Your boy is back...

technorati tags: hip-hop | jay-z

Cam's freestyles and video didn't bring him out...but his distribution of Rick Ross's "Hustlin'" put him back in the booth. He could have come a little stronger, but at least his verses actually reflect his lifestyle and doesn't make it sound like he's still living in Marcy. I'm definitely not feeling that part of his 16 where he sounds like he's taking on Pharrell's style. How backward is that?

Listen to the "Hustlin'" Remix - Rick Ross, Jay-Z, Young Jeezy over @ Vibe.com

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jamie kennedy's blowin' up free download

technorati tags: mtv | jamie kennedy

MTV may have wedded technology behemoth Microsoft to create URGE, its new digital music download service featured on Windows Media Player 11 for the first time today. But the company hasn't forgotten who the real king of digital downloads is.

For a limited time, the first episode of Jamie Kennedy's new MTV comedy, Blowin' Up, about he and a friend trying to become rappers is available as a free download on iTunes. Get it here.

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living in a new new media world

technorati tags: web 2.0 | social media | beyondbroadcast

"the new media world is being assessed on old media biz models" --- Diane Mermigas (Hollywood Reporter)

Unfortunately neither my odeo recording or mda video recording of "Surviving or Thriving: Beta Business Models in the New World" from Beyond Broadcast came out quite right. Diane Mermigas comment from the panel that I quoted above really resonated with me and reminded me of the geekentertainment now that it's 1997 video.

What happened during web 1.0 is definitely not what's happening now. Yet, big business is evaluating business models by the same metrics as they did then. Of course this doesn't make any sense. The emerging e-media companies are different than they were then. Not only has the pervasiveness of broadband changed the game, but so has the focus on UGM (user generated media) and/or UGC (user generated content).

Back in 2000, Douglas Rushkoff, author and new media guru proclaimed: "Those of you who think you are creating online content, take note: your success will be directly dependent on your ability to create excuses for people to talk to one another. For the real measure of content's quality is its ability to serve as a medium." But most media companies weren't listening, because they believed content was king. I even wrote about his assessment here in 2005.

The myspaces, flickrs, and youtubes --- and even in some cases the TIVOS --- of the new world have proven that people want to control their media and not have it control them. People are becoming far more interested in being the media, and the new media world makes it all possible.

With that in mind, I predict that a company like Pluck will do well. The company's SiteLife suite of tools enables web publishers to manage social media on their sites with blogs, community-based interaction (ratings, comments, etc.), photo share, and mynews (like my yahoo). It's basically a means of providing web publishers with a community management system that keep users on their sites while generating more page views.

Also, Pluck's blogburst network, of which I'm a member, is a syndication service for bloggers that assists them with expanding their reader base by distributing their content to large web sites, such as newspapers, magazines, and portals.

Likewise Paul and Milena Berry's Amiglia, a site focused on building family networks through the sharing of photo albums and enabling of the creation of a virtual family tree by attaching photos to people in the tree, also has a place in this new economy. You can even import photos from flickr. The site includes a family calendar, birthday reminders, mp3 uploads for slideshows, Skype intergation, favorite recipes, stories, toddler games, family and trip/vacation maps and photo tagging --- all for the means of creating social media for families.

It's a new media world indeed.

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comment update: what college students actually do online

technoarti tags: beyondbroadcast | digital divide

Hi, thanks, Lynne.

I wanted to clarify that I am not suggesting there are no African American youth online or that none of them take part in such activities. The data are suggesting that they are less likely to do so than, say, Whites.

You mention that they may be online through certain walled gardens. That's fine from the perspective of my study. In looking at the types of activities to which people put the medium, I don't discriminate
between services. I do ask about some of them explicitly, but I ask about general use questions without specifying through which service per se so I should be capturing such activities in the figures. Same
for blogging, I just asked whether they read blogs or interactive sites that allow for discussion, I didn't specify on which particular service per se.

I do need to include more about cell phone uses and need to think about how to do that.

Thanks! Eszter

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comment on what college students actually do online

technoarti tags: beyondbroadcast | digital divide

eszter hargittai, who presented on what college students actually do online, responded to this post: "Thanks for your thoughts on this. I will be doing follow-up studies
on this topic and would love to hear more about what you think would
be the right questions to ask. Seriously, please be in touch about
this. Thanks."

Best, Eszter

(I definitely need to upgrade my installation of MT - it appears to block out any one commenting who doesn't have TypeKey. And I also think that by having the tag "spit heat" instead of "comment" I'm confusing a lot of people. For months now, I've been receiving emails and IMs about comments people tried to leave, and it's really frustrating. My MT installation keeps telling people that they have questionable content in their comments. And yet, all the kids who posted here on this eminem vs benzino post and here on this shyne vs 50 post got through. I don't get it.)

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podcast: what is the community dimension of media?

technorati tags: beyondbroadcast | web 2.0 | community media | media

powered by ODEO

Berkman co-founder Jonathan Zittrain, participated over a Web cam from Oxford, England. He was introduced as "JZ," which definitely confused some people.

Beyond Broadcast 2006: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture
Panel III: What Is The Community Dimension Of Media?

Social networks and online communities are a powerful and growing phenomenon. What can public media learn from these models? With a strong trusted relationship with large audiences, nationally and locally, public media organizations can extend their role as conveners of conversation and connection, but there are many challenges in mindset, risk, culture and practice. What does it mean to enable and nurture online communities in a media context? How do these spaces represent a redefined public media of their own?

Moderator: Ethan Zuckerman (Global Voices, Berkman Center)

Panelists:
Tom Gerace (Gather.com)
Thomas Kriese (Omidyar Network)
Brendan Greeley (Radio Open Source)
Rhea Mokund (Listenup.org)

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more from beyond broadcast

tags: beyondbroadcast

i'll upload whatever podcast, video, and photos that i have later or tomorrow.

i'm a little upset right now b/c i was recording audio with odeo studio and firefox kept jamming up on me. i had recorded mostly the entire "surviving or thriving: beta business models in the new world," which i found very interesting. hopefully what i recorded on audiocorder comes out well enough for me to publish as a podcast.

i'm also not sure about the video or photos, as it's my first time using my MDA for either.

i'll go through everything when i get back to nyc and figure it out.

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what college students actually do online

technoarti tags: beyondbroadcast | digital divide

eszter hargittai, asst. prof. nortwestern interested in user background and activities has found that students who are women, african-americans, hispanic origin, or from parents with lower levels of education (groups)...are using online services far less than white males.

the overall scope of this study can be found @ webuse.org

this comes immediately after i ran into peter armstrong in the stairwell where he reflected that i was missed from the panel (what the emerging participatory web media services are doing) — and commented it was nothing but white males.

so the digital divide does still exist...

you see the jury is still out on that one for me, or perhaps bc i live in new york city i have a skewed opinion of what women and what african-americans do online. and perhaps they're not (all) yet on myspace, facebook, or tagworld, but they're on blackplanet and migente. to think that we of color who do blog, or who use the web medium for social interaction and social advocacy are still so far flung and few.

i think the wrong questions are being asked. maybe we should be asking about cell phone usage - and usage of gaming devices/consoles that hook up to the Internet if we want to know how some groups use (online).

additives:

• African Americans on Leading Edge of Advanced Media Technologies (mediavillage)
  
• Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation (pew internet & american life project)
  
• Public Broadcasters Need to Take the Digital Divide Seriously (andy carvin's waste of bandwidth)
  

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when everything can go wrong

technorati tags: murphy's law | cambridge | beyondbroadcast

I should have flown or taken the fungwahbus. I definitely should have.

This morning I woke up extra early and drove in a torrential downpour to make it to Cambridge on time for the panel I was speaking on at Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture. With all the rain, I figured, "I won't make it in time." But I did. Well, not really.

I got off my exit somewhere between 10:45 and 11:00. This was good. I didn't need to be there until 11:50. Well, I should have been there prior to that, but that was show time. And hey, I'm a Cambridge pro. I was just here to speak at Women, Action & The Media. Remember this post?

Unfortunately, I'm no expert. I got a little bit turned around after getting off the exit. You know, speeding in the rain can kind of shake you a bit. But I thought I was still cool. I ran into a police officer and asked for Mass. Ave. Dude put me on some Interstate, and although I knew he couldn't be right, I followed his directions. Well, yeah, duh, Mass Ave. But Boston dude, no! Actually it's my fault - I should have asked for Harvard.

So after driving around for what seemed like eons - I found a sensible man, who had sensible directions and explained the real deal about Mass. Ave. Ah got it - it runs through Boston, Cambridge, and two other cities. Regardless, Mr. Police officer, I was already in Cambridge and you sent me on a wild goose chase.

Can you say PISSED! I can.

Anyway, I get to Austin Hall after my panel and it was mid-lunch.

Better luck next time.

Next up, a podcast from the conference of course.

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i'm a plaxo junkie

technorati tags: plaxo | contact management

for a long time i wasn't a fan of plaxo. i don't know why.

i think it was because of those annoying emails automatically sent from someone's address book asking me to update my information. but recently, between switching mobile devices and using various computers at work and at home, i needed to get on the ball with a solution. besides i also needed to separate work contacts from personal contacts, and all of this information was becoming too difficult to manage, especially since i had a lot of duplicates in every location.

i first started by getting all of my contacts from all of my old address books (mac 0s 9 outlook and handspring visor) and importing them into the plaxo online tool. this is when i first ran into the difficulty of duplicate contacts. but i first needed a method of bringing all of these contacts into one place and having them updated.

as i started to perform the updates, i noticed that many people i knew were also using plaxo and finding me easily once i signed on. and eventually many of my contacts responded to my annoying email asking them to update their information with plaxo.

soon, i needed to get rid of those duplicates and have access to support, since i'd been having trouble importing contacts from my mac os x address book. somehow i couldn't get the vcard to import into placo online. so i paid for premium services and started with simple things like sending out e-cards for birthdays. then i started using the "fix duplicates" feature and it worked pretty easily.

and, since purchasing the tmobile mda and actually being able to access the plaxo wap site (unlike with my sidekick II that didn't use a real web browser), i really started seeing the benefits of plaxo and wanted to utilize it a lot more for contact management.

today, i had plaxo support remotely install the plaxo for mac application to sync with my adddress book on my computer at work, and i'll do the same on the mac at home later. when i was just using plaxo online, i was only touching the surface of contact management. the sync really extends the capabilities.

the big relief for me though, is that now i'll also be able to manage and locate contacts on my mobile device (via the wap site) without having to worry whether the mobile device's address book is up-to-date.

god, i'm such a geek.

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early adoption can be a drag

technorati tags: tmobile mda | windows mobile 5 | mac

just as i was going on hiatus, and getting ready to enjoy the full benefits of my tmobile mda i realized that i have early adopted (way too early) once again.

so just as i was testing all of those pocket pc phones i wrote about here, i fell in love with the features of the mda and ordered one as soon as i could. though i use both mac and pc at work, at home, i'm a full-fledged mac user. well much to my dismay, there appears to be no sync app for windows mobile 5 edition for a mac, at least not yet. mark/space products has an alpha release and pocketmac says that windows mobile 5 support is coming soon. of course if i were a pc user, activesync 4.1 would already be an option. in fact, i could already be enjoying gameboy advance on my device if i used a pc. and then again, if i had a symbian-based phone it would most likely sync out-the-box with isync on my mac.

my current dilemma, of course, reminds me of when i first purchased my sidekick II. at that point, i didn't even have a clue of what to do to sync with iCal or Address Book on my Mac. at first i found ical to sidekick and address book to sidekick. eventually i found the missing sync for hiptop over at mark/space products. the first rev worked through isync and the second, and one i'm using currently, works as a separate app. this app has been ideal for what i need to do and i recommend it to anyone using a sidekick and a mac.

right now, i just can't figure out whether i need to return the mda, or sit and wait until either mark/space or pocketmac come up with a solution for people like me.

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mini hiatus

technorati tags: hiatus | blog break

I'm on mini hiatus, and though it won't take too long, there's a few things i've got to do before posting anything substantial. following are either reasons i'm on hiatus or things i need to accomplish.

1. i've started many posts the past few months that i've never completed

2. my comments appear to not be working properly and it pisses me off every time someone IMs or emails to tell me so (it doesn't piss me off that they tell me, it pisses me off that i'm missing out on commentors) - which brings me to #3

3. i'm still on MT 3.121 and really need to upgrade to 3.2

4. my new site design has been ready for months and i haven't updated it yet

5. i got a tmobile MDA and really need to spend some time learning to use it

6. i really have to start using skype

7. i've got a couple of outlets pursuing me for book ideas and i haven't completed any book proposals yet

8. i've got more speaking engagements coming up

and who knows what else...

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