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.

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.

Cape Cod Blogging Suit

A blogger on Cape Cod Today and a blog commenter are being sued over discussion of a dredging issue.  David Ardia at the Citizen Media Law Project has a really interesting explanation of the legal issues.

"Peter Robbins, author of the Robbins Report, a blog that appears on the popular community website Cape Cod Today, and an anonymous commenter have been sued over statements they made criticizing a group of Barnstable, MA residents who opposed the dredging of Barnstable Harbor.  The case raises a host of interesting questions, including whether the statements at issue are protected opinions and the potential applicability of Massachusetts' anti-SLAPP and retraction statutes.

The dispute arose over a March 11 post by Robbins entitled Barnstable Harbor: Filling in and falling in, in which he criticized a number of individuals, including Joseph Dugas and his lawyer Paul Revere III, who had challenged orders issued by the Town of Barnstable Conservation Commission and Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection that authorized dredging in Barnstable Harbor (not surprising for a community that is so intimately tied to the water, dredging in the harbor is quite a controversial topic).

(via Metaboston)

Public Access Television in the Age of YouTube

Interesting discussion by Leonard Lopate with Dan Gillmor and Dee Dee Halleck on the future and significance of public access TV, one of the early forms of community media facing some uncertainty in an age of easier publishing and broadcasting over the internet. 

I tend to think that public access television production is becoming less relevant with so many video-sharing sites and cheap cameras.  That said, one model for relevance seems to be what Cambridge Community Television is doing by providing instruction on all kinds of social media as well as more elaborate studio production.

Blogger Night at American Repertory Theatre: Sept. 16

Cambridge's American Repertory Theatre is reaching out to bloggers with complimentary tickets to their new play Let Me Down Easy by Anna Deveare Smith.  If you're not a theatregoer, you've probably seen Smith in a movie but she might be most familiar from the West Wing.

"The American Repertory Theatre invites Boston bloggers to the A.R.T.'s latest production: "LET ME DOWN EASY a play in evolution"

To receive a complimentary ticket, bloggers are asked to write impressions and feedback about the performance on their blog within a few days after the show. You do not need to be an arts or entertainment blogger to attend! If you are curious about theater and/or the A.R.T. this is a great night to see what it's like and then write about it.

It seems like a great idea in trying to broaden theatre audiences and especially good that it isn't limited to "arts and entertainment" bloggers whose audiences are most likely already aware of the play.  It will be interesting to see if there are any issues if blog word isn't positive.  There will be a series of events so it sounds like they've built patience into the plan.

Great work by Sooz to help organize this.

"Sooz, a Boston blogger and event planner, has teamed up with the A.R.T. to host a series of blogger nights at the American Repertory Theatre in Harvard Square.

Using Twitter For Distributed Wine Tastings

Braintree-based Bin Ends wine store is building a customer following by organizing wine tastings where fellow tasters interact over the Twitter messaging service and with wine makers.

“The project aims to give wine enthusiasts around the globe a chance to join the world's top wine personalities online for tastings via the popular social networking tool Twitter. Users need only set up a free Twitter account and then follow binendswine on the service. In the U.S., they can also order the wines being tasted from Bin Ends three weeks prior to the event, with free shipping across the country (Bin Ends does not ship internationally). Then, equipped with the wines and their Twitter account, users can join the event as it takes place, commenting, asking questions and enjoying back-and-forth interaction with the winemakers in real time. Tastings generally take place the third Thursday of every month at 7 p.m. Eastern U.S. time, and are announced on Twitter, Facebook and Bin Ends' own website.

Great idea to attract customers who might not want to head out to a wine tasting and especially for those who aren't in the immediate area of the store.  Not only is it interactive but it overcomes the geography problem faced by a lot of smaller retailers.

Congressional Leadership Develops New Media Staffs

The offices of the Congressional leaders now have staff members devoted to new media, primarily bloggers.  Even if it isn't possible to have a blog yourself as Nancy Pelosi's office does, this article illustrates how important it is to be aware of what is being said about you online. 

"The four congressional leadership offices now all employ full-time staffers who serve as liaisons to the political blogging world and help their party’s lawmakers stay in touch with the ever-growing online activist community.        

Campaign and congressional offices have been testing the waters of this new medium for a few years now, but lawmakers and their staff are still learning the lessons of how bloggers and the traditional press differ."

If you're in an area like politics where discussion is robust to say the least still "testing the waters" is a bit slow.

"Many have already learned the hard lessons of how bloggers can complicate things for a national figure such as Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., or even take down a once-promising politician such as former Sen. George Allen, R-Va., who saw his hopes for a presidential run dashed by the so-called Macaca video that made its viral rounds of the web. But they also are learning that bloggers and online activists can play a crucial role in promoting each party’s agenda on everything from the Iraq War to last year’s battle over child health care legislation."  (Image:  from Pelosi office blog The Gavel)

Audioblogs, the Music Industry, and Free Music

Audioblogs, blogs that discuss music and offer free downloads of those songs, have become an exception to the music industry's dislike of file-sharing:

"This is not, you might think, a development the beleaguered music industry can be watching with enthusiasm, but you'd be wrong. An New York University study published in February, Does Chatter Matter?, found that the volume of blog posts about a new album can significantly affect sales. Many record labels now view the audioblog as a vital marketing tool, and a euphoric plug on Brooklyn Vegan is more valuable in certain cases than a five-star review in Q. ('Certain cases' is worth noting; most blogs shy away from the mainstream, favouring obscure bands whose fans will also favour less obvious sources of information.)

In contrast to their disreputable cousins, file-sharing networks, MP3 blogs don't attract much legal attention. No one has been prosecuted for posting individual tracks. The most serious injunction a blogger is likely to get is a polite 'take down' notice, usually for posting material too far ahead of release. 'In fact,' according to Scott Wright, who runs the London-based blog Pinglewood.com, 'almost everything I post now is something I've been sent or asked to post by record labels or artists.'"

It's interesting to see the music industry adopt a more nuanced approach and realize that closing off all access to music is not helpful to sales and more discussion of music and sampling of music (in the give-it-a-try sense) is how people could get interested.

Britannica Gives In (a Bit) to the Web

The Encyclopedia Britannica is starting to open up to the internet after several years of being known primarily as the former employer of a vehement opponent of Wikipedia while their main mission of being an encyclopedia seemed to recede into irrelevance behind their paywall.

This seems to fall into the "if you can't beat them, join them" department.  The new program known as WebShare "lets web publishers and bloggers link to Britannica articles. Your readers will be able to follow those links without an account."  While Wikipedia has grown into one of the top ten (or so) sites on the web and become an essential reference point for internet users Britannica has remained pretty much invisible on the web. 

TechCrunch notes that even now Britannica is only taking a half-way step.  Britannica will only give free access to approved web publishers but everyone else (they hope) will pay:

"[L]ike the music labels, they still somehow feel as though people should pay to consume their content. And that means search engines can’t index their content. And that means they don’t exist.

Instead of going free and opening up to all, they’re using the new program to simply price discriminate. Give people who may link to the site free access. Everyone else has to pay. So in effect they’re aiming to be half pregnant - they want the benefits of web linking but don’t want to give up the subscription fees from the fools who continue to pay them."

They're also using a blog to update on the project and even twittering. (via Kottke)

The Digital World Discussed: Benkler, Sunstein and Jenkins

Harvard Law professors Yochai Benkler (left)and Cass Sunstein will discuss the pros and cons of a digital age in a discussion moderated by MIT media professor Henry Jenkins and called Our World Digitized:  The Good, The Bad and the Ugly:

"Much discussion of our impending digital future is insular and without nuance.  Skeptics talk mainly among themselves, while utopians and optimists also keep company mainly within their own tribal cultures.  Today’s forum challenges this unhelpful division, staging a conversation between two of our country’s most thoughtful and influential writers on the  promise and the perils of the Internet Age."

Info:
Thursday, April 10, 2008
5-7 p.m.
Bartos Theater
MIT
Cambridge, MA