Xark!

The #helpgeoff thing

Earlier today Janet (@xarkgirl) messaged me that our filmmaking buddy Geoff Marshall was in trouble: His 48-state documentary roadtrip had been interrupted in Greensboro, NC, by a smash-and-grab auto break-in. He lost about $6,000 in video and computer electronics, and apparently some of his material for the film (which he has been videoblogging along the way).

Janet wanted me to contact our Greensboro friends, which I did, getting quick responses from John Robinson, Sue Polinsky and Ed Cone. And as I was doing that, Chrys Rynearson popped up in my Google Talk bar:

exposur3: dude
fundraiser

let's get it going

we can raise 5k

what do you think?

A few hours later, Geoff had bloggers in Greensboro and Charleston working his case and offering help. We had a Help Geoff blog, a Help Geoff Twitter account, a new e-mail address, plus accounts at Tipjoy and PayPal.Someone suggested a #helpgeoff hashtag. We'd worked through numerous technical difficulties, all without anyone "being in charge."

The best place to follow all this? At Charleston's TheDigitel, where Geoff's former boss, Ken Hawkins, is covering this like the community story it is.

Here's what makes it all particularly sweet to me: The most influential moment in my turn toward networked media occurred in 2005 at ConvergeSouth , the Greensboro conference organized by Sue and a host of others. It's where we met John Robinson. It's what inspired Janet and I to launch Lowcountry Blogs in April 2006. At the final free ConvergeSouth in 2008, one of the largest and most enthusiastic groups in attendence were bloggers from coastal South Carolina.We owe a lot to those people in Greensboro.

As his friend, it's my duty to say that Geoff is a dumbass for leaving his stuff in the car, but as Chrys said, "He's our boy." And frankly, I just don't want want his documentary to end in a way that portrays America that way. Online communities are communities nonetheless. Let's see how well they function.

Drum roll, please!

I am happy to announce the exciting new addition of xarkgirl to the xark family of blogs. To all my fans (both of you!) I will not be ditching xark, but xarkgirl will be a little more personal and a little more girly. I am looking forward to adding more authors as I get going and I welcome everyone's participation. Love you, mean it!

Obama needs to hear from us

To put things in Army vernacular, Obama stepped on his dick last week. And no, I'm not talking about his reversal on fund-raising, which was hypocritical  but tactical.

No, I'm talking about the FISA bill. It was Obama's first true test as the leader of both a party and a movement, and let's be blunt: He flunked it. Badly. 

AP v. Bloggers: The cartoon version

News Item: Associated Press claims bloggers are infringing on its copyright, threatens action.

Right...

Best Boing Boing thread ever

Here.

Cone koans

More from my continuing fanboy obsession with Ed Cone... Seriously, though, I think these pithy insights into the relationship between politics and blogs/the Web ought to be more widely disseminated:

The Net is not about the Net.
The ground game matters.
The Net won't sell a bad product.
The Net is a lever that moves other media.
Net campaigns still need a lot of work.
You can't win if you don't play.

Thing is, I could take these same statements and riff on them in different contexts as well. Journalism. Commerce. Art. Ideas.

Filling that Gap, People-style

The band Radiohead has released their new album, "In Rainbows", via digital download, as I'm sure many of you have heard. I received my download pass last night (about 2am), and was impressed by how smoothly and efficiently the whole experiment worked. Within a few cyberseconds, the album was on my computer.

But one thing immediately struck me -- no cover art! This pretty much blew my mind. It's almost impossible now to find a product that doesn't pay close attention to its packaging, but in the world of music, the album cover is a sacred and inseparable part of the whole; often equaling and sometimes surpassing the experience of the music itself. What other medium can do a minimalist gesture like the Beatle's "White" album and have it recognized as an artistic statement? Sure, there are good and bad album covers -- but no cover at all? That seems to go against the soul of music consumerism as I've come to know it.

And the technology has followed this trend. The first generations of iPods were music-only, but subsequent models brought the ability to show the cover art, to the point now where the latest iPods let you navigate solely by album art, demonstrating how the technology has finally caught up with listeners' sensibilities. We need our cover art.

No no, Radiohead -- this will not do.

Left with this gaping gap in my new music experience, I did what any thoughtful person of my generation would do, which was to Google around and see if someone had solved my problem for me. I was thrilled when I came across a site with tons of homemade cover art for "In Rainbows." Some of these designs are incredible, and all clearly are labors of love. Now I'm spoiled with choices as to which one I want to pick for my iPod!

And this leads me to wonder: Although there are claims that official cover art for the album is coming soon, was Radiohead a bit cleverer than I had given them credit for? Releasing a pay-what-you-want album to the masses, and then encouraging fans to produce and distribute their own cover art.... Could this be the most participatory music experiment of the digital age? Stroke of genius, or happy coincidence? Either way, I got to experience an album and my thoughts about music in general from a new angle, and am thrilled by the creativity and energy of those others out there on the other end of my Wi-Fi.

Rockin' good news.

Latest project: Embedded, geo-tagged video maps

Lately my thoughts have been running toward the value of geo-tagged information (How valuable is it? A LOT!) so I've been playing around with Google's custom maps feature and creating content for the paper/website that might have otherwise been presented as a story with a static map. 

My experiment: For the past three Fridays, I've published a short "Fun 5" item on my feature page that points people toward a Google Map I've made of a road-tested local bike route. I figure that's useful for local riders, particularly interesting to visitors who might want to go for a ride, and just kinda cool.  I put a little more info about the route on my Friday 5 blog, and then embed the customized Google Map in my post.

Organic Process goes live

Over the past few weeks I've been helping out some friends of ours with a website they've been remaking, and I've waited to write about their project until the site went live.  But this is not about their site (which is a perfectly nice site, designed by the fine folks at Fuzzco): This is about creative people who are redrawing the lines between art and journalism and activism and commerce.

Her name is Farrah Hoffmire. His name is Mitchell Davis. They both grew up in Summerville, both graduated from C of C. She started off to be a mental health counselor but became an artist. He started off as a musician but became one of the founders of BookSurge.com, one of those magnificent little software-commerce marriages that's just so smart it practically squeaks when you rub up against it. When BookSurge sold to Amazon a couple years ago, Farrah and Mitchell moved to Seattle to help integrate their company into the mega-bookseller's operations. And while they were out there, Farrah decided to learn to make films. That was the spring and early summer of 2005.

In late August of that year, Katrina struck the Gulf Coast and swamped New Orleans. A few weeks later, Farrah packed up her camcorder and headed to the Delta, where she began recording her own personal history of the aftermath of the storm.

Found at Bellascribe: Joni Mitchell & Charleston

From a post by the often-missed Peg Alford:

I learned Joni Mitchell played and temporarily stayed in Charleston, this after one of those synchronicities of three: (1) out in Big Sur, seeing again some of those well-known photos of Joni, and Graham Nash, at Esalen, and I think maybe the Monterey Pop Festival (here’s one of them of Robert Altman’s); (2) seeing a vinyl copy of (the excellent) Hejira for sale at Mole’s Record Exchange; (3) watching, DVD, Copying Beethoven — it was okay, bordering on not — which made me think of Joni Mitchell’s song for Beethoven “Judgment of the Moon and Stars.” (Not unsurprisingly, there’s a YouTube video for the song here.) After these events, I re-watched the PBS American Masters DVD, Woman of Heart and Soul, and was struck anew by the fact of her going on her own, solely, as a young woman around the country playing at these unknown places, which she’d also booked herself. I liked how she talked about a “tempering by fire.” How she was an only child but had “chosen many brothers along the way.” How she called music she wrote later out in Laurel Canyon “kitchen songs.” Her reply to young aspirants who ask for advice, “Do you want to be a star or an artist?”

Always an important, if under-valued, question.