How MapQuest works

Ever wonder how MapQuest, or the OnStar navigation system, directs you from one point to another? The New Yorker's April 24 issue has an in-depth article about it. Here's an interesting synopsis of the system:

Generally, MapQuest and OnStar choose a road based on their calculations of which will get you there fastest. The criterion is time, a function both of speed and of distance. They do not, as some people suspect, simply pick the shortest route; otherwise, you might spend all your time on side streets, stuck at traffic lights or goat crossings. The algorithms consider the length of a road segment and the expected speed of the road and calculate the time it will take you to pass along it. Every road segment has a “costing,” a sum of the features that can slow a driver down. Turns, merges, exits, toll plazas, stoplights, speed zones: they all carry a cost. (Navteq has five “functional classes” of road, ranked according to connectivity and speed. An interstate highway is a one; a local street is a five.) These systems do not yet take into consideration traffic, construction, weather, time of day, or one’s tendency, on certain roads, to go faster than the speed limit.

Nor, I might add, do they suggest the most serendipitous or breathtakingly scenic routes.

Bringing wi-fi to Silicon Valley

San Jose Merc: Let the bidding for the largest wireless Internet project in America begin. The group pushing an ambitious plan to bring free or low-cost Internet access to all 1,500 square miles of Silicon Valley released a ``request for proposals'' on Friday, officially asking companies to make the Wireless Silicon Valley project a reality.

72-hour mobile video contest

Eyespot is having a mobile video contest this weekend. Send in your mobile mixes.

Vloggercon meetup pix

Some Flickr photos of the meetup we had in San Francisco yesterday planning for the Vloggercon videoblogging conference coming up June 10-11 -- from Enric and Markus.

Government seeks to muzzle reporters

Sunday NY Times: In Leak Cases, New Pressure on Journalists.

Earlier administrations have fired and prosecuted government officials who provided classified information to the press. They have also tried to force reporters to identify their sources.

But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.

Such an approach would signal a thorough revision of the informal rules of engagement that have governed the relationship between the press and the government for many decades. Leaking in Washington is commonplace and typically entails tolerable risks for government officials and, at worst, the possibility of subpoenas to journalists seeking the identities of sources.

But the Bush administration is putting pressure on the press as never before, and it is operating in a judicial climate that seems increasingly receptive to constraints on journalists. ...

Because such prosecutions of reporters are unknown, they are widely thought inconceivable. But legal experts say that existing laws may well allow holding the press to account criminally. Should the administration pursue the matter, these experts say, it could gain a tool that would thoroughly alter the balance of power between the government and the press.

This is a radical and unprecedented assault on the press's fundamental right to keep the public informed about the illegal or questionable activities of government. It's shameful, and needs to be challenged at every corner by everyone who believes in a free and informed society.

Free calls

Free conference calling
For the past year I've been using freeconferencecall.com to make conference calls with business associates and friends. A lot of people still don't know about it. No gimmicks — it really is free. A number of competitors offer a similar service, which they can afford to do because VoIP is so damn cheap.

Free directory assistance
Just came across this: Phone companies charge you $1.40 or more for a simple 411 information call, even if you don't get the number you're seeking.

There's a free alternative: Simply dial 1-800-FREE-411 or 1 800-373-3411 for both local and national directory service. Try it out. Again, no gimmicks.

Limbaugh arrested on drug charges

South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Rush Limbaugh arrested on prescription drug charges. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Firefox flicks

Not often that productive days are also fun, but that was the case Thursday when I talked shop with podcaster Dale Willman of Fieldnotes.tv and video site architect Todd Siegel over lunch and then headed over to a panel discussion and screening of 20 creative, clever 30-second spots for Firefox — created by users, natch.

You can see the Firefox Flicks entries online here. I liked:

Xraalthraal and John
Smells Terrific
Song and Dance
and:
Weeeeeee! (which I don't see online)

BTW, user-generated promos seem to be all the rage. See the page of video promos for the Vloggercon conference.

Legal guide for podcasters

Just completed: a comprehensive Legal guide for podcasters. It's also available in pdf format and they'll soon have it available for print on demand from Lulu.com. Great job covering all the bases! Now, we need an abridged version.

Publisher recalls novel by Harvard student

NY Times: Publisher decides to recall novel by Harvard student.

Just a day after saying it would not withdraw "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" from bookstores, Little, Brown, the publisher of the novel whose author, Kaavya Viswanathan, confessed to copying passages from another writer's books, said it would immediately recall all editions from store shelves. ...

The similarities between "Opal" and Ms. McCafferty's books were striking in some cases, with many passages in Ms. Viswanathan's novel — Crown cited more than 40 — echoing Ms. McCafferty's works almost exactly.

Nevertheless, Ms. Viswanathan maintained throughout the week that her copying of the passages was "unintentional and unconscious."

Plagiarism is bad enough. Let's not compound it by lying.

Mercury News, 3 other papers sold for $1 billion

The bad news many of us had feared has come to pass: 4 Knight Ridder papers were sold today to Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group for $1 billion. (Photo: McClatchy chief Gary Pruitt and Dean Singleton)

The San Jose Mercury News and Contra County Times -- my two papers here in the East Bay -- are part of the deal.

San Jose Merc article and sidebars. NY Times coverage.

I won't say Singleton is evil -- Rupert Murdoch's newspaper and broadcast empire has an exclusive on that -- but he was known in the industry 25 years ago as a budget-slashing bean counter with little regard for quality journalism, and there's no indication he's changed. From the Times article:

Mr. Singleton has cut a wide swath through the newspaper industry, becoming known more for his managerial zeal in cutting costs than his promotion of journalism. The Denver Post, his flagship, is in the midst of a reduction of 25 positions.

Social network sites: When a member dies

NY Times: Web Sites Set Up to Celebrate Life Recall Lives Lost. Excerpt:

Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of romance and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites that include MySpace, Xanga.com and Facebook.com are altering the rituals of mourning. ...

Inevitably, some of these young people have died — prematurely, in accidents, suicides, murders and from medical problems — and as a result, many of their personal Web pages have suddenly changed from lighthearted daily dairies about bands or last night's parties into online shrines where grief is shared in real time. ...

A blogger loses his wife

A blogger -- and friend -- loses his wife and writes about it.

Tom Hanks: How I age on screen

In the New York Times, actor Tom Hanks discusses roles past and present and how a 75-year-old makeup artist helped age him.

Preserving an Internet for all

I was interviewed for NPR's "All Things Considered," which went up online a few hours ago, on the subject of Net neutrality — but my remarks didn't make the cut.

In Internet Debate: Preserving User Parity, San Francisco-based reporter Laura Sydell asks: hould the Internet be divided into fast and slow lanes? That's the question at the heart of the debate over "network neutrality." Broadband providers have clashed with Internet and software companies, who are concerned that giving some users preferential treatment for a price effectively shuts out competition.

See more on the subject of this important and contentious debate at Darknet here and here.

Singapore cracks down on blogs, podcasts

At MediaShift, Mark Glaser looks at how the Singaporean government is trying to silence political speech on blogs and podcasts.

Surviving the e-mail onslaught

I came to a realization tonight.

For months, I've been trying to get out from under a flood of email (still have 3,800 unread emails). Even though I've unsubscribed from a number of mailing lists, the situation keeps getting worse, with hundreds of new email arrivals each day. What to do -- especially with an increasing workload and not a chance of clerical help?

Until now, I've been thinking about how to manage email. How to answer every interesting or relevant missive that comes across my in-box. But I've been thinking about this the wrong way. It's not about managing, or organizing. It's about survival.

Tomorrow I'll plunge into my in-box, but not with the thought or hope of cleaning it out and keeping it under control. That's clearly impossible. Instead, I'll dip into it on an as-needed basis, look at what I need to address (chiefly from people I know), and not get heartburn about the whole thing. Communication should be an uplifting experience, not a chore.

That's the only way I'll be able to cope.

Rise of the video blog

Rolling Stone: The Rise of the Video Blog. Online video bloggers are redefining the worlds of news and entertainment. (Above, Amanda Congdon on the set of "Rocketboom.")

Nice that Rolling Stone has stumbled upon this strange, exotic, slightly scary new landscape. Excerpt:

Rocketboom may be the vanguard in the march of the vlogs, but it's hardly alone. Video-blog monitor Mefeedia.com currently lists more than 6,900 vlogs. And while the vast majority are essentially home videos glorifying children, hobbies and pets, vlogs are beginning to infiltrate the mainstream media, part of the increasingly seismic shift in the way we get our news and entertainment.

Baron, a laid-back thirty-five-year-old who dreamed up Rocketboom two years ago while teaching at New York's Parsons School of Design, says that ever since ATM manufacturer TRM paid $40,000 on eBay for rights to a week of commercial spots at the end of the broadcast, advertisers have been lining up. Considering that Rocketboom's audience has more than doubled since the auction, Baron now believes the show is worth $4 million to $5 million annually in ad revenue. ...

The future of online video

Renee Blodget has a nice wrapup of a Churchill Club event in San Francisco (which I didn't know about) centering on the future of video on the Web. Participants included Microsoft's Rob Bennett, Google's Jennifer Feikin, Sling Media CEO Blake Krikorian, John Papenek of ESPN New Media and Ben White of MTV.

I'll be moderating a similar panel next week at OnHollywood called "Is the Web the new Hollywood?"

Giving people a home on the Web

Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher: Home, Home on the Web: Giving the Audience Some 'Space' of Their Own. Millions of people -- yes, more of them young than old -- are creating their own personal spaces online at these huge websites, sharing their lives, often in intimate detail, with the world. Yet with rare exceptions, the newspaper industry is avoiding this personal-page and social-networking trend.

Why an independent press matters

TheArgus' Saving Our Media examines from an inside-the-industry point of view the Knight Ridder break-up after its purchase by the McClatchy group, advising us on what we can do to preserve independently owned newspapers.

Citizen film reviewers in the house?

Kevin Smokler is looking for citizen journalists to attend and review at least two films as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival, running now through May 4. He has 30 press passes to dispense to bloggers, podcasters and vloggers from the Bay Area. (Wish I could attend, but can't this year.) Anyone interested? Let Kevin know at smokler at gmail.com.

A sharing site that doesn't share

A friend has twice tried to share a spreadsheet with me at NumSum. After registering, verifying my registration via email, I wasn't able to see the spreadsheet he was trying to share with me either time.

Next time, use Outhink's free SpinXpress to share anything -- for free -- without the hassle of registering at a site that doesn't work.

TV video that works on the Web

Terry Heaton of Donata points to a regular segment by his client WKRN-TV in Nashville. Called "Out of the Box," the segments, says Terry, "come very close to nailing the tone, style and presentation that is attractive to non-TV viewers. And, like everything else the station does for the Web, it's unbundled -- meaning it can be played anywhere, because the clip is monetized in its unbundled state."

Worst president in history?

Rolling Stone: The Worst President in History? One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush.

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

Fox exec on Fox News

Rory O'Connor: Fox News' Senior Vice President of News Editorial answers 20 questions about Fox News.

Windows XP on a Mac

In the Seattle Times, Glenn Fleishman writes about installing Windows XP on an Intel-based Apple iMac three different ways.

MySpace's challenge: Making money

Saul Hansell in Sunday's New York Times: For MySpace, Making Friends Was Easy. Big Profit Is Tougher. (Above, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson of MySpace.com / NYTimes photo)

More than 70 million members have signed up — more than twice as many as MySpace had when Mr. Murdoch agreed to buy it — drawn by a simple format that lets users build their own profile pages and link to the pages of their friends. It has tapped into three passions of young people: expressing themselves, interacting with friends and consuming popular culture.

MySpace now displays more pages each month than any other Web site except Yahoo. More pages, of course, means more room for ads. And, in theory, those ads can be narrowly focused on each member's personal passions, which they conveniently display on their profiles. As an added bonus for advertisers, the music, photos and video clips that members place on their profiles constitutes a real-time barometer of what is hot.

For now, MySpace is charging bargain-basement rates to attract enough advertisers for the nearly one billion pages it displays each day. The company will have revenue of about $200 million this year ...

Should Josh Wolf turn over his tape?

SF Weekly: Should journalist Josh Wolf be afraid? The Assistant U.S. Attorney, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the SFPD want to get their hands on a video shot by a San Francisco blogger.

At times, Josh Wolf is a journalist. At others, he's a blogger, an activist, or an anarchist. At this particular time, one thing's for certain: He's got a videotape the federal government wants.

The 23-year-old San Franciscan possesses a tape that Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Finigan deems essential to a grand jury investigation of a protest last July that resulted in injuries to two San Francisco Police Department officers.

To Wolf, the government subpoena of his tape represents a threat to his ability to gather news as an independent reporter. He believes it's yet another reel cast in a Justice Department fishing expedition that will stop at nothing to put his activist compatriots behind bars.

To the government, however, Wolf is a misguided, self-important young radical withholding evidence without legal justification. Regardless of the outcome, Wolf's predicament raises questions about how much information journalists should turn over to the federal government, and how the legal system handles those who draw little distinction between citizen journalism and citizen activism.

Though many facts are disputed, all parties agree that Wolf videotaped a July 8, 2006 [they mean 2005], protest march in San Francisco against the G8 Summit taking place in Scotland. At previous protests, Wolf had attended as an advocate for a cause, but this time he went as a journalist, gathering footage for his videoblog, "The Revolution Will Be Televised" (www.joshwolf.net).

"Most of the time I go out, I feel like I'm a fly on the wall," Wolf says. "Whether or not I agree with what they're doing, my role is to document it."

On the portion of Wolf's video that he released publicly, dozens of protesters, some dressed in black and wearing face masks, marched down the street in the Mission carrying signs and placards with anticapitalist, anti-government slogans or bearing the logo of the group Anarchist Action. Around dusk, things went awry; the tape shows marchers setting off fireworks and dragging metal newsstand boxes into the street to block traffic. ...

Wolf doesn't want to give up the complete, unedited version of the tape. He believes the federal government is indiscriminately monitoring antiwar groups under suspicion of terrorism, and as a journalist he shouldn't be forced to surrender unused footage in support of that investigation. He won't say, though, what's on the 15 or more minutes of the confidential portion of video. ...

Two weeks ago, Wolf's pro-bono lawyers argued a motion in federal court to quash the subpoena before Judge Maria-Elena James. They claimed that Wolf is protected by California's shield law, which allows journalists to maintain confidential unpublished information obtained during newsgathering. The law lets journalists cast a wide net in reporting, even though they may end up seeing or hearing actions that are illegal. Granting the government widespread power to request unused recordings, Wolf's lawyers argued, would turn journalists into an arm of the Justice Department, creating a chilling effect among citizens, thereby violating their First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly.

Of course, this contention assumed that Wolf, a self-appointed citizen-journalist, is every bit as much a "professional" as the men and women with years of experience and an editor reviewing their copy — something that's still a matter of debate among the media. Nevertheless, as more Americans become self-appointed citizen journalists, with camera phones and digital cameras and even cheap handheld video cameras, more "news" will come from people like Wolf. ...

Actually, no. No one is claiming that Wolf is acting as a "professional." But the millions of us who believe in the concept of citizen journalism believe that journalism is not restricted to an elite caste of professionals practicing journalism as a black art. Journalism historically is open to anyone who possesses the tools and skill sets to pass along newsworthy events he or she has witnessed. Wolf was surely acting as a journalist here. (The resulting footage resulted in All Empires Must Fall, a video account of the protest on Ourmedia.)

Here's another example of how citizen journalism is taking center stage in the legal arena. Of course, Josh Wolf, as an Internet publisher, might well decide to turn over his videotape, as other publishers sometimes do.

Teens star at Earth Day Film Festival

Today's San Jose Mercury News: Films go green.

Admit that the word educational makes you cringe and you'll understand why the Greenlight Earth Day Film Festival is happening tonight. When it comes to getting a message across, the old saw is right: a picture is worth a thousand words.

In the hands of talented student filmmakers, this Palo Alto festival's program is a lot of fun, too.

From ``Bin There?'' to ``A Can's Life,'' the 46 entries go for the quick hit. Only four of the films are longer than 20 minutes and most fall into the less than five minutes time frame.

With most of the filmmakers still in their teens, the whole event may accomplish the intent of its organizers -- to reach an audience of young people who normally don't pay attention to Earth Day events.

``We've done festivals before,'' said committee member Kim Brown, who brainstormed new ideas with a consortium of local environmental agencies and media non-profits. ``What better way to have them tell us what they think about the environment?''

The entries came mostly from students in middle and high school, with one category for adults. The festival winners will be sharing $5,000 in prizes -- with recycled trophies donated by Palo Alto city employees.

The filmmakers took advantage of the most modern equipment and let their creativity roll. ...

Here are six QuickTime movies of festival entries.

'Save the Internet' campaign

A major effort to educate the public about Net neutrality, and to lobby Congress against allowing telecoms to create a two-tier Internet, begins Monday. See my Darknet blog for details.

I was just interviewed by NPR on this subject, and the report should air on All Things Considered this Tuesday.

As with everything, it's not a black-and-white issue. Safeguards need to be put in place that the next-generation Internet being engineered in educational settings isn't held back by requiring equal access before it even rolls out the door. But on the whole, Net neutrality is an important principle for us to embrace as a society, wih potentially large consequences for grassroots media makers.

Wales discusses political bias on Wikipedia

At MediaShift, Mark Glaser continues "Wikipedia Week" at PBS.org with a debate between Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and blogger Robert Cox.

I know both Jimmy and Robert personally so don't really want to get in the middle of this. Suffice to say that after reading Mark's piece and the Wikipedia entry, the disputed neutrality page on the site, and Robert's Olbermann Watch site, I've taken out a TiVo season pass to Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

If journalism suffers from an institutional malaise, it's because we have too few journalists like Olbermann who are willing to speak truth to power.

The "Abramoff seven"

Brian Mundy, who lives up the road from me and is also represented by the nefarious Rep. Richard Pombo, runs the CA-11 political blog. Excerpt from a recent post:

via TPM [Talking Points Memo]: Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) predicted six Members of the House and a Member of the Senate will go to jail from the Abramoff scandal.

On the Al Franken Show, Josh Marshall from TPM added Pombo to the list of potential lucky winners of a federal indictment in Abramoff related matters.

After that, I think people that get talked about are Congressman Pombo from California although he's much less certain in my mind, than the other three I mentioned [Ney, DeLay, Doolittle].

From DailyKos diarist jorndorf:

Sen. Conrad Burns (R-MT)
Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX)
Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH)
Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA)
Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC)
Rep. Don Young (R-AK)
Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA)

Time to wake up on global warming

My friend Micki Krimmel filled me in the other day about "An Inconvenient Truth," the film (due out May 26 from Paramount) about global warming that's based in part on a scary but true presentation Al Gore has been giving audiences in recent months. It's directed by Davis Guggenheim, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing two months ago about his documentary "Teach."

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, gives a preview of the film in the current edition.

Richard Cohen in the Washington Postalso has seen the film and writes in his column: A Campaign Gore Can't Lose. It's worth quoting from at length because of the dire seriousness of the subject matter.

Boring Al Gore has made a movie. It is on the most boring of all subjects -- global warming. It is more than 80 minutes long, and the first two or three go by slowly enough that you can notice that Gore has gained weight and that his speech still seems oddly out of sync. But a moment later, I promise, you will be captivated, and then riveted and then scared out of your wits. Our Earth is going to hell in a handbasket.

You will see the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps melting. You will see Greenland oozing into the sea. You will see the atmosphere polluted with greenhouse gases that block heat from escaping. You will see photos from space of what the ice caps looked like once and what they look like now and, in animation, you will see how high the oceans might rise. Shanghai and Calcutta swamped. Much of Florida, too. The water takes a hunk of New York. The fuss about what to do with Ground Zero will turn to naught. It will be underwater.

"An Inconvenient Truth" is a cinematic version of the lecture that Gore has given for years warning of the dangers of global warming. Davis Guggenheim, the director, opened it up a bit. For instance, he added some shots of Gore mulling the fate of the Earth as he is driven here or there in some city, sometimes talking about personal matters such as the death of his beloved older sister from lung cancer and the close call his son had after being hit by a car. These are all traumas that Gore had mentioned in his presidential campaign and that seemed cloying at the time. Here they seem appropriate.

The case Gore makes is worthy of sleepless nights: Our Earth is in extremis . It's not just that polar bears are drowning because they cannot reach receding ice flows or that "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" will exist someday only as a Hemingway short story -- we can all live with that. It's rather that Hurricane Katrina is not past but prologue. In the future, people will not yearn for the winters of yesteryear but for the summers. Katrina produced several hundred thousand evacuees. The flooding of Calcutta would produce many millions. We are in for an awful time. ...

Wherever he goes -- and he travels incessantly -- he finds time and an audience to deliver his (free) lecture on global warming. It and the film leave no doubt of the peril we face, nor do they leave any doubt that Gore, at last, is a man at home in his role. He is master teacher, pedagogue, know-it-all, smarter than most of us, better informed and, having tried and failed to gain the presidency, he has raised his sights to save the world. We simply cannot afford for Al Gore to lose again.

Related: "Bush's Last 1000 Days" by Al Gore.

Bobby turns 7

Bobby turned 7 today, nearing the end of first grade, and playing his first season of Little League. I've shied away from posting photos of him on Flickr — until today. There's a new Flickr photo set of my favorite shots of Bobby.

JD on user-generated video

In today's edition of CNN's Digital Life podcast, CNN Headline News anchor Renay San Miguel talks with me about Hollywood and user-generated video on the web. Play MP3 Audio. | Subscribe to the podcast.

Citizen photography at the San Jose Merc

Interesting promotional banner across the top of today's San Jose Mercury News:

SHARE YOUR NEWS PHOTOS
Video, too -- find our new blog at www.mercurynews.com

This wouldn't by any chance be related to this week's purchase of citizen journalism site Bayosphere (run by former Merc business writer Dan Gillmor) by Backfence, would it?

The "Featured Photos" page at the Merc is co-branded with Buzznet.com. And while I greatly admire the Buzznet folks, this seems like an odd partnership. NowPublic.com, or even Ourmedia, seems like a more logical partner for citizen journalism.

Corn interviews Marshall on bloggingheads.tv

David Corn of The Nation interviews Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo on the new edition of bloggingheads.tv.

CIA mines 'rich' content from blogs

Washington Times: CIA mines 'rich' content from blogs and other open sources of information.

President Bush and U.S. policy-makers are receiving more intelligence from open sources such as Internet blogs and foreign newspapers than they previously did, senior intelligence officials said. The new Open Source Center (OSC) at CIA headquarters recently stepped up data collection and analysis based on bloggers worldwide and is developing new methods to gauge the reliability of the content ...

Chill out, my lefty friends, this can only be a good thing. Nobody's invading any foreign country here based on faulty, outdated, third-hand intelligence.

Why my military service made me a Democrat

Kos in the American Prospect: Why my military service made me a Democrat.

Upcoming events: Vloggercon, Bloggercon and more

I'm getting a breather between conferences, so if you've been trying to reach me and your email is among the 3,000 unread messages in my in-box, try me again. Meantime, here's some of what's dead ahead:

OnHollywood

What: Silicon Valley's tech crowd meets Hollywood's entertainment crowd. About 500 people expected. I'll be moderating the opening panel, "Is the Web the new Hollywood?"

When: May 2-4

Where: Hotel Roosevelt, Hollywood

Price: about $1,250

url: alwayson

Comment: It'll be interesting to see the SV-Hollywood dynamic. Plus, I'm told there'll be a cool pool party.

We Media Global Forum

What: The Media Center sponsors its annual We Media event dissecting the citizens media movement. This year it's in London. Can't go because of the conflict with OnHollywood.

When: May 3-4

Where: BBC and Reuters facilities in London

Price: $795 US

url: www.mediacenter.org/wemedia06/

Comment: I would have loved to attend this event, which is always richly rewarding. The forum includes a worldwide BBC radio broadcast originated as part of the program, with lots of opportunity throughout for online participation. This year's forum focus is trust.

Not attending (because I'll be out of the country): Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture.

Vloggercon

What: The 2nd annual videoblogging conference will attract vloggers, video aficionados, filmmakers and other media makers. I'll be moderating one panel.

When: June 10-11

Where: Swedish American Hall, San Francisco

Price: $40-$60 (though no vlogger will be turned away)

url: www.vloggercon.com

Comment: Please come out! This will be a fun, lively and entertaining gathering of the creative folks who are at the forefront of tomorrow's media.

BloggerCon IV

What: Last week Dave Winer announced that the latest installment of BloggerCon will take place in two months.

When: the week of June 19

Where: San Francisco

Price: free admission

url: www.bloggercon.org

Comment: I always love BloggerCon. I'll be there this year, barring scheduling clashes. Hope Dave's aware that Supernova is being held the same week.

Supernova

What: Gathering of Tech business folks to talk Web 2.0, Ajax and new stuff on the horizon.

When: June 21-23

Where: Wharton West and Palace Hotel, San Francisco

Price: $1,695-$2,495

url: www.supernova2006.com/

Comment: I hope to attend.

Gnomedex

What: Influencers, bloggers, entrepreneurs and tech enthusiasts mingle and make geek love.

When: June 29 - July 1

Where: Bell Harbor Conference Center, Seattle

Price: $499

url: www.gnomedex.com/

Comment: The flat-out best geek fest of the year. I’ll be there.

Democracy and Independence

What: The conference’s subtitle is “Sharing of News in a Connected World." Leading thinkers in the transition from legacy media to grassroots media nd new media.

When: June 29 - July 2

Where: UMass, Amherst

Price: $225

url: www.mediagiraffe.org/conference.html

Comment: I was invited to lead a session track and would have loved to attend, were it not for Gnomedex taking place at the same time.

Later in the year:

July 12-15, OhmyNews citizen journalism forum, Seoul, South Korea

July 25-27, AlwaysOn Innovation Summit @ Stanford University

July 28-29, BlogHer, one of my favorite events of the year.

Sept. 29-30, Podcast and Portable Media Expo, Ontario, Calif.

Oct. 12-14, Idea Festival, Louisville, Ky., where I'll be speaking on a panel.

Nov. 7-9, Web 2.0, San Francisco.

I've gravitated toward grassroots media and the tech world in recent years so now only rarely attend traditional media conferences such as the Editor & Publisher and MediaWeek Interactive Media Conference and Tradeshow next month.

Facebook raises $25 million

San Jose Mercury News: Facebook raises $25 million in venture capital.

College student Kelley Finkelstein explains Facebook's popularity (short video).

AT&T to offer TV, movie downloads

San Jose Mercury News: AT&T announced that it will team up with San Mateo-based Akimbo to allow customers to download movies and shows over the Internet through AT&T's upcoming television service this summer.

MySpace, Wikipedia cope with growing pains

Mark Glaser at MediaShift:

MySpace, Wikipedia Cope With Growing Pains

Also: Wikipedia Bias. Is There a Neutral View on George W. Bush?

Why search when you can publish?

Bambi Francisco, MarketWatch.com via Investors.com: Why big search engines are in trouble. Excerpt:

The proliferation of video channels underscores the splintering of the Internet and importantly the sophistication of the Web generation. If people (particularly this Y generation) are becoming savvy enough to create their own publishing empires, do you really think they'll be satisfied with general search engines? Even my generation - those who spend time on Google and Yahoo vs. MySpace and YouTube -- expected more out of Google Finance. It's not a one-sized-fits all Internet world, how can search engines trying to meet the needs of everyone, meet the needs of anyone? ...

Big media will have to let the floodgates open and offer even more free content on the Web. If they don't, those on the Web will find ways to entertain themselves. You know kids tomorrow will be saying, "Have you seen my show lately?" But you certainly don't want kids tomorrow, saying, "ABC? I think that's the old 'TV' channel that my grandmother used to watch."

Videos from Santa Barbara forum

Here are the video interviews I conducted last week at the UC Santa Barbara Forum on Digital Transitions, which I just posted over at my Real People Network videoblog.

• Josh Silver (above), executive director of FreePress.net, discusses the grassroots effort to reform the media. (ourmedia page | m4v video)

• Angela Beesley, co-founder of Wikia (formerly WikiCities), explains the new for-profit global citizens media initiative. (ourmedia page | mp4 video)

• Kelsey Finkelstein, a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara, discusses why Facebook is so popular on college campuses. (ourmedia page | mp4 video)

• Britt Blaser discusses the laudable goals of his company, Open Resource Group. (ourmedia page | m4v video)

If any of these don't play for you, head to Real People Network to download QuickTime 7.

The Armenian Genocide: It happened

NY Times: A PBS Documentary Makes Its Case for the Armenian Genocide, With or Without a Debate.

It is impossible to debate a subject like genocide without giving offense. PBS is supposed to give offense responsibly.

And that was the idea behind a panel discussion that PBS planned to show after tonight's broadcast of "The Armenian Genocide," a documentary about the extermination of more than one million Armenians by the Turkish Ottoman Empire during World War I.

The powerful hourlong film will be shown on most of the 348 PBS affiliate stations. But nearly a third of those stations decided to cancel the follow-up discussion after an intense lobbying campaign by Armenian groups and some members of Congress.

The protesters complained that the panel of four experts, moderated by Scott Simon, host of "Weekend Edition Saturday" on NPR, included two scholars who defend the Turkish government's claim that a genocide never took place. The outrage over their inclusion was an indication of how passionately Armenians feel about the issue; they have battled for decades to draw attention to the genocide.

[In] the discussion program "Armenian Genocide: Exploring the Issues," [i]t turns out that there is only one articulate voice arguing that Armenians died not in a genocide but in a civil war between Christians and Muslims — that of Justin A. McCarthy, a history professor at the University of Louisville. His Turkish counterpart, Omer Turan, an associate professor at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, tries ardently to back him up, but his English is not good enough to make a dent. And the two other experts, Peter Balakian, a humanities professor at Colgate University, and Taner Akcam, a visiting professor of history at the University of Minnesota and a well-known defender of human rights in Turkey, lucidly pick Mr. McCarthy's points apart.

Mr. Balakian, who is one of the experts cited in the documentary, gets the last word. "If we are going to pretend that a stateless Christian minority population, unarmed, is somehow in a capacity to kill people in an aggressive way that is tantamount to war, or civil war," Mr. Balakian says, "we're living in the realm of the absurd." ...

To some, this is an issue of history about a relatively obscure topic. But to those of us who have met and discussed the events of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire with actual survivors, there is no question