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Friday's Links

Here’s what interested me this week:

How to Shoot Events
I was an event photographer last night for Art-O-Sound at Artomatic.  (Pictures coming soon.)  This post had some good advice about taking photos without being a jerk.

Just a Govy
Getting government to adopt the social media tools that the rest of the world uses is really painful and difficult.  Allies from other agencies are needed.  Hence, I was thrilled to add Just a Govy to my blogroll.

.Gov Sites Should Focus on RSS, XML
The controversial ArsTechnica article that states that government web sites should ditch design and context and just serve up raw data in open formats. 

The Butterfly Pavillion
Go see this if you’re in DC!  Beautifully delicate butterflies fly all around, landing on shoulders, heads, everywhere.  You’re even checked on the way out to see if any errant butterflies are clinging to your clothes. 

Does the Novel Really Need Improvement?

Interesting story on ReadWriteWeb on an online novel in a new publishing format called “Quillr.”  The book is a supernatural thriller called Here Ends the Beginning.  The book is basically a mashup of text, video, photos and music.  How is this different than HTML? Do we need another format on the web to tell a story?

I think a blog, which is mostly just text, would make a much better novel. Blogs are also written in the first-person and are often very personal. You could read post by post as if they were chapters. I’m sure someone has done this before.

I’m a writer and a web person.  I love words, whether they’re on a printed page or a glowing screen. However, reading a novel is really an intimate experience that you create yourself, one that requires focused attention to enjoy. A web site with all sorts of bells and whistles detracts from that experience. I’m all in favor of the web but there’s a reason why novels have been with us for hundreds of years – it’s a format that works.

Friday's Links

Here’s what interested me this week:

Apartment Therapy
I wish I knew how to decorate.  Maybe this site will help. 

Tweet Scan
Find out what people are talking about in Twitter.  Apparently, it’s Eurovision. 

Best Places to Work in the Federal Government
More than just a list of best agencies to work for, this report offers ratings from employee surveys on employee engagement, training, pay and benefits and work/life balance. 

Worst Album Covers Ever
A slideshow that you will see in your nightmares.

Crowdsourced Film Festivals

Maybe because I’ve been reading Wikinomics, but the idea of a crowdsourced film festival really seems like a good one.

I’ve been a judge for the DC Shorts Film Festival.  Am I more of an expert than you are on short film? Possibly.  Am I more knowledgeable and astute than a vast crowd of film buffs?  No, of course not. When it comes to judging short films, festivals are limited by the number of judges that can be recruited who will actually show up to watch and review films on cold weeknights when you’d much rather stay at home and watch American Idol than sit through some 17-minute long experimental work on the depressing urban landscapes of Flint, Michigan.

So, I say, the more the merrier. I think people who will bother to go to a site, watch the films and then judge them will be pretty fair. They’ll also be motivated to go to the festival. After all, they helped program it! This is a great way of getting more attendees by making people feel a sense of ownership for their local festival.

How I Learned to Love Twitter

I was at SXSW last year when Twitter launched.  They had monitors outside conference rooms showing “tweets” from users, little random bits of text unfurling on a screen.  I thought it was interesting, like a bad stream of consciousness novel, but didn’t see the point.  Why would I want to let the world know about the trivia of my life?

Twitter won a SXSW Web Award, in the blog category.  The founders gave a clever acceptance speech – in less than 140 characters.

Still, I was unconvinced until a few weeks ago when my buddy Neil suggested that I try it. He and his hard-working IT colleagues use it to keep track of one another across a busy college campus.

That seemed useful so I tried it out.  I found that several other of my friends and colleagues were already on Twitter and it’s been really interesting to discover the projects that they’re working on.  It’s helped me make connections and get good ideas.  For example, I found out that:

Despite the fact that Twitter is not 100% reliable (a real danger, one that doomed Friendster), its simplicity and utility make it a very attractive tool for web workers.  
Note: this post was inspired by the excellent 101 Uses for Twitter.

 

Seniors Spend More Time Online Than Anyone Else

This seems counterintuitive but seniors (age 55+) spend more time online than any other age group, according to a recent Jupiter Research report.

How times have changed since my days at AARP in the late 90s, when seniors were underrepresented online.  More than once, I heard the argument that seniors would never use the web, that “old dogs don’t learn new tricks.”  They would never give up newspapers and figure out how to use computers – how wrong and silly those ideas seem now.

Government Web Managers Conference Presentations Online

The presentations from the Government Web Managers Conference are now online. There’s a wealth of useful information in these slides, relevant to all web managers, not just government ones. The highlights for me were:

  • Janice Nall from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, describing her risk-taking ways as the CDC tries everything from Second Life to “virtual viruses” to get the word out about health. Her point was not to be afraid of the lawyers and to get out there and experiment.
  • The EPA is very similar to NOAA, the agency I work for, and Jeff Levy from the EPA demonstrated some of the ways (Flickr photo contest) that they’re way ahead of us. Not that we’re jealous or anything.
  • Dan Herman, nGenera, introduced the audience to the “wikinomics” concept.  Command and control management is painfully yielding to mass collaboration.  The boomers had the Age of Aquarius.  We have Age of Participation. Not quite as catchy.

The Digital District

enjoying the wifi
Put down the laptop and have a look around.

Where do the digitally savvy roam?  According to a new study, Austin, Las Vegas, Sacramento, San Diego and, coming in at #5, Washington, DC.  Maybe we should be called The Digital District.  It doesn’t surprise me at all.  People here wuv their Blackberries a little too much.  (Not like us iPhone fanatics, we’re the normal, well-adjusted ones.)  DC is all about the trading of information for influence and our digital gadgets make these transactions so much more efficient.

Austin – I’m surprised by you.  You’re a city of music, bars, BBQ, bike paths and “Keep Austin Weird” – you have much better things to do than play online.

How Much Time Does Web 2.0 Take?

I twitter, post pictures on Flickr, comment on other people’s blogs and write my own blog postings. More than once, I’ve been asked, “How much time does that take?”

Really, not much.  5-10 hours a week at most, time that I’d otherwise spend watching TV, I’m sure. Museum 2.0 has a great post on how much time Web 2.0 really takes and includes a handy chart showing how much time each tactic can take.

And how did I find this article?  Twitter.  The author, Nina Simon, is a Twitter friend of a friend of a friend.

Artomatic – First Look

Artomatic – it’s on!  I made my first visit Friday night to sample a bit of this arts extravaganza.  This year, Artomatic has taken over an entire office building one block from the New York Avenue Metro station.  More than just an open art show, Artomatic features music, movies, fire dancers, life modeling classes, bars and creativity untamed by professional aspirations.

Here’s a first look at some of the things I found interesting/scary:

personal jesus

fidel

art critic

You can see more photos on Flickr.