Creative Commons, the great little content licensing scheme that makes it possible for Geek Entertainment TV to be interesting, is kicking off a monthly salon here in San Francisco this Wednesday. I’ve been tapped to present GETV and our CC connection. I will focus on how fun and easy it is to find CC licensed content to spice up the geek video interviews I edit. Also presenting are Josh Kinberg, majordomo of the iTunes killer FireAnt, and Wagner James Au of Second Life. Full details.

shine
1337 Mission Street (Yahoo! Maps, Google Maps)
San Francisco, California

Please join us for the first CC Salon, taking place in San Francisco on Wednesday, March 8 from 6pm-9pm at Shine. CC Salon is a casual get-together focused on conversation and community-building. It’s open to anyone interested in art, technology, education, and copyright. We look forward to seeing you there!

CC Salon – San Francisco
Wednesday, March 8
6pm-9pm
Shine (http://shinesf.com/)
1337 Mission Street (between 9th and 10th), San Francisco

Featuring presentations by:
Josh Kinberg; FireAnt (http://fireant.tv/)
Eddie Codel; Geek Entertainment TV (http://geekentertainment.tv/)
Wagner James Au; Second Life (http://secondlife.com/)

And music by:
Minus Kelvin; ccMixter (http://ccmixter.org/)

Hey my DC peeps. This is a bit last minute, but if you’ve got the day free tomorrow you should check out the BrainJams collaboration geek pow-wow event happening Monday. It’s the brainchild of Chris Huere and Kristie Wells who have done two such event here in the SF Bay area. If you’ve got a project you need some geek help with or you’ve got mad geek skillz and are looking to help out on someone’s cool project, BrainJams DC is the place to make that a reality. It takes place at the DC Improv in downtown DC from 10am-5pm. If you can’t make the daytime shindig, catch up with the Jammers during happy hour at the Lucky Bar. Tell ‘em I sent you.

Saturday night was fun with fire by the ocean. In the annual San Francisco tradition, hundreds of people spontaneously show up to the beach at night with hundreds of retired Christmas trees for the Post Yule Pyre. I shot this video which captures some of the mayhem. Also a GETV episode. 56MB QT - 4 min 00 sec.

Comet deli
Originally uploaded by ekai.

Ah Washington, DC. I like that there’s no billboards or highrises and instead plenty of old school brick architecture. I don’t miss the smokey inside of bars, which may happily change soon as DC comes online with local anti-smoking regs. It was nice to meet new blogger friends. Shoutouts to Tony, Jamy, Shannon, Reya, Danielle and Rob, Michael, Celeste for dragging me to the Science Club.

I was dismayed to hear that the Comet deli & liquor store in Adams Morgan is closing its doors after being a neighborhood institution since the 1930’s. I used to go there for lunch at least a couple times a week when I worked at the Washington City Paper back in the mid-90’s. I remember ol’ white haired Sid, the proprietor of the place, ringing me up on the ancient massive analog cash register while imparting his unique acerbic whit. He passed away in March of this year and his widow Bernice just can’t carry the torch anymore.

The closing of Comet is bringing to light the larger issue of gentrification of the eclectic Adams Morgan neighborhood. It’s one of the most diverse, unique and independent neighborhoods in all of Washington, DC. The place is chock full of restaurants and boutiques run by refugees and ex-patriots of nations far from our shores. It really is the only place to go for Ethiopian food. As the bleak horizon filled with chain stores and neighborhood homogenization becomes ever closer, I’m reminded of the successful legislation that we’ve passed here in San Francisco to give neighborhoods the right to decide whether they want chain stores taking up space amongst them. I’m not sure how the local political winds would favor such a thing in DC, but I hope that some clueful neighborhood activists will take a page from San Francisco and try something similar. I’m sure most businesses and residents in Adams Morgan would support such a thing, if only the DC City Council can show the political will. I’d hate to see Adams Morgan go the way of Georgetown.

People power is finally organizing on the Internet in interesting ways. Digg.com, a site I discovered barely a month ago, has quickly become a favorite place to kill time. Digg is essentially a place to find interesting links to news stories, blog entries or anything of interest on the world wide Internet. It’s mostly tech oriented right now, but that’s about to blow wide open real soon. What makes digg different than most other link aggregators is that editorial control is done by you, me and anyone else who cares to jump in. Anyone can submit a link they think is cool or interesting, but it’s gonna take a small community of people to agree with you for a much larger community of eyeballs to see it.

The way it works is pretty simple. You peruse digg.com for something interesting in the “digg for stories” queue, the place where all new submissions get tossed. When you find something you like, you click the “digg” button next to a link’s title and it is “dugg”. This increments a number next to the submission and adds the link to a personal bookmarks collection. Kind of like del.icio.us, which anyone else can see. When an article or link gets enough diggs, the article is “promoted” to the home page. This boosts the visibility of the article enormously and many more people get a chance to find it and hopefully also digg it.

What’s really amazing about digg and why I think it’s future is really bright is that it empowers the reader of content to decide what is interesting. Contrast this with the current model of the media in which you have a cadre of editors who decide what stories they think are going to gain the biggest audience or sell the most papers. We’ve all seen plenty of bad TV and read really crappy articles. What digg does is it flips the control of interestingness from the editorial ivory tower to the unwashed masses who ultimately consume the stuff. digg isn’t a media desitnation itself, merely a smart pointer to intersting stories and links that others create. Digg CEO Jay Adelson describes the symbiotic relationship he sees with the mainstream media in a recent interview with Mad Penguin.

I believe that the role of the New York Times, just to use them as an example, will be to go out and find the news and to interpret the news. We are going to bringing people to the New York Times IF they make the right choices. I believe that it is a very symbiotic relationship. Perhaps what we will provide organizations like newspapers is some insight into what the mass audience really wants to read about today, at least the on-line Internet audience.

Digg isn’t perfect. Yet. Some popular articles get repeated, some lame stuff bubbles up and it remains to be seen how the digg’s current audience will receive or adapt to non-tech categories. These are all relatively small issues that will evolve solutions. The decentralized editorial approach is amazingly powerful and the mainstream press are waking up to it as they see spikes of traffic from digg.

I recently had a chance to meet Kevin Rose, founder of digg, at a geek party. Very cool dude. He agreed to do a GETV interview, posted yesterday. If you like it, be sure to digg the interview and embrace your new found editorial power. It can be addicting.

Tomorrow/Saturday is the day for remixing brains over geek and non-geek stuff at Chris Heure’s BrainJams event. It’s a collaborative, relatively freeform shindig that revolves around the nebulous concept of “knowledge sharing”. The gist is you spill your passion or project to fellow ‘Jammers and grow from there. Nate and Chris‘ posts explain this much better than I currently understand, but it seems much like the Advocacy Dev shindigs I’ve participated in in the past. Check out the wiki for more deets and register. Oh yeah, it’s in Shallow Alto, but don’t let that freak you out. Added bonus: GETV will be there to cover the fun.

Monday night was rad. Media Alliance did an informative thing at 111 Minna on wifi in San Francisco. Larry Lessig did an inciteful and wry presentation and slideshow on the history of communication monopoly, specifically touching on how AT&T stifled any sort of creativity when they felt the least bit threatened. One example of this is being the Hush-a-Phone case. With the FCC in their pocket for many decades, AT&T got their way until they were finally broken up in the 80’s. After Larry, a panel discussion followed by three people represententing communities that have stakes in wifi access. A reoccuring point of the evening was that whatever gets deployed in San Francisco, should be ‘network neutral’ and ‘platform neutral’ meaning that the city and the provider don’t get to decide who does and does not have access to the network. Neutrality being the key concept here.

After the intellectual fun, a bunch of us headed across the street to a Thai restaurant to munch and shoot the shit. It was cool meeting Jimmy Wales, the genius behind Wikipedia, one of the best things about an open Internet. Rene shot some video of Irene interviewing Jimmy and Irene interviewing Craig Newmark (yes, THAT Craig).

Driving through New Orleans
Originally uploaded by ioerror.

My friend Jake went down to New Orleans to try and help get some computers and Internet working for people in need. Working computers with Internet means being able to get in touch with loved ones, register to find family members and getting news on what the hell is going on, or not going on, and getting supplies. Along the way, he was able to cruise around NOLA and document the devastation, death and hope that springs from trauma. Jake recently called into to the Chris Pirillo Show, giving a pretty amazing account of his experiences. Have a listen, it’s powerful shit.

I met Pam Pam around the old Progressive Nerve Center sometime last year while she was working for Dennis Kucinich’s presidential campaign. She’s an amazing human being that brings SF Peacemakers to life. She and friends and neighbors take back the corner of Sunnydale and Hahn every Friday night. It’s the most notorious block in San Francisco where frequent but little known stories of dead black men are made. Pam Pam brings a moment of peace to where much violence and blood have flowed. This 60 minute video (144MB QT) is Pam Pam’s story of what goes on down there. Get ready, it’s damn powerful. Btw, I didn’t create this video. This is a rip of a DVD that Pam Pam asked me to make available on the ‘net. I just ripped it and uploaded it to the Internet Archive.

My good friend Tim has embarked upon a life changing event to well, help save lives after a family friend of his passed away from Lymphoma. He’s running a triathalon this weekend, just like every weekend. To him that’s like going for a stroll, doing the backstroke and peddling a few times. Actually, it’s INSANE. He’s been training for the past 6 months, it’s a major life achievement. Most people never do a uniathalon much less a triathalon. And I can’t think of a more appropriately nice, caring, giving and INSANE person to do it. That’s my way of saying I’m too much of a loser to take on such insanity, which is my burden. In all seriousness, what Tim is doing is incredible and he deserves big ups and support. He’s still looking to close the fundraising gap, 73% of the way there as of now. If you can give, any amount would help. All the details are right here.