When Hurricane Katrina hit, David Freedman was thinking about the history of jazz. Specifically, he was thinking about how to save the 5,000+ original recordings, 50,000 LPs, and 25,000 CDs housed at his community radio station, WWOZ, in New Orleans. The first emergency — besides evacuating — was saving the vaulted archive of original recordings. David and I were both at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans in March, and the story of his station, combined with the overall vibe of the conference and some exploration of New Orleans two and a half years after the flood, got me thinking about what the ‘community’ in community media and technology really means.
Continue Reading April 30, 2008
At the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans this year, the rooms were all a-buzz with mobile — and it wasn’t just the 1,000+ attendees’ phones on vibrate. Larger nonprofits have used mobile campaigns to remind young people to vote, to disseminate information, and to gather txt-signatures for petitions. But as we look toward BAVC’s upcoming Nonprofit Producers Institute (the first of its kind), how can smaller or more localized nonprofits participate in the mobile revolution?
Continue Reading April 28, 2008
by Carl Weichert, BAVC Training & Resources Strategist
At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas this week, Adobe is previewing some exciting new functionality in the upcoming CS4 version of Premiere, its editing software – automatic transcription of the audio track of video files.
This is exciting in so many ways I could practically faint –
First, instead of sending off hours of documentary footage to a transcription service, you can now do it yourself.
Second, although not mentioned in the CNET article where I read this, I’m sure that it’ll be able to generate closed captioning and subtitles based on that transcription.
Third - Aargh, I’m so excited I can barely type anymore – as it says in the article, it will make video searchable by text while editing. No more shuttling back and forth looking for a particular word or phrase.
Fourth, this frame-based metatagging will not only be available while editing, but also in the finished product, making web video searchable by names or other terms. As the article says:
For example, a person could search a CNET video review for a product name and a specific feature, such as camera zoom.
All right, I’m going to go sit in a quiet corner of BAVC and hyperventilate a bit. Anybody have a paper bag?
April 18, 2008
By Carl Weichert, BAVC Training and Education Strategist
Adobe launched version 1.0 of its iTunes-style Adobe Media Player (AMP) this past Wednesday. AMP is an Air-based application that plays Flash video, either by streaming from the host site or by downloading the video. AMP checks for new episodes of user favorites and downloads them for later offline viewing.
For content providers, AMP offers a lot of control, using the Adobe Digital Rights Management Server. The videos online now are all advertisement-supported, but Adobe plans to add more options, such as paying to rent a video.
How does AMP compare to some of its competitors? In terms of picture quality, AMP delivers really good-looking HD video, and does it quickly. The only other online video service I’ve seen with comparable quality is Hulu. It definitely beats out Joost and some of the other sites I watch video on. In terms of content, it’s definitely lacking compared to other options – Joost and Hulu both have much more, and more varied, content. AMP has partnered with PBS, MTV, CBS, and other content providers to beef up their catalog, but right now, I’d say their strongest offering is Adobe TV, Adobe’s channel of instructional videos. (more…)
April 11, 2008
by Alicia Schmidt, BAVC Marketing Strategist
Okay, to be honest, this blog is going to be all over the place. That’s cause truthfully I can’t really wrap my head around all of this just yet, but here goes . . .
NPR recently reported that the world’s largest database on reproductive health (POPLINE, run by Johns Hopkins School of Public Health), has been blocking searches using the term “abortion” since late February.
Apparently a medical librarian at UCSF discovered the fact and contacted POPLINE. The folks at POPLINE told her that they had indeed turned “abortion” into a “stop” word – a word that is ignored by search engines – because they are funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (hello George Bush?) and they cannot by law support “abortion activities.”
The UCSF librarian then complained to the POPLINE administrators AND sent out warning messages to her colleagues through a mighty librarian list-serv. After word spread, the administrators quickly restored the search term. (more…)
April 9, 2008
by Alicia Schmidt, Marketing Strategist
A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about how Radiohead was engaging its fans in new models of music distribution (the pay-what-you-want album release). They continue to push the mainstream envelope with their newest idea . . . the Nude Re/Mix.
Through the site radioheadremix.com the band asks users to pay (standard song prices) to download the separate “stems” (voice, guitar, bass, drums, and strings tracks) of their song “Nude” from iTunes. The users can take those stems and remix the song using GarageBand or Logic. If you purchase all five stems of the song, you get free access to GarageBand (if you don’t have it already).
Then users post their remixes back to the site, and the public gets to vote for their favorite. You can even download a widget for your Facebook or MySpace pages to encourage your friends to listen and vote.
It isn’t a contest per say since there are no prizes other than that oh-so-coveted web notoriety (the top ten mixes are featured on the front page of the site), and Warner/Chappell Music Ltd claims rights to all the remixes (this is a corporate model after all), but it does offer users a way to engage more deeply with Radiohead’s music. And as an amateur, I have to admit that it is kind of fun to play with the tracks of a song I probably wouldn’t have listened to twice. (more…)
April 2, 2008
By Carl Weichert, Training and Resources Strategist
My SXSW report in chunks . . .
Chunk 1
Most of the panels I attended were focused on some type of gaming. The first two I want to talk about were:
• The Future of Virtual World & Game Development: Rise of the Indies
• Cross-Media Cross-Pollination: Mashing Up Video Games and ARGs
Rise of the Indies was presented by Corey Bridges, Co-Founder of multiverse.net. Bridges reviewed the shift that’s occurred in the broadcast, music and newspaper industries as a result of people distributing their own content via sites such as YouTube (neatly summed up by Bridges: “Sucks to be you, Media Oligopolists”). He went on to assert that the video game industry was the next on the chopping block, citing issues in the current model, issues similar to those in broadcast and so on.
Trends mentioned by Bridges that are opening the industry to indies: faster connectivity, middleware (software that allows other softwares to talk with each other), and the move towards a universal client for virtual worlds (meaning a player in one virtual world, such as Second Life, could visit another world, such as There, with the same avatar).
He also discussed the rise gaming in social network sites, such as Facebook, that now allows users to add games, such as Scrabulous. to their pages, and software such as Flash that allows for easier development of simple games (if you want to check some out, try Kongregate.com). (more…)
March 15, 2008
By Mindy Aronoff, Director of Training & Resources
During the first tech boom, Hugh Forrest, the dude that puts together the SXSW Interactive Fest, was talking about how that conference differs from the music and film one . . . 
“There’s less of a distinction between the speakers and the attendees. There’s kind of a feeling that everyone is in the same boat and we’re all kind of going the same direction. The people leading the panel might have a little better idea of where the boat is going to end up than the people listening to them—or maybe not.” (Italics are mine.)
Even though the boat has gotten so much bigger, Forrest’s observation still holds true. Did I learn a lot from the panels last week? Not really. Not in a traditional sense. But I picked up so much from just being in the same space as Valleywag, Gawker, Mahalo, PostSecret, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Citizen Agency, Pownce, MySpace, Laughing Squid, Meebo, Maker, Upcoming, Flickr, Zappos, Twitter, Udderz, Black Web 2.0, Fast Company, LinkedIn, Opera, Microsoft, TMZ, Robert Scoble, Six Apart, BoingBoing, RazorFish….oh, you get the idea. ‘Bout 8000 people, people. Jeez.
(more…)
March 13, 2008
by Alicia Schmidt, Marketing Strategist
Apparently attendance at SXSW Interactive nearly double this year as evidenced by the fact that there have been long, long lines to get into most of the
parties. Last night, I wanted to go to The People Powered Party hosted by Moo, Threadless, Etsy and SF locals Timbuk2 (some of my favs), but the line stretched around the block to get into a bar the size of my living room. No thanks. Seems like the party lines have been one of the biggest topics about the conference this year. Off to a late dinner instead where we gossiped about how the SXSW crowd turned on Bay Area journalist Sarah Lacy who interviewed Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (a painfully inept communicator - thus the need for him to create a system to “help people connect and communicate more efficiently”). I’m not taking sides on this one, but you decide for yourself by watching the video on TechCrunch. I’m sure there is an interesting blog to be written about gender and SXSW Interactive, but I don’t have the energy to write it today. (more…)
March 12, 2008
by Mindy Aronoff, Director of Training & Resources
1. Orange is still in.
2. Carol Burnett is from Austin.
3. Teachers, nurses and librarians are called “pink collar workers.”
4. Missy Elliot wouldn’t stop eating the chips in the killer interactive commercial for Doritos that Blacklake Productions made.
5. TMZ.com gets 7 million page views a day and took 11 months to become profitable — Alan Citron, General Manager
6. “You can climb to heaven on the back of your enemy’s corpse”– Lane Becker, Get Satisfaction
7. “Lost is the best thing on television outside the box. The Wire is the best thing on television in the box”– Steven Johnson
8. Buffalo meat “Slim Jims” are considered shwag in Texas.
9. “Fifty-seven per cent of young people make media. That means that 40% of kids are not making media.” [in support of diverse communities] — Henry Jenkins
10. “Twitter has made gossip more efficient. Men use it because it allows them to gossip without looking anyone in the eye.” — Owen Thomas, Valleywag
March 11, 2008
