Matt Bigelow – Digital Media Manager

In early June I watched the following video in which Clay Shirky, a professor and consultant who writes and speaks on all things Web-related, talks about two broad ways people use new media tools to contribute.

It is 13 minutes long, so if you don’t have the time to watch it, here’s my summary and takeaway.

Shirky uses two examples of participatory media: LOLcats and Ushahidi, to distinguish between two ways people use new media tools to collaborate. The first, of course, are the incredibly adorable kitten photos with captions, such as “i can haz cheezburger?” added on top:

That kind of participation is communal. It adds value (how much value is debatable) to a community of people who find LOLcats funny. And, arguably, no matter how seemingly inane it is, it beats the heck out of sitting on the couch and watching television because, hey, at least you’re doing something.

Ushahidi, on the other hand, is a free, downloadable open source platform that allows people to collaborate by contributing information that is then added to a map. It was created by a few developers in the violent aftermath of 2008 elections in Kenya, but has since been used more generally in crisis management situations all over the world, including the earthquake earlier this year in Haiti. This kind of participation, Shirky argues, is civic. It generates value that can be enjoyed by society as a whole, not just a small community of folks.

The West Nashville Flood Recovery Network

The reason I wanted to make mention of this now is because the above talk was a main drive that inspired me to pitch in help build a website for The West Nashville Flood Recovery Network here in my neighborhood in West Nashville.

I used a day off from work to build the site (and, admittedly, some extra time on nights and weekends), and I have since wrote up some more about it on our company blog here.

I tip my hat off to Shirky, because he poses a great question. How do we as a society collectively decide to spend more of our free time on collaborative efforts such as Ushahidi, or establishing networks for sustained flood recovery, rather than LOLcats?

Just wanted to give a shout out to everyone at Advocate Marketing & Printing for their mixer Thursday night: Marketing + Advertising + Design.

I never know what to expect as a young, Nashville nonnative when I attend any kind of networking event. This one landed quite well in the middle of the spectrum from overly stuffy to too laid back.

Plus, owner Matt Sims gave me and a friend a tour of his Indigo Press.

Thanks, Matt!

I have agreed to write a monthly article called “Nashville Pulse” for Digital Nashville, the free-to-join networking group dedicated to all things digital in the Music City. The idea is to survey what’s going on in Nashville every month in the digital world, and this month’s installment takes a look at how digital companies are pulling through the recession.

e-learning

This fall, more than 60 school districts across Tennessee, including Davidson-Nashville Metro, will receive $20,000 to serve home-bound students, supplant English Language Learner curriculum or even offer more Advanced Placement courses.

But few, if any, of those additional students will sit in traditional classrooms. Rather, they’ll be taking the courses online.

Read more at DigitalNashville.net.

I have agreed to write a monthly article called “Nashville Pulse” for Digital Nashville, the free-to-join networking group dedicated to all things digital in the Music City. The idea is to survey what’s going on in Nashville every month in the digital world, and this month’s installment takes a look at how digital companies are pulling through the recession.

Digital Game Development

At BarCamp Nashville 2009, at least 58 different presentations offered a veritable plethora of options for Nashville’s digerati to learn about, get involved with and participate in topics as varied as search engine optimization to producing original content for Microsoft’s Xbox platform. At least seven of those sessions, a significant minority in a town known more for honky tonks and healthcare, touched directly or indirectly on a topic for which Nashville garners little clout: gaming and game development.

“It’s picked up really in the last year or two,” says Caleb Garner, who since 1998 has been trying on and off to grow the Nashville game development community.

Gardner and fellow game developer Scott Southworth run Part12Studio, an independent game development company, as well as the Nashville game developer’s group.

Read more at DigitalNashville.net.

I have agreed to write a monthly article called “Nashville Pulse” for Digital Nashville, the free-to-join networking group dedicated to all things digital in the Music City. The idea is to survey what’s going on in Nashville every month in the digital world, and this month’s installment takes a look at how digital companies are pulling through the recession.

coworking

It’s taken over a year, a number of meetings, plenty of online chatter and the wrangling of three distinct initiatives, but it looks like Coworking may finally come to Nashville.

Led by Chuck Bryant and Jackson Miller, with support from the Nashville Technology Council, Coworking Nashville hopes to make an announcement soon regarding available space and a tiered membership plan for coworking aimed at Nashville’s budding technology and general geek audiences. Although Bryant offered a tour of the proposed space, the group is on the cusp of forming a formal LLC and signing a lease, and will wait to divulge details until after a formal announcement is made.

Coworking, for the unfamiliar, targets independent creative types who desire the sense of community and collaboration that comes from a shared work environment, without the bureaucracy of a corporate job.

Read more at DigitalNashville.net.

(This is an excerpt from a blog post I wrote over at ParthenonPub.com, my employer’s blog.)

Amid the financial turmoil plaguing the newspaper industry as a whole, accusations and general finger-pointing has abounded as industry players scramble to figure who’s to blame. You’ve heard the culprits:

* Greedy owners took on huge debt while banking on unrealistic future profits.
* The recession.
* The Internet.
* And then, of course, many have argued that newspaper journalists themselves were too slow to adapt to the digital landscape.

A recent report by Northwestern University’s Media Management Center, “Life Beyond Print: Newspaper Journalists’ digital appetite,” sheds a bit of light on this last one at least.

Read more…

This past weekend I attended Nashville’s Startup Weekend. If you’re unfamiliar with the Startup Weekend concept, here’s a primer. I attended the event last year as well, and my two experiences couldn’t have been more dissimilar. Here are my lessons learned:

1. Leadership Matters

Last year, I voted for teams based entirely upon how impressed I was with the person pitching the idea. I was new to Nashville, and therefore figured I may as well just align myself with someone who (at least in all appearances) knew what they were doing.

This year, I shifted gears a bit.

My criteria for ideas was simple: “Does this sound like a fun way to spend a weekend?”

Having taken those two different approaches, I can say that picking a team based on leadership makes an enormous difference.

If you want to spend a weekend working in a creative environment, go with the idea.

If you want to launch a business in a weekend, go with leadership.

(I want to add the caveat that we had an awesome team with some really interesting people. We just didn’t have any one person, myself included, who decided to step up and provide the leadership necessary to carry the idea through to execution.)

Continue reading »

UPDATE: Read the write up on “Tales From the Road” to hear how they plan to celebrate.

The Society of American Travel Writers announced its Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism awards over the weekend at its annual convention down in Guadalajara, Mexico. Southern Living magazine’s “Tales From the Road” blog garnered the Bronze in the travel blog category.

When I was a lowly “Web-tern” at SouthernLiving.com, I helped the editorial team get the blog off the ground, and even contributed some posts here and there.

Kudos to SL!

I have agreed to write a monthly article called “Nashville Pulse” for Digital Nashville, the free-to-join networking group dedicated to all things digital in the Music City. The idea is to survey what’s going on in Nashville every month in the digital world, and this month’s installment takes a look at how digital companies are pulling through the recession.

The recession may be winding down, but Nashville firms remain cautious…

Halfway through September, U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke claimed “the recession is very likely over at this point,” but cautioned that economic recovery would seem weak for a while.

A quick survey of area digital firms seems to confirm Bernanke’s caveat, as local companies don’t expect a boom in activity any time soon.

“People are looking for ways to save money. They’re really running at a high break-neck rate,” says Bruce McCully, owner and founder of Dynamic Edge, Inc., the IT and computer support firm with offices in both Nashville and Ann Arbor, Michigan. The firm’s products are selling well, but sales of its services and consultation have slowed down, McCully says.

Read more at DigitalNashville.net.

Just stumbled across the following video report on social media in the workplace, via Nathan Moore over at Anthology Creative, a local Web Dev firm here in Nashville. I wrote on this before here, and I couldn’t agree more with Nathan’s assessment.

Whatever you do in your free time is a reflection on you, right? You are you. Your actions on the weekend reflect on your 9-to-5 life and vis versa.

Video Link

I’ll reiterate what I said earlier. Two things must happen (and, indeed, are happening).

1) Employees will be more mindful of their personal behavior and how it reflects on them professionally (or at least they will when they know there’s a digital camera in the room).

2) Employers will become a little laxer when reviewing social networking profiles of employees and potential hires.

Your take? Agree? Disagree?