Monthly Archives: July 2005

Last day at Flashforward

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I’ve been enjoying my trip. It’s always exciting being surrounded by so many creative and diverse folks. The Flash ecosphere is particularly diverse. Marketers sit next to designers, who sit next to developers, who site next to artists, who sit next to cartoonists, who sit next to… well you get the idea. I’m going to walk away inspired for sure. Well worth the trip. Wish I could have spent more time sight seeing here in New York. But that’s for another day and another trip.

Even saying all that – I can’t wait to get home to my family.

A New York negative, at least where I am at (near Madison Square Garden) – a near complete lack of public spaces to sit while eating. No Love Park. No Rittenhouse Square. No Reading Terminal Market. Shit, no Gallery. While I can buy the perfect pizza (for a buck even!), I have no where to go around here to sit. Ah Love Park – can’t wait to see you on Monday 🙂

Now is not the time

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Burningbird – Stop

Now is not the time to point to each other, almost in joy, because, to paraphrase, “we’re covering the story better than the BBC.

Now is not the time to bring up the incriminations of why this happened and use it as fodder and ammunition in this stupid oneupmanship that characterizes too many of the popular web sites.

Write on our shared sorrow for the people in London. Or write on flowers and trips to Maine and life in general, because life is good. Life is good. But not this. Don’t use this event to promote weblogging.

You’re right, and I know I’m guilty of this myself.

London hit by coordinated terrorist attack

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Subways and at least one bus around three and half hours ago – during rush hour in London. Over 95 injured and 2 reported dead so far. Blog reports flowing in from Feedster. BBCNews and CNN updating regularly. Google News and Yahoo News most comprehensive. More at Jeff Jarvis’s.

Our prayers and thoughts are with you.

Viral Marketing and the New Online Experience

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I’m in one of the last sessions for the day, being run by Ken Martin and Ivan Todorov of BLITZ – “Viral Marketing and the New Online Experience”, and of course the focus is Flash (it’s a Flash conference – duh). The surprising thing to me, is how much the language used mirrors that used by citizen media and blogging proponents – indeed even myself. Markting should be participatory. 2-Way. A Conversation. Those are concepts that form the basis of efforts like Philly Future.

And Albert – if you’re reading – I just had the perfect slice of pizza. Only Vincent’s, in my neighborhood, comes close. Damn, damn, damn.

Blogging from Flashforward

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I’m in New York today, attending Flashforward. What – you didn’t know I use Flash? Yeah, I don’t talk about work that much here do I? Java, MySQL, and yes – Flash… well more like Actionscript. Flash as a graphic arts/animation tool is mostly foreign to me – although it greatly peaks my interest. The intersection of code and visual/audio arts can be a lot of fun.

A couple Comcast co-workers of mine will be speaking this Friday.

If you’re around – say hi.

Welcome America Concert Kicked Live 8’s Ass…errrrr

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Well, ummm… not exactly, but Sir Elton John, Patti LaBelle, Rufus Wainwright, and Brian Adams, put on on a terrific July 4th celebration here in Philly. I had to watch from home, but even from there, Patti LaBelle and Elton John were amazing. Turned out the concert had the duel purpose of celebrating our country’s birthday and raising awareness to fight HIV/AIDS. This angle of the concert was completely overshadowed by Live 8 arriving in town. In fact, until the concert, I didn’t know there was an HIV/AIDS awareness effort attached to this. Great job promoters. That didn’t seem to matter because it looked like the Parkway was packed yet again with concert goers.

Here is where to go to donate.

Oh, and unlike MTV’s coverage of Live 8, our local coverage of this concert was a-ok. No music interrupts. No cutting to commercial or to stupid commentators during songs. The music did the talking. Now if we could just get those amateurish audio problems solved. And why not have the Philly Pops play during the fireworks? It would have kicked ass.

So that’s two concerts on the Parkway, each way over a hundred thousand in attendance. Within three days time! Philly has every reason to be proud.

Luther Vandross, Rest In Peace

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Philadelphia Inquirer | 07/02/2005 | R&B star Luther Vandross dies at 54

Grammy award winner Luther Vandross, whose deep, lush voice on such hits as “Here and Now” and “Any Love” sold more than 25 million albums while providing the romantic backdrop for millions of couples worldwide, died yesterday. He was 54.

Since suffering a stroke in his Manhattan home in 2003, the R&B crooner stopped making public appearances, but he managed to continue recording. In 2004, he captured four Grammys as a sentimental favorite, including best song for the bittersweet “Dance With My Father.”

Mr. Vandross, who was in a wheelchair and appeared weak at the time, delivered a videotaped thank you: “Remember, when I say goodbye, it’s never for long. Because” – and he broke into his familiar hit – “I believe in the power of love.”

HonorTags and Citizen Journalism

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Jeff Jarvis’s lists the first duty of a news editor in citizen journalism to “Aggregate, organize, and highlight the best of newsroom and citizen media”.

That’s *exactly* what our volunteer editorial team attempts to do at Philly Future. You can be the judge whether we are successful or not. Doing so requires tools and knowledge to use them. The tools we have are evolving, but are not yet where they should be.

One of the evolving tools we have is the practice of self tagging our own writing and photos with terms that make it easy to aggregate them – to pull them together for use. Folksonomies – collections of these collaborative categorizations – and tools that make use of them – are springing up all over the web

If it wasn’t for this practice, we would have had a near impossible time bringing together our regional web’s coverage of Live 8 . Technorati’s Live 8 aggregator, which brought together a tremendous amount of posts that were tagged as relating to Live 8, and Flickr, which had photos tagged as relating to Live 8, helped to identify relevant posts for review to highlight them at Philly Future.

Our Live 8 Philly coverage will continue to grow long after the event – specifically because of Technorati, Flickr and Philly Future’s own aggregator, which has who we consider the best bloggers in our region in it.

Philly Future attempts to be a tool that brings together the best of our regional web. Opinion, news, information, and more. It’s a daunting task for a volunteer effort. One of the issues we face is finding and attempting to discern if someone is posting something that is a factual news item, or an opinion piece. Reading is the ultimate arbitrator of this, but how to locate these posts initially is very difficult and flawed.

Think about it. How did you find *this* post? Probably from your aggregator. Or another blogger. Maybe a blogroll. What if no one linked to me? What if I had posted a quality piece and had no initial audience among those who are already well read? If I was some feed in a larger aggregator – that no one referenced – this post would easily be missed. Part of the din.

Clay Shirky wrote, way back in 2003, a piece that keeps getting overlooked in some places
“Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality”. Essentially, you must be linked to from those that are already linked to, in order to garner initial attention and traction. Shelley Powers has wrote extensively on this subject.

I took part in a related discussion at Jeff Jarvis’s site the other day. A great quote from Jeff: “I have to constantly kick myself to stop thinking of blogging in big-media terms, to stop judging it by the top of the power law and in silly lists, to stop assuming that bloggers want to do what media does (emphasis mine – Karl), to stop thinking that blogging has to be media, to stop thinking of blogs as publications and remember that they are people.”

Me too. He’s absolutely right. A tool to help combat that is to know a little about what the intent of a blog post is. What is the author attempting to achieve? Share his opinion? Post a news item? Do some activism? Tags can help here.

Look – we can rely on those that are already well linked to for telling us what is the news. For telling us who to read. For telling us what is important. Or we can search. Search for the new voice. Search for the new perspective.

Let those that are creating their own content tell us their intent.

Tags help us to do just that – help us to know the intent of an author. In Technorati, Flickr, and del.icio.us they help us to filter based upon the author’s choice – not some “authority’s”. This helps a host like me find content that I am looking for.

Still we have a long way to go – this volunteer still needs to read far too much to tell ya the truth. And it’s growing by the day.

That’s why I when I saw Dan Gillmor’s post about his group’s concept to help – HonorTags – I became very intrigued and did some thought. I believe – after the team has some discussion – we will use these within Philly Future to help folks identify – for themselves – what they consider the intent of their own writing. I believe it will help readers – and editors – know whether an author wants them to consider a post in different important ways.

Self-tagging is imperfect, for sure. It can be easily abused. And I don’t pretend to be an expert on the subject. But I welcome any new tools in my belt that can make life easier. I think this can be one.

“Philadelphia won. MTV and millions of TV viewers lost. And Africa?”

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While I am still gathering my thoughts, and recovering from a hyper day of metablogging, I can immediately share a few things:

1. The concert was terrific for Philadelphia. We hosted a huge event with flying colors.

2. Our regional web, professional and not, was on fire yesterday. It covered Live 8 far better than TV. Speaking of which – I got quoted in the Inquirer panning MTV!. We’re going to continue to do what we do at PF – highlight the best of it – over the course of the next few days – shoot – maybe even weeks.

3. Philly Future’s distributed approach to all this, with me as host, and bloggers across the region posting and commenting, would have only been possible with the magic combination RSS, Flickr, Technorati, and CivicSpace – and elbow grease. The tools are getting to the point where they can achieve their promise.

4. It’s been amazing to watch the organizers of Live 8 reach out to the digerati, and then the digerati to the blogosphere, to get the word out and take part. Recognizing us as opinion leaders and buzz makers is both a compliment – and a concern (Jeff Jarvis).

5. No matter how you feel about any of this – take the time go to One.org. Get educated. And hopefully you will decide to sign the petition as I did. It’s a cause all of us can support.

6. And Albert Yee kicks ass. You national bloggers should know that he is one the best photobloggers on the web (yes, no lie) and a terrific writer to boot. His efforts helped make Philly Future a worthy place to go yesterday.

Will Bunch, from the Daily News’s weblog Attytood helps to summarize how I feel so far: Attytood: Some final thoughts on Live 8:

Philadelphia won. MTV and millions of TV viewers lost. And Africa? Let’s hope for the best.

There’s no way that 1 million people showed up on the Parkway. It may have been 400,000 over the course of the day, with no more than 300,000 at any time. How do we know that? We don’t. But, psssst, neither does Mayor Street.

No matter, because — even though the non-Stevie Wonder musical acts left us cold — Live 8 was every bit the publicity coup that the city hoped for. There was no violence, few arrests, and remarkably good behavior and good spirits. No booing.

And no snowballs. Heh.

For a city long tarred — unfairly, for the most part — as dirty, rude and disorderly, the images that were beamed around the world today may prove priceless over time. They’re won’t be much immediate impact (except for Milton Street, maybe) but over time, that image will help convince some folks that Philadelphia is a place they want to work. or live, or at least visit on a vacation.

Unfortunately, who knows how many were driven away by the God-awful TV coverage? As we watched the train wreck on MTV unfold, we started to get a sense of deja vu, and we realized why: It was exactly the same things that ruined the Olympics on TV.

Events that could have been shown live instead, inexplicably, on tape. Too much jumping around. The canned interviews, the ceaseless prattling. There once was a time when sports programs showed the games, and concert programs showed the music.

It was live. It was exciting. And now it seems lost. We don’t know why.

…With so many people touched today around the globe, we feel confident that somewhere in Africa, there is another 3-year-old girl who will be rescued by the forces that were unleashed today. And if just one life was saved, Live 8 — which also was a pretty darned good rock concert — will have been worth it.

Live 8 was worth it.

What do you think?

Head on over to to Attytood and let him know how you feel. I plan to.