worth it.

Is it just me, or does it seem like Dave’s who “unconference” concept is really just about him having control of the talk? First he says it’s all about a discussion, instead of just having a speaker. Then he says that he should control who gets to talk, and for how long. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems as though Dave keeps coming up with ways to maintain control of the talk while telling us that he’s giving us control.

Read: Gnomedex

Gnomedex is underway!

Post ImageSomehow, we managed to make it here on time! We just finished listening to Chris Pirillo give his welcome address, and up next is Dave Winer with the first keynote of the conference.

The Podbot seems to be working quite well, though the wireless seems rather slow at the moment. Then again, if you could see all of the computers in this auditorium, you probably wouldn’t be surprised to hear that. Some people have already snapped photos of the Podbot, so be sure to watch Flickr, and the blog sites like Technorati for more.

For those of you who knew the Podbot before Gnomedex, we added the ability to take pictures using the webcam last night. Unfortunately it doesn’t automagically upload them to Flickr, but I will be doing that manually when we get some good ones!

Read: Gnomedex

Announcing the Podbot!

Post ImageI’ve been waiting to post this for quite some time now. I am very happy to introduce to you, the Podcast Wizard Robot, or Podbot for short. You may have heard rumblings about a podcasting robot already, and if so, you heard correctly!

The Podbot is exactly that, a podcasting robot. It moves around like a mini car, and is controlled wirelessly. It’s equipped with a webcam and of course, a microphone. The Podbot has a Tablet PC on board, to act as both the interface and brains of the robot. We control movement, recording, and other functionality remotely using another Tablet PC connected over Wi-Fi.

All of the software is written in .NET. The control software which handles communication with the Podbot and functionality like movement was written specifically for the Podbot. The podcasting software is actually Podcast Wizard, our upcoming podcasting tool. Our podcast is hosted at Podcast Spot, and all of our episodes are tagged with Podcast Tags.

As you’ll see from the website, the Podbot was created by myself, Dickson, Andrew and Ashish. Above all, it was a fun project, and we all learned a lot. Thanks to Andrew and Ashish for all of the hard work you did – the Podbot just wouldn’t exist without you!

You can check out the website for more information on the Podbot, or if you’re at Gnomedex, come see it in person! You can listen to our first podcast with the robot here.

Read: Podcast Wizard Robot

Seattle Trip Day 2

Even though we were awake and working til past 4 AM last night, we decided to get going relatively early this morning. We made it out of the hotel on our way to eat around 11 AM. We found a bagel shop near the harbor, and had a sandwhich there. Then we decided to walk through the very busy harbor area for a bit, past the original Starbucks which we took a quick look at. It was much, much busier than the last time I went.

Then it was back to work. Eventually we went in search of a food court for lunch, and found one in the second mall. Unlike Edmonton, there seem to be quite a few very upscale shopping centers in downtown Seattle. And of course, the downtown area is always full of people.

Tonight we went to the Gnomedex registration, and then for dinner at the restaurant here in the hotel. I think we ordered too much food, but it was quite good. The conference starts tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to that.