A new site you should visit...

Zack Isaacs recently invited me to post for his new blog ZacksTV. This was in response to some of my posts regarding my job hunting adventures.

I'm excited to see his post over at LinkedIn talking about his time in college and his time looking for work in his field. He eventually discusses what he seeks to do as a content producer.

BTW, my first post at ZacksTV is up . I chose to share the story of a Jackie Robinson West player - the team from Chicago that went all the way in the Little League World Series - who's family was homeless during the course of that team's remarkable run. I hope you'll go over there and view it!

YouTube's at five years

Believe it or not YouTube didn't exist when I started blogging five years ago. If I wanted to share something I saw on TV with you all I could do is either link to it or discuss it in whatever detail I could.

Now assuming someone else has posted some segment from TV, I can embed onto this blog. And this doesn't merely have to be YouTube. These days we also have the luxury of embedding from a variety of sources, especially if that clip is available from a major media outlet whether newspaper, TV or whatever. So it doesn't always have to be YouTube.

For example if I were to embed from the C-Span archives the program on the American Presidents I can do that here. Now be prepared to watch a program in excess of 2 or 3 hours.

Of course not all we see on YouTube needs to be that serious. People have become "famous" because people may have created some mindnumbing entertainment. There doesn't have to be any rhyme or reason for it, but it captures people's attention for the moment.

Perhaps that's the revolution of YouTube.

We still don't know who murdered 9 yr old Mya Lyons

Syron Smith has just posted this video on his YouTube channel. The vid doesn't indicate exactly where this march was held, but it almost appears to be Bronzeville although I can't rule out that it might not have been too far away from the murder scene on the 8400 block of South Gilbert Court. I'm not particularly familiar with that area anyway.

Anyway Mr. Smith would like to put some pressure on police authorities to step up their investigation of Mya's murder last year and he's point his finger at someone in the home for her murder. He especially calls out the new Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez.

If you're unfamiliar with this case you can check out this post I wrote last year, Girl (Mya Lyons) Found Stabbed To Death. If you want more on Syron Smith you can check out this post, National Block Club University over at The Sixth Ward.

Time's Person of the Year 2006: You!

Do you remember that? You (or us) was worthy of that distinction.

Everyday folks like ourselves who in some respects became celebrities in our own right. We created and we wrote and most importantly we shared. All thanks to this wonderful network we might refer to as the Internet or the World Wide Web.

Here's the direct article, but I thought about this article because I remembered that I wrote a post about this and there was another by the Peoria Pundit over at Illinoize.

Person of the Year: You - My post
I'd like to thank the academy ... - Bill Dennis, the Peoria Pundit.

Support Bongo

One amazing project affected by the “black blogger boycott” is Bongo, a film and web series that follows a group of street youth recording a hip hop album in Tanzania.

Jay Grandin and Leah Nelson do amazing work. They are now looking for contributions to help finance the project. Regardless of how you feel about the Verizon situation, check out their work and help meet their fundraising goal by making a contribution on this page.

Via 1939Media!

Black bloggers fight to make voices heard

SFGate via Instapundit:

With its power-to-the-individual approach, the new media world promises anyone with a laptop the possibility of a publishing empire. But, as some black bloggers are finding out, the new media world is a lot like the old one: racially segregated, with many prominent black voices still fighting to be heard.

Some bloggers felt insulted this month when the Democratic National Committee selected 55 state-oriented blogs to cover its convention in Denver; critics said few featured African American voices. The DNC said race wasn't considered in its selection from 400 applicants. Officials were more interested in the sites' audience size and how much chatter about local issues appeared on them. The DNC answered critics Thursday by adding several sites led by African Americans to its general blogger pool.

But some critics say the DNC situation is indicative of a larger media divide. It's a division in which stories like the racially motivated beating in Jena, La., last year lingered for months on black blogs and talk radio before the mainstream press picked up the issue.

That coverage gap is partly what inspired Gina McCauley to help organize the first Blogging While Brown conference this summer in Atlanta. The most popular online community conferences - like the Netroots Nation confab that grew out of the Daily Kos blog - tend to be predominantly white gatherings.

"The progressive blogosphere is segregated," said McCauley, whose What About Our Daughters blog was accepted to the DNC's blogger pool. Essence magazine named McCauley one of its 25 most influential people last year alongside Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and filmmaker Tyler Perry. "Black bloggers link to other black bloggers, and progressive white bloggers link to other white progressive bloggers," she said.

Here's more about the organizing aspects of black blogs. It seemed that the ones I know of were really organized about talking about Jena. Indeed they particularly got active:

Some African Americans see an easier chance to have their voices heard in the online world, and black voices there are growing not only in number but in influence. Last September, Wayne Hicks' Electronic Village blog ranked 75 black blogs on his monthly list; now he charts more than 1,250.

Hicks, who heads a nonprofit foundation, also is a member of AfroSpear, a collective of 140 blogs that focus on the black experience and gather momentum behind social justice issues like the racially charged incident involving a beating in Jena, La. Then there's San Francisco's ColorofChange.org, which envisions itself as the "black MoveOn." It has grown from 100,000 members to 417,000 over the past year, many of whom joined the organization after it publicized the Jena incident and pressured the Congressional Black Caucus to oppose Fox News' plans to host a presidential debate.

"I'd say that the new black voices are much more organic than those of the past. They don't need to emanate from the pulpit in order to be heard, or to inform, or to galvanize people from across the nation," said Avis Jones-DeWeever, director of the National Council of Negro Women's Research, Public Policy and Information Center. "These voices epitomize the next evolution of black political activism."

There's a difference in the types of stories that black and mainstream media cover, McCauley said. While some in the mainstream might analyze the influence of large media corporations on the Internet, black bloggers might focus on shows produced by Viacom-owned TV networks like VH1's "Flavor of Love" and question the cartoonish depiction of African Americans.

And when Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton mentioned Robert F. Kennedy's June 1968 assassination while defending her decision to continue her presidential campaign, "a lot of the mainstream media covered it as a statement unto itself," said Hicks. "But in the black community it was part of a pattern." He, like others, noted that Clinton made her statement four days after the Roswell (Ga.) Beacon put a photo of Obama on its front page with the crosshairs of a rifle scope over him, and former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee made a joke about somebody aiming a gun at Obama during a speech to the National Rifle Association.

"The mainstream media had a reason to look at black voices in the media because of the Obama campaign," Hicks said. "But these voices have always been out there."

Go read the whole thing. There's even a brief mention of the state of black media. Black newspapers aren't doing so well. Plus it would be nice if blacks can own more than 0.6% of all TV stations in the nation. Although to be sure owning a TV station is difficult. BTW, we do own 3% of radio stations one of which is surely WVON-AM in Chicago.

Free legal advice for bloggers.

Go to InstaPundit for it!

Steve Garfield's Super Tuesday Coverage Plans With The UpTake

Steve Garfield is getting ready for his coverage of SuperTuesday. Videoblogging is starting to go into the realm of live internet broadcasting! Very cool really.

Advice for election bloggers

Gina from Out on the Stoop. gives you instructions on how to approach poll workers on her nice videoblog. Do it if you would like to cover the election come SuperTuesday which is coming up on the Fifth in fact. You know this reminds me of how she was recieved when she attempted to film at a polling place. Posted here for the benefit of those bloggers who are following the polls in their neck of the woods whereever they are.

Gaper's Block has produced a podcast

Chicago's online magazine or at least that was how it's been described has inaugurated their very first podcast. They want a much catchier name for their podcast. A suggestion for this podcast, "GB Dial" or "The Dial", was already suggested in their comments section. Give them your thoughts on their podcast and give them a name. Of course you may want to listen first.

Another YouTube debate

From their blog today. They want you to fire up your camcorders so that you can ask the Republican candidates for President your question. The deadline is November 25th and the actual debate is on November 28th. Have fun!

MyUrbanReport talks about an ATL ordinance banning sagging pants...

Armani Channel on assignment for HDNews reported on this story back in August interviewing ATL city council member C.T. Martin as well as those affected by this proposed ordinance.

It was mentioned in this video that this style was started in the prisons. I heard somewhere else that wearing such a style in prison gave a signal you wouldn't want it to give (and I'm not saying). What I can say is that this fashion fad has been around a long time perhaps the better part of a decade.

To be sure though I would oppose such an ordinace. I think it would be outrageous to send someone to jail because they refuse to pull up their pants. I've never really understood the fad, but I think there are better ways of using our police and legal resources. There are worse problems than how young people wear their pants.

PubDef's videos taken off YouTube

I've enjoyed the video work of Antonio French although I'm not a resident of St. Louis. If you want to start a political blog of this same vein this is truly a good place to start. A full service blog with video and a great design and it seems fair.

Anyway here's French's story...

Yesterday evening, Multimedia KSDK, Inc. filed a complaint with YouTube about our posting of a video contrasting a September 13 story by reporter Mike Owens which ended with a promise to air a tape of an allegedly crooked real estate seller "saying he makes regular payments of cash to the local alderman" with their September 14 follow-up story that makes no mention of the allegation.

At 5:29 PM we received notice that YouTube took that video off-line. Then late last night, around 1:00 AM, all of our videos went off-line. That's around the time KSDK Channel 5 filed a second complaint, this time on the posting of the original Sept 13 video. YouTube responded by suspending our account and taking all 500 of our videos off-line.

First, we believe our usage of Channel 5's video falls under the "Fair Use" doctrine, the same doctrine Channel 5 presumably operates under each week as they use video content from other sources in their news broadcasts. In fact, PubDef's own video has appeared on local television without our expressed written consent, presumably under "Fair Use".

Secondly, KSDK never contacted us to ask us to remove the content and its labeling of us as a copyright infringer with YouTube is wrong and has caused us and our readers quite an inconvenience.

Anyway he took advantage of blip.tv another video hosting service. So here are the PubDef videos. And I guess you can chalk this up to another attempt by the MSM to maintain their pull over the citizen, grassroots media.

NCAA in-game blogging ban bogus, 'NCAAian'

You know I wanted to get on a trip about this whole blogging/new media/social media craze but let's talk about one of the pitfalls of this. There are those who don't respect this new medium. This is what I found from the Chicago Tribune's Hypertext blog...

Is publishing to the Internet "broadcasting"?

Although it's been unspoken, that question is at the core of the debate over the newspaper sportswriter whom the NCAA foolhardily tossed from a game for live-blogging it from the stadium.

The Louisville Courier-Journal and its writer, Brian Bennett, contend that he was offering instant analysis, not simply a regurgitation of the facts of the game, when he had his credential taken away at a Louisville-Oklahoma State game Sunday.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association contends that what Bennett was doing, as a "live representation of the game," amounted to competition for the official broadcast and Internet partners, folks who pay money for the rights to disseminate the games. This being college baseball, it's small money, but the principle is the thing, and surely the NCAA envisions applying it to bigger-revenue, bigger-interest sports like basketball and football.

In essence, the college-sports consortium contends that the sportswriter was mounting his own, guerrilla broadcast.

It's true -- putting something on the Web, even in text format, is a sort of broadcasting -- but nonetheless, the college sports group's move is remarkably short sighted.

First, Bennett's writing was in no way competition to the official telecast or radio cast. No college baseball fan would choose reading a blog over watching or listening to the thing itself. At best (for the newspaper), the fan might have the blog up on a computer as he watched the game, but even that's good for the NCAA. It maintains interest in the game, instead of luring people off to one of the thousands of other corners of the Net that might come across as more immediately enticing than amateur baseball.

Second, he could have written exactly the same thing by watching the official telecast from his living room or the Courier-Journal newsroom. To try to prevent people from reacting to your entertainment in one venue while allowing it in another is so absurd it needs a new adjective: "NCAAian."

Third, and most important, the NCAA is an idiot if it thinks it can or should start trying to micromanage what newspapers do with their games. No medium has been more responsible for the rise of college athletics. And if the league thinks it can maintain or grow popularity without newspapers or other fan intermediaries -- a group that now includes bloggers -- then it must be true that if you were to go to NCAA headquarters, you would find a cave.

Another blogger, Andy Rainey, talks about this story and gives his own experience attempting to cover a game only to be told to stop by the NCAA...

This particular issue strikes a nerve with me, because I had the exact same experience a few years ago when I was covering my first-ever sporting event as the newly-hired webmaster for fledgling TV network College Sports Southeast. As green as a cucumber, this 23-year-old pseudo-journalist was stoked about being in the press box to cover the SEC Baseball Tournament in Hoover via a live scoreboard/in-game chat/analysis (an early predecessor to the modern game log). Assuming freedom of the press, and further assuming my activities were kosher based on the fact that my employer was televising the game and had asked me to do this task as an accompaniment, I set about enthusiastically tracking the action play-by-play for my huge audience of maybe 20 people. No matter, it was about the game, and the purity of it, right?

About four innings into the first contest of the day, an SEC representative approached me and asked me to cease my activities because this type of content could only be posted after the game due to live broadcast rights reserved by the NCAA. When I explained that those broadcast rights had been assigned by the NCAA to MY EMPLOYER, to my sheer amazement it made no difference, and I was kindly asked to either close my laptop or vacate the pressbox immediately.

Granted, the NCAA has a product just like any for-profit company, and they have the right to protect that product. I'm as free-market capitalist as anyone. But is it really in their best interest to shut down activities that PROMOTE their product, and encourage others to follow it more closely? Seems like cutting off the nose to spite the face to me. Of course, this same debate could be applied to the music, movie and TV industry about file-sharing and the use of the internet to spread the reach of their products. But that's an argument best saved for another day.

No matter the validity of the NCAA's claim on their product, I for one learned a lot about the business of sports that May afternoon seven years ago. As an enthusiastic fan, I assumed that the games were more than a product with restrictions and limitations. At its best, sport is fun - it unites people from all walks of life with a sense of common purpose, common goals, and genuine pride and enthusiasm in the spirit of good, clean competition. At its worst, sport is... well, this. I assumed the idea was for the experience to be shared by everyone. I was naive, and Brian Bennett of the Louisville Courier-Journal learned that same lesson on Sunday. That was the day that changed my perception of the games we play, and is indicative of why my fanhood has dwindled to the level of marginal interest over the years. It is one of the main reasons why I do not miss working in the sports industry today.

I'll get to work on my new media/social media post ASAP.

Evan Coyne Maloney on C-Span tomorrow

He will be on the weekend edition of Washington Journal for roughly 30 minutes at 9AM Eastern to talk about his film Indoctrinate U. This film is about political correctness at American universities. I want to help support an interesting film and I hope it opens some eyes.

I've talked a lot about Maloney in these parts. He made a name for himself over four years ago documenting anti-war marches in New York and San Francisco. His videos have made it onto FOX News Channel, the Rush Limbaugh program, and even the Wall Street Journal's Opinion Journal. And now he's a documentary filmmaker. You can see his videos and other commentaries over at Brain-Terminal.com. You can access it thru the links in the sidebar.

This news of course comes from his website.

There are two new websites this week

From two of Chicago's major papers with, surely, the basic idea of encouraging this idea of citizen journalism. In an era where we see people on the frontlines way before any journalist or TV camera crews it's probably just as important to bring the people in. And what a great idea it is.

It's not only that. Newspapers can't easily cover everything that goes on in a particular community. That is since the Sun-Times and Tribune have a wide market area, mainly the city and its suburbas as well as northwest Indiana it's probably going to be impossible for a given paper to gear its content towards a specific area.

That's where you the citizen come in. These days we have sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and there's Blogger where a person can tell their own stories about what's going on in their communities. And we see that the Sun-Times and Tribune are jumping on the bandwagon, although, for right now they're focused on the suburbs. So when you get an opportunity check em out and see what they offer.

TribLocal
NeighborhoodCircle

It's been a long time since I've actually followed a videoblog...

You can call them vlogs if you want. Videoblogging sounds better. If I even do one I might come up with a better name for one of those.

Anyway there is a blog where you can keep up with news about videoblogging called the Vlog Press Kit. A collection of stories and links with regards to the vloggosphere. The authors there hope to be able to help journalist learn a little more about videoblogging.

BTW, I haven't followed this scene too often because since "discovering" it in 2005 when I first started blogging, the scene has slowed down considerably. Kind of unfortunate but I suppose when it comes to one-man (or one-lady or one-person) it's basically very easy to do. That's not to say they don't produce.

Here's a videoblog I saw today and maybe you have some space at home to build a personal museum of stuff. This segment is courtesy of Lo-Fi St. Louis.

Also Videoblogging week is coming up next week during between the 1st and 7th of April. Have your broadband internet connections ready!!!!