Audio Activism

I’m moving the majority of my blogging activities to Yesh.com. Please change my RSS feed in your feed reader to www.yesh.com/blog/feed. The podcasting feed URL is the same for now www.audioactivism.org/wp-rss2.php. Here is a post I wrote over at Yesh.com explaining the change. Please join me over there!

Welcome to Yesh.com. You might have come here in the past to look at the design “Portfolio of Brian C. Russell”. Well that’s still around. Its just over here now.

This is still the home of Brian C. Russell. Fact is I’ve had many online homes. Too many at this point to even list. Seriously. But here is a bit of info about this particular transition in my life.

From October 2004 to July 2006 I blogged over at AudioActivism.org. It has been more popular than I ever could have imagined. Not as big as some but still amazing to me. I’ve had the wonderful opportunity to communicate with people from all over the world. But mostly my reach as been because of audio podcasting.

I set out to interview activists and tell people about online activism tools. My tag line was (is) “Meta data about media activism”. I made a ton of audio files and share them via my RSS feed. You can still listen to them here.

Another part of AudioActivism.org that is popular and useful is the tutorials section. I wrote Podcasting Tutorial & Intro, How to Pocast with WordPress 1.5, HowTo Create a interview Podcast on the Cheap, DIY Radio: Or how I learned to stop worrying about the media and start podcasting, and more. I’m very proud of these writings. They aren’t going any where right now and I hope they continue to be useful to people.

Thanks to many factors I found that AudioActivism.org has amazing google juice. This is the ability to blog about something and see it as one of the top five hits in a Google search. Because I wrote about social justice issues and other progressive topics I was able to demonstrate the power of blogging and podcasting for communicating ideas to millions with few resources. I hope this has inspired people to blog and podcast so they can create positive change in the world. I can only hope I’ve been able to accomplish this. Sometimes its hard to measure or define success.

As you can probably tell I’m changing my home for blogging, and maybe podcasting. The main reason is I want to keep it personal. It other words all over the place. That’s how I think.

AudioActivism.org is a site with a mission. As it turns out its mission became rather focused. But because it was also my personal blog I wrote about stuff that was pretty diverse in subject matter. I became concerned it was too diverse. I hope AudioActivism.org can become better at its original mission of politically leftist media. I have some ideas for its future. We’ll see how it goes. I don’t want to abandon it completely.

So here I am. The ‘I’ part is important. Yesh.com is about me, Brian C. Russell. I have A LOT of interest. They ebb and flow. My life is changing a ton right now. Moving to another blog is only one. So if you want to keep up with what I think this is THE place to do it. My goal is make this a blog by an expert who really likes helping people.

Andy Carvin writes over at his blog Learning.Now about the wiki SupportBloggging.com. This wiki appears to be a place for information about blogging for education. Lots of information there like How to Start blogging, Testimonials, and what’s the diference between social networking sites and blogs. I will definitely be recommending it to teachers and students who ask me about blogging. [Along with Blogging101 by Anton Zuiker of-course.] Which recently has been quite a few. I think Higher Ed and K-12 teachers could benefit from this. Props to Steve Hargadon for creating this resource. This site is really needed!

I just wanted to renew my call to everyone who lives and works in Chapel Hill to sign the Free Public WiFi in Chapel Hill, NC NOW! petition. As of today, June 19, 2006, we only have 42 signatures. We need many more before I can present this to the Chapel Hill Town Council. There has been lots of positive movement towards the creation of a municipal network in Chapel Hill.

BTW, if you don’t live in Chapel Hill you can sign the petition but the council would be most impressed by signatures from their constituents and people who live near and work in Chapel Hill. Lets continue speaking out! Thank you to everyone who has signed the petition already.

To: Chapel Hill Town Council

The time has come for the Town of Chapel Hill to build a free, community-owned, public municipal network. The network should have wireless access and provide an open, unfiltered, and unmonitored connection to the Internet available to ALL people. It must be maintained by a local nonprofit for the people of Chapel Hill. Not by a private business or corporation.

We request that the Chapel Hill Town Council act swiftly to bring this service to the people.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned

Earlier in the year Terry Smith of Society for Technical Communication - Carolina interviewed me for an article about unconferences. I recorded the audio of our conversation, blogged it, and podcast it. [MP3] The impetus for the story was PodcasterCon 2006. First the story was published in their local newsletter [PDF]. Now I learn from Terry that the STC TransAlpine chapter in Europe republished it in their newsletter. (Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Italy) Very cool to see this info about unconferences spreading around the world! Also the local STC Carolina chapter is going to hold their own unconference.

What do educators think about students using mobile internet devices for education? For example the Nokia 770.

Its an internet tablet with wifi built in, 800×480 touch screen, Linux based OS, bluetooth, Opera web browser, GTalk (VOIP), IM, email client, word processor, and I’ve even seen a Citrix client for it. Keyboard is not included but has been known to work via bluetooth. Retails for $359.95 USD.

I haven’t used this device but I thought it could be handy. Here are more URLs about it.
http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog
www.internettablettalk.com/

Please register/login and comment.

Check out Kirk’s new blogs The Cape Fear Mercury and Exile on Jones Street. It’ll be very interesting to see how they progress. Kirk is an experienced writing professional who ‘gets it’. Put him in the blog world and watch tha hell out!

via: Paul Jones and Ed Cone

After reading MediaGeek’s blog post about how his US Representative voted on COPE (Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act) I was inspired to make a list. I’m happy to say that my Representative David Price voted against it. So did Rep. Brad Miller who represents part of Wake County (Raleigh). It’ll be interesting in the future to create a graph on how they voted on all the bills set to protect and destroy Network Neutrality. COPE is one of the bad ones. Incase you were wondering voting ‘Yea’ for COPE is bad.

This controversial telecommunications legislation would permit phone and cable companies to operate Internet and other digital communications service as private networks, free of policy safeguards or governmental oversight.

via: Democracy Now!

North Carolina

Source for data above

Video Comments looks like a neat WordPress plugin. It allows you to comment on a videos content. Not just the whole video but on a specific point in the videos time line. I wonder if this will work with audio too?

Via: Podcasting News

I’ve been trying to eloquently communicate thoughts I’ve had about privacy. For a long time I realized it was futile to try and grab onto complete privacy it in a digital world. The older I get the more digital my life becomes. If you want to be a trusted participant you need to share info about yourself.

Chris Messina has put it into words the best I’ve seen so far.

… About how privacy is like sand between your fingers and that the more you try to hold on to it, the less you really can maintain control over. And subsequently, over time, more and more spills out into the hands of others, often those who you least expect or want to have information about you.

… a long time ago I decided that there is no privacy in anything digital (which is both a beautiful and a terrifying thing, depending on how much you know about technology). Knowing a bit myself, but not quite enough, I’ve decided to try and flood the network with as much information about myself as possible in the naive and desperate hope that by creating more positive and truthful information I can counter whatever lies may someday be advanced against what I’m really up to.

There is power in numbers. The more of us who control what the world knows about us by publishing it ourselves the harder it will be to distroy the truth. Hopefully this isn’t “naive and desperate”.

sidenote: incase your wondering how I came accross Chris’s blog, it was from a link on the BarCampRDU blog.

Oh yeah… here is my bio and ClaimID.

Bora Zivkovic, local blogging ledgend, has a new paying blogging gig over at ScienceBlogs.com. Congrats Bora! We’ll be reading.

Side note: Remeber that post I wrote called Harnessing the Work of Bloggers? Well it seems Bora the professional negotiated a good deal. One he was happy with. That’s what matters. Why havn’t I heard more stories like this amongst the old school newspapers?