contentious.com

Here are some items that caught my interest, and why, from August 6th from 11:01 to 11:30:

• delicious support forum – Firefox addon limits notes to 255 characters – Apparently, delicious is working on upgrading their FF3 bookmarklet to allow the full 1000 characters in the notes field. Here you can follow the news on this update. It'll be a boon for microblogging!
• Delicious.com Relaunches with 1,000-Character Notes Fields | 43 Folders – LOL! the relaunched delicious.com now has a 1000-character notes field, which is great! Problem is, their posting bookmarklet still only seems to accept the old limit, 255 characters….
• Bookmarklets in ExpressionEngine Documentation – EE is powerful, but can be cumbersome for posting. But there's hope: Under weblog settings: "The Bookmarklet section allows you to create a customized bookmarklet, permitting you to add entries to your site while browsing the internet."
• Why I’m kissing Tumblr a sad, sad good-bye » 16th letter » Blog Archive – Apparently, search engines don't like Tumblr much….
• one hundred push ups – A pretty simple, basic, physical fitness program. I'm trying it.

This is a rare fairly personal, reflective post. I don’t do this often. So if your not into hearing my personal observations about life and death, don’t bother watching this video.

I was inspired here by recent events — primarily watching my friend Sarah Dopp this week share her experience of attending the death of her grandmother. She generously offered a public window to this experience via Twitter (starting July 25, and the rest follows in her Twitter archive) and blog.

But there were other inspirations — the strangest of which is the shuffle setting on my iPod keeps tossing up two haunting songs by Jimi Hendrix: Castles Made of Sand and Little Wing. Here, Tuck & Patti blend these tunes into a graceful medley:

Then, after I recorded my video last night, my spouse Tom Vilot showed me one of the most amazing feats of expression and education I’ve ever seen: The last lecture of Professor Randy Pausch of Carnegie-Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute. He died of pancreatic cancer on July 25 — but not before sharing his insights on how important it can be to attempt to realize your childhood dreams.

My favorite line from this video: “I don’t know how NOT to have fun!”

So if you’re feeling stuck or trapped, Pausch’s talk is a shot of adrenaline straight to your soul. I was crying so hard with joy after I watched it that I couldn’t finish posting my own video last night. (It wouldn’t have worked anyway. My decreasingly reliable web host, Bluehost.com, is having issues and not fixing them fast. I’m ready to post this at 9am MT, but they say probably not until 1:30 pm MT, grrrrr….)

However, waiting until this morning allowed me to assemble this video collage. Hope you like it.

This audio clip, from a July 11 On the Media interview with NYT media reporter David Carr, says it all:

Listen Now!

This pretty much says it all:

Thanks to Kirby Ferguson for the tip.

David Cohn of Spot.us gets geeky at the MIT Media Lab.

Yesterday I arrived in Boston, where starting this evening I’ll be attending a conference at MIT for winners of the Knight News Challenge. This event is hosted by MIT’s new Center for the Future of Civic Media.

I’ll be covering this event — at first on my live coverage Twitter account, amylive. To see my coverage, follow me there.

I’ve also set up a special group Twitter account for attendees via the GroupTweet service. That account is KNCwinners — but it isn’t working properly just yet. You can start following that account now, if you like. I’ll keep trying to troubleshoot the problem. When it’s fixed, you’ll start seeing posts there not only from me but from other attendees like Dave Cohn (Spot.us), Lisa Williams (Placeblogger) and many more bright media folks.

Enjoy! And let’s just hope Twitter doesn’t have too many serious problems over the next few days!

The gradual rehab of Contentious continues. Now existing links to my archives, which were created on an older blogging system, are working again. That’s a relief! Thanks to Justin Crawford and Tom Vilot for all their help with this project.

Halloween morning, Justin Crawford and I will be leading a discussion with journalism grad students at the University of Colorado. The topic we were given is rather amorphous: "blogging and citizen journalism."

Well the good thing about an amorphous assignment is that I can make of it pretty much what I choose. So that’s exactly what I’m doing.

Here are my notes for that talk. I’ve also posted Justin’s notes.

To start with, this past weekend I had the opportunity to speak with many journalism students at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists. I even taught some of them how to blog, so they could contribute to the unofficial SEJ2006 blog. I also got a chance to speak with many journalism educators. These are all very bright people.

Still, I got the strong impression that journalism education today remains focused almost entirely on traditional print/broadcast media — not just in terms of technology, but also by instilling a mindset which assumes a passive audience that absorbs news, rather than engaging an active community that contributes to news.

Here are a few thoughts and tips for how today’s journalism students (and other budding or not-so-budding journalists) can capitalize on a media landscape that has shifted strongly toward participation and conversation…

READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE over at The Right Conversation. You also can comment there, if you like.

As much as I adore conversational media, I like face-to-face conversations even more. I know there are lots of bloggers in the Boulder-Denver (CO) area, but we never seem to get together much. I’d love to meet some of these people.

So this weekend I decided to do something about it. I signed up as a Meetup.com organizer and arranged the first-ever monthly Front Range Bloggers Meetup. It’s Aug. 23, 2006, 6-9 pm (MST) at Trident Bookseller & Cafe, 940 Pearl St., Boulder, CO.

If you’re a blogger located along Colorado’s Front Range, or if you’re from this region and you like reading blogs or are thinking about blogging, feel free to stop by! This event is free.

Please RSVP for this event via Meetup.com. Several people have already indicated they’re coming.

Even if you can’t make it on Aug. 23, please join this group on Meetup.com so you can get announcements of future events. I’m sure we’ll try other locations for these monthly meetings as this develops.