Category Archives: Technology

Community, Ruminations, Technology

ConvergeSouth 2006 – Social Networking, MySpace

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Walked in on Bora Coturnix ( BlogAroundTheClock ) discussing his use of MySpace to identify folk by common Yugoslavian last names and then reach out through th “Add to Friend” function of MySpace to contact them…

Nearly every one contacted joined. He goes on to describe, given the youth of those folks responding, how his profile makes it absolutely clear he’s 40 years-old, a parent, a husband and not some freakish MySpace stalker.

OK, this post got lost in the ether. I’m reconstructing from memory.

Several comments on privacy on social networks. Jen – “as soon as you put your private information in it becomes public…”

Ed Cone – taught kids to treat the ‘net like the local mall – your kids know not to wander off with strangers – real problem is folks don’t understand that interacting on the ‘net is just like the “real” world…

Audience member – it isn’t like the “real” world…when someone is reviewing a college grads history they probably know there’s a good chance that person had been drunk once or twice – that’s OK – it doesn’t disqualify them – BUT if a picture of them drunk shows up on MySpace – that’s it….

Moderator starts a digression on rural Internet access up Edenton way…”there should be an effort like rural electrification to bring Internet to everyone” – I point out that the telcos have been collecting surcharges since 1996 (specified in the 1996 Telecommunications Act) but that they hadn’t fulfilled their obligation and squandered 100’s of billion dollars. I mentioned our Chapel Hill effort to create a muni-network – to bridge the digital divide. A professor at NC A&T asks “what about computers?” I mention that it’s connectivity not computers that we’re short of – that we’re awash in cast-off computers. She says “I want those computers”. Turns out she was part of an organization of 90 GSO churches trying to get computers into the community. They’d tried everything.

Cool thing happens. Several GSO tech people jump in and offer to coordinate getting free gear and free access for her group! There’s about a 10 minute side-bar where various GSO folk do a quick ad hoc plan to make things happen.

I kid the group saying “for the young folk, what you just saw was some old-style social networking”. I really hope the GSO folk rise to the challenge.

Moderator steers the discussion back to social networks. Anonymity, privacy and identity discussion ensues.

Moderator: as soon as everyone can log into MySpace a bunch of “illegal immigrants will flood the MySpace nation” . Audience picks up on dilutive effect of opening flood gates – diminishment of special quality of MySpace.

Student: While she was working with Turner (? Broadcasting) this summer they had their interns search MySpace to report back on prospective employment candidates. They farmed out the job to students because the company didn’t have direct access to MySpace [kind of sleazy, ethically questionable on the company’s part].

Pretty good session. I had more notes that got truncated. Hopefully someone else took good notes.

Community, Ruminations, Technology

ConvergeSouth 2006 – Building a Media Culture within the News Organization

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A room chock-full of “real” journalists. Followed by media/PR consultants and then a sprinkling of citizen activists.

So far, introductions.

Local political whiz, former Council member, Gerry C is here – I look forward to meeting him face to face.

Anglico (Jim Protzman) and SouthernDem are here for BlueNC. SouthernDem is a great, citizen journalist.

Zabouti (George Entemann) , Kirk Ross (ExileOnJonesStreet), GSO’s Lex Alexander, Dave Hoggard (Hogg’s Blog) – former GSO Council candidate and now general pain-in-the-side of the current GSO political apparatchik.

It’ll be interesting to see if the conversations are dominated by the producer-side (media/journalism side of the house) or the consumer-side (folks like myself, the BlueNC’rs, etc.)

Ed Cone – the people that own news organizations are not interested in putting out high-quality journalism – the people working there want the highest quality product but are stymied by the “business”-side of journalism

WillR – “not here to kill traditional journalism” – want to strengthen journalistic institutions. I added my rant on how limiting the community’s access to their story – access to the “long tail” (i.e. paywalled archives of former articles) only serves to weaken the institution.

Jim P. (Anglico) – who watches the watchers – he jumps in on the benefit of ‘blogs as watchdogs of the journalistic institution.

Allen Robinson (N&R) – on managing comments on the N&R – starts with story on how the SBI contacted him ecause a commenter had threatened to blow up the civil rights memorial – moves on to comments in general – Mr. Sun argues they have an overly bureaucratic approach to managing comments – Allen argues that it requires too much staff time to weed out vulgarities or “name calling” – Mr. Sun can’t believe that they spend as much time – that they need to open up comments

The audience joins in an speaks about “wisdom of crowds” type solutions to the comment problem.

Democratic Underground approach of putting a “think button” on their blog to let the community notify the admins of questionable content. Allen says their email would overflow. I think of Slashcode that runs Slashdot – it allows the community to vote comments up-or-down based on the community’s own standards (and also a peppering of “special” designated users). I suggested this to John Hood of the John Locke Foundation last year when he expressed concern about allowing folks to call out his Pope supported think-tank on their own website. I suggested that the critical mass of their “type” readers could squelch dissent quite fine 😉

Kirk Ross – the business of journalism is not willing to fund R&D – every other type business invests money in developing new technology and strategies to meet change head-on – traditional media organizations, especially print, is not willing to invest money or time in developing methods to deal with new trends.

Killian –

Doug Fisher – newsrooms are manufacturing operations – Allen is talking cost not profit – the big hump is to understand they’re in a service business not a manufacturing business….journalism is a cottage industry…
newspapers as aggregators…

Audience – comments as profit centers – some newspapers take the LTE’s and online comments – put them on paper – wrap them in ads and turn them into profit centers

Fisher – let’s change the term from newspaper to newsroom – newspaper implies manufacturing

Wendy – driving attention to your site – do a stunt – get on Romanesko – get A-listers to jump in – “money,stroking,money,stroking” – when the hits go through the roof your publisher might pay attention [ I think it might take the ‘blog-o-sphere breaking a story and making lucre on it time after time before they’ll pay attention]

Gerry – he knows that politicos read ‘blog entries, comments, etc. and send them on to their staff to find out about – that this new medium is having current and direct influence on the political sphere…

Audience – “we’ve been dealing with this since the days of Compuserve” – there’s been this tension with commenting for a long time – moderated vs. unmoderated discussion groups – the group that would succeed was the one with the highest “signal-to-noise” ratio.

John Hall – John Locke rep. – newspapers aren’t interested in local content – reporting what the community wants – instead they report/print what the editor wants…

Roche – problem with purchasing ads online – email Roanoke Rapids paper publisher couldn’t get a rate card, took weeks to get rate cards from others, Charlotte.com turned it around right away – someone in the audience comments “they must like making money” – utility of ‘net escapes folks that are interested in profit but don’t how to understand monetization…

Community, Ruminations, Technology

ConvergeSouth 2006 – Elizabeth Edwards

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First session of ConvergeSouth just wrapped. So far the “UN” part of conference hasn’t really kicked in…probably too early on a Saturday morning to do total engagement.

I had the opportunity to be the first non-“Ed Cone” questioner of Elizabeth. I put a tough one to her, asking if she had had a conversation with her communities on the “monetization” problem. Specifically, with her book, etc. , had she discussed with her online communities the fine line between commercialization/monetization and activating her community.

I believe her motives online have been “pure and true” , as I told her, but it surprised me that she hadn’t thought to broach the subject – especially considering her high-profile book campaign – with her communities.

More thoughts later – moving on to “Creating a NORG” – a new news organization staffed mainly with News Record journalist.

Community, Government, Media, Orthogonal, Ruminations, Technology

ConvergeSouth 2006

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I really enjoyed Greensboro’s first ‘blog-con ConvergeSouth, an “unconference” that attracted quite a few interesting and/or notorious folks. Good conversation (no surprise as Anton “Mr. Sugar” points out that ‘bloggers are usually good conversationalist), good food and a chance to learn by interaction.

Tomorrow’s promises to be even better.

Elizabeth Edwards will keynote on “Building On-line Communities”. I imagine she’ll be talking about her just released book Saving Graces and her experiences ‘blogging on One America Committee‘s ‘blog.

Beyond that, there’s an interesting list of other “known” guests.

I plan to get some feedback from the news-oriented folk on how to break the perma-link mess our local ‘blog community has with the HeraldSun and News Observer.

ChapelHill, Government, MunicipalNetworking, Ruminations, Technology

Easthom, Stancil Breath a Little Life Back into Municipal Network Initiative

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From Council member Laurin Easthom’s ‘blog The Easthom Page:

At our last council meeting, I read the above history of wireless in town, and gave our new town manager, Roger Stancil, the opportunity to begin a process. He appointed a staff committee headed by Flo Miller to keep the process alive in exploring a municipal wireless system within the context of a technology master plan. Additionally at that meeting, when the Town was discussing the timing of the fiber optic traffic signal system, Kevin Foy reminded David Bonk of our desire to study and consider the laying of fiber along with our upgraded system (for a possible future municipal broadband network backbone.) Now we have a council discussion of wireless and our master technology plan scheduled to be on our agenda at our next council meeting.

Phew! After a recent discussion with some local citizens about the majority of Council’s rather tepid and slow response to reconstituting the municipal networking initiative, I was ready to join with Laurin and start beating the drum for both a exploratory task force and a renewed effort to implement a strategic technology plan for our town.

Looks like Laurin went ahead without me 😉

She also reports that Mayor Foy hasn’t forgotten our strategic opportunity to “tag-a-long” with NC-DOT’s efforts to lay fibre to each of our nearly 100 signalized intersections. This community-owned high-speed networking loop would thread its way through every commercial district, lie along almost every University boundary and penetrate deeply into several underserved residential areas.

Long time followers of my efforts to promote municipal networking will remember that former town Technology Board member Terri Buckner and I focused attention on this once in decades opportunity nearly 3 years ago.

Thank you Laurin for keeping hope alive.

Monday’s agenda will be published here.

Government, Ruminations, Technology

A Measure of Transparency in Local Government

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Mark Peters, one of the founders of Orange County political forum SqueezeThePulp and a school-focused activist, created this report card to publicly track local governments fulfillment of their stated goal of greater online efforts to promote e-democracy .

Mark’s site, OrangeRecordings, serves as a clearinghouse for podCasts of school board, council, board of alderman and other public meetings. The archival value of audio recordings and the ability for “time shifting” concerned citizens to “listen in” on proceedings should spur any elected body interested in greater transparency to deploy them.

Unfortunately, while Carrboro leads the way with a %90 rating, Chapel Hill has laid a big fat goose egg (%0).

Chapel Hill’s Town Council is still dragging their feet on using the simplest of technologies to draw citizens into the governance process. Quite unfortunate.

Great work Mark.

Orthogonal, Ruminations, SxSWi, Technology

SxSWi: Inciting Self-Organizing Mobs for Local Progressive Activism

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I submitted a panel proposal for Austin’s South-by-Southwest Interactive (SxSWi) 2007 titled Inciting Self-Organizing Mobs for Local Progressive Activism

Educated and opinionated, netizens are a fractious bunch. Rarely does on-line irritation translate into “real-world” local activism. With the proliferation of no-cost, net-based infrastructure and the power of the “long tail”, why do so few arm themselves on-line to battle off-line? Or even run for office? Join us in discussing how to rouse your local mob, tap their collective wisdom and promote progressive change.

SxSW is a combined music, film and new media technology (‘blog, vlog, podcast, social networks, etc.) conference spread over nearly two weeks. Local ‘bloggers Ruby, Kirk, ae, Fred, Henry went last year and, I believe, there was total agreement that it was fantastic.

SxSWi organizers have setup a system to let the public at large vote (10 at a time) which panels they’d like to see. I’ll be headed down South next March in any case – working on a panel, though, would be gravy.

Here’s the link if you want to help select the 140+ featured panels.

Voting ends ominously Friday, October 13th.

By the way, Fred has a proposal titled The Long Tail of Identity:

As we embrace social technology, the consequences of sharing our identities on the web are unknown. How will our social network profiles or weblogs affect our future possibilities? Does a search engine or archive really have the final say about who we are online? In the panel, we’ll discuss practical and theoretical approaches to online identity management, how our identity is perceived, and what innovations are serving our yet-to-be-defined identity needs.

Community, Ruminations, Technology

OrangePolitics: Three Down, Many More to Go

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Congratulations to Ruby, the editors and many commenters that have made local ‘blog OrangePolitics such a vital forum for our community.

Three years ago, less than a week into OP’s life, Ruby graciously permitted me to blather on about Chapel Hill’s red-light scamera fiasco. Over the years, though I know I’ve tested her patience, she’s continued to host my and other folks contrarian, at least to her, viewpoints.

Yes, there’s been some controversy over content. Some folks opening up dialogues on other forums. Others going silent. Yet others moving on to their own gigs. All together, though, OP, through the efforts of Ruby, the editors and its community, have maintained a high signal to noise ratio.

As I noted elsewhere, the “long tail” of OP reaches back through time to help folks work today’s current issues. It continues to be a critical resource for local activism.

Once again, congratulations Ruby.

And if you move OP to a CivicSpace platform, one small request: PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE don’t break your links!

ChapelHill, CitizenWill, Community, Government, Ruminations, Technology

Sally, Kirk and Shearon-Harris

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Following up on my post Shearon-Harris Offline: Who Tripped Over the Wire?, I’d like to direct your attention to two of our wonderful local ‘bloggers.

Sally Greene has two great posts on the Shearon-Harris nuke plant safety issues and the resulting spin.

First, FAIRWarning

Tonight I went to the briefing in Pittsboro on the Shearon Harris nuclear power plant, its serious and repeated fire safety violations, and the legal action that was taken today by NC WARN, the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, and the Union of Concerned Scientists to seek an emergency enforcement action from the NRC.

Second, today’s absolutely wonderful deconstruction of Progress Energy’s spin, in Shearon Harris: beneath the spin

In response to this week’s events, the community relations manager of Progress Energy was kind enough to write yesterday in an effort to persuade me that the Shearon Harris plant is safe and law-abiding. But I am sorry: this version doesn’t fit the facts. Here is Mr. Clayton’s memo, annotated by Pete MacDowell of NC WARN.

The sharply observant Kirk Ross (Exile, Cape Fear Mercury) follows the money in his post from Exile on Jones Street (why “on”?) titled Duke wants you to pay for a plant they may never build

Duke Energy and Southern are working on a new Nuke project in Cherokee County S.C. No permits have been issued, no construction work on the plant has started. They won’t even submit a request to the NRC for another year at the earliest. In fact, the plan is for the plant not to be online until 2016. Then, there’s the whole idea that a new nuke is really going to happen. Some folks like ‘em. Some folks don’t. Some folks really, really don’t.

Carrboro, ChapelHill, Ruminations, Technology, Transportation

Next Stop, NextBus.

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According to the following Sept. 22nd Town news release, the NextBus system is nearly ready for its trial run.

Suggested online access is through Chapel Hill Transit’s www.chtransit.org site, the blue “Real Time Transit” link.

I suggest by-passing the lame Java-applet and go straight to the vastly simpler and more forward thinking Google Maps interface.


Click Map


I like the idea of a real-time passenger information system [dynamic updates and reports of bus positions within their routes] but I opposed using NextBus for several reasons.

NextBus uses proprietary technology instead of open standards alternatives that could have served both the needs of transit-tracking and blanketed large swaths of town with wireless Internet coverage. NextBus is also charging us more than other communities. NextBus uses cell-phone technology, uses increasingly wretched Cingular for coverage, has caps on cell data transfer [unlike Jane Doe Cingular Cingular customer, they don’t have unlimited plans] and will probably require additional financial outlays to remedy coverage problems. NextBus signage, because of the proprietary lock-in, can not be replaced with cheaper off-the-shelf versions.

The PR folks continue to emphasize that the majority of the $950K in tax monies spent came from a federal earmark [the hallmark of many a pork project] as if that means it’s free money – that it’s alright to make a poor deployment decision.

Most Chapel Hillian’s pay federal taxes and even if we didn’t that is no excuse for not really trying to do double duty with the same bucket of funds.

And, as before, Rep. Price is credited for his help though the campaign contributions received by Price from a NextBus executive and NextBus’ lobbyist remains unreported in the MSM.

Transit Ready for Real-Time

Chapel Hill Transit continues to move forward. This time, the local public transportation provider announces that the “real-time” passenger information system is up and running. Five bus stop locations in the community have electronic signage that allows passengers to observe the timing of the next scheduled bus arrival and departures.

“This is an exciting time for us,” commented Chapel Hill Transit Director Steve Spade. “We have been looking forward to implementing this technology. Along with providing convenience for our riders, the system is also a management tool. It will allow us to better manage the timing of our buses and significantly improve the delivery of our transit service.”

Chapel Hill Transit contracted with NextBus Inc. to procure and install an automatic vehicle location and passenger information system. The new signs are currently operating at the following park and ride lot locations: Eubanks Road, Southern Village, Jones Ferry and Highway 54. The stop on Franklin Street in front of the Caribou Coffee Shop also has an electronic arrival time sign. Plans are under way to equip nine additional stop locations with display signs, Spade said.

The “real-time” technology uses global positioning satellites to track buses on their routes. The system estimates the bus arrival and departure times. The information is available through the internet by going to www.chtransit.org, then clicking on the blue “Real Time Transit” link.

The majority of the funding for the system was obtained through a federal earmark requested by Congressman David Price. The total project cost is about $950,000.

I’ll be giving NextBus a month to hammer out the bugs in their system before reporting on its efficacy.

I’ll also keep an eye on service levels, additional costs and any other supposedly unanticipated problems that crop up over the next year.

Carrboro, ChapelHill, MunicipalNetworking, Ruminations, Technology

DTH on WIFI: They have a point…

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From Sept. 18th’s Daily Tar Heel by kind permission of Mason Phillips.

Nice to see a shout-out to my series on the poor decision to go with the proprietary lock-in NextBus system over an open-standards system. An alternative standards-based system could’ve delivered Internet access along all 23 transit routes – an alternative providing excellent penetration of free communication services into the most under-served of our neighborhoods.

ChapelHill, CitizenWill, environment, Ruminations, Technology

Shearon-Harris Offline: Who tripped over the wire?

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Local Progress Energy nuke plant Shearon-Harris went unexpectedly offline (or in nuke industry jargon “had an unplanned outage”) this morning:

Progress Energy’s Shearon Harris nuclear plant shut down today at about 10 a.m., in the first unplanned outage this year.

The nuclear plant, about 25 miles southwest of Raleigh, turned itself off automatically when the plant’s generator stopped working. Plant personnel are trying to determine the cause of the malfunction.

N&O

Progress Energy continues to have legal, technical and regulatory problems with Shearon-Harris and other operations, including whistle-blowing by security guards, issues with their plan to build additional on-site capacity (reactors) and, of course, the wondrous new over-charging meter fiasco.

Incredible timing as tomorrow (Sept. 20th), NCWarn, our local safe-nuke activists, are holding a meeting on Shearon-Harris’ fire violations.

Community Briefing
Emergency Action on Fire
Violations at Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant   

Wednesday. Sept 20, 7 pm
Central Carolina Community College,
Multi-purpose Room, Hwy 64 West, Pittsboro


Click here for more information [PDF]
CivilLiberties, Orthogonal, Ruminations, Technology

ZeFrank’s Simple, Nuanced Message

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I’m stuck in a video culture. The immediacy of the message, the ability to project nuance, is quite alluring. Today’s low-cost of creation and dissemination has helped unleash citizen’s voices which otherwise would never be heard.

Yesterday, I featured Keith Olbermann’s Sept. 11th impassioned defense of dissent.

It was a strong, direct, thoughtful yet emotional argument from someone perched on the pinnacle of an old-style media distribution empire (in this case MSNBC).

Today, another thoughtful rumination on Sept. 11th from the incredible ZeFrank, exemplar of the new-style media empire. One guy, one camera – scripting, singing and shooting his simple nuanced message – casting it onto the vast ‘net wasteland to be picked up and celebrated on its merit alone.

Continue reading ZeFrank’s Simple, Nuanced Message →

ChapelHill, Orthogonal, Ruminations, Technology

Low Flo

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Fall’s accelerating activity both weather and otherwise has slowed my ‘blog flow. It hasn’t been all work and no play as E. and I stretched our 7 year record of being the last out at the Exchange Pool.

Don’t worry, I have plenty to say on Carolina North, UNC’s Leadership group (of which I recently wrote), the beginning of Council’s new season, Town Manager Stancil’s start, the coming election (you remember that, right?), etc.

Flo is developing East of us and has the potential, as Kirk over at The Cape Fear Mercury observes, of joining “those F, G and H names seem to really nail NC—Floyd, Gloria, Hazel, Hugo, and Fran…”.

Quick orthogonal observation: GoogleEarth is evolving into the new ‘net browser. Geographic visualization is intuitive – and folks are leveraging the heck out of our proclivity to absorb positional data. Mapping is key to local activism – I welcome further improvements.

CitizenWill, CivilLiberties, Community, Ruminations, Technology, Uncategorized

Web 2.0 Activism: Yahoo Maps + Flickr

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Web 2.0 is a disputed frame of reference bounding the next generation of web-based, collaborative applications.

Once upon a time (a few short years ago), tech sales-droids touted ASPs (application service providers) as the natural replacement for individual applications. Net-based alternatives for accounting, human resources or even word-processing would be run and managed from centralized locations. Companies or individuals would “rent” rather than buy software. In many ways, it would be a return to the old lucrative mainframe time-sharing.

That hasn’t quite happened yet.

Instead, bits and pieces of these applications sprouted up on the web. First generation innovators, building upon the (almost) platform-independence of standards-based, Javascript-enabled browsers created dynamic client-server applications.

Unlike old-school client-server, both sides of the application ecosystem – desktop browser and HTTP servers – were quite flexible. Building on common standards – XML, HTTP, Javascript – developers were unbelievably agile – quickly adapting to new market conditions.

Second generation innovators stitched together (“mashed up”) these first gen applications to deploy many new unanticipated synergistic capabilities – maps and social data, photos and bulletin boards and video.

Web-based apps are seductive. Features and fixes come in a flurry. Popularity spawns copycats that thrive, spread, merge. Sites, evolving rapidly on Internet time, live or die based on attention-share.

What does that have to do with local activism?

Quite a bit, I believe. A question I hope to explore in-depth.

Today, Yahoo provided a simple tool to combine their free mapping service, Yahoo Maps, , with their free photo repository service, Flickr (an outside acquisition, by the way).

Not a novel service but one that was quite expensive a few years ago – tricky to implement within the last year.

My hope is that by melding two powerful, easily absorbed, sources of data, pictures and maps, I, and many other local activists, will be able to communicate more effectively.

Map below the fold….
Continue reading Web 2.0 Activism: Yahoo Maps + Flickr →