Orient Lodge

Over on the Second Life educators mailing list, a member asked for an 'Idiot's Guide to Second Life'. I wrote a reply there, which seemed like it might be a useful post here as well.

OpenSim is a project to create software so that others can create their own servers that run similar to Linden Lab's Second Life servers.

Typically, people running OpenSim set up a grid, similar to the Main Grid, the Teen Grid or the Beta Grids that Linden Lab runs.

Some example grids like this are:

Central Grid has about 20 regions and about 1,400 active members. They are focusing hard on the business community.

OpenLife has nearly 200 regions and a population of over 20,000. They support the RealXtend viewer.

OSGrid claims 240 Regions and 2400 active users. They are running as a non-profit.

When you use a Second Life client, you can specify a parameter to get your client to connect to one of these other grids. (e.g.
"C:\Program Files\SecondLife\SecondLife.exe" -multiple -loginuri http://osgrid.org:8002 )

If you have a reason to, you could create your own Grid that you control, e.g.

Orient Lodge Grid

In the old days of MOOs, this was a common thing. People would set up their own MOOs for their universities, or any other place they wanted. I ran LogMoo, which is actually still sitting around in mothballs. When I get a better Internet Connection, I may bring back LogMoo and perhaps setup LogGrid.

As a general rule, there is essentially no connectivity between grids. Just as it is at best very difficult to move stuff from TeenGrid to the MainGrid, etc., it is very difficult to move stuff to the any of the OpenSim based grids.

There are a few interesting exceptions.

SecondInventory now supports OpenSim. What this means in theory as that you can create something on one grid, say the Main Grid, or an OpenSim grid, and then restore it to other grids. I've had limited success with that, that it looks very promising.

For communications between grids, there has been some work done on using IRC channels so that a space in the main grid could listen and/or talk on an IRC channel and a space in an OpenSim grid could listen and/or talk on the same IRC channel. I've heard this discussed, but I don't know anyone who has done this in practice. I think this fits in nicely with the talk about Twitter as well.

The folks at Central Grid have been working hard to get currency working in OpenSim, including working with a company to do intergrid currency exchange. I believe it is still in development, and it raises a lot of issues. Most notably, some of the folks behind Central Grid have been accused of being scammers on the Second Life main grid and people have expressed skepticism about financial transactions on any OpenSim grid.

It is also possible to run a portion of OpenSim so that you run just a region and that region becomes part of another groups grid. Some of the OpenSim grids discussed above have been exploring allowing remote regions to be part of their grid. I'm not sure how well that has worked yet. You can also run a region without it being part of a grid. I've done that from my laptop when I wanted to have a small Second Life environment that I could bring with me.

As a final note, Open Sim is still in early development. Unless you are pretty geeky and like playing things that might break even more frequently than the Linden Lab Main Grid, you might want to leave Open Sim to others. I'm a hard core geek, so I love OpenSim.

Okay. Perhaps that was a little bit longer and geekier than a true idiots guide to Open Sim, but I hope it is helpful.

Saturday morning. These allergies or virus, or whatever it is that has had me wheezing and coughing and not sleeping for a week has waned slightly and I slept well last night. I’m still at a very low energy level, so I thought I would do a little low impact surfing.

By low impact surfing, I mean visiting blogs by following links from sites like EntreCard or MyBlogLog. What I like about these sites is that you can let people know that you were there without having to actually think up some sort of comment to leave. With Entrecard, you can drop a card which the site own sees, and hopefully decides to come and visit your site. You can also buy advertisements, and I’ve been running Entrecard advertisement right below my list of MyBlogLog readers.

MyBlogLog shows a list of recent readers on your site, and I like to check out the blogs of people who have visited via MyBlogLog, as well as people who have been reading their sites.

Typically, these sort of visits bring me to sites very different than I would stop at as a progressive political blogger. Most of the time, I like that. However, sometimes it can be a bit tedious. EntreCard listed a whole bunch of people that had dropped cards on me, but said I hadn’t dropped cards on them. I went to visit a few and found that we’re all ones that EntreCard said I had visited, so I couldn’t drop a card on them. More annoying, as I tried following some of the ads most of them were for opportunities to make money fast on the Internet.

So, I switched over to checking my visitors via MyBlogLog. First on the list was Jill Miller Zimon. Jill is a great writer. We’ve crossed paths talking about different issues and conferences, but I don’t believe we’ve ever met face to face, even though I now live in the town where her parents live. One of these days we will meet.

Unfortunately, her blog doesn’t fit nicely into my idea of Saturday Morning Surfing. While the make money fast blogs were too mindless, Jill’s writing is always thoughtful and requires more time than I wanted to commit to any blog entry. I read her post about Bush, Marc Dann, and Women’s Voices Women’s Votes. Go check it out.

Jill’s list of recent readers included Susan Mernit. Susan is another great writer that I typically wouldn’t visit for some light Saturday morning reading. In her recent blog posts she talks about why she is reading more Twitter and Friend Feed. They act as effective filters for those of us already on information overload. I have problems keeping up with the flood of emails and haven’t gotten through all of the blogs in my feed reader in ages, but Twitter provides a good quick glimpse into what is going on.

She also talks about Digerati as media brand. Well worth the read. It seems like digital natives get both of these ideas. Teenagers spend much of their online communication in short blasts, and do a good job of defining their personal brands online, although some adults might question the markers used to denote a teenagers brand online.

With all this in mind, I went over to Twitter. It struck me, that here I was seeing a much better snapshot of our twenty first century world. whatsnext just finished reading Empress Orchard. chrisbrogan is saying hello to PodCamp in San Antonio. He, along with jerikpotter are twittering about SOBCon. ZoeConnolly is checking the air field in Caledon Penzance in Second Life. Earlier, several friends from Second Life were complaining about difficulties logging in. Others had been twittering about problems with YouTube earlier.

nprpolitics is talking about polls, Rev. Wright, and John McCain. JasonBarnett is reporting live from the Minnesota DFL Second CD convention and MikePanetta is at the DC Democratic State Committee Convention. kentbye saw a bunch of old friends at the Maryland Film Festival. Many friends are talking about Maker Faire.

acarvin is just 49 people away from having 2000 followers. PurpleCar and jeffpulver are talking about Iron Man. Apparently, it is getting great reviews on Twitter and they are both looking forward to seeing it. http://twitter.com/jcnork>jcnork is preparing for his son’s first communion.

As I scan through all of this, my mind goes to Mrs. Dalloway as she reflects on London on the fine day of her party. Pink Floyd’s lyrics come to mind, “Snapshot in the Family Album”. rickmahn twitters from SOBCon08, that Brian Clark says “It is marketing suicide to be too general in blogging today”. I don’t know. Maybe for the make money fast blogs, that I decided to skip over earlier today, it is marketing suicide to be too general. Yet as Susan Mernit points out, people like Scoble, Calcanis, Arrington and Winer have done a good job of creating compelling brands. I’d much rather read PurpleCar and jeffpulver talk about what movie they want to see today, and jcnork talking about his son’s first communion than I would listen to people who have lost authenticity in their business blogging as they try to focus on a narrow niche.

So, I’ll return to my random surfing, until Kim and Fiona get home from riding, and then maybe we’ll find something fun to do on this overcast weekend as well.

From May 20th through May 23rd, the 18th annual Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference will take place in New Haven. This year’s topic is Technology Policy ’08. Early bird registration ends today, so if you are thinking of attending and haven’t signed up yet, today would be a great day to sign up.

In addition, “The Yale Journal of Law & Technology (YJoLT) is seeking essay-length submissions concerning the technology policy platform of the new American presidential administration.” The deadline for the entries is May 5th, and details can be found on the YJoLT Essay Contest

More information can be found at the CFP 2008 Main Page as well as many other sites they list, such as their Facebook Group and their blog. On their blog they have a post entitled Bloggers Wanted. If you are a blogger and planning on attending, please let the organizers know.

It looks like a great conference and I look forward to attending as much of it as possible.

At PodCampNYC last week, there was a lot of focus on the role of podcasting and other social media on education. The old discussion about the digital natives and digital immigrants popped up here and there and stimulated a lot of thinking.

For those of you not acquainted with the idea of a digital native, it is simply, those people who have grown up in a world where there has always been the Internet. Digital natives grow up communicating with their friends via IMs, Facebook, MySpace, text messaging. It is the way they have learned to communicate, just as other generations have grown up with telephones, television, radio, etc.

The digital immigrants are the older people that have come to digital communications technology later in their life. They weren’t born into a digital culture, they moved into it. This is producing a digital generation gap, where digital natives and digital immigrants look at online culture from very different points of view.

There are problems with looking at things this way. While I recent Pew report says that 94% of teenagers are online, there are some that are not, and there are others, that while being online, may not have become immersed in digital culture. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who have been online for many years. I started programming computers in the 1960s and first connected to the Internet in the early 1980s.

Peggy Sheehy of the Suffern Middle School in Second Life, spoke about this in terms of ‘shifted learners’. Some people, both young and old have made the shift to digital culture. Others have not. This, of course, leads to plenty of plays on words about shiftless learners or shifty teachers.

Shifted learners may be a better way of looking at the new digital generation gap, but I still like the idea of a digital natives and digital immigrants.

Christine Cavalier lead a great session on social media parenting, where she explored the digital generation gap. She suggested looking at things in terms of teaching technology, or digital culture as a foreign language, similar to the way we teach English as a Foreign Language to immigrants to our country. As I listened to her talk, images of immigrant parents talking amongst themselves came to my mind, “Oh no, my child is dating a digital native!”

In a different session, John Herman pointed out Having Our Say which captures quite nicely the voice of some digital natives. As an aside, it is best viewed in the context of Did You Know 2.0.

Yet in all of this, I come back to trying to understand my own role. Perhaps I can best be thought of as a digital aborigine, or as one person suggested when I used that phrase, digital indigenous.

I’m not all that versed on various indigenous or aborigine cultures, but it seems like this could be a useful metaphor. Sure, there are the big name digital aborigines, those who have become A-list bloggers and A-list Twitterers. Some of them might be thought of as the great aboriginal warriors that everyone learns about during their brief study of aborigine culture. There are the aborigines that cooperate with the settlers and try to make their fortune off of the settlers. Yet there are many other aboriginal people.

Perhaps, I feel most akin to the shamans. I remember, with a smile, the uucp bang paths that were part of the early songlines of our digital culture. I speak to others about how to use knowledge of digital culture to make cyberspace a better place. I worry about the rabbit proof fences that add to a digital divide and thwart net neutrality.

So, I sat in Christine’s session, where she spoke wisely about trying help digital immigrants feel less afraid of the digital culture they were finding themselves amidst, and felt very out of place. I sent out my messages on Twitter as I listened to people talk about managing reputations online. It felt like some of the digital immigrants were getting Christine’s message and were trying to ratchet back their fears. They spoke about seeking for better ways of talking to children about how pictures from parties where the kids were drinking might hurt them later on in life.

I spoke about whether or not a ‘C’ student at Yale, known for serious partying, could ever become President of the United States. I’m not sure how many people got the reference. I touched on the idea of ‘reputational bankruptcy’, the ability to say, yes, I did some wild and stupid things when I was younger, but I’ve grown and learned from it. I’m not sure how much people get the idea of ‘reputational bankruptcy’ yet.

So, I tried a different tack. I asked who knew about Tori Lindsey. No one recognized the name. However, when I started to describe the story, it rang bells. It reflected a very different way that digital natives look at the Internet. Tori was beaten because she was ‘talking trash’ on MySpace and because the perpetrators wanted to create a viral video.

It was interesting to hear the reactions; they made me feel even more like the outsider digital aborigine. The best comment was from John Herman who talked about the incident with one of his classes. He spoke about how all his students spoke about what the perpetrators had done wrong was to video tape the beating. Finally, one of his students spoke up and said, no, what they did wrong was beat up a student.

Does this tell us something about how kids are thinking about the Internet? I would have loved to listen in on John’s class as they discussed this.

Today, PurpleCar twittered about a blog post by DaveLaMorte about the session. It is interesting to read his comments.

Aldon Hynes, talked about the dangers of social networking as a tool for bullying and abuse... Aldon talked about how a lack of proper modeling/teaching/supervision led to the assalt/video and how it had the potential to ruin the lives of everyone involved because these kids didn't understand to scope of their actions and the permanence of the Internet.

Yes, that is the way I would expect a digital immigrant to hear it. It goes back to the fear of what digital culture means. People hearing what I said, in this context just make me want to bang my head on the keyboard.

However, Dave went on to say,

It was at the moment that I realized that most of the people in the room not only spoke a different "technological language" than many young people, but that we are not even part of the same paradigm. Aldon's comments made me realize that kids are operating under different social codes, norms, and perspectives about how to use social media/networking/the Interwebs.

YES! That is the point exactly! Thank you, Dave. He points to Teens Today with Vanessa Van Petten. Vanessa talks about providing a Gen Y perspective on Teens and Parents. It looks like another blog I need to add to my RSS feed.

PurpleCar added a great comment to Dave’s blog post about the role of ‘micro celebrity’ as well which is worth exploring.

Meanwhile, I will be talking with my daughter’s kindergarten class about what I do. Here are my initial thoughts on this:

"This is what Fiona's daddy does." What do I do? I help people tell their stories safely on the Internet. I'll talk about how sometimes we write our stories. Some times we show our stories with pictures or movies. Sometimes, we even tell our stories over the telephone or record them. We can use computers to tell our stories. We can use cellphones to tell our stories. Our cellphones can take pictures. Our cellphones can be used to make movies. We can even make movies using computer games.

Perhaps this raises issues about what it is like to be the child of a digital aborigine, but that is a whole different topic.

So, I am starting explore what it means to be a digital aborigine, particularly with a shamanistic leaning. Let’s see what sort of discussion we can generate.

Between PodCampNYC, recent announcements and my constant explorations into publishing content online has caused me to stop and rethink some of my current publishing strategy. I am writing this as much for my own benefit to clarify my thoughts as I am for others interested in exploring different forms of content publishing.

Video

Currently, I have three devices that I use for shooting video. The first is a Panasonic PV-GS39 MiniDV Camcorder. It records up to 90 minutes on a MiniDV tape, which I then transfer using a FireWire cable to my laptop. The limiting factor, however, is often how long my batteries will last. If there is a lot of recording, I can use multiple tapes and run off of power from an outlet. When I have my footage, I do my post-editing with Microsoft Movie Maker. If I want to record anything long, that is what I use. However, the amount of work necessary between shooting the video and posting it online is considerable, and I don’t use the MiniDV that much any more.

My second digital video device is a Canon PowerShot S410. I have a 2 Gigabyte CompactFlash card in it and can shoot quite a bit of video that way. Unfortunately, the PowerShot only allows video segments up to three minutes long. However, you can shoot many segments and then splice them together in postproduction.

I used to use a mini-USB wire to copy images from the PowerShot onto a PC. But, the PC I had set up to do that on crashed, so I’ve taken to popping out he CompactFlash card and sticking it in a slot in an HP Printer that I have. The card then becomes a removable hard disk accessible from the computer connected to that printer. Like with the MiniDV camera, if I want to do post-production, I use Microsoft Movie Maker.

The third digital video device that I use is my Motorola RAZR V3xx cellphone. Videos on this are limited to about 16 seconds. They are even lower quality than I get on the PowerShot. Yet what is great about it is that as soon as I finish recording my clip, I hit send, and it is on its way to various video sites.

Sometimes, I also take still pictures and machinima that I mix into my videos. Machinima is making movies using computer games. I’ve shot a little footage from Second Life using Fraps to capture the images. As my kids explore other virtual worlds, I may try some footage from some other virtual worlds.

I’ve also played a little bit with Blender, which looks promising for creating animations.

Typically, I send videos from my cellphone directly to YouTube, Blip.TV, Facebook and send a copy to Kim. Flickr now supports short videos, but I haven’t sent a video to Flickr yet. They only support short videos, and I don’t really see any great advantage to adding them as yet another video storage location.

Utterz also supports video, and I sent a short video from my cellphone to Utterz as well. Yet, I don’t feel any need to send videos to Utterz. Anyone following me there will probably find my other videos.

There are other sites kicking around that add things like categorization of videos, subtitling, the ability to edit online, etc., but I don’t shoot enough video to find these services all that compelling.

What I don’t currently have in my mix is any good video streaming. If I had one of the good Nokia phones that streams on Qik, you would see me on Qik and Seesmic.

Going forward, I will keep posting to YouTube and Facebook to get people to see the videos, but my primary source will be Blip.TV. Special videos will get cross posted to Orient Lodge, with some description. I need to make sure Twitter to picks up Blip.TV postings

Still photographs

I can use the MiniDV camcorder to take pictures as well. It stores the pictures on an SD card. However, the pictures aren’t very high quality, so I haven’t bothered to get an SD card to store in my MiniDV camcorder. Instead, I tend to take most still pictures using either my PowerShot or my RAZR. The PowerShot has many more features and produces a much higher quality picture, yet I don’t always have the PowerShot with me, but I almost always have my RAZR, so I take a lot of pictures with the RAZR.

I cannot think of any time that I’ve done post production processing of any of my still photographs, with the possible exception of rotating them 90 degrees. If I were to do any post processing, I imagine I would do it in Gimp.

When I upload pictures from the PowerShot, I use the same procedure as I do for the videos. These pictures typically only get stored on Flickr. From my cellphone, I send my pictures to Flickr, Facebook, Ringo, and Kim. I recently sent some photos from the cellphone to Utterz, but my concern about Utterz applies the same for still photographs as it does for video.

When it comes to pictures from Second Life, I send them through BlogHud to Flickr. It keeps a copy on BlogHud and adds details about where the picture was taken. I’ve used other services for Second Life images, but I’ve pretty much settled on BlogHud.

For some videos, I post the thumbnails from Blip.TV to Flickr. One thing that I’m missing is the ability to post pictures with geographical information. I found one site that might do this for the RAZR, but it presented several difficulties, including sending the pictures and the geographic information together in the same data stream. For those of us with unlimited MMS but very limited data packets, this just isn’t a good idea.

Another thing that is missing from the still photography mix is a good way to read mobile bar codes. I haven’t found one that works properly with my model of Razr.

So, all of the key pictures ultimately end up on Flickr. Like with Blip.TV, I need to make sure these get cross posted automatically to Twitter. This may produce some duplication for videos that I’ve cross posted from Blip.TV In addition, special photos from Flickr will get cross posted to Orient Lodge. In particular, I like to do this for Wordless Wednesday.

Audio

I don’t do a lot with Audio, but I’m looking to do more in this area. In the past, I’ve used a microphone to record onto my PC and edited it with Audacity. For my purposes, that works quite nicely. These files I share as attachments in Drupal. When I can’t find a decent quality-working microphone, I record voice notes on my cellphone which I send as an email to myself.

In the past, I used to use Odeo as well, and I think I might still have it up and working, but I ran into various problems with it and don’t use it very often.

At PodCampNYC, I spoke with the folks at BlogTalkRadio. I liked the description of how it works. I came home, ran a test session, which worked quite nicely, so I scheduled my first broadcast. Unfortunately, I ran into a long list of technical problems and spent my whole time slot attempting to get it working. I’ll probably give it another shot next Sunday. If that works, I’ll keep going. If not, I’ll walk away until they can convince me that they’ve worked out their bugs.

As I tried to get things going, I received several emails from tech support about how they were working on fixing things, but things never got fixed, and although I asked for follow up what happened, I never received any follow up, so at this point I am skeptical.

I was pleased with my first tests of Utterz, so I expect this will become my standard repository for short audio. It posts to Twitter, and I can cross post audios that I like to Orient Lodge.

Bookmarks

Right now, I tag most pages with del.icio.us or StumbleUpon. On my main machine, I have GreaseMonkey set up so I can tag pages in both systems quickly and easily at the same time. I was using ma.gnolia, but didn’t find a find a nice way of integrating it with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, so for the time being I’m not doing much with ma.gnolia, although it does have a nice automatic feed into Drupal. I pull in some del.icio.us feeds into my Drupal site, and I may get around to reviewing that again soon.

Short text

I’ve updated my status on Facebook, Pownce, Jaiku, Utterz, Twitter, and other sites. I’ve set up feeds so that when I post content on one site, there is short text that shows up on some of these different sites. I’ve added sites like FriendFeed into that mix. I’ve added complicated paths where a Facebook Status gets added to Twitter, and directly to Jaiku as well as to Jaiku via Twitter. It is probably time to restructure all of this.

Longer text

I make a general rule to put any longer text that I write on Orient Lodge. If I’ve posted it elsewhere, I post links to the other places I’ve posted to. As noted above, some videos from Blip.TV, pictures from Flickr and audio from Utterz will get cross posted to Orient Lodge, as will some bookmarks.

Location

Perhaps the next thing to add into all of this will be location. Sites like BrightKite, Fire Eagle, and older attempts like MeetMoi have tried to bring in a location component, but none of them have really gotten my attention yet.

Attention data aggregators

Right now, I plan on pulling most of this together via Twitter. Sites like FriendFeed might do a better job of it, and I’m busy populating sites like that, but I do like Twitter best.

Another thing that is interesting to note is that many of these sites have social networking components, but what matters is their role in distributing different types of user generated content, and not the social networking in and of itself.

Slowly, I will get my feeds into these systems running more smoothly, then a new system will come along, or I’ll get a new device and I’ll need to rejigger the whole system.

Bears gather to talk about Metanomics, originally uploaded by Aldon.

The show on BlogTalkRadio failed due to technical difficulties. I’m still waiting to find out from them what went wrong. I’ll probably write up more details later. On the other hand, Utterz has worked nicely. I hope to add both of them into my mix. Depending on timing and talk about them when I visit Fiona’s class on Friday. Also, at some point I want to put up a blog post about how all these and other new sites are changing my approach to posting different forms of content online.

Today, per Chris Brogan, is supposed to be blog commenting day. Leave a comment on at least three or five blogs, depending on whom you listen to. I haven’t started adding my comments, but will try to get to that later. It does give me more reason to put off writing a serious blog post today.

Metanomics will be speaking with Glitteractica Cookie today. I intend to be there as a bear, instead of as the dolphin I sometimes appear as when reporting in Second Life.

On top of that I’m tired. Lack of sleep from PodcampNYC, rainy day, allergies or a cold. Just not a lot of energy to write up the really great blog posts that I have pending.

This evening, I will produce my first public show on BlogTalkRadio. I had a great discussion with one of their representatives at PodcampNYC, and I figured I should give it a test and see how well it really works.

I did a simple test this morning. I dialed into the host number, brought up the chat and the switchboard, dialed in from my cellphone as a guest. All of it worked quite nicely. You can have up to five people dialed in at the same time. Afterwards, the show gets archived and saved so people can listen to it later on the BlogTalkRadio website, or on iTunes. I have not explored the licensing issues closely, but people have told me that BlogTalkRadio retains some rights to the material and if you use the archive elsewhere, there may be some revenue sharing issues. At least right now, I’m not particularly concerned with that. I just want to get a better feel for their system and how it fits into the larger media mix.

Earlier today, I had Fiona record a quick ‘Utter’ on Utterz.com. I used their tools to post it on my blog and on Twitter. She wants me to go visit her class this week and talk about social media. It is interesting to think about this in terms of the discussions at PodcampNYC about education and social media.

So, what would it be like if students were using Utterz? If they were using BlogTalkRadio to talk about what is going on at school? How can these tools be used covering political events, campaigns, and so on?

Well, this evening, at 6:30 ET, we will do our first BlogTalkRadio broadcast. I’ll probably talk a little bit about podcasting, and then turn most of the show over to Fiona, to talk with her Papa and Nanna, her cousins, her sisters, or any other friends that may call in. I’ll start to learn the ropes, and then figure out where to take it from here.

#PodcampNYC Day 1

There is no way that a day of a podcamp can adequately be summarized in a single blog entry, especially when sitting on a train back to New Haven, after having had several Gin and Tonics. However, there are many impressions that are worth sharing.

During the introduction, there were talks about simple logistics. The WiFi was down, but they were resetting the router. People spoke about the infectious joy of learning and a desire to spread that. One person spoke about learning astronomy from his grandfather when he was five years old and dedicating his Podcamp experience to his grandfather. There were discussions about the importance of the 'rule of two feet', meaning that if you are in a session that you are not getting a lot out of, don't feel bad about walking out and finding a session that is better suited to your needs. They spoke about the importance of tagging, and if you don't know what tagging is, ask someone near you. They some about the importance of Creative Commons, and the whole idea that the podcamp experience is based on sharing information. It was noted with humor that this was perhaps the first camp where people asked for press passes.

Then first session had several good sessions. I went to Teachers Teaching Teachers. Paul Alison and Susan Ettenheim had many great comments. Several of which I captured on Twitter. Since I am sitting on a train without Internet connectivity, I will have to simply try to remember as much as my Gin laden brain can remember.

The session started, in true podcamp style, with everyone introducing themselves and talking about what they hoped to get out of the session. Peggy Sheehy, whom I knew from Second Life and the Second Life educators list, and who describes herself as a consultant in Virtual World Education, summed it up quite nicely by stating that she was all over anything that gets people engaged. Another person in that session, whose name escapes me as I take the train home, is a . Another was an artist, who, because of the small living space that he currently lives in, creates his sculptures in SketchUp. I wish I got his name, or a link to some of his SketchUp sculptures.

During the 11 o'clock session, there a couple sessions that drew overflow crowds. Alan Levy of BlogTalkRadio spoke about "how to build and sustain a social community". He told various stories about BlogTalkRadio and I think I will see about adding them into my social media mix. Perhaps I can set up a weekly podcast featuring Fiona. Concurrent with that, Dave LaMorte spoke about "Using technology for differentiated instruction" and Cliff Ravenscraft spoke about communicating with your audience: Building community around your podcast. Cliff's session was overflowing as well, and I confused the two sessions in a couple messages I sent to Twitter. Cliff had great comments about responding to every email and about using sites like TalkShoe, as well as either j2.com or k2.net for voicemail.

After lunch, Peggy Sheehy and AJ Kelton spoke about 'Second Life: Shifted Learning". I liked their approach to the divide between digital natives and digital immigrants, noting that some older folks, like Peggy and myself, are perhaps closer to being digital natives than some teenagers growing up in a digital native culture. Instead, looking at it in terms of a shift in culture and education, and thinking about those who have not made the shift, many digital immigrants, and those who have made the shift, many digital natives, seemed particularly useful. There is probably some play on words about those who are 'shiftless', but I will leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Peggy made reference to a book, "Don't bother me mom, I'm learning", which sounds like a book worth exploring. She also noted a T-shirt that says, "I'm not ADD. I'm just not listening". There were many great tidbits from that session. Peggy suggested that one of the worst things teachers can do is to teach students about technology without talking about the ethics of how to use it responsibly. She spoke about how kids come into schools, full of media rich experiences, and how schools shut these kids down. She told a wonderful story about one day when a pigeon flew into her classroom. It walked over to a computer and started walking on the keyboard. Peggy called someone to get her digital camera out of the locked draw in the desk in her office. Yet by the time the person arrived with the camera, just about every student had taken a picture with their cellphones. Students these days are well versed in the use of digital media tools.

She did note that 21st century literacy is based on traditional literacy, such as reading and writing. There wasn't any reference to the Pew report that just came out, and it seems like this is a good area to explore.

There were several other sessions I was particularly interested during this time slot. Lisa Thurmann ran a session entitled "Using Podcasting to Connect with Children Re-entering School After Having Been Treated for Cancer". I didn't get any details about the session afterwards, but many people said it was going to be a great session. Another session was "Music in Podcasts-Pandora.com", lead by Kevin Seal. Later in the day, many people told me that this was the best session, in true Podcamp style, with a very lively and informative session. I had a brief chance to speak with Kevin at the bar at the end of the day, and it does sound like this was a great session.

During the 2 PM time slot, Christine Cavalier spoke about 'Social Media Parenting". The crux of her talk was about how we need to teach kids about digital technology. Yet it is the kids that understand digital culture, better than their parents. She took the Digital native/Digital Immigrant dichotomy and ran with it to a great place. Parents are like the first generation immigrants in America. They need to learn technology as a second language, so they can communicate with their kids growing up in a digital culture. What we have to worry about are the parents that are afraid of technology, and help them ratchet down their fear factor.

I think her points were right on mark, but as people explored what it meant, it felt like a bunch of digital immigrants returning to their fears of being online. As someone whom so many of the new digital natives meet as they first explore their surroundings, as a digital immigrant since 1982, I felt very frustrated by the discussion.

This session was followed up by Whitney Hoffman talking about "Education 2.0 - How New Media is Changing Education". I would be tempted to retitle her presentation to "How New Media Should be Changing Education...” She had many great comments about encouraging students to set up Wiki's, mailing lists, blogs, and other tools to make sure that their educational experience is as fulfilling as it should be. Whitney was a key organizer of PodcampNYC, and if anyone 'gets it', it is probably Whitney. I bookmarked a few sites she highlighted and started following her in various social media sites.

By the time the four o'clock session rolled around, I was close to information overload. The session I sought out didn't have the presenter appear. So, I headed out, in search of another session. On my way, I ran into Ann Marie Mathis and Howard Levenson of Cheil Worldwide. Cheil is an advertising agency that seems to 'get it'. I first met Ann Marie and Howard at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference. They are fellow residents of Second Life. As I spoke with them, I wondered why there were no other advertising agencies apparent at PodcampNYC. This was a gathering of some of the leading content creators, as well as people who could be potential clients for advertising firms. Is it just because Cheil is the only firm forward thinking enough to get beyond strict adherence to ROI thinking? Just because people haven't figured out, yet, how to measure something, doesn't mean that there isn't great value there.

As I sort through the business cards and brochures that I received, I find a few other sites that deserve mention. At the bar, various firms deserve shoutouts. I believe that Raw Voice and Culinary Media Network bought the first round, Blip.tv bought the second round, and mDialog bought the third round. This does illustrate a problem. After a long conference, and a couple hours at a bar, some of the details get a little blurry. Let me simply say that I have been a long time fan of blip.tv. mDialog is a company that particularly caught my interest early, during the show. While blip is a great way to upload videos, and I'll probably keep uploading my videos to blip, mDialog looks like a great way to create channels of video content, whether you use their own site, blip.tv or other sites. I need to explore their system in much more detail when I get a chance to catch up. That said, I may be confusing them with Magnify.net. When the dust settles, I'll try to figure it out.

Another site that caught my attention, in part because they had a table, thanks to their sponsorship of PodcampNYC, was redlasso.com. Redlasso gives you the ability to search TV and radio broadcasts and then clip and share the stories on your own blog. I look forward to seeing what they can really do.

Other sites that I picked up cards for, mostly because the people involved seemed like good interesting people were Travels with Child, Leisure Creative, Queens Artists, including their podcasts, Karol Duclos Photography, and Terrific Teaching Ideas, although the site isn't fully functional yet.

With that, I've done a mind dump of the first, very full day of PodCampNYC. Tomorrow, I'll be speaking at the first session, gathering more information, hopefully, writing another blog post, and then crashing in exhaustion. If you were at PodCampNYC, and have additional information, please drop me a note at aldon dot hynes at orient dash lodge dot com.

Yesterday, I was in meetings and mostly offline for much of the day, so my unread emails have sky rocketed again. On top of that, I was told about two new social networking tools yesterday I want to explore.

The first is SpokeO. I kicked it around for a while, but so far, I’ve been pretty unimpressed with it.

The second is onaswarm. This site is overwhelmingly cool. I played with it for a while last night. It is supposed to support OpenID, but I tried to log in with OpenID today, and it said they weren’t accepting any new users. I guess they got swamped last night. Perhaps I can find how to associate my OpenID with my existing account.

It did go out and import 18 social networks that I’m part of. Today, it is asking for validation of a couple of them. The validation is returning blank pages, but seems to have worked. Well, it is a beta, after all.

When I go out to explore my contacts, well, that is where it starts go get overwhelming. It pulls in friends list from various sites, as well as picks up microformat tags. With that, it picks up over sixty sites that are identified as ‘me’. It grabbed another hundred general sites. It grabbed about a hundred from Livejournal and about 350 from Twitter. Other sites will a small number of friends added about another hundred althogether. These sites included Blogger, buzznet, Jaiku, last.fm, Myspace, Pounce, StumbleUpon, Tribe, Typepad, Upcoming and Vox .

Some of these sites over lap, although onaswarm doesn’t seem to recognize these overlaps yet. In my case, there was also some interesting stratification of the social networks. One group of friends were people that I knew from LambdaMOO. Many of them ended up on Livejournal and Tribe. Then, there were my friends from the 2004 presidential cycle. Some of them also show up in places like Livejournal and Tribe. Others of them have remained more active or connected than some of my old MOO friends.

It was curious that onaswarm brought in only two of my friends from StumbleUpon. I checked and saw that I had closer to a dozen. I also saw that a lot of people added me as friends on StumbleUpon that I haven’t added as friends yet. So, I spent a little time updating that. Now, if only I can figure out how to get onaswarm to recheck my updated friends on StumbleUpon.

One thing that I liked was the way onaswarm sorted my friends, by network, and then by name. I know that people have been looking for nice ways to get a sorted list of people they are following on Twitter. Onaswarm seems to do that.

The friend adding was slow, tedious, and didn’t really seem to bring much benefit. The sorting of entries in the feed didn’t seem to work all that well, and I’ve already got enough different sites that do this. What is interesting is that onaswarm, as well as many of the other friend feed type sites make their feeds available via RSS, so you can subscribe to them on other systems.

As I wrote in A maze of twisty little passages, all alike and Tracking the Twisty Mazes, there are all kinds of interesting and potentially horribly confusing things you can do in trying to link all of this together. Onaswarm just takes it to one more level.

So, I’ll poke around onaswarm a bit more when I don’t have hundreds of unread emails waiting for me, as well as a fun conference coming up.

Over on Twitter, a few people have been asking who is going to #PodcampNYC. If only I could get Onaswarm to check out who is going to be at Podcamp and come of with a list of people to say hello to.

Aleady, I know quite a few friends and fellow twitterers that will be there: Faye Anderson, Joyce Bettencourt (@rhiannonsl), Christine Cavalier (@PurpleCar), Tom Guarriello (@tomguarriello), Chris Hambly (@audio), Noel Hidalgo (@noneck), Dean Landsman (@deanland), Joshua Levy ( @levjoy), Drew Olanoff, Heath Row (@h3athrow), Liza Sabater (@blogdiva).

So, hopefully, I will rally and find the energy for all this social networking, not to mention, catching up