See What’s Out There

Before there was the Onion, there was the Weekly World News. The Weekly World News wasn’t afraid to tell it like it is - about Bat Boy, or that a “Space Alien Backs Bush for President”. The headline of this post is my all-time favorite. Sad to say, but the Weekly World News is printing their last issue. I will now have to watch the new TV’s installed at the supermarket check-out line and not read my favorite diversion. The Weekly World News has been run out by the move to all celebrity gossip all the time. For me, it was more interesting to read about some crazy event — that always seemed to happen somewhere in Turkmenistan or Ukraine — than to read about Brittney or Paris.

The most interesting thing about the story in the Times about this is how the whole Ed Anger column which was over-the-top parody Archie Bunker style, has basically become mainstream culture with Rush Limbaugh, Hannity, Ann Coulter, et al. It just wasn’t outrageous anymore.

The messaging of the Weekly World News simply didn’t keep up with the culture we live in that values celebrity more than news of the weird. There actually is a connection here to nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits that live long enough face challenges in cultural or technology change that they can react to or that they can ignore. For example, a change we are seeing right now for many organizations is toward a kind of disintermediation that has given rise to gift catalogs and sites like Kiva.org — that seek to make direct links between the haves and the have-nots in new and expanded ways. Should organizations that have historically been in the middle, positioned as experts who make good decisions about what is worthy of support, ignore these trends or reinvent themselves in some way to take advantage of these trends?

The answers are often complex. But we are seeing new organizations spring up and grow quickly by using technology and taking advantage of the current flavor of philanthropy. The older more established organizations have to encourage a kind of nimbleness of culture so they don’t become the equivalent of the Weekly World News.

The first Community Media Summit was held in Chicago on June 15th.

The purpose of this event was to explore what is “community media” and how new media and technology impact how we work with communities.

Among many others, the event included:

Alyce Myatt, Managing Director – Grantmakers in Film & Electronic Media
Richard Somerset-Ward, Media Consultant
Catherine Settanni, Digital Inclusion Task Force
Scot Rouke, President – One Community
Julia Stasch, Vice President, Human & Community Development – The MacArthur Foundation;
Alexandra Close, Executive Director – New America Media

What’s a Community Media Summit without media? We (See3 Communications) partnered with the Benton Foundation, CAN TV, Chicago Community Trust and the host, the Community Media Workshop to develop a 4-part video on What is Community Media. You can see this at the Community Media Workshop’s site and at DoGooderTV.

This effort was made possible by the vision and pushing of Charles Benton, the financial support of the Community Trust and the hard work of many people, including Thom Clark and his staff at the Community Media Workshop.

Here’s one of the four videos:

If I took a picture with a digital camera and then shared that picture online, all anonymously, could you figure out it was me that took the picture?

This question came up recently when someone who got an early copy of the new Harry Potter book — Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows — took a picture of every page and then posted those pictures to the web.

It turns out that digital cameras not only take photos. They also embed those digital images with metadata, information that you can’t see with the naked eye, but that you can read with a computer. The idea behind including other data in the photograph is that it can be useful. For example, imagine if photos had built-in geocoding (GPS) data that showed where exactly a photo was taken. With geocoding, your online photo album could list the location photos were taken automatically, and you could even connect to other people’s photos taken in the same location, for example. That would be pretty cool and you can expect it soon.

The person who took the pictures of the Harry Potter book probably didn’t realize that it left digital fingerprints behind. The information that digital cameras now capture is known as Exchangeable Image File Format (Exif) data. With some special reading software we know that the Harry Potter spoiler used a Canon Rebel 350. We know that camera was only sold in the US and Canada. And we actually know the serial number of that specific camera. So, if this person registered the camera online or took it in for service, their name is probably attached to the serial number in some database, easily accessible by the Canon and likely made available to the publisher of Harry Potter upon presentation of a subpoena.

As the TimesOnline (of London) wrote:

Every image that is taken on a digital camera contains Exif data, which holds information about the picture such as zoom, contrast, focus and ‘distance to subject’ measurements. It is typically used for ‘trouble-shooting’, so an owner can ascertain why a picture may not have worked, but it also enables a court, for instance, to establish whether a picture has been digitally altered.

“The Exif data is like the picture’s DNA; you can’t switch it off. Every image has it. Some software can be used to strip or edit the information, but you can’t edit every field,”
Experimentation with meta data

For the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all of this has serious implications for personal privacy. EFF points out that it isn’t only camera that are tracking our every move. Did you know your color laser printer is also spying on you?

Of course, digital cameras aren’t the only devices that may keep a record that could track a document back to its creator. We’ve extensively discussed how most color laser printers invisibly embed the printer serial number and date and time of printing on every page, in a pattern of tiny yellow dots. Although customers have been complaining, printer manufacturers have so far refused to let customers disable the tracking. (HP, for example, recently wrote to update one customer that it was wrong to say initially that it was unable to disable the tracking; instead, it now says it “will not” do so.)

Most computer users are unaware that CD burners in their PCs also contain a similar tracking mechanism that embeds a unique serial number, called a Recorder Identification Code, on every CD they burn.

Does it all smell of Big Brother? Or is this just the world we live in where data is everywhere all the time and we should just relax?

Mainstream media spends a lot of time trying to be more relevant in our world of unlimited online channels. So in this context I can excuse people for being skeptical that the CNN - YouTube debate was anything more than a gimmick. If you are unfamiliar with this, the idea was that instead of the moderator asking questions, YouTube users would submit videos that ask the questions.

The debate aired on CNN tonight and I just finished watching in online in my living room on CNN.com with my wife Jessica. (Why the video of the debate wasn’t also on YouTube, I don’t know. CNN has a very annoying player that required me to download a new plug-in.) Some criticism before the debate, particularly from Jeff Jarvis, was that CNN shouldn’t be deciding which videos to show. In this way, he and others argued, CNN was simply replacing questions they would ask with the same questions being asked by YouTubers. What these critics wanted was that the most popular question videos on YouTube be the ones they show at the debate. CNN argued that if they did that then the candidates might try to manipulate the popularity of the questions online. I would add that we would probably have had 30 questions about health care.

In the end, I think CNN made the right choice and I think this was a much better debate than usual. Jeff Jarvis thinks it sucked. He says that an online debate, with the candidates responding directly to the videos would have been better. Probably. And you have to agree with his point about the “horse race blather” from the commentators after the debate ended. This might be baby steps, but it is certainly steps.

Michael Bassik, an authority about all of this from MSHC Parnters, was quoted in the New York Times as saying it was less about which questions are picked and more about simply giving people a voice that don’t have in the traditional debate format. After seeing it, I agree.

Jessica said it’s all about stories. The videos became real reality check stories. At one point, John Edwards told us about a man he met on his recent poverty tour with a medical problem — a cleft pallet that he didn’t get fixed until he was 50 years old. This story, stuck in the can by Edwards before the debate and pulled out to show he is in touch with real people, seemed totally hollow to those of us watching from the couch. It didn’t have any impact because minutes before he told his story we saw videos of adult kids feeding their mother with Alzheimer’s and a woman taking her wig off and talking about being denied preventative care because she didn’t have health insurance.

Yes, there were too many candidates. And Dennis Kucinich has to be the most annoying candidate that ever ran. And there is never enough time. But millions of Americans saw this video. And I think that really is a difference.

If I was a nonprofit CEO or IT director, and I wasn’t totally over invested in Exchange Server and I didn’t have more than 100 people, I would go with Google apps for email and shared calendaring. Google apps allow you to have web-based service at your own domain running on Google servers and for free. Google, in partnership with NTEN, just announced that they have extended the additional features of Google Apps for education to all 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations.

For all of you folks struggling with servers and infrastructure, some advice: Buy less servers and Microsoft and spend the money you will save on more bandwidth.

Here’s a note from Google that was in the most recent NTEN Connect newsletter.

Jess Daniel, Google

IT infrastructure is hard work for any organization. Having worked at a nonprofit prior to coming to Google, I know that the combination of long-standing legacy systems and limited resources certainly doesn’t make things any easier. Now that I’m member of the Google Apps team, I spend my time working on simple but powerful communication and collaboration tools for organizations. And so it’s with special satisfaction that I share this bit of news: Google has extended the Education Edition of Google Apps to registered 501(c)(3)s.

You may already be familiar with Google’s standard suite of free hosted services, including private-label email, calendaring, and online-document sharing. But the Education Edition offers a number of value-added admin features at no additional cost, including email migration tools, phone support for critical issues, and extensibility APIs. (Ads are also optional, in case you’re curious.) There’s no need to take my word for it, though: if you attended NP.IT recently — the Google-NTEN midsummer mixer — you may have bumped into a few nonprofits with their own Google Apps success stories.

At the end of the day, enabling good works through Google Apps — in any capacity — both inspires and humbles us. We’re excited to offer this worthy sector a low-investment, feature-rich IT choice. Find out more or apply for an account.

Now featured on DoGooderTV is Ben Affleck in a corn suit. Really. The first in a great serialized set of short videos called Project Phin - Clean My Ride, Flex My Fuel. It is from the Center for American Progress and was brought to our attention and to DoGooderTV by our friends at MSHC Partners. Have a look!

The Obama campaign is doing great things with video that every organization should be doing. They are documenting his travels and speeches. They are interviewing supporters and making short films about supporters and their issues — all in addition to more traditional advertising. Have a look at a couple videos they did around a contest for a donor to have dinner with Senator Obama:

We made some terrific videos for CCAP - the Center for Community Arts Partnerships at Columbia College. This one was originally part of a longer piece but I wanted to pull out this story to show you. I just love this story. It gives you a sense of how the arts can really change kids’ lives.

You might think that YouTube has all but won the online video game. Just as Google seems to have search locked up, so too YouTube would seem to be the only destination you need for online video. But just as Google has a batch of new competitors for search, YouTube has some competition on the video front. (One of these is our very own DoGooderTV – the home to nonprofit video.) The game is far from over.

While YouTube may always be the best place for America’s Funnies Home Videos, it seems doubtful that they will win the battle for IPTV — streaming professionally produced content through the web to your computer and eventually to your TV. On one side of that battle is Joost – from the people who brought us Skype. They have a really cool interface and are doing deals for all kinds of content. This is like cable TV — Joost has channels and if you want your content on Joost you have to do a deal with them.

I tend to think the Joost approach is bad. Why recreate cable TV online? Why have a limited number of Joost channels when you can have an unlimited number of channels in the open web? The approach I find to make more sense is that of Veoh. They are saying “we will give you a single player and aggregate content from all over the web for you.” There was an article in the Sunday Business section of the Times about their launch of VeohTV.

Once the software is downloaded to a computer, it offers an easy-to-navigate directory of 114 video channels, including listings for CBS, NBC, Fox and YouTube. On the NBC channel, there are dozens of episodes of “Heroes,” “30 Rock” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.” On the Fox channel, there are several full-length episodes of the dramas “Bones” and “24.”

Those shows are free and available for streaming on the NBC and Fox sites. The VeohTV player, Mr. Shapiro said, is just giving them a new audience.

“There are full-length episodes at Fox.com, but many customers don’t know how to find them,” he said. “The Web browser is fine for short clips. But if you just want to sit back and watch video on the Web, this is what you will want to use.”

The content providers are nervous about this approach because while VeohTV will include whatever video ad the content provider has in the stream, the content provider no longer gets the benefit of the page view — and the non-video advertising there. We will see how it plays out.

Just remember, YouTube isn’t the only game in town. Here’s a sample from Veoh which is pretty good quality.

Online Videos by Veoh.com

I read a recent blog post — and I am sorry I don’t have a link handy — basically saying all of our click-to-advocate activities (such as send an email to your congressman about this or that) are really nice, but it’s nothing like taking to the streets. Imagine 1,000 people in front of a Congressional district office vs. 10,000 form emails. Which would have more impact?

Also, much of what is online is what we call narishkeit. Serious time wasters. How many times have you seen something online and thought… get a life!

It all came together for me in this important special report from the Onion News Network:

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash