Author: BrianR

The General Assembly belongs to the people, not the powerful

HKonJ: Big March in Raleigh Tomorrow
Historic Thousands on Jones Street, aka HKonJ, is tomorrow. Check out this video of Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, President of the North Carolina State NAACP.

From the HKonJ website:

HKonJ: The People’s General Assembly

In order to make substantial and progressive change in North Carolina public policy, we need a movement and not a moment.

HKonJ is a call by the North Carolina NAACP to the progressive and civil rights community to come together to support 14-point public policy strategy that will begin to shift North Carolina political action in a way that will more clearly match our rhetoric with reality.

February 12, 2007 is the 98th birthday of the NAACP, in commemoration of a time when progressive whites and blacks came together to fight racial injustice and social inequality. Today, our challenges revolve around the issues of education, health, labor rights, economic empowerment, civic engagement, and criminal justice.

The goals of HKonJ are to:

* Gather 50-100 people from 100 counties in Raleigh before the General Assembly to embrace a 14-point agenda that we demand the legislature to act upon. We will insert the 14-point agenda in every political debate and discussion until they become a reality.

* Remind North Carolina that the General Assembly belongs to the people, not the powerful; to everyday folk, not just those with the money and the influence.

* Create a statewide network of the progressive and civil rights community which we will build in order to promote a progressive agenda and civil rights in North Carolina .

HKonJ will not be a moment, but a movement. This event will bring hardworking, everyday people together and on March 28, 2007 the Second Annual People of Color Legislative Day where we bring hundreds of people together to lobby the General Assembly will be held.

Yahoo's Pipes

This new online software creation app by Yahoo called Pipes could be a big deal. (requires Yahoo login) I’m going to play with it this weekend and report back here.

It seems to me much more than a way to mash up different web services. Its a visual programing tool. Non-techie people programing could cause a radical transformation on the web.

Tim O’Reilly has some good thoughts about Pipes.

…to develop a mashup, you already needed to be a programmer. Yahoo! Pipes is a first step towards changing all that, creating a programmable web for everyone.

Coffee Cam

The Trojan Room Coffee cam was the first web cam. It was set up to see if coffee was ready in another room. Geeks are lazy by nature. Laziness inspires all kinds of great innovation!

Don Sizemore has set up a web cam to see how long a line is at an outside coffee stand. (The camera isn’t pointed there yet. But soon… hopefully.) Our beloved Daily Grind Coffee is in a temporary trailer home. Its cold out right now so why not find out what’s up before you get in line? Fortunately or unfortunately for me I get to work early enough to beat the lines. 🙂

Thanks for telling me about this Paul!

Change.org

A new social networking site for non-profits and causes called Change.org has launched. It uses Web 2.0 stuff (tag clouds, groups, blogs, etc.) to help people organize around issues and create… Change. (I hope)

Its a beautiful idea that lots of smart people have been thinking about and working on. Nice to see something like this implemented. This could be some really powerful stuff.

On first glance it looks good. I’ll be using it for sure. Ruby is bound to have more to say about it soon. Until then here is a review on Read/WriteWeb that Rabble pointed me to.

Hat tip to Rabble and Ruby for telling me about this.

Will DRM disapear?

This is my favorite part of Steve Jobs letter Thoughts on Music:

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! No DRM system was ever developed for the CD, so all the music distributed on CDs can be easily uploaded to the Internet, then (illegally) downloaded and played on any computer or player.

Yet when you read this part you can’t help but wonder what this letter has todo with law suites in Europe.

Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard. The largest, Universal, is 100% owned by Vivendi, a French company. EMI is a British company, and Sony BMG is 50% owned by Bertelsmann, a German company. Convincing them to license their music to Apple and others DRM-free will create a truly interoperable music marketplace. Apple will embrace this wholeheartedly.

At the end of the day if Apple can champion the END of DRM the people formally known as consumers will throw their dollars at them. People don’t want DRM. Their is no fiscal future in it and Apple knows it.

(Is this Apple’s version of astroturf?)

More Local Individual Blogs

Props to Ed for giving thanks where its due, LOCAL BLOGS.

Via Ed Cone:

…the power of the internets does not lie only in building a new generation of high-traffic sites. Individual voices speaking to relatively small audiences can be powerful and useful things, and that may be especially true at the local and regional levels, where a few people can make a difference.

Note also that individual voices are important in realms beyond politics. In era of newspaper cutbacks and TV fluff, local bloggers are covering stuff that might otherwise go uncovered, adding to mainstream stories, allowing pros to tell stories that would never fit in print, and doing service journalism, too.

Hat tip to Sally Greene for the pointer. [Can I just say how much I love learning from my fellow bloggers. Ed may live 50 miles west of me but he’s still local to me.]

Open your Content: More good advice for the MSM

John Joseph Bachir adds this bit of advice for the mainstream media. See his post, Television talking to bloggers (and: I was on TV!!!!!!!!1111111one), for full context.

WNBC wants to take advantage of a more distributed information collection model. Fine. But this does not bridge the gap between old media (TV) and current media (blogging/internet). The internet is about conversation, removing degrees of separation between people, feedback…. I could go on. If WNBC is serious about participating in our world, they need to make their content accessible and usable after it has aired, allow feedback on their stories either via direct comment threads or forums on the website, and PARTICIPATE in these new tools. Have a presence on their forums. Adapt programming to the feedback… I know, I’m dreaming.

And dream on we will…

If TV stations allowed their video content to be shared, reused, and remixed that would be an excellent offering to their communities. A serious first step towards fair partnerships with bloggers and other content creators.

Put permanent links on your websites to copies of YOUR audio and video files. Encourage people to download the content and make something new with it. We’re already sharing our content. Not its your turn.

I know copyright is complicated. Creative Commons is the answer. It doesn’t circumvent the rights of Copyright holders it augments it.

Video: Building on the Past by Justin Coen

Arctic Weather and Tara the Cat

Now back to our regularly scheduled program of boring bloggers witting about the weather and their cats.

Yesterday in Chapel Hill was COLD. I mean arctic cold! Trust me. Even tho’ I hate the cold weather and cover just about every inch of my skin when I go out doesn’t mean it wasn’t cold. Poor folks elsewhere had it much worse.

Today its a balmy forty degrees. Go figure.

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Recently I’ve noticed my cat Tarra likes to run around the house like a freight train making lots of noise. When I’m sitting downstairs I can hear her upstairs knocking stuff over and making general bumping noises.

We recently moved to a new place and could really use a cat door. Sad thing is even if she had a cat door right now she probably wouldn’t stay outside to long. There are like ten cats in our neighborhood terrorizing both our high strung felines. Once outside they just run back to the safety of our loving arms. Awwww.

Snarky Bloggers and Why I Don't Trust the MSM

David Kirk wrote a blog post called Press Tries to Meet Snarky Local Bloggers about three people who commented on NBC-17’s invite to meet with a bunch of bloggers. My response is a bit out of context here so please go read his blog post or see part of it bellow for context. Here’s what he said about me.

iii. Uppish – Brian Russell:

7. Be very honest early on about what you want from Bloggers. We are not free labor.

8. Most important: Treat bloggers as equals and with respect. The era of consumers and passive viewers is over. Put links to us on your website…

Before we start making recommendations, should we at least sit down with them first? This is like trying to figure out who gets the kids in the divorce before the first date.

Here is my perspective.

* * * *

First thanks for the link David. This is the kind of media I like. The kind with conversations. With no disrespect intended to you, let me elaborate on how I feel about this.

I have real experiences that leads me to mistrust the media. That’s why I blog and podcast. To make my own media. I hope others will do the same. My mistrust does not prevent me from working with journalists nor hold any grudge against their profession. FAR from it.

Big picture: NBC, which NBC-17 is an affiliate, helped bang the war drum for George Bush that sent the US to war in Iraq. Over 3000 dead American Soldiers is enough to make me think twice about the trusting any media business. The New York Times and Washington Post apologized for their lack of coverage of contrary war evidence. When will the three big TV broadcasters? Not to mention Fox…

Local Picture: Local media has used local bloggers writing for profit without attribution. The biggest example is some News and Observer writers snagging quotes and beat research from OrangePolitics.org. Plus their general attitude, in my experience, has been one of condescension.

The latest dis is the recent N&O article Blogs are Changing Politics. The only reason they could come up with in their article for the large amount of politicians blogging in Orange County was “its politics tend to be more liberal.” The actual reason is lots of Orange County bloggers asked their representatives to start more transparent relationships with them by starting blogs.

I don’t hold NBC-17 accountable for the N&O’s actions. But sadly it reflects upon all of media. That’s why we lump the MSM into one big basket sometimes.

Bonus: Big media consolidation being allowed by the FCC is wrong. Local media owners are lining their pockets by exploiting public resources like physical right of ways and the airwaves.

So many more reasons… I’ll just stop here.

Should I blame NBC-17 for all this?
I don’t blame the workers at NBC-17 personally. But I’m not going to go running to their party acting like a star struck fool dreaming that they’ll listen to me and then actually change for the better overnight. I can meet other bloggers through our blogger meet ups we’ve already organized. I do a lot of media out reach/education without pay already.

What excellent opportunity do you see for Bloggers with NBC-17?serious question Please let us know how your meeting with NBC-17 goes.

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Again no personal disrespect intended towards journalist and media workers. Also thank you Jason Clough for your kind note via the contact form.