Personas

I was at some Macalester something, and folks were talking about how Facebook killed the Spotlight. I also did some Googling of myself during this recent job search to try and find out what I could find about myself. I’m sure that folks are continuously talking about the breaking down of boundaries between public/private, and I don’t think I’m another alarmist (or even all that concerned, apparently, after seeing all the public profiles of myself I could find with a google search). Anyhow, the Personas Project from MIT is pretty cool, and pretty pretty.

From the description:

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.

Integrating Web 2.0 into Youth Programming

“If you work with youth, you know that they are interacting online. They are creating and posting content and remixing, commenting on, and mashing up content created by others. New Web 2.0 tools, which encompass sites allowing for collaborative, dynamic, user generated content, are quickly becoming ubiquitous in everyday life.”

Myself and a few other CTEPs worked for the past few months on an article for the Youth Media Reporter, a professional journal for the youth media field. We focused on how new technology tools are being integrated into youth programming and what capacity building needs are still there.

Its definitely a topic I am interested in looking at in the future. You can read the full article here. (http://www.youthmediareporter.org/2009/08/integrating_web_20_into_youth.html)

I’m a terrible blogger. But I went to a conference about media and the internet.

So, I started out strong, or relatively strong on this blogging front but then I fell apart fast. I saw Arianna Huffington speak at the National Conference for Media Reform this weekend. Not only does she have a blog that gets updated many times a day, she has readership and turns a profit. Not that I am looking for this little enterprise to be profitable, I just need to get better at writing down my mental “tags.”

Mary has been trying to get our whole department at work to use delicious, a social bookmarking site all year long. I signed up for an account, and have used it a few times, but I haven’t really gotten into it. When I logged on the other day, I see that she has been sending me links all this time using the site, including some suggestions for this very blog. I am using borrowed internet right now, so I don’t think that I can write a few long blog posts (its also one in the morning), but I will work through those links soon…I promise.

For now, you can watch this video from the conference I went to this past weekend.

It is Lawrence Lessig, giving the most impressive use of a powerpoint presentation I have ever seen, talking about why we need to reform congress, east-coast and west-coast code (the constitution, and computer code). While this presentation might only be tangentially related to this blog, he was one of the founders of the Creative Commons movement, talks about the internet, and just check out that powerpoint. (It may lose something that you can’t see him in all of this, just his slides, but you have to imagine that he was doing this all at the same time, the images weren’t added to the lecture after the fact.)

Stay tuned to Paradessence for killer robots, king kong meets godzilla, the future of the internet, and more.

-P

Community Access Television!

This is less a post and more of a plug. Make it, watch it, use it, support it. I think it will probably turn into more of a new media thing as funding decreases and the possibilities of online video and television continue to increase. I’ve heard good things about Denver’s access center making this transition, I think this is their website so you can check it out… http://denveropenmedia.org/

Also, I know I have written about map mash-ups before, but this is a great example of making media LOCAL: http://cctvcambridge.org/mediamap

Teen Buzz

I guess its probably going to be hard to write a world famous blog or achieve fame and fortune if I forget about the blog for months at a time…but…

I was just setting up the small studio at work so that one of the youth producers could record a voice over. That small studio control room has this terrible, awful high pitched noise spilling out of it all the time that usually makes me not want to hang out in it. Its a pretty cramped spot, and with the door closed and the sound proof walls, all of that whine hangs out with you. I was playing around with the knobs and turned off one of the camera monitors (which in the small studio, that doesn’t get used a whole lot, is probably circa 1986) and there it was, the whine went away. One of the community productions producers, who uses this studio a lot more than I, was walking by and I asked him if he ever noticed the noise. He didn’t know what I was talking about; I turned the monitor on and off again to show him, and he couldn’t hear it at all. Anyhow, all of that reminded me of a radio story that I heard a while back, about stores which were using high pitched noises that only the younger set could hear as a deterrent to keep them from loitering in front of the stores. In Germantown, where I went to high school, they just used polkas for that purpose.

The interview is with the inventor of the Mosquito, which creates the high pitched sounds, and his daughter. (If I remember correctly, I haven’t relistened to the interview.) His daughter, Isabel, recorded the sound with her cell phone to create a ringtone that her teachers couldn’t hear. That way, her and her friends were able to text message in class without their (older) teachers being able to hear the tones. I still dont’t know how they could be typing the messages without getting caught.

I just started texting, maybe I’m a little late there. I also just figured out how to use bluetooth and garage band to make ringtones from .mp3s and put them on my computer, maybe I will try recording the sound from the control room and using it to pass messages at staff meetings.

You can listen to the interview, which originally aired on All Things Considered, May 26, 2006 here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5434687