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MySpace, Inconvenient Truth partner up

Posted May 28th 2006 12:02PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: nptech, social networking

Being bought by the owner of the Fox empire hasn't scared MySpace away from partnering with Al Gore's high profile film about global warming, "An Inconvenient Truth."  Announced last week but receiving little play in the blogosphere to date, the partnership appears to be more low-key online than the previous X-Men promotion but set to leverage the online community for real-world public events.  The movie's main site doesn't appear to make any reference to the partnership, as it is described on MediaPost, but MySpace friend to all Tom does have a Truth badge and link to the film's MySpace profile.

According to MediaPost,  "the campaign will culminate in a 10-city MySpace theater buyout on June 16, with free tickets going to select members of the film's MySpace community.  MediaPost also reports that MySpace is contributing a significant amount of ad space to raise climate change awareness.  The MySpace music channel is reported to be planning  an artist-on-artist interview between the former vice president and a to-be-announced rock star who is also happens to be part of the MySpace community. The MySpace movies channel will spotlight an interview with the film's director, Davis Guggenheim.

The partnership between the film and the high profile online social network appears to be remarkably low-profile.  No press releases appear on PR Web, few bloggers outside of MySpace have written about it and a Google News search brings back surprisingly few results.  The MySpace community itself appears to be responding well, however, as almost 45,000 users have added the films as a friend to their profile in just less than a week.

CA AG candidate launches RSS to IM notification system

Posted May 25th 2006 5:23PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: IM, nptech, RSS

California Attorney General candidate Rocky Delgadillo doesn't just have a long list of endorsements on his side - he's got new web tools going for him as well.  Delgadillo's campaign just launched a new service offering for supporters wanting to keep up with the campaign - RSS to IM notification from immedi.at. 

The letters RSS don't appear anywhere on the site, in fact there's not a link to subscribe to news from the campaign in a feed reader - but there is a link that allows you to plug in your IM username and get instant notification of new developments that can be passed on to others.  Timely updates have an excitement that may be more likely to spread by word of mouth.

Delgadillo's "vision" page begins with the sentence: "As I look around our state today, it's not just crime and violence that threaten our families.  It's also the greed and arrogance of corporate power run amok."  Sounds interesting enough to me.  I wonder how extensively the campaign is using RSS to IM internally.

They Might Be Giants offer NSA ringtone

Posted May 18th 2006 1:19PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: nptech, portable media, wireless media

Old school jokester/art band They Might Be Giants continue to prove themselves one of the hippest bands in the Web 2.0 world (check out this fan wiki) with a new offering of ring tones.  Including this humorous one called "Call Connected by the NSA"

I'm not super into the politics of this, but I find it humorous.  Found via Ringtonia, a good source of international ring tone news. See also my recent interview with Katrin Verclas of the awesome group MobileActive.

World Vote field test coming this month

Posted May 4th 2006 12:54PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: nptech, paradigm shifts

I just found a very interesting initiative called the World Vote field test.  Aiming to hold a global, simultaneous online voting day in a couple of weeks.  Seems impressive, warrants a closer look.  As things like this move forward, is the digital divide all the more apparent?   Hard to know what it means for sure, but thought it was interesting.  Found via KnowProSE.

Africa blogging round up

Posted Apr 17th 2006 2:39PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: nptech

The video above is the first episode of a new video blog, The Nata Village Video Blog.   The Nata Village Blog is a new project by the staff of an HIV clinic in Nata, Botswana.  The clinic's work days begin with a song, as you can see above.  With the assistance of some international travelers with tech skills, the blog has become quite an impressive use of services like Typepad, Flickr, Blip.TV and PayPal. 

Continue reading Africa blogging round up

Blogswana: Blogging for others in AIDS-struck Botswana

Posted Apr 6th 2006 7:08PM by Marshall Kirkpatrick
Filed under: blogging, citizen media, nptech

Fascinating sounding project unveiled yesterday by the folks at the Committee to Protect Bloggers.  The project is called Blogswana and the idea is that they will train 20 university students from Botswana in journalism and blogging, then those students will go into the field once a month and interview some one who does not have access to the web or blogging. 

The interview will be turned into a blog post for the interviewee's blog, the interviewer will have a blog of their own as well, and the most recent posts from the blogs written by the 20 students will be aggregated onto a central site.  Comments left by users will be delivered to the interviewee next month and their answers will be posted back on the blog.

The AIDS angle is that all the parties involved will be people who have been impacted by AIDS in one way or the other, though that won't be the central topic of the interviews. 

The instigators of this project hope that it will be a pilot for many others based on the principal of overcoming the digital divide and doing citizen journalism by actually visiting and talking to people who are not online.  This particular area was chosen because one of the US instigators lived in Botswana for some time.  I think this sounds like a great project.  If you're interested, you should read their write up on it.  The project is currently looking for a variety of forms of support, so stop on by if you'd like to be of assistance, too.

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