I meant to post this a couple days ago, but I got distracted by my crazy job.
Remember Louis Armistead, the UVM senior who did the Davis Center video? We just hired him as a freelancer, and he's making videos every other week for Seven Days. At least, that's the plan.
The first episode of Loutube News features superstar politico-spawn Chelsea Clinton.
Clinton or Obama? McCain or Huckabee — or Paul? Should the school budget pass? What about the Moran plant?
Vermonters will decide these questions and more on Tuesday. And this year's Town Meeting Day promises to be an exciting one.
All the more reason to share your election day stories on the Exit Voices blog!
Exit Voices is a "Vermont blogging experiment" sponsored by the Burlington-area cable access channels — 15 (VCAM), 16 (RETN) and 17 (CCTV). It's moderated once again by Vermont blogger and filmmaker (and VCAM producer) Bill Simmon.
Here's how it works:
Exit Voices is a forum for Vermont voters to come together and discuss the issues and candidates on the ballot.
In the comments section of the Exit Voices posts, answer these two questions:
1. What motivates you to go to your town meeting or polling station and vote?
2. If you could add a comment on your Ballot for your elected officials to read, what would you say?
Alternately, tell us what you said at your Town Meeting, why you refused to vote, or what makes you crazy about our system of democracy.
I've participated in Exit Voices in the past. I love checking in to read other peoples' accounts of their polling places. In fact, I love it so much that I convinced our editors to run some of the comments in the paper.
Next Wednesday's edition of Seven Days will reprint some of the content from the Exit Voices blog.
I've got to start curating these comments by 2 p.m. on Tuesday — sadly we've gotta send the paper to print before the election results are in. So consider this my first plea to all of you Vermont bloggers to post early (and often!). Your words could wind up in Seven Days.
Kluster is online. Not much there yet, but you can go check it out.
This is the outfit behind the Burlington Brainstorm from a couple weeks back. They're headed to the TED conference next week.
Check out this audio slideshow I produced this week, with help from Andrew Sawtell, one of our designers (who is also a photographer). It accompanies Pamela Polston's cover story about photographer Näkki Goranin and her photobooth obsession.
Näkki owns a stunning collection of discarded photobooth snapshots. She's got about 3000 images, a fraction of which made it into her book, American Photobooth, just released from W.W. Norton. Some of the others are on display through March at Pine Street Art Works.
If you like found art, you'll love this exhibit. We're lucky to have it here in Burlington, so go see it while you can. Here's a peek.
Vermont blogophiles will guess that the headline refers to Morgan Brown of Norsehorse's Home Turf.
Morgan is an activist, a blogger and a fearless communicator. I've lost count of the number of times he's emailed to alert me to a new Vermont blog, or an important news story.
On Wednesday, Morgan will be taking part in the national Homeless Marathon:
WHAT IS THE HOMELESSNESS MARATHON?
It is a 14 hour radio broadcast featuring the voices and stories of homeless people from around the U.S. The Homelessness Marathon features live call-ins all night long via a national toll-free number. The Homelessness Marathon is available for free to all non-commercial stations.
Morgan sent me this message via Facebook:
WGDR 91.1 FM in Plainfield, VT will be airing the 11th annual homelessness marathon from 8PM to 1AM and I will be in the WDGR studio from 9PM to 1AM.
Listen in tomorrow night and support Morgan and this important event.
Sorry for the blogging hiatus. I really should have taken a day off after returning from San Fran, just to get my ducks in a row, but I didn't. And now I'm paying for it.
Here's an interesting opinion piece about journalism from Edward Wasserman, a j-school prof at my alma mater, Washington and Lee University. Incidentally, I didn't actually study much journalism there — I was an English major.
Wasserman wonders, "Can journalism live without ads?" I wonder that, too.
Modern computing offers unparalleled capacities to track and calculate. Imagine a vast menu of news and commentary offered to you ad-free for pennies per item, the charges micro-billed, added up and presented like a utility bill at month's end. The money that journalism providers got would depend on their audience.
Plus, if you uploaded comment or video in response, to the degree it was downloaded by others you'd get credited for it -- compensated like any other provider.
Interesting. I looked into the micro-billing option a few years ago, when I was working for cartoonist Alison Bechdel. At the time, it seemed that there weren't any good ways to micro-bill. Has that changed?
I wish there were a way to either 1) allow people to pay a small fee if they choose or 2) make some things pay per view (like, pay a few cents per view), in exchange for dispensing with ads online.
I'm not sure how I feel about it all yet — as a media-lover or as a media company employee — but I'd like to know more about what's out there.
I should add that I'm not really sure that removing ads is a good idea — not just because they pay my salary, but also because I use them as a source of information. A different type of information, to be sure, but they're a source nonetheless.
I went to the Burlington Brainstorm last night, to check out kluster, the new collaboration application from Ben Kaufman and crew.
I'm a homebody, so I went early. I was there from 7:30-8:30 p.m., so if the party got going later on, I wasn't there to see it.
But I was able to test the system, and talk to Ben and some of his design team — including the curiously named Mat Poprocki. Yes, that's really his name. The first photo is Ben, the second one shows (from left to right) designers Mat Poprocki and David Hitchcock.
This was definitely worth an hour of my time, if only because the set-up was so swanky, and I got to play with something new. Although the "free drinks" were actually drink tickets redeemable at local bars. Too bad.
They're not launching kluster until February 18 — this was actually the first time the system was live and open to the public for testing. "Pre-beta-testing" they said. And it's true — a few things didn't work, and I found a typo, but what I saw was still pretty cool.
They asked that I not say too much about how the system works since they're not going public for a week or so, but I can tell you that it's an application that enables group collaboration around ideas. "Anything better served by asking a group," says Ben.
Ben, by the way, is 21. He dropped out of Champlain College and is working on this full-time. He's got 12 people working with him — they got funding to develop this from outfits like Vermont's own Fresh Tracks Capital. In other words, they're exactly the type of business that we saw at Vermont 3.0 a couple weeks ago.
They were asked to take kluster to the TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design), which I've never heard of — possibly because I'm not "one of the 1000 most remarkable people in the world." The gathering takes place at the end of the month. According the the schedule, speakers include Al Gore, Amy Tan, Dave Eggers, Samantha Powers and oceanographer Robert Ballard — the guy who discovered the Titanic on the bottom of the Atlantic.
The kluster crew will be there to use their collaboration tool to help these thinkers and doers share their collective wisdom. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with — if it takes off there and people actually use it. Good luck, guys!
You can still get a sneak preview tonight (Saturday) starting at 5 p.m. in the offices above Stone Soup and Bueno Y Sano on College Street in Burlington (the corner of College and S. Winooski Ave.).
A couple weeks ago, I posted a video about a German TV crew that interviewed Bolton cartoonist Alison Bechdel. Well now the German video is posted on YouTube, so here it is. And Don the Jonesville postmaster makes an appearance! Yay!
Bad News: Bill Simmon's film about local political blogger Steve Benen (of The Carpetbagger Report) was rejected by South by Southwest. Sorry, Bill!
Good News: Bill wrote a blog post about his rejection, and provided a link to his film on YouTube.
Here it is, the Goldstone-award-winning short film, Digital Pamphleteer.
For more background on Steve in print, here's an article I wrote about him in 2006, called Posting Truth to Power.
Five of us from Seven Days are in San Francisco right now, at the AAN Web Publishing Conference. I'm getting lots of good ideas, and actually saw some of the city after we got here on Wednesday.
I couldn't really enjoy our tour, though — I had a ton of work to do. I wrote and sent the 7D NOW yesterday from our hotel. Then yesterday afternoon, Eva Sollberger and I did a presentation on how to do editorial web video.
But that's all done now. I had a glass of wine last night and felt like I was going to pass out.
In other news, we launched our iSpy Facebook widget yesterday. I'm psyched we finally got it up, and curious to see how that goes. Thanks to Efe Cimrin for getting us started on it — Efe actually developed a prototype, but we didn't end up using the one he made. Thanks anyway, Efe. You rock!
Now I'm going to enjoy the city for a couple hours before the next session.
Thanks to everyone who expressed concerns about my parents. Turns out they're fine.
Better than fine, actually. They were staying on the 7th floor, so none of their stuff was damaged. They got it all back. And they got to spend a free night in the nearby Bellagio, which, they tell me, is very posh.
So apart from the initial terror of seeing flames leaping from the top of their hotel, they had an ok time of it. Not sure how much money they lost gambling, though. I think I'm glad they don't tell me...
The Monte Carlo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas is on fire. There are flames leaping out of the top of it. Looks pretty bad. I'm watching it on my laptop in my office.
I'm posting about this because I just got a phone call from my mom, who wanted to let me know that she's ok. She and my dad, and some of my aunts and uncles are in Vegas this week, and are all staying at the Monte Carlo. They're fine, apparently. They've been evacuated from the casino, are standing nearby.
The pictures on CNN.com are pretty scary. I'm glad they're all outside. Their stuff might be toast, though.
Not surprisingly, the CNN is asking people to email and send photos or anecdotes. Citizen journalists are always useful in disasters...
Next week, I'm headed to San Francisco with three of my co-workers for the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' web publishing conference. Eva Sollberger and I are giving a presentation on how altweeklies can integrate video into their editorial operations.
I bring this up for two reasons:
1) To excuse the fact that I've been neglecting my blog.
2) To ask for input, should you have any. What do you like or dislike about the way Seven Days does video? We're going to be citing examples of great newspaper videos that we like. Any recommendations?