Lisacast features a world of new media guests

Lisacast has been all over the place and has more great shows coming. This week I interviewed Dr. Noam Lemelschtrict-Latar about social DNA and his deep experience in new media and it's effect on social interaction and information overload.

He earned his masters degree in engineering systems at Stanford University and a Ph.D. in communications at M.I.T.’s Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Mechanical Engineering and Political Science. Dr. Lemelschtrict-Latar offers insightful thoughts and encouragement directly from Israel.

You can listen to past shows here.

You can listen to the stream via browser or call into the shows while they are live and just listen or ask a question. The US number is (646) 478-4956. Upcoming shows feature the following guests:

August 12th, 2007: Jack Androvich, Sr. Director of Marketing Intelligence and Operations for Worldwide Marketing at Autodesk

August 8th, 2007: Ian Browde, Nokia on the device company’s future and user-generated media

August 19th, 2007: Ning CEO, Gina Bianchini on user controlled networks and what to do with an extra C-series funding of $44 m

August 26th, 2007: Bill Turpin, ex-Netscaper and current CEO of Metaverse.net, multi-player gaming and developer networks

Know someone in new media who might be a good guest on Lisacast? Please email me with your suggestions.

The Return of Reliance

Must the village be a verboten concept? Are we so independent that we cannot collectively agree that independence in the grand scheme is a temporary reality, and not an optimal one. It is the splinter of a moment at the end of a race where one man stands at the top of a mountain and says "Just me." We have not forgotten that the sum of the parts is greater than the whole, have we?

"I am an island", my long-time male friend proclaims as he finishes the build on a beautiful log cabin house on the water in Tahoe this month, customized to every detail of a singular life dependent on no one. Another female aquaintance of mine, a single mother, maintains that she doesn't seek to establish a traditional family scene and in the same breath mentions also that she is exhausted and feels unsupported. And many of us have felt for years that our voice doesn't matter, our votes don't matter, recyclying doesn't matter, my way or the highway and so on.

But I think now there has begun a renewal of community, real community, not just virtual. Whether you believe it or not, virtuality has enabled the return of reliance on one another. Last weekend, because I do less podcasting less these days, I rented out my Marantz sound recorder to a woman who was capturing the sounds of birds. Today I need to find a British army coat for my daughter's 5th grade play. I bet if items like that were listed in some loan database by zipcode, like making my recorder available, I could find one blocks away instead of having to go downtown. I think we're very close to that reality. For resources, for information and support, for all kinds of things.

Last weekend I held a talk show on BlogTalkRadio and my guest mentioned the disappearance of a woman on vacation in Cancun, Mexico. Last night, a woman called me from NY with information about the incident and sent me several articles which lead to the idea that a suspect in the woman's disappearance may be on the west coast now. I wondered if there were any bloggers who had put together an alert system yet about missing persons. In the U.S. anyway, a certain amount of time must pass before a person is considered missing yet homocide police will say that every hour matters in the capture of criminals in cases like these. Again, community stemming from the virtual world can touch our every day lives. These things are coming. If you have any information about the disappearance of this woman, an Israeli tourist, please contact me.

A live voice for press

I keep a Google alert running for the keywrods "citizen journalism" and found out about this story through a blog post from yourfreepress.blogspot.com written by Rafael Martinez Alequin. Mr. Alequin for over 20 years has been covering New York mayors as well as state politics. He is the founder and publisher of a bi-weekly publication covering community, city, state and national issues at http://www.nycfreepress.com. But now that his publication moved online and technically he is also a blogger, he is not considered to have the right credentials as a member of the press and recently he was not allowed in City Hall in New York and is fighting for press credentials once again.

Rafael Martinez Alequin, now 74, was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He studied at Universidad Ibero-American in Mexico City and graduated from Hobart College in Geneva, NY. He was a freelance writer for the New York Yankees Magazine, started a print publication that moved online, ncyfreepress.com, and is known for asking hardball questions.

The timing of my discovery of Mr. Alequin's situation ties in with my joining BlogTalkRadio and expanding my own media contributions to include a live talk show. So I asked this seasoned and passionate journalist to allow me to interview him and he said yes. You can read more at Lisacast.com, listen live to the show, scheduled to air each Sunday at 10 am PST or download it from the archive.

BlogTalkRadio allows hosts the ability to take live calls while the show is aired live and automatically generates a feed for your show so that listeners can subscribe and be alerted when shows are going to be on. There are a ton of categories and countries represented in the programming guide and the site is undergoing some nice changes which will include better search features, listener profiles and promotion tools for hosts. Some very exciting things are coming from the company.

Hamster Pie

I watched an Irina Slutsky video recently about locals in Stockholm, Sweden and their use of the Internet. A gentleman said he participated in a commmunity site called 'Hamster Pie'. I followed my short attention span first to a new browser tab and optimistically typed in 'hamsterpie.com' at which I found a most literal result, i.e. 'pie for hamsters'.

Google search results for hamster pie. And you know what's coming right?

Well hamster owner forums, small animal into food fetish communities, the Swedish mister's social network and yes, a recipe for Le Hamster Pie from the French. I just love the picture at the top of the page. And I give to you, a poem from the food fetish collection, it goes:

"A pan of hot oil
A frog is dropped gently in.
Vigorous sizzling."

The number of cultural differences a couple of words can have is dizzying. I fall into the hamster advocate group, having had 2 as pets when I was in grammar school, however, I've also eaten a frog.

The last 9 people

I just took a peek at the last 9 visitors to our site and wanted to share that I couldn't have hoped it would appeal to a more global audience. That it will grow ever more so opens up so much learning about the world's culture.

1. Cairo, Al Qahirah

2. Lausanne, Vaud

3. Hatfield, Norfolk

4. Muenster, Nordrhein-Westfalen

5. Pleasanton, California

6. London, Lambeth

7. San Francisco, California

8. San Francisco, California

9. Waianae, Hawaii

The most intersting thing I learned recently

Do you have a story to share with me from your side of the world? What's the most interesting thing you've learned recently?

The most interesting thing I saw this week was a latest demo of dotSUB.com, a translation service site with a really intersting player which allows you to scroll through captions in various languages. They are about to incorporate the service with sites like witness.org. Check witness.org out. Very smart, socially-conscious and responsible crew. Something the UN should support no debate.

"Messy and wonderful"

That is how Dan Gillmor charactizes the state of Citizen Media tonight at the Mid-Peninsula Community Media Center. The long-time blogger and ex-columnist for the San Jose Mercury News now runs the Center for Citizen Media.

Dan touched on the history of the newspaper industry as an example of the changing landscape of journalism and said that for the past 40 years it has been dependent on monopolization. "It was previously bad business to annoy half of your audience."

But the traditional journalism business models are quickly eroding. The product is no longer printed on presses that cost $50-75 million. The competition that previously existed in journalism is much less significant today than the present race for ad dollars. We are struggling to encourage local coverage, which is playing a very important role in the value of community knowledge. Investigative and in-depth reporting sites and those adding value to content like newassignment.net, Witness.org, and dotSUB.com are also key to keeping some structure in place and continuing quality journalism. This discussion on citizen media attracted its own "random acts of journalism," a term Mr. Gillmor uses.

I have been part of Ourmedia.org since last May, which today celebrates its 2nd birthday. Happy Birthday! Two years ago J.D. Lasica and Marc Canter approached Brewster Kale, founder of the Internet Archive, to open the Archive's media repository to user-generated content. This turned out to be a popular idea and Ourmedia.org now enables a widely-available library of deep-tagged media, hosted for free. The content is copyright-indicated so people can use them in their own works if you say so. Ourmedia.org's library includes articles about how to use materials.

What's okay to use and what isn't? What do the different licenses mean? How do you strip out or add audio to a podcast or video? Ourmedia.org answers these questions. Ourmedia.org also sports a peer-to-peer file sharing application from Outhink Media you can use to create all kinds of things called SpinXpress. With SpinXpress you can set up private groups and share large files from one computer to another (without uploading it somewhere else first or emailing large files). These image, sound and video files are almost always huge so it solves a big problem. Plus you can publish to multiple locations, including . The Internet Archive is a really nice clean place to showcase your media too. Here a few pieces I published there. Ourmedia.org is also about to relaunch it's site with a Drupal upgrade, which will improve the user interface and extensibility of the service.

What else to expect in the future from these new media experts?

Dan and J.D. are about to launch a project at the Center for Citizen Media centered around "principles of journalism" which includes topics such as story accuracy, fairness and transparency. Check out the media center for ongoing projects and courses you can take to learn more about video production and editing and more.
When tonight's audience was asked why they came to Dan Gillmor's discussion, a member with a philosophy background said, "I want to change the world."

Let's continue with a common goal of better journalism, encouraging the diligence of formal reporting and working too with the spontaneous, creative nature of citizen-generalted media. Some pictures courtesy of Jeff Schwartz are posted on Flickr.

Related items:

http://www.communitymediacenter.net
http://www.archive.org
http://www.ourmedia.org
http://www.citmedia.org
http://www.metacafe.com
http://www.wikipedia.org (my home page is currently set to this page on the Wikipedia.org site and learn something every day)
http://www.newsvine.com
http://www.blip.tv
http://parr.org

$70 M rewards loyalty?

by Michal Berman

Recently much was made of hockey goalie Rick DiPietro's 15-year $67.5 million contract, some commentators went as far as to call the move insane – owner Charles Wang said he believed in rewarding loyalty as a principal of doing business. What a refreshing message or reminder of the value that can be placed on loyalty, the faith (in humanity) required to set out on such a deal, and of how unfortunately rare this commodity (in the sense of an "article of trade") is in business.

Hockey commentators are still shaking their heads at this move and are questioning the merits of offering this type of a deal to an athlete considering the risks of injury and the affects on motivation to maintain a high level of performance. However, NHL and NBA analyst Maria Rotundo indicates in her research that these types of moves may be exactly what is needed to improve overall team performance and reduce counterproductive or retaliatory behaviour on the rink/court. I'm not arguing for or against this kind of contract in sports what I'm more interested in is the message that owner Charles Wang is sending by rewarding loyalty in what is deemed as such a controversial move. Just who wouldn't want to feel some of that organizational "love" at your company?.

Loyalty, according to many industry pundits, is an important business goal. It's sought after to build great teams, to enable revenue growth via customer retention and for those some would argue, more enlightened companies, it's a powerful productivity tool.

The current business climate seems to be far from realizing the concept let alone the ideal of "investing in loyalty in reward for superior value". It's the exception to be able to establish a relationship whether as an employee/employer or consumer or service/goods provider that lasts the long haul e.g., 15 years or more.

Although we don't know the personal aspects of this deal, it will take all the stakeholders (the owner, the individual and the team) to create success from this start. While maybe a bit trite or sophomoric to those whose business is hockey or other sports (or for organizational theorists and psychologists), a great example of the human and environmental complexity required to support this move is the film Jerry Maguire. Ultimately the success of all involved came down to loyalty, loyalty between player and agent, agent and business partner, and player and fans. Loyalty is a quality hard to offer, challenging to maintain and impossible to mimic. I'm hopeful from the various quotes I've read by Wang and DiPietro that all involved will have the faith in each other to sustain this public commitment, (and we all know, deals, whether in writing or not, are broken every day).

A refreshing example, well who knows really? Guess we'll have to wait the 15 years to surely find out in this case.

If you want to read more about loyalty in a business context, check out University of Toronto, Business school, Rotman's latest magazine on the subject.

Michal Berman is a multi-national technology consultant from Toronto, Canada.