Recent Professional Writing

Something I've been meaning to do for a while. Here's a listing of my recent professional writing.

• "To Tweet, Perchance to Dream: Dismissing Three Twitter Myths," Scatter/Gather, February 28, 2012
• Interview: "SXSW 2012 Q&A: Matthew Diffee," Scatter/Gather, February 2, 2012
• "Autofail: How Apple's Autocorrect Teaches Bad English," Scatter/Gather, October 7, 2011
• "How Egypt Got Her Voice Back," Scatter/Gather, February 7, 2011
• "Your Content Is Showing," Scatter/Gather, December 30, 2010
• "Robosketching for the People," Scatter/Gather, October 15, 2010
• "A Bah-Bah-Bah Blog Blunder?" Scatter/Gather, July 22, 2010
• "Cheaper Than a Bag of Popcorn," Scatter/Gather, March 18, 2010
• "Order Out of Nothingness: Tagging 101," Scatter/Gather, January 12, 2010
• "News That's Fit to Tweet?" Scatter/Gather, November 13, 2009
• "Blinded by Content Bliss," Scatter/Gather, August 3, 2009
• "Here Comes User-Generated Content," Scatter/Gather, July 28, 2009
• "Cultivating Effective User-Generated Content," With Bob Maynard, Razorfish.com, July 2009 [pdf]
• "Crowdsourcing Content," Scatter/Gather, April 22, 2009
• "Auto promotion: Using Twitter in the automotive industry," Headlight Blog, March 30, 2009
• "To Fabricate or Not to Fabricate," Scatter/Gather, March 12, 2009
• "Mind Your Micoblogging Manners," Slant, December 2008 [pdf]
• "Let ‘em talk: How dealership employees use message boards and what can be learned from them," Headlight Blog, October 28, 2008

Jennifer Egan on Social Media

Jennifer Egan on the transactions we make in order to participate in social media:

He never could quite forget that every byte of information he’d posted online (favorite color, vegetable, sexual position) was stored in the databases of multinationals who swore they would never, ever use it—that he was owned, in other words, having sold himself unthinkingly at the very point in his life when he’d felt most subversive

- Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Social Camp

The New Yorker reports folks are actually debating whether this YouTube video, entitled "That's Why I Chose Yale," is earnest or high camp. Presumably, it's a knowing attempt at a viral video, performed in the vein of Glee Club. One hopes anyway.

Broadcast Yourself

The video ain't much to look at, but I just tried Qik, which allows you to live stream video from your mobile phone to the Qik Web site. That video is broadcast publicly (unless you choose otherwise), and automatically saved to your profile. Set up, as the name suggest, was very quick, and operating the installed application from my cell, astonishingly easy. I'd say the implications of this sort of technology for citizen journalism are huge.

Saving the World With Video

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

- Article 19 of UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Tonight, I went to a panel at The New School, entitled "Saving the World, One Video at a Time." Each of the four panelists represented human rights organizations, which focus on the use of video (chiefly in the form of documentaries) to educate and promote social change. A few details about each of the agencies follows:

• Arts Engine - Maintains MediaRights, a database of some 7000 documentaries on the subject of human rights, available to educators, librarians, and activists. It also presents the Media that Matters film festival each June, a showcase for a dozen new short films on human rights issues.

• Human Rights Watch International Film Festival - Human Rights Watch selects documentaries from over 500 submissions to feature in this festival each year. The festival encourages film makers of any age and point of view to submit their work.

• Video Volunteers - a social media network, which focuses on issues pertaining to the poor in rural communities around the world. Maintains Channel 19, an online network for distributing community-produced media in India.

• WITNESS  - Encourages people to create videos about or depicting human rights violations and to submit them via The Hub, a sort of YouTube site for human rights videos.
  

The panel was organized by The Center for Communication and The New School's Department of Media Studies and Film.