On MTV's Video Clash, the audience can choose from two options to decide the next video in near-real-time by voting using SMS messages or going to MTV.com. What amazes me about this is how into the idea I am. It's such a narrow channel of control, but the power of knowing the decision is happening now on dozens or thousands of phones and computers all over the place feels enormous.
First of all, check out this incredible building presiding over Syracuse University, The Hall of Languages. (Also see a webcam for it here.) I arrived in time for John Hlinko's talk at this conference by the Center for Digital Literacy. (Also in time for tasty BBQ from Dinosaur Barbecue.) Hlinko's sharp and funny and clear and you can see his background as an economist, comedy writer (what's with the Wesleyan corner on comedy writing?) and the creator of DraftWesleyClark.com. The same savvy is apparent when he explains some of the tactics that the Draft Clark folks used. They were thinking holistically about a communications strategy, not just presuming that a grassroots/magic-bullet/sliced-bread approach would scale them to the amazing level of success they achieved. People don't make this point enough. For the Internet to do what it can for your campaign, or your product for that matter, it needs to be…
I'll be at Syracuse University Friday for a workshop on The Internet & Democracy. Moderating a panel on youth and democracy, where I'll be mentioning my experiences with Project 540 and the amazing work Barry Joseph is doing developing online leadership tools at Global Kids. On my panel, John McNutt and Sarah Gatson. Also excited to finally meet John Hlinko, of Grassroots Enterprise and formerly of the Clark campaign. And speaking of civic engagement, you know who else I want to meet some time?? Professor Molly Andolina, youth civic engagement expert. Yeah. Finally, on the subject of panels, I meant to mention that the folks at the Personal Democracy Forum posted webcasts of all the panels, so you can see what Eli and Matt Gross and Dave Weinberger and the rest of us had to say during the session on "New Tools and Dynamics."
My friends I stand before you in total astonishment. Today at the License X-Press office of the New York State DMV I renewed my driver's license in under 30 minutes and walked out with an interim paper license. They took a new photo, gave me the eye test, gave me a number and then 20+ minutes later: Bang. Incredible. You'd think this was Switzerland or something.
Thursday night, I met Greg Elin at a BBQ and he told me about Fotonotes, his evolving protocol for annotating images in marvelous and hitherto-unimagined ways. If you work with images online you know that the image info that travels with an image is static, limited and nearly useless if you want to know anything besides caption and credit. What if instead images came with a flexible architecture of annotation? What if you could string together multiple narratives based on segments of images or even connotations of an image? What if the annotation space was extensible based on user input and response? The possibilities seem pretty limitless. It only makes sense that we should shake off the notion that an image is inert and sacrosanct in what it's doing and what it's about. We respond to it with a rich context of associations, why not embed more of that into…