The Click Heard Round the World

My 30 second review of the Casio 53W digital calculator watch

Here's my review of the nerdalicious Casio 53W digital watch that I posted to Amazon today.  Could I be a bigger dork?

New Typepad App for iPhone is teh Roxxor

I just installed the new, free Typepad app for my first gen iPhone. I'm posting this from my phone now and it seems to work seamlessly.

You can add pics stored on your phone or take one on the fly like this lovely self-portrait I just took.

Sweet!

Yehoodi Video Talk Show Episode 510: Kelley vs Astaire, West Coast vs Lindy vs Chicago Steppin...

After a somewhat long hiatus, Spuds and Rikomatic are back with yet another Yehoodi VIDEO Talk Show, Episode 510 (not 509 as we erroneously say on the show!). In this episode, we talk about ketchup swing, why Satcho loves cheesecake, the difference between "jitterbug" and "Chicago Bop" and what happens when Westies and Lindy Hoppers crossover. Head to the Yehoodi Video Talk Show page to start watching now!

Thanks for all the video links, people!

Eventful.com: your personal event coordinator

I've been experimenting with the cool calendaring website Eventful.com. It's an impressive online community-based calendar service with lots of Web2.0 goodness built into it.  What's innovative about Eventful is that any user can add events, tag them, and share them with others.  Even better, you can export the events to all sorts of other scheduling programs, from Google to Outlook to iCal. 

Now here's what's super-cool. Last year, Second Life started sending their events to Eventful automatically.  There are to date 266,701 SL events from past six months archived on Eventful, plus another 2,493 listed in the future!  This is way more useful than the standard calendar offered on the Second Life in-world interface and their website. 

Cisco:virtual environments help education, video-conferencing doesn't

Cisco has conducted a meta-study of education technology entitled “Technology in Schools: What the Research Says." Produced by Cisco Systems and the Metiri Group, the report summarizes general trends and representative studies in areas such as television and video use, calculators, engagement devices such as interactive whiteboards, portable or handheld devices, virtual learning, in-school computing, and one-to-one computing.  There are several parts of the report that touch on the educational impact of virtual learning environments.

Plone Magic!

I'm at "Plone Magic Camp" this weekend to learn about the Plone content management system, programming and designing in Plone. (For web geeks: Plone is an open source CMS built on top of the Zope framework which is written in the Python programming language.) Going to "Magic Camp" I was hoping to get a wand or a floppy hat, but alas all I got was a tee-shirt.

I have dabbled with Plone in the past, building an earlier version of my website in Plone, as well as launching a community-populable calendar for the United Nations NGO community. It's pretty easy to work with even for a dummy like me, which you can skin and customize without too many headaches. However I'm no programmer or scripter, so everytime some Plone product I was using broke I was generally in the dark about how to proceed. So this year I switched to the less powerful but virtually bug-free Typepad service.

Being here I realize that I really need to learn CSS, since that skill will apply across whatever CMS or web platform I have to work with in the future.

Activist Tech: from listservs to virtual worlds

I went to a workshop on "Technology and Social Activism" at the Beyond Broadcast conference this weekend. I suppose it was ambitious to expect anything other than a quick fly-over of interesting initiatives in using technology for activism, since this could have easily been the subject of a three-day conference. As one participant Sean Coon blogged, "the discussion was a bit broad."

The key we all agreed on was to know (1) what your end goal was and (2) who your intended audience is before rolling out your tech solutions. I.e., using an English-only blog to reach out to illegal immigrants in Texas is probably a poor choice of technology.

I remarked that there are a wide range of uses of ICTs for various advocacy efforts, from email listservs to virtual 3D environments modelling real-world problems. But one of the biggest obstacles activist groups face is thinking outside-of-the-box. Many groups still organize like they want to be the next Amnesty International, with a million members and a large centralized secretariat giving them their marching orders. The problem is that this strategy doesn't even work for Amnesty anymore, who has to pay for expensive mailing campaigns and hundreds of canvassers annoying people on the streets to maintain their levels of membership.

As Alex Steffen writes in an essay on Worldchanging.com:

It's a dysfunctional model, all the way around. Mass-marketing, direct mail, subsidiary income tracks (like selling T-shirts) and the rest of the modern NGO racket degrade everyone involved. It turns passionate advocates into carnies and citizens into consumers of change-related program activities and products, who cannot in any meaningful way act on their beliefs (and, as Ed Abbey reminded us, Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul). It wastes vast amounts of resources. It doesn't even work particularly well. We're still losing, nearly across the board.

Meanwhile people and websites like Marty Kearns's Net Centric Campaigns, techsoup.org and Worldchanging.com are doing a lot to aggregate some of the "best practices" in the use of tech to promote social change. Key to this strategy is creating a new vision of activism beyond the centralized membership campaign and coalition-building efforts of the 1990s.

The new net-centric vision centers on the idea of using technology to empower individuals to do good in ways that bring them social and emotional benefits while also building social ties to other like-minded people. This paradigm shift involves letting go of a bit of the reins of control, allowing your members to help you craft your message and letting individuals inspire each other with new ideas and strategies. The obvious examples are the Howard Dean campaign as well as the best aspects of Moveon.org.

The net-centric approach is based on what Marty calls "dense communication ties to provide the synchronizing effects, prioritization and deployment roles of the organization." In other words, creating new kinds of campaigns that use information communications technology to coordinate a distributed body of volunteers.

One sign of things to come is the recent hijacking of a Chevy marketing campaign for their Tahoe line of trucks. Chevy hired a marketing firm to create a website where anyone could create their own Chevy Tahoe web-vertisements (ugh) using stock footage and their own scripts. Activists soon seized on the tool to create web-ads that sarcastically commented on the environmental effects of C02 emissions from cars and America's addiction to oil, among other things.

No one organization coordinated the production of these subversive ads. Instead it was one of these viral (sorry) ideas that spread via blog, email and IM into something that looked like a spontaneous national campaign.

The activist organization that has a strong, clearly stated message and can seize these tools and deploy them in ways that empower a distributed network of activists will be a force to be reckoned with.

Green.tv: the first broadband TV channel on the environment

Today was the launch of Green.tv, the first "broadband TV channel" on environmental issues.  Sponsored by the UN Environment Programme and a host of other sponsors, the site will carry films from around the world produced by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community filmmakers, public sector bodies and companies with a firm interest in protecting the environment.

On launch, Green.tv will show films from numerous environmental and other organizations, including UNEP, Friends of the Earth UK, Greenpeace International, the World Conservation Union-IUCN, Stop Climate Chaos, Barclays, Water Aid, and the European Environment Agency.

The channel will offer both streaming videos on the web, as well as video podcasts that you can download to your iPod or other portable media player.  They have their content divided into air, water, land, technology, climate change, people and species.

It's good to see a UN agency recognizing the value of utilizing information communications technologies to get out the word on their work and mission.  And kudos to the sponsors for creating a channel for insightful content on the net. I really don't have to see anymore viral videos of young people doing stupid things to themselves.

Now we'll have to see if Green.tv draws an audience.  So far, there seem to be a large number of downloads and subscriptions on the Apple iTunes Store.  Let's hope the momentum keeps going.

webconferencing < teleconferencing

So after researching pretty extensively the webconferencing offerings of all of the main providers on the market (webex, webconference.com, webdialogs, elluminate, centra, net meeting, etc), I have come to the conclusion that none of them can provide yet the kind of fidelity of a traditional teleconference. Multi-party, full duplex on all webconferencing services I have tried is sketchy and full of latency issues, even in broadband environments. 

VOIP is good and getting better every day for one-to-one uses.  But beyond that, the data coordination issues become a problem. Which I guess is why most of the webconference providers offer a traditional teleconference package as a telephony solution.

It's a bummer because SSRC was really hoping to roll out a web conferencing tool that we could use to facilitate small group meetings more effectively than a teleconference.  But we may have to wait until the tech catches up with our needs, at a cost we can afford.  If I hear right, Skype may be  unveiling something in the next few months that might be very interesting.

Until then, we're back to Ma Bell.

Web conferencing woes

I'm evaluating several web conferencing packages for my organization. In my mind I imagine that there must be one that combines video conferencing, VOIP, traditional teleconferencing, app sharing and recording. And that doesn't cost $10,000 a year to deploy.

I'm quite fond of Elluminate, which is a web conferencing service that comes from the academic world, originally designed for distributed e-learning, webinars and other nerdy education purposes. It's OS independent, running as a java app. It's got very nice moderation capabilities, like letting people "raise their hand," "giving the mic" over to a participant, and assigning a sub-set of your participants to work together in a "breakout room."

One other really nice feature is that it's the only web conferencing provider out there that made the effort to be compatible with various screen readers for blind people and other people with disabilities.

That said, the academic edition is several thousands of dollars to deploy, and their "lite" version is too underpowered for my purposes.

WebDialogs is an interesting SME-oriented web conferencing service. I did a demo with one of their sales people today and it's pretty slick. My main beef is that it doesn't support video, nor does it offer VOIP, which kind of screws our international participants. Their voice component is handled by a traditional teleconference module.

WebDialogs has just released a free plug-in for Skype called "Unyte" that offers app sharing for up to five people. If Unyte was integrated into their basic conferencing package I'd be super-happy.

Anyone else have a webconferencing service that you are happy with that you'd like to share with me?