youtube – Don't Gel Too Soon

World Water Problems, YouTube and a Great Organizing Tool

Experts tell us water will be the “new oil.” Las Vegas, running out of water, is already paying residents to replant their lawns with desert plants to save water. It’s getting really scary here; it’s been scary in many other countries for a long time. In some of those countries, the situation is desperate. Killer dysentery is rampant; babies die, children die, parents die. And it’s not so hard to help.

Today I received an email from Ramya Raghavan, from “CitizenTube“, announcing some new tools to help deliver video messages for nonprofits. Here’s the example she sent along – it raised $10,000 in one day. “That’s enough to build two brand-new wells in the Central African Republic and give over 150 people clean drinking water for 20 years!”

Ramya urges others to take a look; you can make it work for your nonprofit too. Here’s the link. Some days I really love the Internet. This is one.

PARDON ME, DO YOU THINK THE WEB CAN CHANGE THE WORLD?

I began my day at the plenary session of one of my favorite conferences –NTEN — The Nonprofit Technology Network. It’s a gathering of mostly non-profit activists who use the web to enhance their work. They are sharp, committed and fun.

The main session this morning was off the charts: David Weinberger, from Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. He nay be the best speaker I ever heard – certainly one of the best. Of course he’s funny and sometimes outraged – both very good things — but he also offers really thrilling analysis of our lives online and the role of each of us in making the Web what it is, and what it will be. Read more about him from another admirer, at the conference blog.

I also popped in at "Using Technology to Support Your Mission." Very cool but it turned out to be techier than I wanted, so wandered around running into people. This community is so vibrant and purposeful that it’s a wonderful place to hang around. These are people who don’t think the web can change the world, they know it has.

By the way, beyond what I’m learning in sessions, I can tell you what’s hot by the sessions I couldn’t even get into: The Age of YouTube: Using Video Online to Reach the Masses and Leveraging the Power of Participatory Media. Fortunately the YouTube one, at least, was videoed and will appear on the NTEN website where we can attend without sitting in a corner on the floor and sweating from the major body heat surrounding each of us.

Even so, in all it was a great day; sorry this report is so brief. More tomorrow.

HILLARY, THE TONKIN GULF AND 1984

OK, those folks who run TypePad and YouTube haven’t found a way to add this blog host to automatic video posting so I’m hooking a link in right here so you can watch this. I can’t decide what I think – it’s funny and clever and a perfect definition of a mashup but it’s also mean and off-mark. While many, including many feminists, have issues with Senator Clinton – this 1984/Apple Commercial version isn’t representative of most of them. Accusations of opportunism and flabbiness on the war are not the same as totalitarianism. True, she voted for the Patriot Act, but so did all but two Senators – and one of them didn’t vote at all!

Now, I remind myself – we still remember who voted against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution (Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska) and that was in 1964 so maybe this vote will last too. Anyway, I don’t know where I’ll land politically this year – I’m really just thinking about the power of the kinds of media manipulation (in the technical sense) that are possible today. How will we ever help newer voters figure out how to determine the truth? Are they so much more evolved than we are in a media sense that we needn’t worry, or is the dismal lack of critical thinking work in current No Child Left Behind education going to affect how people think in the voting booth as well as our educational standing in the world?

Thoughts?