Lisa Padilla on Media and Culture

Sad indeed, I just read this email from Eyepot.com . From: noreply@eyespotcorp.com To: lisa@informationcolony.com Sent: 09 Oct '08 19:58 Subject: To Our Users and Customers: We deeply regret to inform you that Eyespot Corporation will no longer be able to continue serving you. For our users at eyespot.com, we're no longer allowing you to upload new videos. You can retrieve your uploaded video and mixes by going to your mymedia gallery and clicking the download link below the video thumbnail. For our business customers in the eyespot video network, your site will continue operate unaffected for a limited period of time. We encourage you to migrate your video solution to one of our competing providers in the video mixing (e.g. http://corp.kaltura.com/ ) and video publishing space (e.g. http://www.fliqz.com/ ) immediately. We'll soon be providing you with the means of downloading your community videos from within your dashboard at [ http://eyespot.com/partnerDashboard ]. We ha...

Dangerous tools and environments were just a couple of the risks when the oil industry first started. That torturous first scene in the movie There Will Be Blood shows Daniel Day Lewis, the oil seeking maverick, injured and stranded with broken bones after a fall into the well he dug. There is payoff this time and his pain is outweighed by his joy when the oil shoots up from the earth allowing him victory. Of course there are many wells that don't pay off but one must keep plodding through each as if it would. Some wells seem to have more promise than others. In my world of drilling and discovery, crude technology is the black gold sought. New media technology has become so exciting in the past 3 or 4 years, even though it's played down by those sorely recollecting the 'Bubble.' Yet, it's rampant. Most TV shows have web sites and if the producer don't build it, the fans will. My daughter's orthodontist has her own radio show. You can order groceries, drugs,...

It can be said that Alan Levy is a good business man, a direct and effective negotiator. He retooled existing, large telephony infrastructure technology into a free, light-weight web service anyone with a phone can figure out. He makes money on both premium services and advertising, as well as backend US numbers procured by the phone company he also owns. But the service, again, is free. And long distance is included with virtually every phone service these days. I said "hero", because we'll all see heartbreak at some point, but few of us create a mechanism by which anyone can communicate, build community, share, connect with friends, family, paranormal psychologists, authors who write about paranormal psychologists, actors who play them on TV and activists concerned for the pet portrayals played therein. Smart businesses will take the technology, like Dave Winer did and build cool sub-services. They can use these privately like recorded conference calls, or on the fly...

Social media was made for me. I have always favored personal bonds among colleagues and more often than not found it to strengthen the work created together. I have accounts at over 30 social networking sites. I Twitter , Pownce , Jaiku , Flickr and Blip . I chat on over half a dozen instant messaging clients. I write 4 blogs and echo each of those in excerpt or comment on many other web sites. I have several feed readers and foster relationships with influencers I respect to keep up with anything I might have missed. My attention touches a lot of things and I like it that way. Some people feel that there is no intellect in the village, especially if the village is filled with idiots, but I disagree. We can learn much from this knowledge, about the variety of individual beliefs and collective views and about problem solving. So I'm a big fan, you can tell. But I want to raise a problem with social networking yet unsolved. What's missing is the ability to socially "(un)boo...