Kind words from documentarian Peter Wintonick:

In terms of figuring out video on the net, of course we have our GooTubes and our Revvers and all the other perfectly great initiatives. But from me, byte by byte, Dabble is the next great thing, the next great think. Co-founder Lisa Rein presented a run-through. She is a multi-talented coder, podcaster, musician, re/mixmash artist and co-founder and first Technical Architect of Creative Commons, and the XML world's "it" girl. That's it as in I.T. If I was an enlightened patron of the electronic arts, or a venture capitalist, and I'll never be because I am still waiting for money to become open-source, Rein and her team at Dabble have cottoned onto something with vision which answers my age old consumer question: How can I get my head around and manage all that video that's out there on the web? Dabble provides an elegant, innovative answer. It zooms through literally millions and millions of clips and video videos out there and brings it all back to us at our little home/work stations. It scans, searches, organizes and indexes it all. It searches, makes sense and shares.

But the real genius is that it doesn't actually need to bring in video from all over the place, it points to that content that partners and creators have out there and lets your keyboard fingers do the rest in a few easy steps. Like all great new things it makes the complicated simple. The nice thing about Dabble for makers and owners of content, is that it's not a spider, and the original creator sources are attributed. And for all of us social networkers, which includes a few social not-workers too, Dabble’s bookmarklets, playlists and all sorts of value added features really do add connective value.

This is from September 22, 2005. I was interviewed on
Junket 415 -- another of Mondoglobo.net's cool podcast shows.

Here's a
direct link to the show. (My interview starts at 14:23.)

I was interviewed by BBC's Maggie Shiels in April 2003 about being a peace blogger, amidst all of the "War Bloggers." She had no way of telling me at the time when the piece was going to air, but she did give me a clip that I could play for my parents -- but I couldn't publish it on my blog or anything.

Well, now that so much time has passed, I wrote to see if it was OK, and she said it was.

Here it is. (Real File)

(Here's a link to its directory if you need that for some reason.)

Also interviewed are UC Berkeley School of Journalism Professor Paul Grabowitz and blogger Chris Perillo. (Will somebody let them know about this for me? I don't have their emails.)

That's me reading from Salam Pax's weblog too.

The story is about bloggers taking over as reliable sources of news.

This interview ran in the May 2003 issue of Japan's
Internet Magazine. (The translation is a little choppy...)

Title: XML Specialist Lisa Rein CTO of Creative Commons who has another name as XML Queen - an interview with Lisa Rein By Gohsuke Takama. XML Specialist Lisa Rein is leading technical architect for Creative Commons, which Lawrence Lessig has introduced. We asked her about how she, a journalist/ musician/editor, became recognized by some as the 'XML Queen.'

Q: What kind of work was that you did in the CreativeCommons project?

LR: My official title was 'Techinical Architect.' Basically I was the first CTO of CreativeCommons. I did basic reserach and designed architecture with development team. Larry (Lessig) already had an idea of building machine readable licenses, so my role there was to lead to accomplish (the project of) buiding XML licenses using RDF, that is based on right ideologies and is compatible and interoperable with many different systems.

Q: How did you get inerested in XML?

LR: It was in 1997. I was an editor of Netscape World magazine at that time. At a conference in April I met Chris Lilly of the W3C and asked him many questions. He happily answered me, and gave me the draft of XML standard, which was still under development. I had no idea what it was at the time, but got excited about the fact that a standard that everyone could use was getting realized.

Q: What was the situation surrounding XML?

LR: "The Web needs XML" was understood by everyone of the first XML WG, and they guided me. Tim Bray and the older generation who made HTML were very worried about the future of the web. But they also thought that if we can build a legitimate standard as quickly as possible, the web would keep going for a while.

Q: So are you self-taught in XML?

LR: No, not by myself. The whole world was a teacher to me. When I sent out questions in emails to experts all around the world for different themes, most of them replied to me with wonderful answers! I thougt that they felt happy to be asked by a person who really wants to learn that had a serious interest in the subject. Then, as I learned more about the subject more, I became more interested in getting actively involved.

Q: How did you start teaching XML?

LR: Since I was involved deeply, to spread XML to the world became my role. My teaching started in my local community college in Bellevue, WA, and then I also did consulting for corporations. But it wasn't fun to teach students who were told to study by their bosses. Or, I should say, it sucked, and could not wait to go home every day. After that, I started teaching at UC Berkeley extension's online seminars. In 2001, I had more teaching gigs as XML get into main stream, but several gigs were canceled in the middle of the course affected by ecconomic down turn.

Q: How did corporations and universities find you?

LR: UC Berkeley, via Craig's List. Corporations, well, probably they searched on the web. They only wanted some big names. and around that time there were some people calling me the "XML Queen". It was kind of like "hey everyone, here comes the queen to teach you XML" kind of thing...

We don't need your stinkin' amnesty!
File sharers scoff at the recording industry's offer of forgiveness for repentant downloaders.
By Farhad Manjoo For Salon.

Lisa Rein, a blogger at On Lisa Rein's Radar

I would not participate in this program under any circumstances.

I don't feel comfortable with the privacy policy -- which has a pretty big exception, that the information would not be divulged, "except if necessary to enforce a participant's violation of the pledges set forth in the Affidavit or otherwise required by law."(Meaning if the RIAA receives a subpoena from another party.)

The RIAA doesn't have the right to give full amnesty anyway -- you could still be sued by the individual copyright owners/song publishers (like Metallica).

So they are collecting a big database of individuals that can be turned over to other individuals who will then sue the file-sharers anyway. And the file-sharers will have admitted to it, thinking they were getting amnesty. Forget it!

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2003/09/09/filesharing_amnesty/print.html

We don't need your stinkin' amnesty!
File sharers scoff at the recording industry's offer of forgiveness for repentant downloaders.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Farhad Manjoo

Sept. 9, 2003 | On Monday morning, the Recording Industry Association of America, (RIAA) the music industry's main trade group, announced that it had filed lawsuits against 261 people in the United States for allegedly violating copyright laws by using online file-sharing programs such as Kazaa.

The move did not come as a surprise; for months, the industry had been warning that it would go after individuals it suspects of trading songs online. But because the people being sued could theoretically face fines of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars, these lawsuits can't be good for the RIAA's already tarnished image. (Under U.S. copyright law, the RIAA can ask as for as much as $150,000 for each copyright violation.)

Perhaps to show that it wasn't the big bully file-sharers claim it is, the RIAA also introduced an "amnesty" program for people who have not yet been sued. Under the program, called "Clean Slate," file-traders can send the RIAA a notarized declaration that they will delete all stolen files from their hard drives, and that they will never again trade MP3s. If you agree to live a life free of Kazaa, the RIAA will not sue you; but if you happen to fall off the wagon, you better watch out.

After the RIAA's announcement, Salon surveyed the Web for reactions to Clean Slate. We e-mailed bloggers, Usenet users, people on P2P discussion sites and others who've been known to get a song for free every once in a while. Not a single person was willing to sign on the RIAA's amnesty program. Here are their reasons:

Eric Olsen, a blogger who runs Blogcritics.org

I would not sign it for several reasons: the behavior in question has not been clearly identified as legal or illegal. Of the four factors the Copyright Act lists that must be weighed in determining fair use -- 1) the purpose of the copying, including whether it is commercial or educational; 2) the nature of the work; 3) the amount of the work that is copied; 4) the effect of the copying on the market for the work -- 1 and 4 are very much up in the air regarding music file sharing.

I object to the RIAA scorched-earth legal campaign on virtually every level, and would see seeking amnesty as moral and legal capitulation and tacit acceptance of its legitimacy. File sharers aren't "pirates" or "thieves": pirates make illegal copies of copyrighted works and sell them on the black market. File sharers make no profit. Nor is it "stealing" in the sense that any property has been taken: it is still a very open question whether in fact file sharing may actually increase legitimate sales via exposure and experimentation.

It would be foolish to put myself on record as having committed a perceived offense with the very organization that most wants to maximize that action as an offense, and to commit myself to never again committing an act that may or may not end up being at least partially legal, or legal in a mutated form.

Lastly, without questioning the integrity and good intentions of the RIAA, the track record of database security is such that I wouldn't trust that kind of sensitive information about myself with any organization.

A 26-year-old tech professional in San Francisco who uses Kazaa, speaking to Salon by phone

It's 261 lawsuits out of several million file-traders in this country. To be honest I don't think that the RIAA is going to spend the time and money that it takes to crack down on these cases, and considering the frequency with which I use these services, the chances of any prosecution coming against me are pretty slim. And I think that signing an affidavit is only going to alert the authorities that I might be trying to evade to my intentions and my identity. ... I think it's [being sued] is real threat, just as being hit by a car is a real threat -- but I don't think it's very likely that they will sue me. If anything, the threat of a lawsuit would drive me to severely limit my use if these file-sharing services. But I would never throw away the little bit of anonymity I enjoy on the Internet [by signing an amnesty program].

Moonman, a member of Zeropaid.com, a P2P discussion site

Would I ever sign this? Never. Think about it for a moment, would it be good to have a written document saying that you have done illegal things in the past in their hands as well as a photo? I don't think so. These are just scare tactics. They are hoping people like college kids will use this as a sort of "get out of jail free card," when in reality they are only admitting they have done wrong.

A file-trader who talks about music on Usenet

Personally, I would not sign this amnesty letter. The RIAA is not a government entity; therefore, they are not authorized to give amnesty to anybody who has a case with the potential of criminal liability. This amnesty letter is more of a P.R. move than anything else. They look bad for suing some people; this makes them look like they actually care. Don't call it amnesty, it should be called a signed admission of guilt. This amnesty contract does not get you off the hook if you share, and people that have already been subpoenaed do not qualify. So tell me, what is the point?

Aqlo, another Zeropaid user

Reasons not to consider the Amnesty offer:

a) It makes your identity known where it might otherwise not have been, or might have been insignificant until you spoke up.

b) Having done so it fails to protect you from any criminal action (RIAA actions are civil, they have no control over real prosecutors).

c) It also fails to protect you from civil actions by any other body (such as the MPAA).

d) It greatly hurts the cases of any current defendants. If a multitude of people sign this document they each serve as witnesses for the idea that sharing is a crime, something that has not yet been adjudicated.

e) It encourages further harassment along these lines at a time when many questions are up in the air.

f) It does not apply to anyone who has already been subpoenaed.

g) It constitutes a waiver of many rights to which you might otherwise be entitled.

Under no circumstances whatsoever would I sign such an onerous document, there is no advantage in doing so which can outweigh the overwhelming disadvantages.

Lisa Rein, a blogger at On Lisa Rein's Radar

I would not participate in this program under any circumstances.

I don't feel comfortable with the privacy policy -- which has a pretty big exception, that the information would not be divulged, "except if necessary to enforce a participant's violation of the pledges set forth in the Affidavit or otherwise required by law."(Meaning if the RIAA receives a subpoena from another party.)

The RIAA doesn't have the right to give full amnesty anyway -- you could still be sued by the individual copyright owners/song publishers (like Metallica).

So they are collecting a big database of individuals that can be turned over to other individuals who will then sue the file-sharers anyway. And the file-sharers will have admitted to it, thinking they were getting amnesty. Forget it!

Mary Hodder, one of the bloggers at the Berkeley Intellectual Property Weblog, or bIPlog

I would not sign the amnesty, because I do not file-share (up or downloading copyright protected materials -- (I) used to pre-Napster decision, but not now), and because the RIAA does not represent all the parties potentially involved, and therefore admitting to the RIAA that you file-share is asking for more trouble. They say you can "wipe the slate clean" in their press release today, but that would only be their slate, nobody else's.

I would not sign because who knows what they would do with the photos and personal information they will collect. They are not a law enforcement agency, and as such, are not subject to public oversight. They are a private trade group, and have way too much power under the DMCA to subvert people's rights, without judicial oversight, as it is (the subpoenas are generated by bots and sent out without a judge or clerk checking them out, and they've been wrong in some cases, and may be or have already been wrong in more...)

I do think this program will push more people to DarkNet solutions, and will cause the two extremes (RIAA vs. people who hate them and don't care about copyright) to grow further apart, making it harder to get to reasonable solutions, that don't criminalize millions, like compulsory licensing or good, well made Web downloading services with reasonable prices and a great catalog.

Not to mention that subtle, nuanced concepts like fair use and the public domain get totally shot. As well as any perspective on the DMCA and why some things in there aren't quite right. The RIAA is just shouting loudest right now. It's kind of a guerilla war they will never win. Like Vietnam.

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, a graduate student at the School of Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley

It reminds me a lot of what SCO is doing right now in their case against IBM and their quest to destroy Linux. That is, they are attempting to force upon people the belief that what they're doing is wrong through legal maneuvers and indemnity ploys. In the RIAA's case, file-trading of MP3s and in SCO's case, running the Linux kernel. I would not sign it as that would mean that I'm admitting that sharing music with the world is illegal... I happen to believe that sharing music with my friends (or even potential friends) is well within the bounds of fair use. This is all very similar to software "piracy"... that is people are "trying to protect their intellectual property" when they should be thinking about value-added services or non-digital materials that people would flock to purchase....

I just wonder what all the resources that the RIAA is throwing at this from a legal perspective could do if they were funneled to discovery of new talent or new distribution channels. They don't seem to understand that trading of their files "is a GOOD thing (R)". Exposure is half the battle... especially for the majority of little bands out there... Sure, the big manufactured talent gigs will suffer. But that's flawed design...

J.D. Lasica has written a lovely article for the Online Journalism Review.
(Thanks, J.D..)

Personal Broadcasting Opens Yet Another Front for Journalists

Video blogging takes root

Like Raven, Lisa Rein of San Francisco has become her own one-woman news crew -- and she expects plenty of company in the years ahead.

During the peace demonstrations in February, Rein took to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, camcorder in hand, and shot footage of the marchers and speakers, including Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), singer Harry Belafonte and antiwar activist Ron Kovic. She posted the video on her Weblog, complete with color commentary, providing much deeper (if more subjective) coverage of the events than a viewer would get by watching the local news.

"At one point, the press started covering the protests as an annoyance, a traffic jam problem," Rein says. "Videotaping the early marches helped spread the word that there were a lot of people who had reservations about our intentions in Iraq."

In recent months, Rein has covered three different conferences. At South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, she videotaped the keynote presentation by Lawrence Lessig. At the Internet Law Conference at Stanford, she interviewed one of the key speakers. Rein also taped highlights of a digital rights conference in Berkeley. She has posted countless hours of video on her Weblog, along with her analysis of events.

"There are just so many interesting things happening in our lives that would make great programming," she says. "The networks aren't interested unless it will attract millions of dollars in advertising revenues. Meanwhile, there are people and events all around us that are meaningful and that people would love to watch."

Rein, 34, also borrows network news segments and public affairs programming for retransmission on her blog. She recently recorded Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's appearance on "Meet the Press." She has become so prolific that staffers for presidential candidate Howard Dean notify her when Dean appears on C-SPAN so that she can give the appearance wider currency. She now uploads video to her blog several times a day and says such borrowing is permitted under fair use.

"When NBC News said it would air a story on bloggers, I got e-mails from bloggers saying, 'Hey, grab it and put it up.' Not everyone can watch the news, and not everyone gets cable. My main goal is to capture news as its leaps along the airwaves from reputable sources and archive it on the Web for people to access as needed."

A teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of the copyright-licensing center Creative Commons, Rein has a background in technology and freelance writing, laced with an avid interest in public affairs. But she says the tools have become so easy to master that anyone can do it with a little practice.

She captures footage on TiVO -- this can also be accomplished with almost any VCR or other home-taping device -- and transfers the footage first to her DV camcorder and then via firewire to her Mac computer.

"I'm trying to show other people how easy it is to create programming and set up your own TV station on the Web -- without help from anyone in big media," she says.

Others are also getting in on the action. Jeff Jarvis, a veteran journalist who is president of Advance.net, has published a series of video commentaries on his Weblog. At OregonLive.com, a college student created an online video report from the state cheerleading championships. Members of the Independent Media Center create Web video for their alternative news articles.

The Center for Digital Storytelling is turning out thousands of workshop graduates skilled in the art of personal filmmaking. And Steve Mann, a researcher at the Humanistic Intelligence Lab at the University of Toronto, has outfitted students with Webcams on the theory that being an eyewitness to live events qualifies as journalism.

Down the road, the programmers at the Gnu open-software project hope to transform millions of our personal computers into potential personal broadcast receivers and transmitters, using software to turn PCs into radios and digital televisions.

It all adds up to a personal video revolution coming into focus.

Rein sees the day when tens of thousands of Web users have their own Internet TV shows. But for now, she has a more modest goal. Two cable channels, in California and the Midwest, have offered her a slot on public access TV if she can finish three complete shows culled from her raw clips.

"To get your message out to the masses," she says, "it still has to go out over the box and hit them in their living rooms."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/workplace/1060223904.php

Personal Broadcasting Opens Yet Another Front for Journalists

A camera, firewire and the ability to Webcast are all you need. Oh yeah, and don't forget that you have to like sticking a camera and microphone in people's faces.
J.D. Lasica, OJR Senior Editor
Posted: 2003-08-07

By night, Raven -- the name everyone uses for 47-year-old Harold Kionka -- works as a janitor, mopping the floors and cleaning the grease traps in TGIFriday's in Daytona Beach, Fla.

By day, he operates almost single-handedly a 24-hour Internet TV station, serving as owner, station manager, producer and on-air personality. Daytonabeach-live brings live coverage of events in the Florida resort town to as many as 17,000 viewers a day.

Raven and a handful of others are at the vanguard of a new breed of journalism: personal broadcasting. Using equipment that is now relatively inexpensive and simple to use, these video pioneers are claiming a stake in territory that was once the exclusive province of big media.

But let Raven tell it. "I consider a lot of what I do real reporting with no strings attached. When a major event comes to town, I'm there with my camcorder to record everything that goes down while adding some color commentary. On slower days, I still capture the city's day-to-day life."

Daytona Beach is home to a number of well-attended public events each year. In March, Raven covered the Birthplace of Speed, a three-day antique auto festival. During spring break he waded through a quarter-million people thronged along the city’s main street and interviewed college students from around the nation. "I call it the sidewalk commando cam," he says.

He does the same during Bike Week -- Daytona Beach claims to be home to the largest motorcycle gathering in the world -- and Black College Reunion week each spring. In June, he covered the Great Race, an annual race of classic cars that began in Michigan and wound more than 4,000 miles through 15 states, ending in Daytona Beach. Raven was at the finish line, interviewed the winners, and broadcast it on the Web. In mid-July, he gave viewers a tour of the city's Florida International Festival. In October he'll be covering Biketoberfest.

He also covers space shuttle launches, power boat races, fishing and beach activities, performances of live rock bands and more.

"I'm out there interviewing people just like the local Channel 7 news, only I can bring people more complete coverage, and my signal travels a lot farther," Raven says. "Some days it's almost like being a documentary filmmaker. You're showing things to people who can't be here, and that's a community service."

The town fathers weren’t always sure about Raven's intentions. At first they thought he might be connected with Girlsgonewild, a renegade group of video voyeurs who descend on spring break destinations and ask young women to remove their bras or swimsuit tops. The group does a brisk video business.

Raven’s not into that scene. "Everything I shoot is family-oriented -- basically, all G or PG rated." In the past year, he has become such a local fixture that the Ormond Beach Chamber of Commerce (just north of Daytona Beach) added him to its mailing list for media outlets. Local PR people make sure he's in the loop whenever they promote an event.

Daytonabeach-live is Webcast seven days a week, 24 hours a day, barring a technological hiccup. Raven estimates that 40 percent of the programming airs live; the remainder is rebroadcast from earlier tapings. When Raven heads off for his night job, he plops an old-fashioned videotape into the VCR and streams it onto the Web.

How does he pull all this off? On the cheap. Raven and a part-time computer technician, who volunteers his time, run a small production studio out of Raven’s home. Raven uses a Hi8 analog Sony Handycam, which he bought for $200, and hooks it into some used computers.

Typically, a Webcaster pays hundreds of dollars for server costs and a high-bandwidth T1 line. But all Raven has to do is point his camcorder and flip a switch, which sends his signal to an Internet service provider in Utah. The ISP handles the technical heavy lifting, hosting his Webcast on their servers and splitting his feed into 1,500 simultaneous streams. The cost? A grand total of $17 a month.

"None of this is Hollywood quality," he admits, "but it's all original programming."

(For more on citizen reporters and the recent increase in participatory journalism, see this sidebar.)

Despite the low costs, the Webcast has been less than lucrative. "I've done this basically free for the past five years," he says. But in July, he nailed down two paying sponsorships for live local music acts that he helps to produce and Webcast.

He has begun to approach sponsors to see if he can wrangle enough money to let him quit his night job. Already, he has obtained two rooms on the top floor of a beachfront motel -- worth $1,400 a month -- in exchange for mentioning the motel on the Webcast. Those quarters have become the studio of a sister station Raven recently launched, GalaxyUniverseTV. The studio features second-hand computers, stereos, a few worn couches and a tripod on an outside balcony overlooking the beach.

A headline news box on GalaxyUniverseTV’s main page offers links to ABCnews.com, MSNBC.com and other news sites. Users can check Daytona Beach weather and jump to live or taped Webcast footage. The site is getting 2,000 to 3,000 visitors a day and, like Daytonabeach-live, gets a fair number of international viewers. Both stations are among the 3,000 live and archived television and radio feeds from around the world listed on Internet portal wwiTV and its North American affiliate, TV4all.

Raven, a Michigan native, began his personal broadcasting odyssey in the late 1990s in Albuquerque, N.M., when he launched Route66live.com, the city's first Internet-only radio station. Two years ago, he gave up radio Webcasting -- which now requires small broadcasters to pay fees to music publishers -- and moved his family to Daytona Beach, fertile territory for a video Webcast.

He hopes to do more hard news in the coming year. One idea involves examining a recent rash of pickpockets who prey on tourists. Raven wants to set up a sting operation, placing "a mark" on the beach and capturing the theft of a wallet with a hidden camera.

"I don’t claim to be Dan Rather," he says, "but I'm free to cover whatever I want. I don't have to get permission from the head office to run something. I think a lot of what we see in the media is compromised. I just wish I had more resources. Then I'd be unstoppable."

Video blogging takes root

Like Raven, Lisa Rein of San Francisco has become her own one-woman news crew -- and she expects plenty of company in the years ahead.

During the peace demonstrations in February, Rein took to the streets of San Francisco and Oakland, camcorder in hand, and shot footage of the marchers and speakers, including Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), singer Harry Belafonte and antiwar activist Ron Kovic. She posted the video on her Weblog, complete with color commentary, providing much deeper (if more subjective) coverage of the events than a viewer would get by watching the local news.

"At one point, the press started covering the protests as an annoyance, a traffic jam problem," Rein says. "Videotaping the early marches helped spread the word that there were a lot of people who had reservations about our intentions in Iraq."

In recent months, Rein has covered three different conferences. At South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, she videotaped the keynote presentation by Lawrence Lessig. At the Internet Law Conference at Stanford, she interviewed one of the key speakers. Rein also taped highlights of a digital rights conference in Berkeley. She has posted countless hours of video on her Weblog, along with her analysis of events.

"There are just so many interesting things happening in our lives that would make great programming," she says. "The networks aren't interested unless it will attract millions of dollars in advertising revenues. Meanwhile, there are people and events all around us that are meaningful and that people would love to watch."

Rein, 34, also borrows network news segments and public affairs programming for retransmission on her blog. She recently recorded Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's appearance on "Meet the Press." She has become so prolific that staffers for presidential candidate Howard Dean notify her when Dean appears on C-SPAN so that she can give the appearance wider currency. She now uploads video to her blog several times a day and says such borrowing is permitted under fair use.

"When NBC News said it would air a story on bloggers, I got e-mails from bloggers saying, 'Hey, grab it and put it up.' Not everyone can watch the news, and not everyone gets cable. My main goal is to capture news as its leaps along the airwaves from reputable sources and archive it on the Web for people to access as needed."

A teacher at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-founder of the copyright-licensing center Creative Commons, Rein has a background in technology and freelance writing, laced with an avid interest in public affairs. But she says the tools have become so easy to master that anyone can do it with a little practice.

She captures footage on TiVO -- this can also be accomplished with almost any VCR or other home-taping device -- and transfers the footage first to her DV camcorder and then via firewire to her Mac computer.

"I'm trying to show other people how easy it is to create programming and set up your own TV station on the Web -- without help from anyone in big media," she says.

Others are also getting in on the action. Jeff Jarvis, a veteran journalist who is president of Advance.net, has published a series of video commentaries on his Weblog. At OregonLive.com, a college student created an online video report from the state cheerleading championships. Members of the Independent Media Center create Web video for their alternative news articles.

The Center for Digital Storytelling is turning out thousands of workshop graduates skilled in the art of personal filmmaking. And Steve Mann, a researcher at the Humanistic Intelligence Lab at the University of Toronto, has outfitted students with Webcams on the theory that being an eyewitness to live events qualifies as journalism.

Down the road, the programmers at the Gnu open-software project hope to transform millions of our personal computers into potential personal broadcast receivers and transmitters, using software to turn PCs into radios and digital televisions.

It all adds up to a personal video revolution coming into focus.

Rein sees the day when tens of thousands of Web users have their own Internet TV shows. But for now, she has a more modest goal. Two cable channels, in California and the Midwest, have offered her a slot on public access TV if she can finish three complete shows culled from her raw clips.

"To get your message out to the masses," she says, "it still has to go out over the box and hit them in their living rooms."

So I've been waiting until I had my movies from last Thursday ready before I officially announced my endorsement for Howard Dean as our next President of the United States, but now Time Magazine has announced it for me, so this is as good of a time as any :-)

I actually didn't consider myself a part of Dean's constituency yet when I met Joe Klein on the ferry boat. (Although perhaps Joe could already tell at that point when I talked to him that my decision had been made, and I was won over.)

I actually decided during some point on the ferry ride back, after I had heard Dean speak and learned more about the various grassroots movements that supported him for a diverse range of reasons while interviewing the crowd after the rally. (Video of that going up today too.)

Just to clarify: This category isn't going to be me trying to tell you how to vote. It's just a place where I can explain in more detail about why I like Dean and why I'm voting for him in this week's MoveOn Primary. (Please Register for the Primary now, if you haven't already.)

It also hope that it will become a place where you can go to learn more about Howard Dean, as I learn more about him.

Here's the article by Joe Klein for Time Magazine:
Why Dean Isn't Going Away

In any case, Dean has unlocked a fairly new and vibrant Democratic constituency that transcends his left-wing peacenik stereotype. It is young, middle class, white and wired. Standing on the aft deck of the ferry from San Francisco to Marin County, the Governor was approached by a stream of computer geeks: a woman named Lisa Rein, who has a weblog; a man named Eric Predoehli, who has a website; as well as several people from among the 35,000--astonishing if true — who had joined the Dean affinity group on Meetup.com. Dean seemed nonplussed by it all. "I have no idea how any of this works," he said. "But the Meetup folks are the core of our organization out here in California. In New York, they're working to get us on the primary ballot, which is not an easy thing. This campaign is totally decentralized. There are probably 15 or 20 different kinds of Dean bumper stickers, because people in different states decide to print their own."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030630-460238,00.html

Why Dean Isn't Going Away
By JOE KLEIN

Monday, Jun. 30, 2003
I want a balanced budget," Howard Dean said, and the crowd at the Larkspur Ferry Terminal roared. "Imagine that!" Dean continued with a smile. "Here we are in Marin County, the last bastion of liberalism, hooting and hollering for a balanced budget." But the crowd wasn't really cheering for balanced books; it was hooting and hollering for Dean himself, who could come out foursquare for a healthy balanced diet and his supporters would find it deliriously rebellious. By recent Dean standards, the Larkspur assemblage — several hundred people — was meager. He's been greeted by 3,000 in Austin, Texas, and 1,000 in Seattle. But the very notion of unaffiliated civilians gathering to hear a candidate is increasingly rare in American politics, and the former Governor of Vermont has emerged as the one Democrat who can draw a crowd.

We are now little more than six months away from the primaries. The real campaign will probably begin on Labor Day, but the Democratic field seems to have organized itself into three tiers. The bottom tier is the vanity candidacies: Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich, Carol Moseley Braun. The middle tier is serious candidates who have yet to catch fire: Joe Lieberman (despite high name recognition in the polls), John Edwards (despite financial support from his fellow trial lawyers and some creative speeches about specific issues) and Bob Graham. At the top are John Kerry, the party establishment's favorite; Dick Gephardt, the Midwest labor candidate. And Howard Dean.

In a year in which just about every Democrat running has claimed that he wants to be the reincarnation of John McCain, Dean has won the Straight Talk primary. He did it early on, by opposing the war in Iraq — and by speaking in clear, lean, unmuffled English. And he did it by attacking the other candidates, usually by inference, sometimes by name. As a result, his rivals despise him — a cause for glee in the Dean camp. "I didn't understand the impact that the line 'I represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party' would have," Dean told me last week, referring to his use of Paul Wellstone's famous formulation. "I wasn't aware of the huge anger out there among Democrats — anger at Bush, but also against the Democrats in Washington who weren't willing to stand up against the right wing of the Republican Party."

There is some irony here: Dean hasn't been nearly as detailed or creative — or even as courageous — in his position taking as some of the other Democratic candidates have been. He had to hastily revise his health-care plan because it wasn't as detailed as Kerry's regarding cost-containment measures. His knowledge about many issues, even domestic ones, is sketchy at best. He once told me that the school-voucher movement was Southern, white and conservative, even though it is predominantly Northern, urban and African American. He isn't above political opportunism of the basest sort — he has changed his position on free trade to suit Iowa's protectionist labor skates, and a cynic might argue that his position on Iraq was a clever response to a market void. But Dean is a master of the snappy formulation. He tells audiences, for example, that the President's tax cuts will "raise local property taxes and reduce services." This has the virtue of being accurate — there will be less money to cities and towns — and accessible.

In any case, Dean has unlocked a fairly new and vibrant Democratic constituency that transcends his left-wing peacenik stereotype. It is young, middle class, white and wired. Standing on the aft deck of the ferry from San Francisco to Marin County, the Governor was approached by a stream of computer geeks: a woman named Lisa Rein, who has a weblog; a man named Eric Predoehli, who has a website; as well as several people from among the 35,000--astonishing if true — who had joined the Dean affinity group on Meetup.com. Dean seemed nonplussed by it all. "I have no idea how any of this works," he said. "But the Meetup folks are the core of our organization out here in California. In New York, they're working to get us on the primary ballot, which is not an easy thing. This campaign is totally decentralized. There are probably 15 or 20 different kinds of Dean bumper stickers, because people in different states decide to print their own."

Dean has no idea how large this constituency is, but he knows it isn't large enough to win the nomination. "It's time to shift gears," he told me, "to become a more presidential candidate with an inclusive vision, not just a bomb thrower." The official announcement of his candidacy this week was to signal that change. And the broader vision? "We've lost our sense of community," he told me. Not exactly a new theme. The Governor road-tested "community" at the Larkspur rally, and it wasn't nearly as much fun as the bomb throwing. And not nearly so easy. If Dean wants the nomination — still a long shot, but not an impossibility — he will have to be as convincing a statesman as he is a scourge.

From the Jun. 30, 2003 issue of TIME magazine

Wow! I got a mention in the New York Times. How totally cool.

Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)
By Lisa Guernsey, for the NY Times.

But women's blogs about current events are out there too. Leslie Veen writes about politics in California, when she is not musing on baseball. Lisa Reins makes regular postings promoting online freedoms and ways to avoid war with Iraq. Lynne Kiesling writes about economics and energy deregulation. (She also links to a knitting blog.)

Ms. Sessum and Elaine Frankonis, her co-pilot at Blog Sisters, say they are already witnessing some slippage between the stereotypes as both men and women get comfortable in the new medium.

"I think that what's happening is that we're meeting in the middle," Ms. Frankonis said. "The men started by writing about technology and opinion and the women were writing personal diaries. Now the men are putting more of their hearts into their Weblogs and women are talking about the issues."

Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/28/technology/circuits/28blog.html

The New York Times The New York Times Technology November 28, 2002

Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)
By LISA GUERNSEY

A FEW months ago I joined legions of other online narcissists and decided to start a Weblog, one of those personal Web sites where people spout their thoughts for the world to read. Within a few days I was browsing through other Weblogs, commonly called blogs, for inspiration. And within a week, it hit me: the sites I was visiting were all run by men.
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The bloggers I knew of, to name a few, were Andrew Sullivan, a writer; Scott Rosenberg, the managing editor of Salon.com; Glenn Reynolds, the force behind Instapundit.com; and Jim Romenesko, a monitor of the media. The sites they linked to were also mostly written by men. Articles in mainstream publications, like one that ran in Newsweek last summer, dropped some of the same names, all male. Garry Trudeau even tackled blogging recently in "Doonesbury," and the blogger he created turned out to be a man.

Where were the women?

Over the last few years blogging has become an international pastime, embraced by Web aficionados around the world. Its popularity was spurred by new software that enabled anyone to build a site and post commentary without knowing a lick of Web code. It is impossible to count exactly how many blogs have sprung up (let alone how many have an audience), but Rebecca Blood, the author of "The Weblog Handbook," reports that the number has swelled from a few dozen in early 1999 to hundreds of thousands today.

The allure of blogging lies in the thrill of circumventing the establishment, of being able to publish worldwide without having to be an op-ed columnist or a famous writer. Blogs can be nurtured at all hours of the day and night - an advantage for anyone juggling work and children. Virginia Postrel, one of the few women who is commonly listed among well-known bloggers, points out that blogging is actually quite friendly to women.

"You don't have to be part of quite literally an old boys network," said Ms. Postrel, a former editor of Reason magazine (and a contributor of monthly Economic Scene columns for this newspaper's business section).

Her point made the seeming dearth of women all the more a mystery. Was there really a gender gap in Blogville? The answer, I soon learned, was complicated. And it was wrapped up in knotty issues like the power of celebrity, the male tilt of the computer industry, the grip of sexual stereotypes (women keeping diaries, men droning on about politics) and the preciousness of time - specifically, the fact that women with children and jobs have almost none to spare.

I, for one, was probably feeling the disparity with hypersensitivity. I became a mother last spring and started my blog to keep up my writing. (The fog of sleep deprivation made me crazy enough to think I would have the free time.) After spending hours dealing with technical glitches and typing with one hand while trying to soothe a colicky baby, I started to assume that women who blog, particularly mothers who blog, were a rarity.

But women are, in fact, blogging in big numbers. Mr. Rosenberg, who keeps an eye out for new bloggers and links to them from his Salon.com blog, estimates that the ratio of women to men is something like 40-60, or perhaps 50-50. Once I dug around, I found plenty of company. Blogs typically publish links, known as blogrolls, to kindred blogs. So whenever I found a woman's blog, I would find links to another handful, which led to another dozen, and so on.

There are even sites designed to showcase female bloggers, like the Blogs by Women home page and Blog Sisters, which has 100 registered female bloggers.

Why didn't I find these sites to start with? Web experts assign some blame to the mainstream media, which has focused its attention on a predominantly male group of bloggers who write about terrorism and Iraq and have come to be known as the warbloggers. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, for example, is the one of the most frequently cited warbloggers, and his blogroll is heavily weighted toward men.

Mr. Rosenberg, whose Salon.com site has become a gateway to blogging for many newcomers, keeps a list titled "Some blogs I read." All but one (Virginia Postrel's) are written by men. Many are opinion writers with journalistic backgrounds, a group that is understandably of interest to Mr. Rosenberg, given that he is a journalist himself. (Media types often write about other media types, skewing the sample.) Others are gurus of technology, like Marc Canter, the founder of the software company Macromedia, who is often called a "founding father of multimedia." Mr. Rosenberg conceded that the list needs updating, and he has linked to several new women's sites in the last month.

Ms. Postrel said that the imbalance was probably a holdover from the world of print, where men continue to dominate the opinion pages.

Continued
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The New York Times The New York Times Technology November 28, 2002

Telling All Online: It's a Man's World (Isn't It?)

(Page 2 of 2)

And that is where things get touchy. People who track blogs hate to make generalizations, but many acknowledged that female bloggers often have more of an inward focus, keeping personal diaries about their daily lives.

If that is the case, the Venus-Mars divide has made its way into Blogville. Women want to talk about their personal lives. Men want to talk about anything but. So far the people who have received the most publicity (often courtesy of male journalists) appear to be the latter.
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Why men are more likely than women to write about news and politics is a question that existed long before the dawn of the Web, and the answer is rolled up in cultural trends that span centuries. Men's continued dominance in the software industry, where they are apt to fiddle with a new computer art form, stacks the roster too.

But some women see the tables turning.

It was the sense of male blog domination that led to the birth of Blog Sisters, a site where female bloggers come together to support one another, talk about gender issues and spread the word about their existence.

Jeneane Sessum, who has been blogging for a year and who started a blog called Baby Blogger for her daughter, Jenna (now age 5), awoke in the middle of the night with the idea for Blog Sisters last February. "At that time, I wasn't reading as many women's blogs as I was men's and I wondered, 'Where are all the women like me?' " she said.

Julie Powell, who runs a blog called the Julie/Julia Project, had a similar question. "When I started, it did seem more like a guy thing," she said. Nevertheless, she kept writing. Her site cropped up on Salon.com's list of most-visited blogs this fall. (In it she regales readers with what she calls a "deranged assignment" to make every recipe in Julia Child's classic "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." )

Some sites where women are raising their voices do reflect traditional roles. (Blogs about knitting are popping up everywhere.)

But women's blogs about current events are out there too. Leslie Veen writes about politics in California, when she is not musing on baseball. Lisa Reins makes regular postings promoting online freedoms and ways to avoid war with Iraq. Lynne Kiesling writes about economics and energy deregulation. (She also links to a knitting blog.)

Ms. Sessum and Elaine Frankonis, her co-pilot at Blog Sisters, say they are already witnessing some slippage between the stereotypes as both men and women get comfortable in the new medium.

"I think that what's happening is that we're meeting in the middle," Ms. Frankonis said. "The men started by writing about technology and opinion and the women were writing personal diaries. Now the men are putting more of their hearts into their Weblogs and women are talking about the issues."

Ms. Sessum concurred. "Men are getting riskier too with what they are telling," she said. "There are many who dare to tell what is going on in their family and their hearts and their everyday lives."

Ms. Postrel said she had noticed some of that heart-baring too. "I'm seeing men writing about their kids," she said. "It is something that happens in blogs but does not happen very much in regular journalism."

As for me, I'm still in awe of anyone - man or woman - who has time to blog and be a parent at the same time.

I think of the hours that I have so far spent setting up my blog, learning the software, combing the Web for links, fiddling with graphics. Each minute I have been vaguely conscious of the things I should have been doing instead. I should have been reading Dr. Spock, gazing at my snoozing child, vacuuming the dog hair off the rugs, finding a child-care provider, doing research for work, paying bills, talking to my mother-in-law, writing thank-you notes, washing dishes, making dinner.

Heck, I should have been sleeping.

But the chance to bend sexual stereotypes is all too tempting. And I can't pass up what is starting to feel like a parallel form of motherhood: the experience of raising a Web site that I'll soon feel guilty about neglecting.

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