Good Reputation Sleeping

Hacking My Reality

The first time the power of the net hit me was way back in 1997 when I posted my first gallery of photography, some pics of trips to Cuba, on my website. A day or so after they went up, I got an email from Japan, someone who had seen the photographs and wanted to say hi. My photographs had just gone global in an instant.

The light bulb went on, the ground shifted, hell froze over - I got it.

A few days ago I finally made good on an invite I received a couple of weeks ago from a netizen named Mike Lee. We came to each other's attention through a website called hiptop Nation where we both started posting photos from our Sidekicks way back in 2003. I soon left for the greener pastures of better voice communication and bigger phonecam pics, but we kept reading each other's blogs and soon met up again on the uber-photo site Flickr.

We had lunch near The Post and chatted about life on and off line for almost 2 hours. A main topic of conversation was our admiration for the work of John Maeda at MIT. Turns out that Mike, through his gig at AARP has spent a good deal of time in the Maeda-sphere and clearly saw my eyes light up every time he recounted some of the things he saw and did while there.

Mike, who looks innocent enough, has hacked my reality - I got an email from the good Dr.'s office yesterday and I will enter the sphere in a couple of days. Life hack, via hiptop, Flickr and the web, courtesy Mike Lee.

Video Experiments

I am not sure what I am doing, but here is some more video. This one, my father-in-law practicing his guitar in our kitchen, was a quickie made with my Canon A520 digital still camera; I find I like this format - straight to flash disk, drag and drop to desktop - more than DV. Quality is decent for the web and much quicker to use.

As bandwidth increases and complexity of shooting video decreases, I can't help but expect that more and more of us will be taking and viewing moving pictures than ever before. Here is the feed for these experiments.

Scripting News:Live and In Living Color

Scripting News: 10/8/2005.

"This conference was notable in that there were many African-Americans. Usually we lament the lack of color in tech conferences. Not this time."

flickr SUSPENDS charliebrown8989

flickr SYSPENDS charliebrown8989
Originally uploaded by Natchaliti.

Is this the end of Flickr as "the next big thing"?

Questioning someone's account because they have too many contacts?

I thought that was the whole point, you know, interaction with your fellow flickr-ites!

What's the real deal here?

Blog City, It's Alive!

My last labor of love after a 6 year run as photography editor of The Washington Post Magazine has launched. 'Blog City' makes its debut in this weekend's magazine. It features the work of several D.C. area flickrites, and lives up to my dream of perfect synergy between web and print.

Thank you to the editors of the Post Magazine for not being afraid of the future!

Next month I become the Picture Editor for The Washington Post newspaper. What a strange journey this has become!

Blogs Will Change Your Business, But Print Will Set You Free!

Meant to comment on this sooner. I thought last week's BusinessWeek article on blogs was a good attempt to capture the history and flavor of the medium that is now 'the new black'. Interestingly though, the strengths and weaknesses of the current data-centric web were also on display.

While the online version of the story looked and read like a weblog, I thought the print version looked and felt much more inviting; like something I actually wanted to read! And that is it, in a nutshell - the web is great with information, but 9 times our of 10, in the hands of a good designer, print does a way better job of integrating pictures and graphics to help tell a more complete story. This is very important to me, I am a visual journalist, but it should be important to all who find art and beauty necessary parts of their daily lives.

The beauty of the layout. The art of picture placement on a page. The effect of a stunning typeface as your eyes flow over the words. All these things are becoming lost as we reduce everything to their basic 1 and 0 digital elements. This is what print still has on digital; this is why magazines and newspapers should not give up the fight, why ink on paper has survived for thousands of years and still has many, many years left. As the culture of man becomes more and more visually literate, lets remember to keep evolving those elements of information sharing that remain true to providing form with content.

Photography, Today

NPPA Best Of Photojournalism 2005 Web Site Category Winners.

ST. PETERSBURG, FL (March 25, 2005) – “This year’s Best of Photojournalism Web site contest was the most competitive ever,” Web competition organizer and Best Of Photojournalism 2005 Contest Committee member Keith Jenkins said Friday when the winners were announced. “The quality of entries across the 130 or so we judged was universally high, with very little separation between the winners in each division (large affiliated, small affiliated, and unaffiliated). And there was very little difference between the divisions themselves.”

The New York Times on the Web was awarded the Best Use of the Web honor. “After a lengthy discussion with the judges attempting to find a single package that demonstrated the best use of the Web, the panel eventually recognized The New York Times on the Web as an example of a site that has truly helped the evolution of online storytelling,” judge Andrew DeVigal said.

Looking back on the week of judging, Jenkins said, “The change this year was most evident in the judges giving an award to a ‘photoblog’ with an Honorable Mention in the Unaffiliated News Picture Story category ("Justly Married; Ephemera"), as well as with the judges’ choice of “Haiti Turns 200” by the Unaffiliated Web site BlueEyes Magazine as the contest’s Best Picture Story winner.”

Here is the full list of this year's winners.

Keeping it Real

apophenia: SXSW, why i attended and marginalized populations.

Good Points, well stated:

"It's socially and culturally not an equal playing field. You can't build a meritocracy on top of that and one doesn't exist. There are biases at every level. And if you want diversity, you need to actively go after it. Conference organizers - reach out to the women and people of color you know and ask them to brainstorm with you. Actively invite marginalized groups who you know are doing great stuff (or get your friends who are women, POC to do so). Make sure you have diversity on your board. Put together identity-driven BOFs. Invite diverse groups to the low-key events where they're underrepresented so that they can meet and greet (because not all get-togethers are conferences). Do *NOT* expect them to come to you. When you do so, you perpetuate hegemonic forces - you become part of the problem. Meritocracy doesn't emerge by just pretending it exists and without equal grounding, it is not possible."

Thanks Dave (white male) for the link.

Talking Points

MSNBC - Blogging Beyond The Men's Club .

At a recent Harvard conference on bloggers and the media, the most pungent statement came from cyberspace. Rebecca MacKinnon, writing about the conference as it happened, got a response on the "comments" space of her blog from someone concerned that if the voices of bloggers overwhelm those of traditional media, "we will throw out some of the best... journalism of the 21st century." The comment was from Keith Jenkins, an African-American blogger who is also an editor at The Washington Post Magazine [a sister publication of NEWSWEEK]. "It has taken 'mainstream media' a very long time to get to [the] point of inclusion," Jenkins wrote. "My fear is that the overwhelmingly white and male American blogosphere... will return us to a day where the dialogue about issues was a predominantly white-only one."

The Road Ahead

Following up on the diversity discussion going on at Rebecca MacKinnon's RConversation site started by my earlier post - Blogging the News, In Color, I posted this earlier today on Rebecca's site. Thought it wise to share it here as well.

The concept of reducing this to an affirmative action argument misses the point. In the first place, getting a computer and internet access is still a huge barrier for the majority of the world's population, including a significant number of people in the so-called developed world.

Just as generations ago only a relative handful of people had access to printing presses, so too today, the internet community is an elite group of publishers, 'printing' the news from the viewpoint of those wealthy enough, educated enough, and fortunate enough to live somewhere that can connect to the internet.

But like the printing press, the internet's distribution far exceeds its boundaries. Even if you can not get online, the influence of those who can is already effecting how you live, who governs you, and what things are being discussed in boardrooms, military barracks, and halls of government around the world. Those discussions, influenced by the connected, lead to decisions that effect connected and unconnected alike.

The point of diversity, whether in a newsroom, the blogging community, or at conferences where the attendees are discussing issues aimed at shaping the future of developing technologies and ideas, is not just to have people of diverse genders, colors and backgrounds sitting in the same room. It is to take those issues and problems under discussion and filter them through prisms other than our own, in order to find alternative and perhaps better ways to solve them.

Growing up in rural China or inner city America are two very different experiences from growing up in the Hollywood hills or on New York's Long Island. Naval gazing only occurs when we refuse to view these experiences as being anything different from our own and therefore incapable of adding anything to the various discussions underway.

Maybe this will become a moot point when we have truly universal computer access and translation software that can keep up with the thousands of languages spoken in the world. Until then, however, those of us fortunate enough to be connected to this global network should do what we can to be mindful of the experiences, knowledge and cultures of those who are not.