CivicActions

Podcast available here

In a quest to get myself caught up on what's happening in the Drupal community from a high-level standpoint, I realised something.

It can be really hard keeping track of everything that's going on. So I decided to do something about it.

Next week, Zoey and I will be at the NetSquared Conference in San Jose, CA and if you're one of the 350 lucky participants attending, we would love to connect with you!

NetSquared is a two-day event of innovators in social benefit initiatives & technology to advance change around the globe.

This is all about how NGOs can use social tools to collaborate, share information and mobilize support using FOSS (like Drupal), blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasting, user-generated content, twitter, and all the other key tools and buzzwords.

Also, take a moment and give our Mashup idea a "star" (vote) and help us support the Network for Good API.

Earlier in the month, Mark Michael Lewis interviewed me on his podcast show which is about practices that integrate money, mission and meaning into life.

We rapped about how technology and values can create measurable results in a wide variety of social contexts, highlighting a series of CivicActions clients.

A brief look at YouTube's most popular videos of the day, and what do you find? Cingular with the #1 video?! (391,397 views today alone!) Yep, the name of the video is "Cingular presents: YouTube Underground!" Cingular nabs the "Viral Day Action" award (VD Action) with this clever bit of marketing... a video announcing a YouTube contest for the best band, video or song on the hugely popular video social networking site. And, only a day after Warner Music signed a deal with YouTube - agreeing to a new royalty-tracking system... A good week for the 'Tube.

Politicians are discovering the new political maxim in the Web 2.0 age: "The next stupid thing you say may be on YouTube." This great NYTimes article examines the new political landscape in which millions of grassroots cameras and instant video publishing are shining new light into the banal and risk-averse world of modern politics.

Some political analysts say that YouTube could force candidates to stop being so artificial, since they know their true personalities will come out anyway. “It will favor a kind of authenticity and directness and honesty that is frankly going to be good,� said Carter Eskew, a media consultant who worked for Senator Lieberman’s primary campaign. “People will say what they really think rather than what they think people want to hear.�

We at CivicActions have helped clients to develop "Social Media" websites which enable members of a community to bond around shared media for fun, learning, advocacy and transformation. One of the principal aims of this development has always been the empowerment of individuals and communities to rise above the echochamber of monolithic media channels by accessing wider sources of content and even by becoming the media makers themselves.

Now YouTube, the current granddaddy of Social Media sites in the videosphere, and best known for "America's Funniest Home Videos"-style fare, seems to be growing into a role of crucial and transformative importance: leveling the playing field for presenting disparate eyewitness views of something as profound and inflammatory as the current Hizbollah-Israeli conflict -- unfiltered by editors, advertisers or even production values. It's chaos, but somewhere in the triangulation of a million lens-eyes, we can hope that the complex truths of such difficult circumstances may be brought to light in ways that don't fit neatly in between car commercials.

After nine months of development, The Institute of Noetic Sciences has launched "Shift in Action" 1.0, an already thriving online community of like-minded thresholders committed to personal, social and global transformation.

The tireless and amazing CivicActions team engineered the site, with partner HoloCosmos providing architecture, visual design and online marketing. Stephen Dinan, the Institute's Director of Membership and Marketing, was the visionary client and head of a talented team there.

Kent Bye just posted his vloggercon presentation which includes a demo of his extremely novel "EchoChamber Project" -- "an open source, investigative documentary about how the television news media became an uncritical echo chamber to the Executive Branch leading up to the war in Iraq..."

Kent is developing a Drupal-based collaborative editing approach that will allow the greater community to share video resources and contribute their distinct voices and perspectives. With so many alternatives to state-run media, perhaps we'll see if Stephen Colbert is right when he stated at the recent White House Press Club Dinner: "Reality has a well-known liberal bias."