Google CEO On How The Internet Is Changing Politics

At the Democratic National Convention, Rachel Maddow interviewed Google CEO Eric Schmidt on how the Internet is changing politics.

More videos from the Big Tent, the Google-sponsored facility for alternative media, are available on YouTube.

via JD Lasica

Protestors & Video Bloggers Arrested In Minneapolis For Being Liberal

Dozens of people are being arrested in Minneapolis ahead of the Republican National Convention, apparently in a pre-emptive attempt to stifle protest and independent media coverage.

The people arrested appear to fall into two general group, liberal protestors and video bloggers.

The New York Times reports “Dozens Detained Ahead of Convention“:

On the weekend before the Republican National Convention, law enforcement agencies detained dozens of people and issued a series of search warrants aimed at groups believed to be organizing demonstrations while delegates and Republican officials are in town.

On Friday night the Ramsey County sheriff’s department, accompanied by the St. Paul police, detained people inside a building here that was being used as a headquarters to plan protests.

“They handcuffed all of us, said Sonia Silbert, 28, from Washington. “They searched everyone

A copy of a warrant at one house said the police were authorized to look for a laundry list of items, including fire bombs, Molotov cocktails, brake fluid, photographs and maps of St. Paul, paint, computers and camera equipment, and documents and other communications.

Attorneys for the National Lawyers Guild said the people who were detained and photographed included local residents as well as visitors in town to demonstrate at the convention.

Bruce Nestor, a lawyer at one house, said three people there were arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit a riot.

“In my mind it’s a classic preventive detention charge, Mr. Nestor said.

He said the authorities were permitted to hold those they arrested without charging them for up to 36 hours — excluding weekends or holidays — in essence detaining them for the length of the convention.

Eileen Clancy blogs at iWitness, a group of bloggers that “uses video to protect civil liberties.” She discusses their experiences in this statement:

<h3"i-witness video emergency press statement from the RNC

Live from the I-Witness Video Residence

Saturday, 30 Aug 2008

by Eileen Clancy

This is Eileen Clancy, one of the founders of I-Witness Video, a NYC-based video collective that’s in St. Paul to document the policing of the protests around this week’s Republican National Convention.

The house where I-Witness Video is staying in St. Paul has been surrounded by police. We have locked all the doors. We have been told that if we leave we will be detained. One of our people who was caught outside is being detained in handcuffs in front of the house. The police say that they are waiting to get a search warrant. More than a dozen police are wielding firearms, including one St. Paul officer with a long gun, which someone told me is an M-16.

We are suffering a preemptive video arrest. For those that don’t know, I-Witness Video was remarkably successful in exposing police misconduct and outright perjury by police during the 2004 RNC. Out of 1800 arrests, at least 400 were overturned based solely on video evidence which contradicted sworn statements which were fabricated by police officers. It seems that the house arrest we are now under and the possible threat of the seizure of our computers and video cameras is a result of the 2004 success.

We are asking the public to contact the office of St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman at 651-266-8510 to stop this house arrest, this gross intimidation by police officers, and the detention of media activists and reporters.

Clancy later reported that five people from iWitness were detained all in all, but at least three had been released.

While there was a lot of discussion of censorship of dissent going on during the 2008 Olympics in China, the state of new media in the US is means that there’s video on the Internet of these events as they happen.

Here’s an example from Qik:

Here’s another video taken after a raid on peace protestors:

More coverage is available at Salon & Boing Boing.

Hurricane Gustav Spurs Volunteers, Relief Via Social Media

On the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation along the Gulf Coast of the United States, another huge hurricane, Gustav, is howling around Cuba and heading for New Orleans, which was devastated by the 2005 hurricane. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin is calling Gustav “the mother of all storms,” and has ordered the mandatory evacuation of the city’s residents.

The storm is picking up in intensity, and is expected to make landfall in the US on Monday. Fears abound about a repeat humanitarian catastrophe in the aftermath of the hurricane as in ‘05.

One major difference this time around which gives us hope is the proliferation of social networks, and the coming together o highly connected users of social media to mobilize help.

Saturday afternoon, Tim Street, Executive Producer and creator of French Maid TV, asked on Twitter “#Gustav is not looking good. Are we going to be able to use Twitter to help people after Gustav hits? Can we brainstorm some ideas now?”

Around that same time, Andy Carvin, coordinator of social media strategy for National Public Radio, set up a Gustav website on the do-it-yourself social networking platform Ning to coordinate volunteers and list what needs arise.

Street sent lots of direct messages to other widely-connected Twitter users to please spread the word of the social network efforts to their friends and followers. He and Carvin, working from opposite coasts and far away from the storm’s path, asked for hurricane help, and received it by the bucketful.

Over the past few hours Saturday evening another Twitter user set up the script so that Twitter account @GustavAlerts would tweet the latest government hurricane alerts. Michael Bayer, who founded Utterz, set up a special Utterz widget for displaying “utters” about Hurrican Gustav. A collaborative Gustav Wiki is under construction by two others and will be available through the Ning site on Sunday. These efforts are meant to coordinate with the “older” new media like Craigslist and with traditional relief agency Red Cross, which organized massive emergency relief efforts in the aftermath of Katrina.

UPDATE 8/31/2008 - Podcasting News reader Christopher Carfi shares, “Since many in Gustav’s path will not have internet access, a mobile-based resource guide has been set up here: http://ventana.cerado.com/gustav08 .”

Of course, all the bandwidth and cool platforms and wikis in the world do not by themselves equate with alleviating human suffering. As one Twitter user put it, “hopefully, digital info converts to analog help.”

We hope so, too.

If you have other online resources for coordinating hurricane relief, please let us know in the comments below.

Image: GISuser.com

Embed Flickr Slide Shows

Flickr has introduced a new feature that lets you create fullscreen slideshows that can be embedded and shared.

Slideshows are available from just about every page where you see a group of photos on Flickr: photostream pages, sets, tag pages, group pools and search results. Just look for the slideshow icon, right.

I’ve embedded an example above, for a search for “sarah palin”.

Updated features include the ability to embed videos in your slideshows, customizable embed code and the ability to view slideshows in fullscreen mode.

Little Known Fact: Sarah Palin, GOP VP Pick, On Alaska Podshow Podcast

Not twelve hours had passed after the end of the Democratic Party’s National Convention in Denver, before presumptive GOP Presidential nominee John McCain this morning named whom he’d chosen to be his Vice-President on the Republican ticket.

Not three hours had passed after McCain’s nomination of first-term Alaska Governor Sarah Palin before little known facts about the dark horse VP pick began to bubble up on microblogging site Twitter. Some of the little-known facts were true: Palin was a runner-up in a 1984 pageant, Palin is a mother of five, Palin was a city councilman and subsequently mayor of the small Alaska town of Wasilla. Hundreds more of the increasingly ridiculous (and often far-fetched and hilarious) little known facts popped up in response.

A little known, but true fact, is that Sarah Palin (apparenty no relation to Monty Python alumnus Michael Palin) appeared this winter on the video podcast, Alaska Podshow.  In an episode about the capital city of Juneau, host Scott Slone tours the town of 30,000 and takes a walk with Governor Palin from the governors’ mansion to her office.

Zune Bug Nightlight/Wireless Speaker

Ashley Payne is a design student at College for Creative Studies in New York. The Zune Bug is her design concept for a Zune-branded nightlight that reacts to your room’s ambient light level. 

It’s also designed to be a wireless remote speaker for your Zune and responds to the frequency and volume of your music with variations to the lights brightness and color. 

Here’s another illustration highlighting the Zune Bug’s features:

This is just a design project - but it shows that there’s a lot of room for innovation still in the world of portable media player accessories, especially on the Zune side. 

via Yanko

Digital Media Insider Podcast 27: Steve Horowitz and the Code Ensemble

Composer Steve Horowitz has written soundtracks for movies, dance, video games, TV, live orchestra, and even computerized piano. Now comes the world premiere of his multimedia extravaganza Invasion from the Chicken Planet, and New York City may never be the same.

Free Podcast Features Classical Guitar Music

The University of Utah’s Classical Guitar Podcast (iTunes link) features classical guitar audio and video podcasts.

The podcasts feature performances of works by Tárrega, Torroba, Berkeley and others, as well as original compositions by Tully Cathey, a classical and jazz guitarist who teaches at the College of Fine Arts.

Image: ycguitar814

Malaysian Blogs Shaking Things Up

The New York Times recently claimed that the "year of the political blogger" has arrived. While that might be a true statement, it is certainly not limited to the American political agendas discussed in that article.

The Malaysia Situation

TechDirt has been keeping an eye on what is happening with blogging in Malaysia, and gives a little background:

read more

Dedicated Podcast Audience Up 300%

Podcasting continues to grow by leaps and bounds, with the total audience for podcasts increasing by 58% in under two years, according to research by the Pew Internet Project.

The dedicated podcast audience - those that download podcasts every day - has gone up 300% in the same time, from 1% of those surveyed to 3%.

The survey promises to provide ammo for podcasters and critics alike. While the number of dedicated podcast fans is up 300%, the technology’s steady adoption rate is closer to something like RSS’s, rather than the rocket-fast adoption of something like YouTube, which has a much lower barrier to entry.

Pew also found that men continue to be more likely than women to download podcasts:

• 22% of online men have downloaded a podcast
• 16% of online women have downloaded a podcast

Men and women are equally likely (3%) to download podcasts on a typical day.

Age differences are more defined with regard to podcast downloading than they were in 2006 when all age groups, except for those 65 and older, were almost equally likely to download podcasts. Now, the dividing line is around the age of 50, with internet users under 50 years old significantly more likely than older users to download podcasts. Fully 23% of those under 50 say they have ever downloaded a podcast and 4% downloaded one yesterday, compared with 13% and 1% of their older counterparts. Since 2006, younger generations have more fully embraced the technology, their percentages nearly doubling since 2006.

Pew also found a strong correlation between broadband access and podcast use:

Internet users with broadband and premium broadband access at home are significantly more likely than the average internet user to have ever downloaded a podcast, with twice as many premium home broadband users being daily podcast users.

Image: nataliej

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