Where pixels end and reality begins

Steven Winn in the San Francisco Chronicle: It's hard to tell where pixels end and reality begins. Excerpt:

As digital technology assumes an ever-widening role in the way we do business, play games, make friends, buy books, hunt for bedmates, troll for news, decipher meaning, craft identities and both literally and figuratively see the world, the boundary between it and everything else blurs. "We make our own media," exults J.D. Lasica in "Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation." "In many ways we are our own media."

It's no wonder we can't trust our eyes anymore. We're so deeply invested in the digital universe, and its infinitely malleable reality, that perception itself has become an endless hall of mirrors. If anything can be Photoshopped -- digitally added or subtracted, heightened or diminished, rebalanced or synthesized out of thin air -- then almost any electronically transmitted image is provisional and subject to skepticism. It may be a defining paradox of the digital age that at no time in human history have so many people had so much access to so much imagery -- and had so many reasons to doubt what they see. ...

Everything we encounter, in newspapers, on computer and movie screens, in museums and on television, passes through new filters that experience has made for us. A certain amount of media literacy, these days, is a minimum requirement.

Cut and paste culture

The Book Babes, Ellen Heltzel and Margo Hammond, have an essay in today's San Jose Merc Perspective section: Of plagiarism and punishment.

At the Forum on Digital Transitions

I'm here in Santa Barbara, Calif., for the daylong Forum on Digital Transitions, focusing on where online communities are heading. Here's the speaker list. Author Howard Rheingold gave the keynote last night putting collective action and community-building into historical perspective (with his usual presentational flair). Rep. Lois Capps, the progressive local House representative, just gave a talk about health care and other issues where civic engagement is essential.

Among those sitting at tables here at Corwin Pavilion on the UC Santa Barbara campus: Howard, Doc Searls, Elizabeth Osder, Angela Beesley, Markus Sandy, Jay Dedman, Ryanne Hodson, Micki Krimmel, Robert Kaye, Jennifer McClure, Britt Blaser, John Seely Brown, Mary Hodder, Brad Templeton, Danah Boyd, Bruce Bimber, Dave Toole and lots of other familiar faces.

I hope to post some video from the event later.

Later: Jen McClure is blogging it on her new blog. Here's our group SB Forum video blog on Blogger.

Coming in April: OnHollywood

At Web 2.0 last week, I cornered the high-energy, super-sharp Valerie Cunningham about AlwaysOn's just-announced OnHollywood summit -- a gathering of the best and brightest in the movie and tech industries, coming to Hollywood on April 25-27, 2006.

Here's Valerie's 2 1/2-minute description of the conference (in MPEG-4). (Ourmedia page | watch video)

From the AlwaysOn announcement:

ONHOLLYWOOD is where cutting edge technology from the backstreets of Silicon Valley meets Hollywood's digital media revolution. This two and a half day industry insider event borrows on the "film market" tradition by providing an open environment where 80 top digital entertainment and media entrepreneurs meet the big time studio, telco and consumer electronics executives. …

Among those invited are the top dogs from Yahoo, Disney, Sprint and other bigger players to mix it up with the entrepreneurs, VCs and talent agents that will be wandering the halls of the Roosevelt and hanging out at the pool party on opening night.

Count me in.

Technorati tags: Hollywood, OnHollywood, HonorTagJournalism

Preserving the digital world

The Boston Globe has a profile of Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive (Ourmedia's partner): Saving the world as we know it. Excerpt:

The Internet Archive has the ambitious goal of offering ''universal access to human knowledge," and, in pursuit of that, in a small white wooden building that once served the base as a general store, the archivists are collecting every sort of digital file imaginable, from Web pages to podcasts, software programs to movies, presidential phone conversations to recordings of Cowboy Junkies concerts.

Brewster Kahle is the MIT-educated former entrepreneur who began building the library in 1996, for the simple reason that ''nobody else seemed to be doing it," he says. Now, he realizes that he has undertaken a task with no obvious stopping point. In 2001, he started recording 20 television channels, continuously, and recently he has had volunteers scanning thousands of out-of-print books. Each month, the Internet Archive collects the equivalent of one Library of Congress, says Kahle. The collection, available at www.archive.org, has already surpassed one petabyte. That's a million gigabytes. ...

Planet Web 2.0

Forgot to mention that a couple of weeks back I discovered that my blog has been aggregated into the Planet Web 2.0 commnity, along with others like Chris Anderson, Dave Sifry, Mitch Ratcliffe, John Battelle, Marc Canter, Ross Mayfield, Jon Udell, Jimmy Wales and others. Nice little effort by Ian Davis. Didn't know about it, but since they're not getting any ad income off it, it's fine by me -- and it's good reading.

Eye in the sky for house hunting

Glenn Fleishman has a feature in today's Seattle Times about using online resources,
including aerial and satellite maps, to research buying a new house.

Now this is how to shop for a home.

Who inherits your digital data?

John Boudreau in the San Jose Mercury News: Pondering new puzzle: who inherits digital data.

Datin' and matin'

In Sites check and rate reputations online, the San Jose Merc's Michael Bazeley looks at digital identity in the online dating scene. Sites to enhance trust in the singles space include TrueDater and Opinity.com.

Camera phone storytelling

From Dan Gillmor's new blog:

HP has developed an interesting new technology it calls StoryCast, described as "an experimental digital storytelling service that lets people use their camera phones and other mobile devices to easily create and instantly share stories with friends and family. Each story consists of a sort of narrated slide show of photos accompanied by the storyteller's voice."

Apparently it's being used at the Red Herring conference this week in Monterey. ...

Excellent!