Center for Citizen Media

Walt and Kara at AllThingsD.com just posted a piece I wrote for them, “Waiting for the MacBook Air Pro” — which begins as follows:

Having seen Apple’s MacBook Air notebook computer up close, I’m as dazzled as everyone else who’s had a chance to examine this delicious piece of industrial design.

Dazzled doesn’t translate to handing over a credit card, however — at least not yet, and not solely because it’s almost never a good idea to buy Apple’s (or anyone else’s) hardware immediately after its initial release.

Even if serious flaws didn’t frequently surface in the company’s first batch of new models, I’d hold off on buying one of these despite my admiration for the genuine accomplishments in this one. Cost isn’t the issue; rather, there are just a few too many feature compromises for my work-style.

Nice. Consumer Reports and the Center for Media and Democracy have created Full Frontal Scrutiny

to focus public attention on the people and organizations who function in our society as hidden persuaders. You’ll find them at work posting to blogs, speaking before city councils, quoted in newspapers and published on the editorial page, even sponsoring presidential election debates. All this while pretending to represent the grassroots when in fact they are working against citizens’ best interests. We call these organizations front groups. One of the best ways to put their agendas in proper perspective is to expose their work. That’s what this website is for. We hope you’ll use it, tell your friends about it, even contribute to it.

This is an expansion in some ways of the great SourceWatch, and much needed. Join in please..

UPDATED

Demo is probably the longest lasting of the tech conferences, justly so. Each year a host of companies — 77 this time — demonstrate their products on a stage in front of several hundred technology folks including venture capitalists and other investors.

There are occasional triumphs. I was in the audience at this gathering in the mid-1990s when Palm Computing launched the first Palm Pilot. I wrote in my column that night that these folks had cracked the code for handhelds. A few years later, TiVo became one of those aha! moments.

I’ve also witnesses some spectacular flubs, where demos utterly failed, humiliating the companies’ presenters and pretty much killing their futures, at least in front of this crowd. I’ve had my own speaking messes, so I emphathize.

Will something leap to public conciousness this year? Unlikely. But the array of ideas I’ve already seen this morning, in just the first few products, is already fairly impressive.

Liquid Planner has promise, for example. It’s yet another web application, but this one is pretty intriguing for people who plan complex projects. It’s taking what the Basecamp folks do to a much more granular level, including Gantt charts that reflect uncertainty in scheduling.

Citiport, another web app (most of these are) is a bottom-up aggregation site, created mostly by users, of local favorites in cities people visit. People share information about the places they’ve lived and visited. (Note: I have a conflict here, as we’re encouraging people in Dopplr, a company I co-founded, to do this too, though that’s not the main purpose of Dopplr.) Like other things of this sort, Citiport’s entire business depends on achieving a critical mass of users.

LeapFrog, an interactive tool to help kids learn to read, looks dynamite. It’s getting some buzz in the room.

I was interested in SkyFire, a new mobile web browser, until I discovered it only works on Windows Mobile handhelds. The company says it’s going to support Symbian (good for my Nokia N95), but it’s not remotely competitive with, say, Opera Mini, which runs pretty much everywhere. SkyFire is about mobile multimedia more than anything else, as far as I can tell. And it’s pretty good at that. But this is not my primary purpose in using a mobile, and the comparisons the demonstrators are making with other phones are therefore not quite fair. Interesting app, though…

Joggle, from a company called Fabrik, shows you your own data from a variety of places in a central view. it aggregates from local and remote sources — “access to all your stuff,” as a demonstrator explains. This is on the track of something valuable.

SpeakLike does almost real-time chat translation, though not always instantly, with what’s described as a hybrid of automation and human translators. The idea is fascinating, but there are a lot of potential gotchas. This service will need plenty of disclaimers, but there’s great potential.

The first mini-flop of the day: A demo of noise-cancelling system from Step Labs, which didn’t work well enough to make me want it — yet. But there’s some interesting work going on in that company, and I’ll keep an eye on what they do in the future.

I’m getting too much email about NotchUp already. This is company that claims to pay people for interviewing for a new job. You set an interview price. The security problems are obvious. What if your current company finds you here? You can block one domain, but if your company’s recruiters only use their own email domains they’re idiots, and no doubt they’re also using third-party folks to scan for employees.

• (Rex Hammock Twitters with a three-year-old post: The reason you’ve heard of podcasting is because no one first “demo’d” it at a conference and no corporate marketers were involved.)

New portal: Education.com — for parents to help figure out the education system and get resources for their kids. “All in one place” seems to be the mantra.

Tokitumi’s demo had problems. It’s an interesting PBX-like application (Windows only, stupidly) for small businesses

Video conferencing is getting serious attention here. Avistar Conference does multi-person Windows video almost as well as iChatAV on the Mac, with bandwidth management features to boot, according to the company.

Movial’s Communicator is fascinating, a mobile phone app, all about presence, that I’m going to try.

Ribbit? A web voice system that is “an extention of my mobile phone” — looks like it does nice organizing of calls. It syndicates itself to other sites as an applet, and imports what others are doing. Intriguing…this one’s getting a lot of buzz, in part because it has the potential to inspire an ecosystem around it. Looking forward to trying it out when I get access to the beta.

LiquidTalk, not to be confused with LiquidPlanner, has a number of features, but I’m not exactly sure what it can do for me. (Needs better elevator pitch…) It’s aimed at enterprises, that much I get; the CEO keeps talking about “Sam the sales guy” as the prototypical user…

Zodiac Interactive introduces Zodigo — downloadble mobile content. Podcasts, videos, tickets, coupons, etc. Uh oh, “fantastic merchandizing experience” — repeated twice now — the coupon feature is a bit Minorty-Reportish. Well, I get the business model, anyway. The company has an API, like several others, aiming to build an ecosystem.

Voyant is about money: web-based financial planning. The timeline is cute, and maybe even useful. Good graphics show shortfalls coming up, smart. Looks sophisticated, with simulations that show what-ifs in dramatic ways. Data security will be a big issue for these folks.

Aha, a really useful mobile app for wine drinkers: Review2Buy‘s text messaging about the wine you’re thinking of buying. It’s not just wine, but a variety of products. Includes price comparisons, locally and on the web. If they could marry this to the bar-code reader that comes with some new phones, they’d really be onto something.

Aceisis is “point of care” health-care software, aiming to replace pens and paper in medical care. It’s a web app with desktop functionality (Mac and Windows). Very smart demo of filling out a form, with templates and tablet functionality. Customizable, too, because the user can create the forms on the fly. This one could be a winner. Will they get doctors and medical groups to use it? The learning and using curve could be a barrier. Ugh, they say “Health 2.0” — please…

blist is not aimed at programmers, but is a database “for the rest of us.” Unlike Filemaker? This one’s a web app, looks a bit like a spreadsheet with visual aids. You can store lists, photos and a variety of other information (and kinds of information) in various cells. Looks quite adaptable. There’s a single-record view, of course, and planning calendar. Visual query interface, drag/drop values into new window. Good potential. Unfortunate name, though.

CellSpin is about sharing content from your mobile phone to a variety of sites including Flickr, Facebook, YouTube and even eBay. It doesn’t support enough popular phones and operating systems, however. I’m trying ShoZu, in the same vein, but that app is ruining the performance of my Nokia, so I’m about to uninstall it. I do need something like this, but still haven’t found anything that works right.

FlyPaper, a company based in Phoenix, lets you do fairly sophisticated Flash presentations (and video files, etc.) using a downloadable (Windows only, sigh) app. There are models — designed templates — that the users can apply to their own interactive projects without knowing Flash programming. Some interesting possibilities here, but this one needs a Mac version or at least a web-based version.

GoldMail puts links to multimedia into emails to “bring messages to life.” I don’t want more multimedia attached to my mail, do you? (Part of the demo is unfortunate — someone’s young daughter letting her father know that she just lost her first tooth. And dad’s not home for that? Uh, oh…) But as an app for sharing slide shows with audio online, this could be quite useful in a media production sense.

Sprout Builder is about building Flash content — web-based, yay — create multimedia and interactive media, the best widget-builder I’ve seen so far. Rich development tools, working inside Firefox, include a variety of components such as RSS readers and other things. There’s a mashup tool, too. The code is embeddable in a variety of online sites, with tracking tools showing views — “portable living content” with many potential uses. Prediction: Sprout will be one of the big hits here.

Ooh, I like the idea behind the Green Plug universal power adapter. A chip in a power supply will tell it how much juice to give an individual device, and then shut down the power supply to a device that’s fully charged. Here’s their problem: Manufacturers deliberately sell individual power supplies, because the make lots of money on them from their customers. They have every incentive to keep screwing us and not cooperating with initiatives like Green Plug. Increasingly I look for devices I can charge from USB ports, period.

Celsias aims to solve global warming, “one project at a time.” The project-builder uses social media and technology to help people create their own green projects, and is an aggregator of those initiatives. The community features look promising. Think of a content-management and social-networking platform with the environment in mind, but obviously if this works it has wider application.

A session with two university professors who have created companies based on their research (with the help of the Kauffman Foundation (see below), is about connecting academia to the business world. I am obviously interested in this. More in a separate post later…

Wow, LiveScribe combines pen computing and paper and audio and a lot more. Just look at the site to see what’s what. Big applause for this one…

Loic LeMeur is showing Seesmic (disclosure: I’m an early investor). Good job.

Moli is designed to let you manage multiple online identities and profiles. Settings are public, private or hidden (and somewhat granular). At first, it sounds great. But wait. Are we supposed to upload our lives into Moli — why should we trust this site above all others? I can’t see why we should. In the end, this is more of a marketing tool than something end users will need. Truly portable data and what Doc Searls calls vendor relationship management strike me as vastly better approach.

iVideoSongs is a site aimed at teaching fans how famous artists play their songs. Great idea and implementation. Still, why do people want to totally mimic what others have done? The entire idea of learning a song is to do it your way, isn’t it? Ringer alert: They have John Oates doing a demo.

Note: The Kauffman Foundation, co-funder of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s journalism school (my new gig), is a major sponsor of Demo this year. This is an interesting branching-out for an organization like Kauffman.)

Adrian Holovaty and his team at EveryBlock (subtitle: “A News Feed for Your Block”) have launched in Chicago, New York and San Francisco. This is a solid start to a project that has enormous potential.

Congrats to all…

There are plenty of reasons to wonder about citizen media’s business model. One, which I’ve talked about many times here and elsewhere, is the tendency of site owners to rely on free labor. The method goes roughly this way: “You do all the work and we’ll take all the money, thank you very much.”

People do things for many reasons, but it’s always about getting something of value back. The value may be a psychic reward of doing something good for someone else. It may be ego. It may be money, or the ability to save money. In community-driven websites it may be contributing a tiny bit of effort to something that gives the overall community, and thereby individuals, great value. Usually it’s a combination.

But when the big money starts to flow to a few who are leveraging the work of the many, a disconnect emerges. And that’s why I’m so bothered by part of an announcement of some interesting new features that will give users or reddit, a news-recommendation site owned by the parent company of Wired magazine, new ways to help each other understand the news. reddit is refining the process in a smart way, by dividing the recommendation system in ways — assuming it works — to make it better and, perhaps, more reliable.

There’s no sense of whether the “private” and “restricted” section of the site, in which the Chosen will presumably elevate the content because they are doing things better, will have any stake in the outcome beyond being given more responsibility. I hope so, and we’ll know more when the features roll out more widely.

What really bugs me most in the reddit blog posting about the changes is the following:

Right now we really only have English and German, but if you would be generous enough to translate reddit into another language, please email feedback@reddit to offer your support.

As usual, if you’re interested in working on reddit, please email jobs@reddit and describe what a badass programmer you are.

Read it again. You are invited to translate the site into another language, because you are such a generous person. If you are a badass programmer, however, you are invited to apply for a job and make some actual money.

I like reddit a lot, and think it’s doing some terrific work with community-driven news. But this request goes beyond the pale.

Conde Nast, a privately held empire that owns some of the most profitable magazines on the planet, paid a bundle for this site. It can afford to pay for translations.

If you are generous enough to do this kind of work for free, please consider doing instead it for a nonprofit site of some sort. Please don’t be giving away your time to mega-wealthy media barons.

Look at the covers of Time Magazine’s current edition:

The rest of the planet gets a pointer to a thoughtful series of articles about globalization and mega-cities that have changed with the social and economic times.

Americans get romance. (To be fair, the article is quite good.)

Because, apparently, we are too shallow to buy magazines pitching serious journalism about global issues. Sheesh…

I’m on my way to the DLD Conference — it stands for Digital Life, Design — in Munich. The gathering is held each year by the folks at Hubert Burda Media, one of the most forward-looking media companies on the planet.

The conference is always fascinating, and this one has the look of an especially mind-bending couple of days.

The New York Sun, often an entertaining read, published a commentary by one Conrad Black, identifying him in the tag line in this way:

Lord Black is the author of “Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full” and “Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom.”

True, I guess, but of course it’s missing the most salient element of the man’s recent biography — his criminal conviction for looting the media company he controlled.

Black is not as famous as he’d probably like to be (though for other acts). So the Sun’s omission looks like an effort to help rehabilitate its ideological friend who is also a crook. We already knew Black is a sleaze; now we know something more about the Sun.

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall reports that he’s been “Banned at The DoJ” — taken off the email distribution list for press releases and the like. This has to be one of the more lame governmental PR decisions of the recent past.

TPM and its sister websites did spectacular work last year in uncovering and pushing ahead the story of the political firings of U.S. attorneys (and government sliming of those prosecutors who dared ask why they were being fired), which is the obvious reason the Justice Department has shunned them. The department PR person observes in an email to TPM that the releases are otherwise available:

We do however have all our press releases on our website and update them the minute they are released so I would suggest looking there. You can also always call us with press inquiries.

But the message is plain — and petty.

As you might expect, the department doesn’t make its releases available with an RSS feed. That would be, well, up to date.

So here’s a suggestion for a non-shunned journalist covering the Justice Department. Kindly set up an automatic relay in your email to forward all department press releases to Marshall and his team.

And let your department contacts know how idiotic the public-affairs people — under orders from their bosses? — are being.

Glenn Greenwald accurately explains the grotesque result of laws that seek to curb that amorphous problem of “hate speech” — a concept that turns free speech on its head. And unlike many of his colleagues on the political left, Greenwald explains why he’s defending people whose speech frequently deserves contempt:

People like Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant are some of the most pernicious commentators around. But equally pernicious, at least, are those who advocate laws that would proscribe and punish political expression, and those who exploit those laws to try use the power of the State to impose penalties on those expressing “offensive” or “insulting” or “wrong” political ideas. The mere existence of the “investigation,” interrogation, and proceeding itself is a grotesque affront to every basic liberty.

How many times can we say this? If you care about your own free speech rights, you must defend the rights of people whose speech makes your blood boil.