Metaboston Media

Harvard Book Store on Twitter

 

Follow them! 

Other bookstores on Twitter?  Powells, Vertigo Books in DC, Skylight Books in LA, Puddn'head Books of Missouri, and Liberty Bay Books in WA  are some that are tweeting but the bookstores are far outnumbered by publishers.

Nonprofit Media Fellowships at CCTV

Cambridge Community Television is offering a fellowship program to help nonprofits and government agencies use new media better.  CCTV offers a wide variety of media training and has been exploring a lot of interesting projects so this is a great opportunity for the right organizations.

Could your organization use digital media and technology more effectively? In order to build capacity in local non-profit organizations and City agencies, CCTV is offering the Media Fellowship. This program is designed to empower local non-profits and city departments to produce media by training members of their staff. CCTV will provide agency staff with knowledge and skills to produce effective media within the scope of their agencies mission and goals and will foster fellowships and synergy between agency professionals working in media oriented roles.

One of the interesting things we've found working with nonprofits as clients is the importance of familiarity with media and technology within the organization so that it can be used well for projects that further the organization's mission.

Boston Games from the Global Game Jam

 
This month's Boston Post Mortem will be featuring games created by Boston teams for the Global Game Jam where teams around the world competed to create video games over a weekend.  It's a good example of how quickly projects can move from start to finish and could be an inspiration for organizations hesitating about dipping a toe into new media.

This month's meeting of the Boston Post Mortem will be next Wednesday, the 11th, at 7pm at the Skellig in Waltham. Instead of a single speaker, we're going to be doing a showcase and post mortem of the games created last weekend at the Boston site of the Global Game Jam. For those of you who don't know, the GGJ was organized by the IGDA as a game jam happening simultaneously around the world, with over 1600 participants creating over 300+ games in 48 hours. Our Boston site was hosted by the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. All 300 games are on the official website, but you might particularly want to check out the six games that were made in Boston

They're all open-source, too, so feel free to take a crack at the code!

The event will take place on Wednesday, Feb. 11 starting at 7:00pm at the Skellig in Waltham.

Broadway Theatre and Online Social Networks and Video

Broadway productions have begun experimenting with the use of social networks and online video.

Broadway productions now offer pages on social networking sites. For example, the MySpace page for “In the Heights” features a blog with updates about the show, widgets that fans can embed in their own MySpace pages, a jukebox that plays songs from the show and several music videos from the cast. These include a parody of the song “Umbrella” called “Abuela,” and a spoof of “High School Musical” that features Lin-Manuel Miranda, the show’s lyricist and star, singing and dancing in Central Park.

Mr. Miranda has created several videos for the Web, including a series called “Legally Brown,” which lampooned the MTV reality show that chose a replacement for the lead in “Legally Blonde.” In the series, which is at legallybrownonbroadway.com and on YouTube, Broadway stars like Matthew Morrison of “South Pacific,” Allison Janney of the coming “9 to 5: The Musical” and Cheyenne Jackson of “Xanadu” competed to become the next piragua vendor on “In the Heights.”

Giving people a sense of what they will be getting such as through Miranda's videos is a good idea particularly for a high-priced item like theatre tickets.

Other approaches by theatre productions seem less successful:

To help the producers of “Sunday in the Park With George” build a relationship with theatergoers, Situation Interactive set up a Web site that allowed users to digitally recreate Georges Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” with personalized dots.

and a Nine-to 5 promotion might be funny but seems like it will lead to people getting fired or a lack of participation due to fear of the same.

For “9 to 5: The Musical,” the firm is working on an online game in which players can upload pictures of their bosses for a shooting gallery.

Rather than becoming too creative with their online offerings, producers should consider providing more content related to the show to potential audience members. Videos of rehearsals or performers or interviews with backstage personnel. An online video is not goign to be a perfect substitute for attending a performance so cannibalization should be a minor concern. Instead online content should help to interest people in a show and also to help explain all the work that goes into it from people who work on sets, lighting, and all the other aspects of the theatre that audience members may be unaware of. This might also help to make ticket prices seem more understandable.

Somerville Local First's Facebook Contest

 Somerville Local First, a group that encourages local shopping, is running a contest on Facebook through Jan. 2

To enter, participants must post photographs on their Facebook site of a favorite locally purchased or received gift and identify the business from which it came. It does not have to be in Somerville though the organization would love it to be. It could be a locally produced item anywhere in New England.

Send in a picture, you could win a $150 gift certificate.

It's a good way to start an easy experiment with social media. (via Metaboston)

Lawrence Lessig on Remix and Change Congress

Lawrence Lessig discusses with Brian Lehrer his new book Remix, his last book on copyright, and his new project to utilize new media tools to Change Congress.

Henry Jenkins To Leave MIT for USC

Henry Jenkins, the head of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and a prominent academic voice on game culture, fan fiction and other new media, will be moving to USC.  He describes the difficult decision on his blog where it seems a prime cause was MIT being unwilling to invest more in the program.  Given the economic downturn things were unlikely to change anytime soon.

"On the one hand, accepting the USC position means leaving a school which has been my intellectual home for almost two decades. MIT was willing to give me my first academic position, just out of graduate school, and it has provided me with an intellectual context for doing my work. It's a safe bet that none of my digital work would have taken place if I had not landed in Cambridge in time to experience some of the early years of the Media Lab or to live among the ultimate community of early tech adapters or to have a chance to meet with the digerati as they passed through campus.

***

But I have also struggled with the reality that we do not have the level of faculty commitment from MIT to allow us to sustain this kind of activity long term. Despite a decade of arguments, we still have only two dedicated faculty members on whose back all of the activity you've been reading about here has rested. I'm often asked how I manage to do everything I do and now you know the sad answer: I can't -- at least not year after year. Even Green Lantern needs to recharge his ring now and again. When I began this process, I had the body of a 37 year old. I woke up one morning and discovered that aliens has swapped it out for the body of a 50 year old. We had enjoyed dramatic expansion over the past few years, but with it has come dramatic increases in my responsibilities, until I reached a point where it was not humanly possible to continue to work at the pace I have been working.
 

His departure leaves the future of the CMS program up in the air.  It is too bad that this had to happen as CMS has brought a lot of interesting programs to Cambridge and really seemed to compliment the geeky culture of MIT.

Obama and YouTube

Obama's decision to begin a series of weekly YouTube videos rather than continuing the radio address format is smart.  He's benefited from YouTube and shouldn't engage in a pointless excercise of recording a radio address listened to only by reporters required to do so.  Will families gather around the computer to watch these videos?  No, but they certainly don't gather around the radio to listen to the presidential address.  Do you know when the addresses are broadcast?  Neither did we, until we looked it up.

Presentation on Second Life and Education at Harvard

Harvard's Berkman Center is hosting an event on education in the virtual world Second Life led by the interesting law professor Charles Nesson and his daughter Rebecca who have co-taught courses in Second Life.  The spotlight on Second Life has faded quite a bit after the corporate and media landrush of a couple years ago so it should be interesting to hear this.  The Nessons have written a paper on their experiences (pdf) and the event will be webcast.

Second Life: Open Education and Virtual Worlds

Millions of people worldwide have flocked to a virtual environment known as “Second Life” during the past few years. There, they create three-dimensional representations of themselves, known as “avatars,” that buy, sell, teach, build, and relate in a world totally created by its residents. 

Join us for a thought provoking evening, at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, with Harvard’s father-daughter team of Charles Nesson and Rebecca Nesson as they examine Second Life and the opportunities and problems that this virtual environment confronts.

Info:
Wednesday, November 12, 6:00 pm
Langdell North Classroom, Langdell Hall, Harvard Law School (Map)
RSVP Required
This event will be webcast live at 6:00 pm ET.

Boston Media Makers Meeting

Steve Garfield posts images from the recent Boston Media Makers' meeting.