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New RSS feed

I've been furiously posting to the new home of Newmediamusings over at SocialMedia.biz, and I've learned that some aggregators won't accept the forwarded feed, so the easiest thing to do is to update your subscription. Here's my new feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/social_media

Redirecting feeds in Feedburner

I don't want to lose all the RSS feed (or webfeed) subscribers I've built up over the years, so I asked Rick Klau of Feedburner whether I could redirect the feeds from NewMediaMusings.com to SocialMedia.biz. Yes, he said, and walked me through it. (This is one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of Feedburner.) Here are the steps:

Step 1: Go to your My Feeds page. Select the name of your old feed that you want to redirect, and click 'edit feed details.'

Step 2: In the field called 'original feed,' type in (or copy) your new feed (mine is: 'http://feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/social_media') and  click the button labeled 'save feed details.'

Step 3: Click 'delete feed' (right next to 'edit feed details'). Don't be nervous — check the box labeled 'use 30 day redirection'. Click the button that says 'delete this feed now.'

You'll be done. In my case, this sends all requests for
feeds.feedburner.com/newmediamusings to
feeds.feedburner.com/typepad/social_media. It sends a permanent redirect, so most aggregators will automatically update their subscription to the new feed URL. This will ensure that both audiences converge on your new feed.

Hope this works for my 12,186 subscribers at NewMediaMusings. If not, you can manually add my new feed.

Cross-posted to SocialMedia.biz.

New name & url for this blog

I began the New Media Musings blog in May 2001, and have kept at it almost every day for the past 5 1/2 years. That won't change.

What will change is the name and url of the blog. As of today, it's now the Social Media Podcast & Blog, at Socialmedia.biz. The new name signals what has been evident over the past couple of years: I'm writing a lot about grassroots media/citizen media, social networks, user-created content, home-brew video and mobile technologies, and less about the news industry. It also signals that this will be a rich media effort, with video podcasts and an occasional audio podcast sprinkled in with the text posts and photos.

I just turned on domain forwarding for this domain. All the archives will remain intact, so the thousands of links people have made to my posts over the years will still work. In addition, TypePad's "export" feature let me export all of my posts to Socialmedia.biz, so you can browse and search past posts there as well. See you at Socialmedia.biz!

BBC starts GPS-based citizen journalism experiment

mocoNews.net: BBC Starts Citizen Journalism Meets GPS Experiment.

Time overlooks citizen media sites

Good point from John at open parenthesis about Time's Person of the Year story, published yesterday:

Where were the links to places like OurMedia, NewAssignment, The Independent Media Center, and the Center for Citizen Media?

What happened to the many seizing power from the few? Is it expecting too much from a mainstream media story about user contributed content that it would point the way towards something better than just America’s Funniest Videos without a decent editor?

Digg revamps its site

Metanews site Digg revamped its interface on Monday, focusing more around podcasts and video than ever before. Some coverage:

CNET News.com: Digg goes deep and wide.

Journalism.co.uk: Digg added a Top 10 feature to its news and videos, as well as relocating its navigation bar to the top of the site. Digg extends its reach beyond news. 

Wired Blogs:  Digg  revamped its design and added some new features earlier today.   The biggest new feature is the ability to  digg podcasts.

ABCNews.com:  Digg Revamps Site to Feature Video, Podcasts.

Giving up on DirecTV sports packages

I've subscribed to DirecTV's NFL and NBA season passes the past few years, but I won't do it again. The leagues, or the franchise owners, have gotten too greedy. Couldn't watch the Giants-Eagles game yesterday because it was blacked out here -- 3,000 miles away -- due to its being shown on a pay-per-view Fox sports channel. Can't watch the Mavericks-Kings game tonight because it's being shown on a pay-per-view Comcast channel. That never seemed to happen in years past. You subscribe to a league, and you expect to see the games -- without ponying up even more.

Carly: 'My time in the spotlight'

AlwaysOn: A four-part Q&A with former HP chairwoman Carly Fiorina.

Eyewitness journalists

Washington Post Foreign Service: Regular Folks, Shooting History. Digital Technology Makes 'Citizen Journalists' Out of Eyewitnesses Eager to Click and Post. (Photo of Imelda Marcos, transmitted by the AP)

The rapid rise of digital technology, which enables ordinary people almost anywhere to record images and post them quickly on the Internet, is changing the way the world witnesses history, not to mention the dependable misbehavior of celebrities. Events that once were recorded only by human memory may now endure in full, pixelated detail, available in seconds around the globe. ...

Raymond: Two years of videoblogging

Norway's Raymond K. looks back on two years of videoblogging.

New at the Learning Center

New at the Personal Media Learning Center — some of it created by the Ourmedia staff, some of it republished with permission:

8 ways to shoot video like a pro

All about digital audio

A simple guide to publishing audio on the Web   

How to add voice narration to a slide show 

Video editing software choices

Self-publishing a book 

Top 7 free video editing software products 

Personal media glossary

Adding identifying info to music files

Fixing unbalanced sound levels

All about aspect ratio

All about the widescreen format

The Pan and scan technique

How to remix content

Five rules for building a successful online community

How to make a stop-motion video short

What EXIF data do digital photos contain?

Where to find photos for remixing

Updated:

How to record Internet radio (or any audio)

Soccer in the suburbs

Spent a brisk Saturday afternoon (49 degrees) at Foothill High School here in the SF East Bay, watching a scrimmage between the Rockridge Sting and Pleasanton Rage U12 teams. I've known Mekala, who played midfielder for the Sting, since she was a toddler — now she's eyeing a soccer scholarship. Here's a Flickr set of the game.

Salon and Time's Persons of the Year

Salon Person of the Year: S.R. Sidarth. The Virginia native and son of Indian immigrants changed history with a camcorder and introduced Sen. George Allen -- and the rest of us -- to the real America.

Meantime, Time magazine names its Person of the Year: You! Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.

We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software. ...

Technorati Tags: 2006, citizen media, grassroots media, person of 2006, person of the year, salon, time

Why Scoble shoots in HD

Why is Robert Scoble shooting in high definition at PodTech? He just posted this explanation to the Yahoo! videoblogging list:

I'm only using HD camcorders. Why?

For one, the image I get is much higher quality overall. My $4,000 Sony can shoot in low light, has better image stableization than the $700 Panasonic cameras I used at Microsoft, and I like the widescreen format better. The images are also better sharpness before compression and I find they compress better too.

But, that's not really the reason I'm using them. I expect that sometime in the next 18 months that old-school TV distribution networks are gonna need HD content and need it bad. I'll have it.

Also, look at new school distribution networks that are popping up like Tivo, Xbox, Playstation. All are looking for HD content.

Plus, if you ever want to show your videos off in HD, say, in a conference setting, or at a future Vloggies, or something like that, having HD originals will make you shine in those places and if you are shooting some video for home use, some for videoblogging, and some for friends and/or company, you'll want HD, especially if you have an HD screen.

My video on my Sony 60-inch is stunning. Makes me look like the Discovery Channel.

Robert's using foresight here. Still, there are few of us who can afford $4,000 video cameras. Let's hope they drop rapidly in price during 2007.

Meeting Russ Solomon

Spent an hour Friday in the corporate headquarters of Tower Records in West Sacramento, CA. Boxes line the hallways and offices, and employees are emailing last farewells, as the once-mighty retailer slides into bankruptcy -- and perhaps new life under new ownership.

I met Tower founder Russ Solomon (snapped the photo above) and will have a video interview with him up, perhaps Christmas week.

Get on the Netscape/Digg home page every day

Jason Calacanis: 5 steps to get on the Netscape/Digg home page every single day!

Naughty or nice?

Merry Christmas! Thanks, Micki.

Social media giving big media a headache

New York Press: Social media, user-generated content, digital egalitarianism … big media has a big problem.

Independent social-media Web sites like Digg and Wikipedia need sites like the New York Times for reference material. But this will not always be the case, writes Adario Strange. "What will happen when they stop linking to old media and start creating their own media?" Thanks to IWantMedia for the pointer.

The Internet is now the mainstream medium

The Media Trainers:   The Internet Is Now The Mainstream Medium. Even more evidence that this is where much of your attention (and investment) needs to be.

Ad spending on the Web will reach $16 billion this year, a mind-boggling 25 percent increase over last year, predicts Steve King, CEO of media-buying company ZenithOptimedia.

Associated Press: Americans' Media Use Rising, Internet Passes Newspapers.

Americans spend more time watching TV, listening to the radio, surfing the Internet and reading newspapers than anything else except breathing, says a new U.S. Census Bureau report. This year, use of the Internet passed reading newspapers. Also: "People want information 24 hours a day."

Video podcast on tech from USA Today

A video podcast I just found out about called Talking Tech from Ed Baig and Jefferson Graham at USA Today:

Dec. 10: What you need to know when buying a cellphone
Dec. 7: Camcorders take next step with hard drives
Dec. 4: Backing up your digital memories
Nov. 30: Microsoft's 2007 Office and more Zune thoughts
Nov. 27: How to buy a digital camera
Nov. 20: How to buy at high-definition television
Nov. 15: Fujifilm's S6000 with 'face detection.'
Nov. 8: Microsoft's Zune and cellphone alternatives to the iPod
Nov. 1: Tiny redesigned iPod Shuffle is a big value
Oct. 25: The SanDisk Sansa and the Sony Mylo

12 unwritten rules of cell phone etiquette

Digital Media Wire: 12 Unwritten Rules of Cell Phone Etiquette.

10 disturbing trends in mass media

WSJ via Digital Media Wire: 10 disturbing trends in mass media.

Video competition winner snags $100,000

From the Current TV blog:

Last night in Los Angeles, Lucas Krost was awarded top honors in the Seeds of Tolerance competition for his film "One Nation Under Guard," which highlights the racial injustice of the US prison system and the intolerance shown to ex-prisoners once they have served their time. Lucas took home $100K (plus another $15K for charity), a Sony HD Handycam, and a snazzy trophy.

That's some serious dough. Check out the winning entry here (in Flash).

Lonelygirl tops AP's top 10 YouTube videos of 2006

Associated Press:  Lonelygirl tops AP's top 10 YouTube videos of 2006.

Youtube has long established itself as the frontrunner in the race for online video-sharing dominance, and frankly, the competition is light years away. From users trying to upload important recordings to random browsers looking for a good laugh, it's video-sharing heaven. There even have been talks about professional poker players studying YouTube videos to develop their bluffing skills and to better hone their capabilities to mask their true feelings. It may be a bit farfetched, but judging from the video that sits atop their list, it might actually be true.

It's no wonder the Internet people view its rankings as a good, if not the best, way of weighing online popularity. Far from being a reliable source of info, YouTube still managed to get a significant portion of the whole Internet activity.

Lonelygirl, the cute 19 year old every guy (and not a few girls) with Internet access ogled at in front of their computer monitors, sits atop the list, with a few other Internet memes following her. Though it was later revealed that Lonelygirl is actually doing all her videos "for show," Jessica Lee Rose (Lonelygirl's real name) and her scripted videos still left an indelible mark in everyone's heart, garnering her the top spot. Hey, if you can get people making a living out of lying and bluffing check your videos for tips, you're definitely a winner in our books.