a heads up from George Nemeth: Podcasting Goes Mainstream - eMarketer

George found an article that gives some excellent background material on the practice of podcasting, on which MeetTheBloggers capitalized beginning with its first session in August of 2005 (with our current Cleveland law director, Bob Triozzi, then a mayoral candidate). George has always been an early adapter. Podcasts accompanied by text renditions of the podcasts seemed an efficient way to span generations of users. Attempts to integrate video were of mixed result.

Last night at a public meeting at the Jones Home about ward division here in Cleveland, Anthony Fossaceca of the Ohio Daily Blog was recording the session, the flip charts, and the wall-chart presentations with a FLIP video camera, which he said was the smallest one FLIP offered and held one hour of video content, which could then be uploaded to the internet immediately. This seemed to be an excellent medium choice to marry to podcasts and text.

I'd like to have a presentation format that offered all three media. Add something like Betsey Merkel's Mogulus for live streaming video, and you have the perfect dialogue-type presentation, coming at you live and with interaction, able to be uploaded to YouTube quickly, available later in podcast format, and text-searchable. Two or three people could produce this easily.

Last night, though, it was comforting to have Henry Gomez Joe Frolik of the PD there, to pick up on the patter that only full-time journalists can share, and TV crews from 5 and 23 or 25. And, it was really fun to see people from all the wards coming together to, essentially, give the whole ward-healing process a big "WTF"? It's good to know we all agree on the basics, which is that this is more about the City Council itself than it is about any of us, or economies, or efficiencies, or improving the quality of life for each of us, or protecting individual rights. Gloria points out that we as a community may have voted for the ward revisions, but we certainly didn't want it all used for political infighting.

Podcasting Goes Mainstream - eMarketer

contemplating the essence of "busness"

from our friend Ralph Solonitz

http://www.ralphstuff.com/

Bus.The.Bloggers road trip

SENT VIA EMAIL

Dear Blogger Pals--

Would you believe that nobody has stepped forth to write a check for $50,000 to send a busload of bloggers and community-dialoguers from Cleveland to Akron to Columbus to Cincinnati to DC and back again?

Can you even begin to imagine that nobody as yet wants to sponsor an exercise to bind Ohio together, in wholly public discourse, from the road and from the capital and then from the road again, over 4 wired and connected days from January 18-21? To have the content posted forever on the internet as blogs and tweets and podcasts and videos? To usher in the new intergenerational Woodstock on wheels?

I offered the Greater Cleveland Partnership the opportunity to write a half-check for $25,000 to send us on a one-way trip and not come back--something I thought they might snap up-- but nobody got back to me.

My rolodex was out of date when it came to calling Mike White down there with the alpacas or the llamas, so I called around and found everybody else had trouble reaching him, too. I was hoping he would be able to make the call to Sam Miller so that Sam could get behind the "participatory democracy" he holds so dear.

I tried to get a news operation to partner with us by sending along embedded journalists; the blog-based Huffington Post didn't seem to understand, and one of their blogger/journalists, Paul Krassner, is still too bunged up from a 70s police beating to put in 4 days on the road (Paul knew Magic Bus people like Ken Kesey and Wavy Gravy and is a piece of walking/limping history himself). I was going to try to embed Dick Feagler, recently available, I hear, because of his prior successes at interfacing with the blogosphere, but I didn't want to ask him outright until I had the trip paid for.

I've established a couple of things, or a few:

--Nobody who wants to ride the bus has enough money to carry the whole thing off, and doesn't know anybody who could help at the last minute

--There are no civic-minded sugar daddies out there who specialize in making seminal events happen, at least not among our contacts

--There may be more than one way to skin a cat.

Therefore, it's now time for all of you who think that the Blogger Bus needs to roll out of here tomorrow to begin to ASK SOMEBODY TO GIVE US A BUS FOR 4 DAYS. Dan Gilbert over at the Cavs might have one, or the Dolans may have one that's not being used next week, or the Browns organization may have one that needs to be exorcised by having joyous riders for a change.

After somebody gives you the bus, then ask them where's the food going to come from? Then, ask to borrow their air card. It's simple. Like back in the days when everybody went to San Francisco.

Hey, I've blogged this a bit at--

http://timferris.blogspot.com/2009/01/january-18-21-blogging-from-bus.html

--and I've Facebooked it at--

http://apps.facebook.com/causes/192544?m=49f3b4f1

I've asked some of our politicians, but some were immobilized by fear of conflicts and others thought that, if this were a proper thing to do, their brilliant Washington staff would have already told them about it.

Gloria this morning told me to leave this whole thing alone, that people would start thinking I was crazy, and I thought, "Yeah. So what else is new?"

It's been fun. Call me or email me or tweet me when you get a bus, or a check for food for 40 people for 4 days, or blog it or make a video and stick it up on U-Tube, or even call WKYC or the PD first--I don't care. What I do know is that we can fill the bus in a heartbeat, create a heck of a lot of good will, create great content and post it for time immemorial to the internet, and bring three generations together on a very favorable basis, conducive to telling stories that need to be told and tales that need to be kept in the public consciousness.

I'm going to the market now, before it closes. I have no Plan B yet. I still have faith in Plan A's being executed by a group of bloggers and other people of good will on a bus, somehow, so open-source it and see what happens.

Tim Ferris
taferris@gmail.com
216-255-6640
http://timferris.blogspot.com

That Tim Ferris is so Damn Smart!

That Tim Ferris [sic] is so Damn Smart! « Experience Experiment -- Hey, it's not my place to tutor them in spelling. I like the headline. It resonates with me. I couldn't pass up the chance to exploit it.

At the link, as well, is an interesting profile of a modern office arrangement in Holland. It reinforces what we learned with Meet.The.Bloggers: Online is fine, but you have to get everybody together face to face regularly as well for the synergies to work.

And while I'm talking about it--I realize that the Meet.The.Bloggers site is still biffed and crippled, and that George only has so much time. However, if you have dead links or if any of your favorite interviews or transcripts haven't reappeared yet, why not drop him a note and see if he has time to get around to recovering content on a per-request basis. We all have a lot invested in the project, and we can ill afford to waste what gives value and depth to a community dialogue.

Boston Legal: junk like a turtle

►► Boston Legal TV Show Unofficial fan site: James Spader, John Larroquette, William Shatner, Candice Bergen, Tara Summers, Christian Clemenson, Gary Anthony Williams, Saffron Burrows, Rene Auberjonois, Mark Valley -- Thank goodness we got the heads up from the kids down in Knoxville about the season's premiere of my one and only TV show. Find out what Denny's talking about, at 10 PM tonight, on Boston Legal, Season 5, Episode 1, "Smoke Signals", when he says:

"It's receded - like a turtle too ashamed to come out of its shell!"

Callahan nails it again--add your 2 cents

Callahan’s Cleveland Diary » Blog Archive » Battlegrounds and bailouts -- Go to Callahan's and add your two cents. If you want to find a few other talking points on these topics, call me at 216-255-6640, and we'll kick things around a bit. Not everything belongs on a blog.

The dialogue could be very interesting and productive these next few months, if we talk about what we as stakeholders critically need to talk about, not what "they" want to promote as the issues with which to manipulate and polarize the public prior to the election.

I'm not sure that our interests are parallel with "theirs."

The Citizens' Symposium in Port Clinton

Primary Voices - Home -- I had the opportunity to speak at the Friday kickoff, in Port Clinton, of an all-Ohio forum and teach-in for citizens' participatory democracy. My session was "Stewardship and Financial Freedom."

After my formal, regulator-approved presentation, Gloria and I were able to pivot to a conference format and get really involved in what the people at our session were really interested in talking about. Briefly, their interests centered around conservation of all types of assets, freedom, truth, education, community dialogue, transparency, family, legacy, and finance. We had a great introductory discussion, but only scratched the surface.

Dr. Vernon Albright and his wife Mary, who pulled the whole thing together, are truly remarkable people based in Chicago. On the audio, you can hear his idea of reviving the town forum. We didn't get a chance to tell him much about Meet.The.Bloggers, but I'm sure we'll get around to it, as we review the after-effect of this weekend's Citizens Symposium.

making critical distinctions

Washington Wire - WSJ.com : Did Bill Clinton Go Too Far? -- I like the way this dialogue is getting framed out [bold emphasis mine] :

Mr. Clinton stirred up controversy on the campaign trail by saying he’d been told his wife would lose because voters were choosing candidates “because of their race or gender.” Before the polls closed, Mr. Clinton pointedly told a TV reporter – who asked why both Clintons were needed to beat Obama in South Carolina – that Jesse Jackson had won the state in 1984 and 1988. At the time, Jackson was often seen as the black presidential candidate, rather than a presidential candidate who also happened to be black.

“Do you think President Clinton was engaging in racial politics there?” George Stephanopoulos asked. Obama on ABC’s “This Week.”

The Illinois senator, who won almost four out of five votes from African-Americans, didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, he talked about health care, college costs, the credit crunch and the subprime-mortgage mess. “As long as we were focused on those issues, we thought those would transcend the sort of racial divisions that we’ve seen in the past,” Obama said.

sort of like MTB, but with VC backing and video, too

Ex-Harvard President Meets a Former Student, and Intellectual Sparks Fly - New York Times -- Here's a story about a site making its debut today that seems to have a lot in common with MeetTheBloggers so far as trying to provide the content you can't get elsewhere, and then keeping it posted on the internet in perpetuity, as a reference source.

“The idea behind Big Think is that you do have to sit down for a few minutes and listen to people who know more than you do,” Mr. Hopkins said.

Mr. Hopkins knows his site will naturally appeal to secular East Coast intellectuals, but he wants to challenge their secularism with sections on faith and love and happiness. “There’s a ton of evangelicals,” said Mr. Hopkins, including an interview with Rick Warren, the pastor and best-selling author of “The Purpose Driven Life.”

“People, whether or not they believe in God, these issues really resonate,” said Mr. Hopkins. “Look at the success of ‘The Secret’ and ‘The Purpose Driven Life.’”

He also hopes the site can transcend partisanship and become a destination for thinkers open to hearing opposing views.

“We live in this hyperpartisan world with really smart people on each side,” Mr. Hopkins said, invoking John Locke and John Stuart Mill, two enlightenment thinkers who believed in being open to hearing out the other side. “But there’s a lot of information not being exchanged because of these false barriers. People should expose themselves to the counterpoints.”

MTB did this two years ago

Alliance Pushes NBC To Open Presidential Debate To Bloggers, Internet -- Presidential Debates -- Interesting developments for copyrights, MeetTheBloggers, and so forth. Around here, we've been sharing the community dialogues for a good while, on our way back to democracy That Kos character, quoted later in the article, makes us remember that he has more to do with being shrill and keeping people at odds than he does with uniting a community for a common purpose, attaining its own best interests. He likes to emphasize the differences, not the commonalities; he's paid best when he harps on the differences and crafts exaggerated distinctions.

CNN has promised to free its footage of sanctioned presidential debates for Internet use and distribution. But an alliance of voters and technology leaders haven't persuaded NBC to do the same.
The Democratic National Committee sanctioned six debates Wednesday. A group of organizers wants the debates licensed as Creative Commons or placed in the public domain so they can be aired legally on YouTube and used in blogs.

The group -- which includes members of both major political parties, as well as Craig Newmark and Jimmy Wales, the founders of Cragislist and Wikipedia -- used the occasion to renew demands that the material be made available without restrictions. The alliance has sent letters asking both parties' national committees to use their power to press for free and open airing of the debates.

Lawrence Lessig, law professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society, is spearheading the effort. Lessig also chairs the Creative Commons project.
"I am very hopeful that both the Republicans and the Democrats will help encourage the extraordinary public discussion around the election that the Internet has enabled, by removing any uncertainty about the right of the people to comment upon the speech of presidential candidates," Lessig said in a statement.

CNN announced last week that its footage would be open.

"Due to the historical nature of presidential debates and the significance of these forums to the American public, CNN believes strongly that the debates should be accessible to the public," the division of Turner Broadcasting Company said in a news release.

"The candidates need to be held accountable for what they say throughout the election process. The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them. Therefore, CNN debate coverage will be made available without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate. We believe this is good for the country and good for the electoral process." (more)

first That Red Guy, then The Open Source Guy

Meet the Bloggers » SourceLabs’ Bruce Perens VP and author of “The Open Source Definition” -- Gloria and I were extremely fortunate last week: We got to have dinner Thursday with open-source evangelist Bruce Perens and his local Sourcelabs business affiliate, Athena Diamantis; the dinner was a five-course Greek-wine-tasting at M Bistro in Westlake, where she and her husband have ownership, and where he is the chef; we got to hear Bruce again in a panel discussion at I-Open's second Defrag event at Lorain Community College; and we got to talk in an MTB around-the-table discussion to him yet again right after the panel presentation and before his next plane out.

This is an amazing guy; I now have a grasp of what "open source" means and why it is so important, and why Merrill Lynch and TIAA-CREF already have embraced the concept. I know that only 30% of companies' software is "paid software," and the other 70% is custom, that there is a critical distinction each business must make between its differentiating and its nondifferentiating software, that the Bayh-Dole Act needs to be reexamined to make sure all businesses' best interests can be held foremost. I picked up pearls like "a massively parallel drunkard's walk filtered by a Darwinian process," and I learned the perils of the theories of "revenue bypass" and "revenue capture." I heard a multi-leveled metaphor involving Smoky Bear and taking a match to the forest.

Bruce brings us all a most critical community dialogue, and you owe it to yourself and to all of us to listen now and often.

Wild Bill O'Neill & the National Journal

Judge O'Neill Makes the National Journal Buckeye State Blog -- Here's our friend Wild Bill O'Neill getting some positive press again. We interviewed Bill for Meet.The.Bloggers on this past Bastille Day, July 14, 2006. From Jerid at the BSB--

While it's largely a paraphrase of of Sabrina Eaton's PD Article from earlier last week, it's still exciting to see Judge O'Neill getting early DC attention. From the National Journal's House Race Hotline (subscription):

Ret. Army Lt. Col./registered nurse/Appeals Court Judge/'06 OH Supreme Court nominee William O'Neill (D) has announced he'll seek Rep. Steve LaTourette's (R) seat in '08. O'Neill: "I'm running because I'm impatient with waiting for Congress to change the course America is on." O'Neill said LaTourette's 57% victory margin in '06 over "underfunded political novice" Lewis Katz (D) shows he can be defeated by a strong candidate. LaTourette "declined to comment on the challenge or whether he's planning to seek re-election" to an eighth term.

O'Neill lost an '06 OH Supreme Court bid, but won 1.3M votes despite raising no money for the campaign. For '08, O'Neill "intends to raise" $1-2M, but "he has to delay fund-raising until he leaves the bench" in 7/07. O'Neill "predicts he'll have no trouble raising cash." O'Neill: "People should be encouraged to put their money where their heart is." LaTourette, O'Neill said, is "dead wrong about the war, and on China and on health care. I will make that case, and we'll see what the voters have to say."

O'Neill, who earned a Bronze Star in the Army during Vietnam and has a son who served in Iraq, "said he plans to attack LaTourette's voting record on the Iraq war." O'Neill also said he feels well-equipped to call for universal health care, given he's a registered nurse who currently works on call in Hillcrest Hospital's pediatric ER.

freakonomics road show visits Youngstown

YSU News Releases--Just a reminder that author and economist, economist and author Steven Levitt appears tonight in Youngstown. They seem to be getting excited about it--

First, the obligatory Staubaugh listing:
http://www.stambaughonline.com/content/view/70/

Then Janko mentions the appearance along with lots of background and pictures:
http://shoutyoungstown.blogspot.com/2007/03/tofflers-take.html

And then, two days ago, the Vindy has Levitt angering "liberals and conservatives alike." I guess they're trying to create some common ground, in a backhanded way, and raise the level of excitement based on controversy.
http://www.vindy.com/content/local_regional/321498358234966.php

Personally, I would like to be going over there today to cover this as a Meet.The.Bloggers engagement, but we couldn't make the connections. This is a good series, and the participants need to have their content posted in the perpetuity that MTB brings to the community dialogue. This isn't just about Youngstown, and it's not just about our region; this is a huge discussion, and can become huger quicker if we share. The knowledge economy starts now and grows exponentially, once we begin to share openly and freely.

YSU, through the income from an endowment established by Paul J. and Marguerite K. Thomas, established the Colloquium on Free Enterprise in 1981. The Colloquium is a series of lectures or workshops by recognized leaders in business, economics and finance for both the public and academic community.

Dovilla's back, sort of

Three months ago, we covered Mike Dovilla's departure for the zone, the theater. Today, he's back with us, in a way, because he is announcing his new blog presence. I got this from an email he sent out St. Patrick's Day:

Dear Friends,

My blog on cleveland.com is now live and can be accessed at: http://blog.cleveland.com/baghdad/

I wish to thank The Plain Dealer, especially Denise Polverine, editor of cleveland.com, for this opportunity to share my story – and Frank O'Grady, my good friend and one of our most indefatigable volunteers during last year's Congressional campaign, for his helping in setting up and maintaining the blog. We will be updating this page regularly, so visit "early and often."

Please keep in touch.

All the best,

Mike

new blog by Don Iannone

Conscious Communities: Welcome to Conscious Communities©--be sure to click through to a very promising, thoughtful new blog from Don Iannone. Here's the kickoff--

This new blog explores the complex and essential nature of community in our lives. We live and we die in communities; from the tiniest crossroad towns to the largest megapolitan areas. Conscious Communities looks at community from various vantage points, and it offers a new way to conceive of communities, as we move forward into the future.
This new view encourages us to see communities as having the potential to rise and grow as places or centers of heightened awareness and expression. By heightened awareness and expression, there is an intention to point to the effect of community, in its many dimensions, on our consciousness, or our deepest sense of ourselves. It is in this vein that this blog is given its name: Conscious Communities. Communities should inspire and exhort their citizens' consciousness, and citizens should in return use that inspiration and exhortation to lift up and sustain their communities.
On one level, each of us is conscious, that is perceptually aware, of the communities we know and have experience with. There is more. Have we considered the possibility that communities are powerful agents co-creating our most basic consciousness? Have we considered the possibility that our most intimate and personal interiority is in part supported and shaped by what we take to be community?
Have we considered the possibility that we owe, in part, our capacity for heightened awareness and expression to those communities in which we live, work and play? So too, our communities, when beset by social, economic, political and ecological problems, diminish our capacity for heightened awareness and expression. For our communities to support and sustain us, we must support and sustain them. (more)

I don't quite get it

The Chris Matthews Show--I got up early this Saturday morning, 0630, zero dark thirty, to watch the Chris Matthews show; I've been watching Chris perform since I arrived at Holy Cross in the fall of 1964, finding him a year ahead of me and holding forth daily in raucous and impassioned discussions in what we called "the caf." The 1967 Purple Patcher tells me that--

"Caf" is an abbreviation for

a) a place to sit and watch other people sitting and watching,

b) a room where you can hear lunch-room theologians, boasting casanovas, budding leftists, and "Caf rats" discuss the importance of Polynesian Frog Worship,

c) an enameled chamber designed by the architect of Madison Square Garden's washrooms,

d) all or none or some or any of these

Most don't know that Chris owes much of his style to dead Jesuits. But, I've digressed. But, what the heck, it's Saturday. Anyway, what struck me as I listened to this week's gathered pundits extrapolate political data in order to game the primaries in February of 2008, a full year away, was that we were focusing on something that's a mere whistle stop on the way to the main event in November of 2008, and that's a very long time to be talking about these same aspirants, and a long time for them to be playing to the audience of potential voters. Can't we talk about something else for a while, like what is do-able and achievable here and now, and not after somebody gets elected in 2008 and into office in 2009?

The other, more pernicious aspect of these campaign-horse-race shows is that the candidates, whom we've not yet elected and may never elect, have more ability to form the public dialogue and to sway public opinion than the people we've elected already. Are we being fair to ourselves to take ourselves out of the present and focus on a hypothetical future? Let's get some work done for a change, and stop talking about what might happen, if only somebody gets a chance to implement their ideas, and if only they work out as advertised. Let the aspirants be known by their deeds, not by their promises. Let them be known by their works.

Which begs the question: Does any real work ever get done by people in the political arenas, or do we all just talk about it, as we slide into an abyss we refuse to talk about?

heavy day with Meet.The.Bloggers

Heavy, in the '60s sense. Meaningful. Rich. Rewarding. Valuable. Talked to Fred Krum at CAK mid-afternoon and Hunter Morrison at Midtown Brews early evening. More tomorrow. Tired. Sleepy.

through George, through Chris Corrigan: Art Of Hosting - The Principles

Art Of Hosting - The Principles--Here's a killer blogsite that came to my attention through George Nemeth and through Chris Corrigan, whom George has linked to a bit lately. Maybe I'm just dazzled or starstruck with all the new awarenesses or consciousnesses that are popping up out there, but here's another really good one, one that frames the practice as "hosting," and all of them seem to somehow be speaking in the same voice, or singing the same tune.