Tag Archives: Media

Media, Ruminations, Technology

Practical Technology Activism

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AudioActivism’s Brian Russell has taken the best practical step to advancing work on the “digital divide” I’ve seen in awhile.

What has one of our great local technology activists done?

Created Chapel Hill Wireless, a site whose goals are:

…to help you find good wireless access points (aka WiFi) in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, North Carolina.

…to promote the creation of more public wireless hotspots in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. (Carrboro seems to have a head start. :) )

By the way, Jason Baker, another 2005 Council candidate and technology advocate, took a practical step in community outreach by creating OrangePedia.org several months ago.

OrangePedia, a wiki collecting and collating information on Orange County, is still growing and the idea is catching on.

Media, Ruminations

SxSW Day 1.2 – Craigslist Newmark’s Austin Upgrade

Craigslist’s Craig Newmark’s conversation with Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales is highly informative, entertaining, insightful (Newspapers are community services, for instance).

[UPDATE: Newmark’s remarks.]

Ruby S. had an opportunity to ask Newmark about a comment from today’s NPR discussion of the Knight/Ridder-McClatchey media merger. A guest claimed Newmark’s Craig’s List was responsible. Newmark laughed and said it had more to do with the Penny Trader and Monster.com than his service. He continued speaking about the decline of traditional journalism in big media – and the rise of citizen journalists in the blogoverse. Ruby pointed out that local UNC journalism Prof. Phil Meyer thought blogs reach was restricted to the national level instead of understanding that local reporting is enhanced by local blogs.

Funny comment considering how Ruby’s local ‘blog OrangePolitics frequently “reports” stories not covered by our local news, fills in the gaps in stories, corrects factual errors in stories and even occassionally scoops the local press.

I’m upgrading my SxSWi Day 1.1.1 to Day 1.2 because of dog lover Newmark’s wit and verve.

Campaign, Media

Life, the universe, everything…

Wikipedia is an open source encyclopedia that represents a “public works” project of the first-order. Jimmy Wales, the founder of the effort, realized there’s a lot of smarts in the world community – all he needed to do was to tap into that creativity and talent and then step out of the way. In a sense, he created an ecosystem where freely contributed collaborative works could live and flourish.

Smart guy.

In the computer world, we say “there’s intelligence in the network”. In open source software development, we say “the more eyes on the code, the better”. In other words, “many hands make light (and smart) work” and the more folk that review an issue, the better chance for finding the underlying problem and really fixing it.

I’d like our Town to start building an institutional memory using technology like Wikipedia. We need to publish as much detail as possible, lower the costs of accessing this detail (make it easy to search, manipulate, aggregate) and trust the “more eyes” of our incredible community to find issues and suggest innovative solutions.

There’s the windup, here’s the pitch (via ibiblio’s Paul Jones [another “smart guy”]).

ibiblio.org Speakers Series
Who: Wikipedia founder, Jimmy Wales
When: 3:30 Wednesday October 5
Where: Freedom Forum Conference Room
305 Carroll Hall UNC-CH
What: A talk about the world’s most popular encyclopedia and news source,
Wikipedia and Wikinews by the man who invented and sustains them.

More here.