Comfest08 Media Tagging

The Community Festival is over, but our tagging experiment has just begun with our comfest08 Flickr group. Go HERE. The group currently has 27 members who have added 687 photos since it was started 2 days ago.

Flickr Group Description:
Photos from COMFEST, June 27-29, 2008 in Goodale Park, Columbus Ohio. This Flickr group is a project of the Columbus Social Media Cafe.

July’s Cafe Meeting

The July meeting of the Columbus Social Media Cafe (July 29 at 6:30pm) will be held at Columbus Metropolitan Library–the Main Library–in the 3rd floor Board Room (Science, Business, and News). The Main Library is located at 96 South Grant Avenue (across from Grant Hospital).

Helene Blowers, Director of Digital Strategy for the CML, will share information about a free online discovery learning program that she developed to provide library staff with exposure to 2.0 tools. The program, Learning 2.0: 23 Things (http://plcmclearning.blogspot.com/) has been written up by numerous times by the press, including Wired magazine (http://www.wired.com/culture/education/news/2007/03/learning2_0) and since its inception in August 06 has been replicated by over 500 libraries and organizations worldwide.

Mark your calendars now!

Agenda for Tuesday’s Cafe Meeting

The next Cafe meeting is Tuesday, June 24 at 6:30 at Tech Columbus, 1275 Kinnear Road.

Here’s the agenda:

1. Administrative Stuff
   1. Update on Comfest (Andrew)
2. Podcast Discussion
3. Open Space with two different groups (unless everyone wants to do only one discussion topic versus two; if so, we’d opt for the SMART goals one but still break up into smaller groups.
   1. Discussion around “Why are you attending the Café and what is the value of the group to you?”
   2. Discussion around goals and values. Short discussion of SMART goals (Specific; Measurable; Attainable; Realistic; Timely). We’d begin by looking over our mission statement, which we should have ready to send out to everyone no later than Monday.

Hope to see you there!

Next Meeting of Cafe

We’ll meet next on Tuesday, June 24, from 6:30 to 8:30pm. We will meet at Tech Columbus, and here’s the link for directions!

See you then.

Columbus Among Top Blogging Cities

Nielsen Data


Nielsen data shows Columbus as one of the top blogging cities.

Video #2

The group examines vocalo.org, a web site that we’d like to emulate.

Let’s Talk About Education

Urban In-Fill and Elephants on Bicycles are both blogging about education. Check out their posts, then check out This American Life, where you can hear the story Urban In-Fill refers to, Human Resources. All TAL episodes are available via podcast. This American Life airs at 4 p.m. on Sunday on WOSU 89.7 and at 1 p.m. on Saturday and 10 a.m. on Sunday on WOSU 820.

Interesting stuff in LA!

I’ve been in Los Angeles this week at the Integrated Media Conference—a conference predominantly for public broadcasters. PBS and NPR are both here, and there have been a host of sessions of interest to us. Just attended one on the new PBS strategies which was pretty interesting. The buzz, of course, this year is video on demand. There have been quite a few sessions devoted to that topic: an especially good one was led by Maria Thomas of NPR (SVP of npr.org) and Jennie Baird (Senior Vice President of NBC Universal and editor-in-chief of iVillage.com). Maria talked about how NPR is getting into video…trying to figure out how to communicate “NPR-ness” in video (and not lose the audio quality of nature), and Jennie focused on an acronym she likes to use and which explains her online philosophies: DUMBI (on Demand; Unmediated; Of the Moment; Bridge (teach me something I don’t know); Interactivity).

Anyway, I was on a panel where four of my colleagues (KQED-San Francisco; WGBH-Boston; vocalo.org-Chicago; uVu—WPBT (Florida) discussed embracing independent voices. I talked about the Columbus Social Media Café. All of the projects were quite interesting. WGBH, for example (WGBH produces more of the PBS primetime and Web lineup than any other local station) talked about Open Call where they give their audience a theme (say the War) and solicit pitches for shorts that they will fund (three minutes). Once they get the pitches in, they cull them down to the best 25 or so, and ask the public to vote on which pitches should get funded (each awardee gets $3000 to make the short…WGBH helps with editing, etc.; five shorts get made). A really cool project.

 

The Columbus Social Media Café was really embraced by the public broadcasters: they love the idea. We talked about all the possibilities for moving forward, and I showed the video we took down at WOSU@COSI. Needless to say, more than one station is interested in starting something like ours. They appreciated (like us) that we’re running this via Open Space collaboration. Everyone pretty much agreed that the meet-ups are as important as the online stuff.

You walk away from a meeting like this feeling pretty energized about the possibility of social media. Clearly the big players and the smaller players (!) are invested in this area, but everyone is still wrestling with big practices.

Columbus Social Media Cafe #3 : Responses

1. Columbus Social Media Cafe « Zanne

2. Urban In-Fill

3. Thoughts on Social Media Cafe January Event | The Walker Evans Effect

4. Notes from the Reserve: Tonight’s Columbus Social Media Cafe

5. Elephants on Bicycles » Blog Archive » First WOSU Commentary…

Topic Ideas — First Session

Walker Evans — Rallying support on-line for causes off line

Josh Quinn - Supporting Local Business

Andrew Miller - How to break in to Traditional Media using stand by resources — finding a way for WOSU to use citizens in participatory media — CITIZEN JOURNALISM

Effective Tools for off line causes

Jeff - How we capture the stories of our citizens

How can you use blogs to welcome newcomers to Columbus

Twitter is down so we’re live blogging on this page.