Kathlyn Clore

Despite the fact that we are well under 65 years old, my boyfriend and I are subscription people.

Delivery people visit us almost daily, materializing out of Monterey Bay to bring us everything from the Wall Street Journal to Yoga Journal. There’s also Men’s Health, Sierra Club, New Yorker, Vanity Fair and AAA magazines (come to think of it, I think our magazines are cooler than we are!)

They also bring us coffee.

Yep: We subscribe to coffee. (If Amazon should ever start selling beer, we would never leave the house!)

Three different kinds of espresso, no less:

First, there’s Lavazza Caffe Espresso Ground Coffee. In our house, its name is the “jar one” or sometimes “the black one”. It’s fab for cappuccino, which I somehow manage to make every morning before even waking up. I don’t know how it happens, but one moment I’m sleeping and the next moment I’m standing in front of the coffee machine. Sometimes I suspect Dave is somehow responsible for this, but I’m never sure.

Next there’s Lavazza Qualita Rossa. In our house, it’s known as “the red one” (which although I don’t speak Italian, I think is a fairly accurate name!) Its job it to be our after-dinner espresso. (Seriously, how else could we stay awake to watch all those Criminal Intent marathons? duh).

Finally, we have added Lavazza Crema e Gusto, a.k.a “the blue one”. Its job is to kick our butt should the other coffees not be enough to get us through the afternoon.

I should note here that we also enjoy Illy coffee from time to time. We’ve also tried Cafe Bustelo. So don’t think we’re brand-focus snobs (only pro-Italy, anti-drip snobs. Sorry Folgers, but ICK).

(To be fair, Bustelo is apparently the hippest espresso north of the equator and is available on subscription. But Dave prefers Italian over Mexican coffee. So as Heidi Klum’s tacky tacky producers would say, Bustelo got “Auf’d”!)

One of my favorite bloggers (who I sometimes comment to but never e-mail responses to (sorry Vrabel! It’s not you, it’s me and my horrible horrible lack of focus)) recently wrote an entire blog post just to made me feel a lot about better about all these subscriptions:

“a study…published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a title that it’s very difficult to not make a childish joke about, involved two large studies that followed professionals for over two decades. And it found that people who drank at least five to seven cups of coffee a week — around here we call that “the crossword puzzle,” but whatever — had a significantly lower risk of dying from anything compared to those inexplicable freakshows who didn’t drink any at all. Those who drink four to five cups a day had even better protection, although it’s difficult to congratulate them on it, because they’re in the bathroom all the time.”

In other coffee-related fabulousness, are you familiar with Lavazza’s super cool yearly calendar? It’s so exclusive and hip that it seems impossible to buy anywhere on the entire Internet.

Tags: coffee, newspapers, subscriptions

Cash-strapped editor seeks easy creative collaboration online:

Me: Law-abiding journalist who takes blurry photos. Looking for illustrative photograph to run alongside article or blog post. Editor at a not-for-profit by day, sometimes producing video for established media brands.

You: A talented photographer who reads Lawrence Lessig on the weekends. Have posted your telling, creative photograph on Flickr. Like to put your work under Creative Commons licensing. Mainly looking for Attribution-Noncommercial, but Attribution-Share Alike is OK.

Our collaboration will hopefully go viral.

My attribution gets your picture, free and clear.

What is Creative Commons?
Creative Commons licences are an evolution in copyright.

Copyright law has so far developed mainly within nation-states; copyright law in the UK developed differently than copyright law in Italy or Germany.

The Internet enables more collaboration between people and businesses in these countries, though, necessitating a harmonized way to share.

Creative Commons licences allow creators of original works – be they photographs, articles or videos – to easily label their works with copyright permissions.

There are six versions of the licences, ranging from restrictive “Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives” permissions to an “Attribution” licence that allows the work to be used for commercial and not-for-profit work as long as its attributed.

Permission granted
Joi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons, the not-for-profit that helps write and distribute the licences wrote:

“Imagine an amateur filmmaker creating content to upload to their website as they try to clear the rights of music that they’ve gathered from across the Internet.

Or imagine someone who wants to give a television broadcaster the right to use, with attribution, a photograph that they had posted on their blog.

In most cases, the legal fees would exceed the value of the transaction and the sharing would fail, either because the parties would ignore the law, or opt not to share because the legal cost of doing so was prohibitive.”

Creative Commons allow for a reversal of permission paradigms.

Editors or filmmakers previously had to find and ask authors or studios for legal permission to use a particular original work.

Creative Commons allows authors and studios to label their original work with legal permissions. Anyone who sees the work is then aware of how they may or may not legally use the work. They don’t have to ask permission.

What’s happening in Europe?
Creative Commons licences have been written for 25 of the 27 member states of the European Union. Legal experts in each country have written the licences to comply with the basis of local legal codes.

Proliferation of Creative Commons seems to be in line with current thinking in Brussels. Fostering a climate that enables Internet users to easily share their creative work is a priority within the EU.

In late January, 2010, the COMMUNIA Thematic Network On The Digital Public Domain, co-funded by the Commission to generate policy guidelines related to open access, released a dossier called The Public Domain Manifesto.

Its first principle states, “The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception.”

The Manifesto is available in 11 languages; a Facebook group dedicated to it has about 1,300 fans.
D2#07 Europe, The Borderless State? - Panel WCS 2009

Original signatories to the manifesto include Knowledgeland, a Dutch thinktank working toward a knowledge-based economy; iCommons, a UK charity promoting open-source software; and Digitale Allmend, a Swiss association dedicated to securing public access to digital assets. Other original signatories include like-minded Italian, Slovinian, Croatian, Brazillian and American groups.

The COMMUNIA is mainly concerned with open access and making analogue versions of cultural heritage available to the public in digital form. The Commission-funded digital museum project, Europeana, is a reflection of this effort.

The COMMUNIA defines open access as:

“a movement away from an ‘all rights reserved’ approach, by which rightsholders reserve every single use possible, towards a “some rights reserved” approach, by which rightsholders voluntarily renounce to some of the exclusive rights granted by copyright law.”

Future of EU copyright law
Addressing the future of copyright law online in Europe was from 2006-2010 the job of commissioner Viviane Reading, who for the second Barroso Commission has shifted to work on another portfolio.

Before Reading took this role in the second Barroso Commission, she
spoke in favour of reforming European copyright law to better enable protection of orphan works as well as the digitalisation of cultural heritage.

Dutchwoman Neelie Kroes now presides over the task of online copyrights. Like Reading, Kroes has said that allowing for the development of a single market for online content is the best way to fight Internet piracy. (Other commissioners may disagree with this approach.)

Kroes, who worked on international competition issues during the first Barroso Commission, is most famous for imposing fines on Microsoft related to an antitrust case with the American software maker.

Kroes’ stated priorities in her new job include creation of a single clearinghouse for music rights in the EU.

She could be supportive of initiatives like Creative Commons, according to Reuters reporting from 21 January, 2010:

“Kroes, however, has shown little appetite for extending crackdowns on piracy — France, for example, has legislated to disconnect consumers from the Internet for illegal downloading — before a properly functioning market is in place.

‘Copyright is important for economy and culture, people deserve its protection, but no proper action is possible while there is no single market,’ she told the European Parliament last week in a final “interview” for the Digital Agenda post.”

So what?
Whether you’re working on a non-profit media site like this one, a private media startup, a government or a blog, Creative Commons makes it possible for you to share or use writings, photography or videos.

Even established newspapers, like La Stampa in Italy, are utilising Creative Commons.

In January, 2009, Al Jazeera began hosting a repository of Creative Commons-licensed footage from Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza.

With seven reporters based in Gaza, Al Jazeera had access to exclusive footage while the Israeli Defence Forces would not allow more journalists into Gaza. Al Jazeera could have charged other broadcastors by the second for its exclusive content.

Moeed Ahmad, the head of new media for Al Jazeera, said his company benefitted from incoming links from sites like Wikipedia, which used still images from Al Jazeera videos.

In the summer of 2009, Al Jazeera opened its blog section for re-use with a Creative Commons license.

What for photographers?
Many photojournalists worry that the proliferation of free photography will lead to the devolution of photojournalism as a profession.

Others have used Creative Commons to search for new ways to profit from photography.

In autumn, 2009, professional photographer Jonathan Worth circulated Creative Commons licensed photographs of science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. The images were licensed for commercial and non-commercial use.

Alongside these, Worth began selling series of limited-edition prints of his work alongside Doctorow’s book, For the Win. He wanted to see if the free photos generated publicity for the paid-for versions of his work.

They did, and Worth made 760 GBP, or 867 euro. He also earned many of what he calls perceivable non-material benefits.

A Foto8 blogger wrote about the experiment,

“What’s at stake here is the possibility of identifying practices that enable community-building and audience-building on the fly, around an idea, something we’re seeing more and more of.”

Tags: Al Jazeera, collaboration, copyright, Creative Commons, European Comission, Italy, Joi Ito, Neelie Kroes, Netherlands, photography, photojournalism, resource, Switzerland, video, Vivianne Reading

Think legacy media brands are not reinventing and repackaging themselves?

Check out some video and print ads I’ve found online promoting news products from Russia Today to O Globo (Brazil) and TV3 (Estonia).

A slick Simpsons parody advertises Estonian news (Thanks for the tip, RFE). I was told via Twitter that the ad was very believable in its portrayal of Estonian life (kidding!).

In Belgium, this quirky ad showcases an artist frying a steak to promote cobra.be, a culture site with content from Belgium’s state broadcaster. The theme in this campaign seems to be that whenever someone famous in Belgium - like actress Marie Vinck - Cobra.be will be there to cover it.

These nice videos (with subtitles, helpfully!) come from Brazil, where they promote O Globo. It is the biggest newspaper in Brazil.

This one is my favorite. I love the action of the “mouse” picking up trash or helping students. The ad shows the paper as a partner for motivated citizens.

This one promotes O Globo as being more than “just the paper” in a newspaper

This cheeky ad comes from France, where it advertises Le Monde Magazine. The tagline is “Bring the world into focus.” It seems to be a big hit online; the two YouTube versions of it that I’ve found each have more than 50,000 views.

Finally for now, these ads promoting the international TV channel Russia Today are causing a stir in the United Kingdom. The theme here is promoting Russia Today as a channel whose journalists ask tough questions and challenge commonly held beliefs.

Tags: ads, advertising, Brazil, Estonia, O Globo, Russia Today, Simpsons, The Guardian, UK, video, viral video

He hung out with prostitutes, madams, fishermen, immigrants, field workers and hitch-hikers. Then he wrote their stories.

The city in California where he was born once burned his books.

He was a war correspondent in Europe who toured Russia on his own after the Second World War. He wanted to see what life under communism really looked like. Some Americans wondered if he was a communist.

He had three wives.

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

See, John Steinbeck is way cooler than you thought during that high school English class in which you were forced to read Of Mice and Men (or worse, the never-ending saga Grapes of Wrath).

I wrote this article detailing a weekend itinerary for exploring where Steinbeck grew up and drew inspiration for his life’s work.

Once you spend a weekend roving around his old haunts in Monterey County, its clear why Steinbeck painted in such stunning language both the landscape where he lived and the struggles of the tough immigrants who worked - and tried to earn a decent living - in the Salinas Valley. Both are tremendously inspirational.

What’s unique about the Salinas Valley is that its beauty - and its immigrant workforce - are still intact.

20080930_me_19

Tags: books, freelance, John Steinbeck, Salinas

They may appear just another group of anonymous geeks banging away behind laptops in your local café. But online — and in Brussels — the bloggers who write about the European Union are starting to be noticed.

“There is some kind of European blogosphere evolving, at least for some issues,” prominent EU blogger Julien Frisch wrote in one of his first posts of 2010.

“And that if (influential) national blogs take up European questions, they can become more important than one might initially expect.”

The remark came at the end of a post describing information flow within the community of bloggers concerned with the daily politics of the European Union.

One of the best places to delve into this community is Bloggingportal.eu, which promotes the most interesting posts of the day from among more than 500 EU blogs. Frisch’s site is among them.

The team of 25 volunteer editors at Bloggingportal.eu reads hundreds of posts every day. They link to the most interesting of the bunch on their front page.

“We want to reach people that do not necessarily read blogs and we want to show that there is a quality debate going on when it comes to the EU and European debates,” said Andreas Müllerleile, one of the site’s founders. He also blogs on EU issues at Kosmopolitio.

“The long-term goal is to offer a selection of the best blog posts in as many EU languages as possible.”

Bloggingportal.eu turned a year old in January, 2010. The number of blogs it aggregates and monitors has doubled since its launch.

“It somehow shows that we are growing although some blogs stopped posting regularly and it is difficult to filter them out,” Müllerleile said. “However, compared with national political blogopsheres the number is still tiny and I think we still have not reached a critical number of people who write regularly on EU/European affairs.”

Bloggingportal.eu launched on 25 January, 2009, the result of follow-up efforts to a pair of 2007 blog posts about the development of an EU blogosphere. In these, EU blogger Jon Worth attempted to categorise and characterise prominent EU blogs.

“The sheer number of links below means I never quite know where to start for good EU analysis on blogs – maybe time for some better aggregation somewhere?,” he wrote.

So began Bloggingportal.eu. It started as a collaboration between Worth, Müllerleile, and Norwegian media professional Bente Kalsnes. Stefan Happer donated programming expertise and the site initially aggregated about 275 blogs.

“We do not have any funding so we have been working on it in our free time which has been a challenge. We are still beta and we are trying to implement new features. And we are always looking for new people who want to get involved,” Müllerleile said.

The community of people who are interested in closely following the political machinery of the EU may be small, with many a student among the bunch.

But most EU bloggers are focused on moving beyond surface-level EU stories that appear in traditional national newspapers. Many of these stories contain inaccurate information, Müllerleile said. The EU blogosophere is a realm in which to suss and discuss errors made in mainstream press.

To those Europeans surfing happily outside the existing EU blogosphere, though, examining and debating the inner workings of the European Union is a fantastically dry proposition.

Curation – employing editors handpick the most noteworthy posts – is an attempt to make the EU blogosphere more accessible, personal and relevant.

“So many Europeans feel disconnected from European issues and bogged down by the complexity of the institution itself. Having an editor create a path through the information can be a definite bonus for those not already familiar with the topic,” said Ruth Spencer, an editor at Th!nk About It, a European blogging platform supported by the EJC.

This idea is captured in the logo of Bloggingportal; here the stars of the European Union flag dance within what could appear to be a drop of water.

The drop represents the “pure essence” squeezed out of the EU blogosphere, Müllerleile said.

Will it catch on?

This may depend on the ability of writers, translators (machine or human) and readers to break through language barriers.

At the moment, national communities in Europe do not interact much with one another online, a report by French research agency Linkfluence concluded in autumn, 2009. Most interactions and conversations happen within the respective national communities, the report said.

Conversations about how to best overcome this challenge are happening around the EU blogosphere. Models like Café Babel, which pays translators, and Global Voices, which uses volunteer translators, are often cited.

“Bloggingportal isn’t a content creator but an aggregator,” said Spencer, the Th!nk About It editor. “The best they can do is take as much as possible from all the EU languages.”

Müllerleile said Bloggingportal.eu initially tried translating posts using automatic machine translation, but were unsatisfied with the results.

“We are thinking of other solutions but nothing has emerged just yet,” he said.

It’s indeed a good challenge for Bloggingportal’s future years.

Tags: aggregation, blogging, Brussels, entrepreneurship, EU, Europe, identity, RSS

(This was originally published in my local newspaper, to which I contribute occasionally. It’s here.)

An autumn moon rises over the pink sunset on Monterey Bay as Kathleen Tarp calls out to the day’s final visitors at the Monterey Peninsula Art Foundation Gallery. Constantly smiling, she chats up a middle-aged couple visiting from Ohio. On a wooden easel, a trumpeter wearing a purple beret plays colorful jazz against a previous Pacific coast sunset Tarp captured in vivid strokes of oil paint.

Tarp is one of 31 local artists who display and sell their work in the waterfront gallery at 425 Cannery Row.

“Artists and Cannery Row go together like Coke and pizza. We have a history of artists being here on the Row,” said Dick Crispo, the notable local artist who helped start the Monterey Peninsula Art Foundation at a 1981 meeting in his living room.

Crispo looks on from a second-story window as Tarp locks up and descends into the night. His home, studio and personal gallery is next door to the collective’s gallery, which was his boyhood home.

“People come here looking for artists because they associate artists and writers with Cannery Row,” Crispo said.

Cannery Row was made famous in John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel of the same name. Even then, Steinbeck’s first-chapter descriptio of Monterey’s sardine-canning district reads like an elegy, as though he sensed the rowdy character of the place would disappear.

“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light . . . a nostalgia, a dream,” he wrote.

Fish are no longer caught or canned here as they were then, when the smokestacks and corrugated metal of sardine canneries dominated the waterfront.

But the flavor of the Row as Steinbeck depicted it lives on in the vibrant characters making their living on this meandering street.

Among them are local businessmen braving the frigid business climate. There’s the local firefighter who opened a frozen yogurt shop in July. In the same month, a pair of brothers from Utah began selling gourmet sardines, bringing the oily fish back to the Row for the first time in 50 years. A family of Nepalese immigrants opened an import shop in September and a family of Thai-Americans began filling a tiny shop with startlingly uniform hand-knit hats in October.

The newcomers join the entrenched businesses that have thrived in the area for decades, including the Sardine Factory, the Whaling Station, the Monterey Plaza Hotel & Spa, and the kitsch shops in the Bear Flag Building. The Intercontinental recently opened a waterfront resort known as The Clement. Mix in the franchise presence - Bubba Gump’s, El Torito, the Chart House and the Holiday Inn - and Cannary Row is a premier tourist destination.

But if there is a keystone of Cannery Row, a central focus to ensure enough business to ensure sales of the “catch of the day” remain high enough to pay the dishwasher, its the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

The Aquarium, which marked its 25th anniversary on October 25, 2009, is today the main draw for visitors to Cannery Row. Aquarium officials estimate that in 2009 about 1.9 million visitors will enter and be inspired by the magical worlds of live kep forests, sea-horses, sea otters and jellyfish.

AGE OF AQUARIUM

“It really anchors one end of Cannery Row,” said Mimi Hahn, the aquarium’s director of marketing. “And in our surveys we see that people find our exhibits actually inspiring. … When you come to the aquarium, you’re seeing what’s right under the water.”

Nearly all the sea life available to watch or touch in the aquarium connects to the ecosystem of Monterey Bay itself. Some staff like to say a visit to the aquarium is akin to strolling through the underwater neighborhoods of Monterey, Hahn said.

In addition to enchanting exhibits like The Secret Life of Seahorses, a local ecological focus is part of how the aquarium creates a unique sense of place for its millions of visitors.

In 2006, aquarium staff began partnering with local restaurants to cultivate awareness in Cannery Row kitchens about sustainable seafood eating habits. Twenty-four restaurants participate in the free partnership, in which they are asked not to serve seafood that is on the aquarium’s “red list.” The partnership seeks to helps tourists and locals quickly implement consumer knowledge they glean at the aquarium.

“People who go to the aquarium are generally environmentally aware and they choose restaurants that are similarly motivated,” said Sheila Bowman, senior manager of outreach and education for the Seafood Watch program.

Many are also interested in cutting back on paper. In January, the program unveiled a free iPhone application version of its Seafood Watch card. The application displays three categories of seafood supper options: Green for best choice, yellow for good alternatives and red for seafood to avoid at the table.

“We like the overall idea that people could carry around their iphone and have better and more current information than someone who has a piece of paper,” Bowman said. “That way you don’t just read the list on paper. You can click through the list and read why you should be eating wild alaskan salmon.”

The app has been downloaded about 200,000 times.

Appropriately, sardines - the bread and butter of businessmen on the Row during the early 1900s - are on its list of best choices for seafood purchases on the West Coast. This is good news for Daren

Warnick, who opened the Cannery Row Sardine Company in July.

THEY’RE BACK: DOWN TO BUSINESS

“This area is missing sardines,” Warnick said. “I was walking to my car one day and jut thought, ‘Hey, sardines would work.’ With the history and tourism here, it just seemed to fit.”

Tucked next to the Fish Hopper restaurant, Warnick’s shop in July began selling boneless, skinless sardines for about $7 a can, in addition to other canned seafood. With his kitschy label on T-shirts and the sardines receiving good reviews among foodies, business is good, Warnick said. Whole Foods will also soon begin stocking Warnick’s sardines, which are fished from as far north as Washington.

Cannery Row Sardine Company is one of a spate of new businesses on Monterey with plans to become mainstays for locals and tourists. Another good bet is Myo, a self-serve frozen yogurt shop at 685 Cannery Row.

Stuart Roth, an outgoing Monterey native and career firefighter with the Monterey Fire Department, opened Myo in July with longtime buddy Paige Meyer and two additional business partners. The Row previously had no frozen yogurt shops.

Myo, for Make It Yourself, is sparklingly clean and blindingly colorful. It offers constantly changing flavors and types of frozen yogurt as well as toppings ranging from fruity pebbles to fresh fruit from Del Monte Produce.

“Cannery Row is just a magnificent spot,” he said. “It’s got everything, so much to offer. It’s a neat area, and for locals I think it is underutilized.”

Over at the Little Hat Shop, at 645 Cannery Row, Nicole Chalardpru and her family of Thai-Americans are knitting up hats in just about every color, texture and style imaginable.

Many are sized and themed for children, including a series of fruit-themed hats. Each is made by hand.

“You can’t just go anywhere and find these,” Chlardpru said. “It’s a unique product. We have fun making them. Once you start doing it, you just can’t stop.”

ARTISTS ABOUND

“I came here in 1974 for the Monterey Jazz Festival, and I thought, ‘This is where I want to get old,’” said Kathleen Tarp, a singer who has been painting for about seven years. “So I travelled all around the country doing the music thing and then came back here in 1999.”

Tarp is one of 31 artists who volunteer at the gallery one day a month so the collective can save on commission fees. Small oil, water color and mixed media prints sell for as little as $35; larger works cost more.

Tarp welcomes customers heartily, freely punctuating her remarks with an emphatic, “Right on!” She’s quick to get on the phone to other artists when customers have questions or requests for companion paintings. There is no trace of the snooty atmosphere often associated with art galleries.

“We’re artists, we don’t have any money either,” Tarp exclaims. “They’re always checking you out see if you have any money. And you know those salespeople don’t have a dime either!”

Just as much as smelly sardines, artists have always been a part of Cannery Row. In the late 60s, Crispo and other artists worked in the former Hovden Cannery, which they could rent collectively for $150 a month as long as they agreed not to damage any of the knotty pine or copper inside the former cannery.

That space is now the main entryway to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, constructed in the late 1970s with a $55 million gift from David and Lucile Packard.

Tags: California, travel

I am in the middle of a tedious editing project.

Many documents have been poured over. Much has been learned - by me. Some phrases have been changed. Also, by me.

Hopefully, both products - me and the documents - have been improved.

A problem I’ve been mulling:

New terminology reflects a gradual shift in publicly accepted thinking and emerging realities. As Innovation Journalism playboy David Nordfors wrote in 2007, innovation requires new words (iPhone, smart phone, Twitter) and a public that can use those words in conversation.

Simultaneously, as we integrate new words the existing realities move toward becoming “old” and the terms we use to describe the existing reality become stale.

This is a problem for editors, who have to decide what phrases are passe, which represent commonly accepted vernacular, and what terms represent still-fringe nomenclature.

At the moment, it still seems acceptable for media workers and academics to use the terms:

New Media
Cross-Media
Cross-platform
Hybrid media
Online media
Internet media
Online Television

Which of these these terms fair and accurate? A bit passe, some of them, I have begun to think.

Here I begin to feel like a climate change scientist: Can I describe a particular time frame in which these terms will go bad? If so, how? (With a degree in linguistics?)

New media doesn’t particularly seem that new anymore; the term is particularly confounding because “old media” isn’t an apt characterization of anything, really. To deem “old media” and “print media” synonymous would be a cheat, inept.

I do like the phrase “legacy media brands”, I like how it hints at “the establishment”; those large branded chains that are slow to change.

Separately: In the face of: free papers, the free press and freesheets — what’s the most succinct term for papers that cost money? Paid-for papers?

Anyone?

Tags: editing, Grammar Girl, innovation, Style Guides, vocabulary, writing

Is the threat of climate change what legacy media brands needed to finally implement innovative new media strategies?

Starting with a syndicated editorial that ran in 56 newspapers, the international press have demonstrated far more collaborative spirit in coverage of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen than the politicians who have been sent to Denmark to take action.

The editorial, penned at The Guardian, notes:

“If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.”

In addition to 16 newspapers from Asia, 20 European countries ran the editorial. The 1,113 words - in English - of the editorial were translated into 20 languages.

Indeed, COP15 has been a boon for syndication, distributed coverage, interactivity and aggregation.

On Facebook, a group called The Climate Pool has become a second home for the content of 11 different news publishers, including: Agence France-Press, ANP (the Netherlands), APCom (Italy), RIA (Russia), dpa (Germany), Lusa (Portugal) and The Associated Press (United States).

The group accumulated more than 5,000 fans as of the start of COP15. Participating agencies have posted articles relating to Copenhagen coverage, opening these up for comments. The group also includes discussion forums, on which - impressively - journalists from The Climate Pool have engaged with other Facebook users.

According to its own press release, The Climate Pool was initiated by a global media network called MINDS International. Based in Germany, MINDS began its life as European Commission-funded project in 2004; it now operates with funding from its members.

The group represents a departure from the isolated positions of news agencies like the AP, which distribute content to paying members but act as vertical silos online, unwilling to share content. An executive from the AP told Journalism.co.uk that participating in The Climate Pool is an experimental project “to help the agency better understand what tools are best used for covering certain events and answer questions about social media newsgathering and distribution.”

For netizens who want to comment on COP15 proceedings as they happen, enter the OneClimate Channel.

Thanks to the free video-sharing platform Justin.TV, the is running an interactive livestream of the meetings in Denmark. Viewers are able to watch live meetings, in English, while discussing with other viewers in real time alongside the video.

Live broadcasts are available on the COP15 site itself, but the UN site does not offer viewers a chance to comment.

In between official briefings, interviewers from the OneClimate initiative host discussions on various climate change themes with other activists. These too are open for real-time reader comments.

The Channel, which is live during business hours, can be embedded across the Internet.

“OneClimate.net has always been in the business of producing free digital spaces and tools for amplifying the voices of thousands of climate action groups around the world,” a press release from the initiative said. “Its new interactive TV channel is based on the same philosophy.”

OneClimate is part a UK nonprofit called OneWorld Network, which began in 1995 and is now a distributed network of activist sites.

Finally, thematic blogging platforms like the EJC’s ThinkAboutIt campaign and Global Voices Online have been active for months.

Both offer netizens a portal to blogs of citizens from all over the world; they’re reliable sources for authentic voices speaking from countries like Brazil, India, the US and the EU27.

The question is: Will the politicians at Copenhagen listen?

New media strategies like syndication, distribution, aggregation, social networking, curated lists, real-time discussion and search do provide entry points for more voices. But is it all one big echo chamber?

Communications staff in charge of compiling media briefings for their respective politicians each day of the COP15 have no excuse not to have their hands full of material.

Tags: aggregation, AP, Climate Change, Copenhagen, curation, distribution, ejc, entry points, Facebook, real-time, sharing, social networks, Th!nkAboutIt, video

Why didn’t I think of this?

After reading the first paragraph of this Advertising Age story about a pharmaceutical company petitioning the FDA to use its logo as a marker for social media posts that contain safety information from the Food and Drug and Ministration, I see the first possible solution to the FTC blogger restrictions has been suggested.

Kitemarks . As defined by Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog, they are:

“… a symbol (expressed visually, and electronically as metadata) to convey to audiences, bloggers, journalists and others that a piece of news content had been intelligently labelled with relevant information and that it is open to derivative checking/use… similar in a sense to the Creative Commons ‘mark’ that travels with media content across the web.”> “… a symbol (expressed visually, and electronically as metadata) to convey to audiences, bloggers, journalists and others that a piece of news content had been intelligently labelled with relevant information and that it is open to derivative checking/use… similar in a sense to the Creative Commons ‘mark’ that travels with media content across the web.”

Could bloggers or other online creators who have received free products or services to review use a kitemark on Twitter, Facebook or their blog to indicate that they received payment?

Inserting a kitemark seems like an easy standard operating procedure for folks who craft and who read sponsored reviews. And it should be easy enough for regulators to search for this.

If it could work, by what procedure would society learn about this mark? And could someone make money by creating and marketing such a mark?

Money, maybe not… But reputation, probably. This seems like a good project for the Creative Commons folks, like Joi Ito, to discuss.

Tags: blogger, ethics, FTC, Joi Ito, kitemark, laws, Paul Bradshaw, social media, symbols

In honor of my sister arriving from Chicago today to run the Big Sur Half Marathon with me here in Monterey, California, here are two viral videos depicting the City of Big Shoulders.

First is a time-lapse sequence of bridges raising over the Chicago River:

This one shows the view from an El train circling the city. It is actually a TV commercial for Budweiser, but is mainly cool for the song (a Beatles ditty sung by The Hours) and views:

Tags: Chicago, timelapse, viral video