Boston Media Makers Meeting, April 1, 2007

Today I attended another wonderful meeting of Boston Media Makers held at Sweet Finnish in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, the first Sunday of every month. We go around the room and everyone talks about what they are doing, triggering interesting discussion, questions, answers, suggestions, and ideas. It’s an unmeeting much like an uncoference. Another thing that makes these meetings special is the mix of pros and amateurs, everyone is learning new things, everyone helping each other out, sharing pointers, tips, techniques, talking about their new projects, a really good vibe.

Steve Garfield talked about the start of Videoblogging Week 2007, so make a video every day for a week, and be sure to tag your videos with videobloggingweek2007 so people can find then. Steve also showed a demo of Joost, which I wrote about in a previous post. It’s a cool peek into the future of internet-television convergence.

John Herman talked about the RPM Challenge and the Nanoloop, a synthesizer and sequencer for the Nintendo Game Boy stored on a game cartridge, it allows you to produce interesting electronic music without additional hardware.

John Herman and I will be doing a session at Podcamp NYC titled, “Using cinematic language elements in your video,” for a long time filmmakers have been evolving a language for communicating efficiently using a stream of visual and audio elements over time, and this session will discuss some approaches applying this language to your video in order to increase viewer engagement.

My show and tell this month consisted of two books that I highly recommend reading, they both present some very important ideas. The first is Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. And the second is John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity.. This book offers a refreshing perspective on simplifying of the systems we design and the technology we develop, and even extends into business, and even your own life.

Joe Cascio continues to work on his email project that promises to deal with the spam problem in a manner better the solutions presented so far, he’ll be doing a session on email at Podcamp NYC.

Glen Cooper, a photographer who teaches photojournalism at New England School of Photography will be working on the new Boston Now coming April 17th. Publications on the net offer more room for video, text, and photos, Boston NOW wants citizen journalists to be featured right along professional journalists. They will not edit blogs except for profanity or slander.

Jack Hodgson is a new media producer, writer, and web-developer and the host and producer of the Uncontrolled Airspace, a general aviation podcast. He’s been flying since 1989. His goal for 2007 is to help his clients to use more audio and video on their web sites, move away from text web pages, and towards more audio and video. I say, “bravo.”

Adam Weiss, who does the Museum of Science Podcast, is now blogging for O’Reilly Digial Media Blog, very cool.

Phillipe Lejeune did a great video collage covering the recent Barcamp that gives a nice sense of what went on for people who missed the event.

There was lots more, but I’ve got to cut this short and begin preparing for my shoot tomorrow. Check out some of the photos on Flickr.