· January, 2005

Stories about Citizen Media from January, 2005

Blog: The Gates @ Central Park

  29 January 2005

Hi everyone.... I've set up a community blog for "The Gates," the upcoming art event in New York's Central Park by the artist Christo. For two weeks in February, Christo will decorate Central Park with thousands of saffron-colored flags on gates throughout the park. http://nycgates.blogspot.com/ The website is set up to accept blog postings from anyone who visits The Gates and wants to comment on the event. The site will accept new posts via email and voicemail. Think of it as a public experiment in collective art criticism. :-) There are two emails you can use to post comments to the site - one email for people with positive comments about The Gates and one for people with negative comments. You can even attach a photo to the email and have it placed on the blog, if you go to Central Park and take pictures. Soon, I'll have the blog set up so that visitors can post audio blogs/podcasts about the event from their phone, using a call-in number and PIN code. I used this technique at the Berkman blogging conference for the blog http://mobcasting.blogspot.com. So for those of you who are in NYC or are planning to visit the city during the February event, I'd like to invite you to post your thoughts about The Gates. Feel free to post before, during or immediately after the event; I'll probably close the site's posting features a couple of weeks after the exhibit ends. How to Post Your Comments and Photos to the Site If you would like to post your thoughts about the Christo Central Park exhibit to the website, please send an email with your comments to either of these addresses:

For positive comments: yes-christo.gates /at/ blogger.com For critical comments: no-christo.gates /at/ blogger.com
(You'll have to remove the "/at/" and replace it with an @ symbol. This is to discourage spam.) Please put the title of your comments in the "subject" field of the email, and then your comments in the body of the email. Feel free to sign your email or post anonymously, whichever is more comfortable for you. Spam and off-topic posts will be removed immediately from the site. You can also use these email addresses to post a photo to the website; simply attach a photo to your email, then put the title in the subject line and a description and photo credit in the message body. Please only send your own photos; do not send copyrighted material or other people's photos without their express permission. If you would like others to be able to use your photo, please feel free to make a note of it in the body of your email message. If you're interested in discussing the site, including the development of lesson plans and other tools related to it, I've set up a yahoo group as well. To subscribe, please send an email to the-gates-subscribe /at/ yahoogroups.com and you'll be added to the list. thanks, Andy Carvin

Barlow on a new mode of building bridges

  26 January 2005

I've been spending a good part of the last few days meditating on Hossein Derakhshan's three metaphors for blogs: windows, bridges and cafés. John Perry Barlow, who takes life in great big gulps online, as well as in the “real” world, has a wonderful story of a way that Skype...

Jeff Ooi, Ferryman extraordinaire

  17 January 2005

Jeff Ooi announced today his new Chinese-language blog, 摆渡人 (in English: “The Ferryman”), quite possibly the first Chinese language blog in Malaysia. Jeff is launching this project explicitly to build bridges with the Chinese language blogosphere – he explains in his post that the blog is a result of the...

When Mobile Podcasting Leads to Mobcasting

  16 January 2005

I've just posted a blog entry on my website that might be of interest. It's about mobcasting-- the idea of combining mobile phone-enable podcasting with smart mob-like group action. The blog was inspired by a tutorial I wrote yesterday on how to podcast with only a smartphone.Here's a snippet from the blog:

What do I mean by mobcasting? Well, it's really a double entrendre, if you will: a play on both mobile podcasting and Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold's notion of viral-like social coordination enabled by information and communications technologies. Smart mobs got a lot of hype last year in the mainstream media, usually in the form of surrealistic group performance art initiated over the Internet. But smart mobs are much more powerful than just a group of college kids showing up in an art gallery at 12:15pm, standing on one foot and yelling "Tevye, get off the roof!" before dispersing without further comment. Like the case of SMS use during the anti-Estrada demonstrations in the Philippines, smart mobs can be any form of group social action enabled by ICTs. A quick example: imagine a large protest at a political convention. During the protest, police overstep their authority and begin abusing protesters, sometimes brutally. A few journalists are covering the event, but not live. For the protestors and civil rights activists caught in the melee, the police abuses clearly need to be documented and publicized as quickly as possible. Rather than waiting for the handful of journalists to file a story on it, activists at the protest capture the event on their video phones -- dozens of phones from dozens of angles. Thanks to the local 3G (or community wi-fi) network, the activists immediately podcast the footage on their blogs. The footage gets aggregated on a civil rights website thanks to the RSS feeds produced by the podcasters' blogs. (Or perhaps they all podcast their footage directly to a centralized website, a la OneWorld TV but with an RSS twist.) This leads to coverage by bloggers throughout the blogosphere, which leads to coverage by the mainstream media, which leads to demands of accountability by the general public. That's mobcasting.
Here's the permalink: http://www.andycarvin.com/000712.html Would love to hear your thoughts on the concept.... -andy

Global Voices on Omidyar Network

  15 January 2005

I just set up a request for a group on the Omidyar Network. If you haven't been there yet, give it a whirl. It's a very interesting community based on a wiki/blog system with a reputation system that is quite interesting. It's an interesting not-the-usual-members mix. Since GV is a...

Introducing Tsunami-Info.org

2 January 2005

Hi everyone.... My tsunami info website now has its own domain name: Tsunami-Info.org. The site aggregates news feeds and blogs from a variety of sources around the world, and offers machine-generated translations in more than half a dozen languages. Some of the feeds captured in the digest include Yahoo!/Reuters tsunami coverage, the BBC, South-East Asia and Tsunami Blog (SEA EAT), Crossroads Dispatches and Emergency Action Blog. The most poignant feed comes from SEA EAT's Flickr feed: a stream of photos and descriptions of people still missing from the tsunami. It sends chills up my spine every time I see them.If you'd like to see any more feeds added, please let me know.... -andy