This is the community weblog that gives crowdsourcing a good name.
I’m making note of it because MetaFilter is the work of McMinnville, OR resident, Matt Haughey.
Since moving to Portland last August, I’ve taken note of how many craftsmen and women are at work here. Many. In every conceivable field. To stay with content creators for now, I’d like to present my list of Portland’s top producers.
Dave Allen of music site Pampelmoose is a founding member of UK Post-Punk band, Gang of Four. He hosts a show on 94.7 knrk and holds down a big time day job at Nemo Design.
Rick Turoczy is the Silicon Florist. He keeps Portlanders up to date on all the local happenings in tech. He also writes for ReadWriteWeb, one of the most prominent tech publications online.
Marshall Kirkpatrick is Vice President of Content Development at ReadWriteWeb, and also the Lead Writer.
Dawn Foster is a social media maven, community manager and event organizer. She writes Fast Wonder and contributes to Om Malik’s WebWorkerDaily.
Amber Case is is a Cyborg Anthropologist and Consultant. She writes at Hazelnut Tech Talk and Discovery Channel’s new NerdAbout.
Julian Chadwick is the content generating mad man behind PDXPipeline, the best source for upcoming cultural events in the city.
Cami Kaos & Dr. Normal are the city’s husband and wife podcasting team par excellence. They produce Strange Love Live, a weekly interview show featuring Portland’s movers and shakers in the social web space.
By no means is this list exhaustive. A quick run through Strange Love Live’s archives, for instance, shows how much deeper it all goes.
The New York Times Sunday Magazine today features Chicagoan Bill Ayers, college professor, author and former member of Weatherman Underground. He provides some great answers.
How do you define yourself politically?
I think I am a radical. I have never deviated from that. By radical, I mean someone trying to go to the root of things.
Do you regret your involvement in setting off explosions in the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol?
Anyone who thinks what we did is despicable should look at the fact that the U.S. government killed three million people in Indochina between 1965 and 1975. That’s really despicable.
How do you feel when you wake up?
Happy, and then I drink coffee and I’m even happier. I’m a work in progress and, even at 64, living in a dynamic history that’s still in the making.
You’re weirdly cheerful for a former bomb-thrower.
I suffer from a genetic flaw, whichis that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.
Sarah Lacy is a successful tech journalist. So successful in fact, Sarah Lacy is more than a journalist, she’s a brand. Yet, she’s not convinced that being a brand is all that great.
I’ve written before that one of the advantages of the Internet– the relatively low barrier to click on something– is an advantage for building brands and gaining distribution online, but it’s also a disadvantage. People flock to you as a side-show, but don’t actually want to invest real dollars to support whatever you are doing. Honestly, how many of Tila Tequila’s million MySpace friends buy her CDs? There’s a currency in mild watching-a-train-wreck-fascination and even hate online, that doesn’t exist in the offline world in the same way. And, to date, it hasn’t translated.
I’ve got an inkling that this multi-year trend towards brand-this and brand-that in the business world may be in for a rude awakening. After all, there are far more high-profile examples. Think about Howard Stern: He used to be one of the most talked about, most hated, most beloved people in popular culture.
Valleywag asks, “What is wrong with you internet people? Sarah Lacy is working hard so you can fully appreciate her and you’re not FULLY APPRECIATING HER IN ALL MEDIA CONSTANTLY.”
On a personal note, my brand is not here at this scrapbook site. It’s at AdPulp. My intention from the beginning was to create something bigger than just me. I suppose that’s the difference in being a writer versus a writer, editor and publisher.
Kathleen Parker, a columnist for The Washington Post is working to understand what the rise of new media means for print journalists like herself.
Thankfully, she does so in a funny manner:
It’s over. Done. The old media are no more. We are all new media now. All journalists, we are also the news. We are essentially a nation of news-mongering newsies making news as we do the news. At some point, the news will simply consume the news consumer-slash-provider in a big-bangish event that will go unreported.
Parker also offers this bit of insight in to the news business:
If you want friends or money, my first editor told me, get another line of work.
What are we to make of all this journalistic self-loathing? I know what I make of it. Clearly, this is the perfect time to create a new kind of media company. One that holds tight to certain basics—like an informed citizenry being the key to a healthy democracy—while finding new means of production, distribution and monetization. Paid advertising and paid subscribers can’t be the only two methods of making money in this business. Let’s invent some new ones!
Laura Oppenheimer of The Oregonian put together a feature article on the efforts being made by Portland’s various creative communities to unite and successfully promote themselves.
salon owner, Kahala Orian, sporting a knitty
Here, Oppenheimer shows the two ends of the local spectrum:
If you picture the creative economy as a continuum from corporate giants to part-time artists, Nike inhabits one end. Oregon’s largest company employs more than 6,000 people at its headquarters, on a college-size campus near Beaverton.
A notch away from Nike is the advertising firm that branded it: Wieden+Kennedy. Columbia Sportswear Co. and Adidas USA round out the huge names. A slew of midsize companies design clothing, sports equipment and buildings, make movies and computer games, and promote it all to the world.
To explore the other end of the continuum, you could’ve walked down Southeast Belmont Street last weekend, past coffee shops and neighborhood bars, across from a retro arcade and a vegetarian diner, into KOiPOD salon. The owner, Kahala Orian, hosted a craft show called Handmade for the Holidays.
More than 20 entrepreneurs covered card tables with knit hats, soy candles and hand-stitched pillows, while a DJ wearing giant silver headphones spun tunes.
The article also explores how Steve Gehlen and Tad Lukasik are launching Oregon Creative Industries “to connect people online and in person, lobby for resources to help business grow, and to make creativity the state’s economic signature.”
OCI is a startup in the non-profit sector. They’re looking for volunteers to help grow the business, if you’re interested.
Local rivers and the magnificent fish in them have been top of mind recently. On Monday night we attended a World Affairs Council-sponsored series of talks by professional river savers at the EcoTrust Building in the Pearl District.
We enjoyed hearing from Jeremy Five Crows of the Nez Pierce tribe and the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission. He educated us on the Columbia Basin Fish Accords, an historic collaboration between the four tribes in the Columbia River basin and the federal government. At the heart of the Accords is a 10-year, $900 million agreement to restore salmon habitat. Five Crows mentioned that the tribes can’t advocate for dam removal during this 10-year term, which I found interesting. He didn’t say anything about the rest of us pursuing that particular goal.
Today, while doing my internet rounds, I happened upon Rivers in Demand a project from media advocacy group, Epicocity. Here’s a sample of their mission-driven work:
As you can see in the video above, the Rogue’s 40 anniversary of protection under the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was greeted by a proposal to log in its basin. Thankfully, a coalition of concerned groups, called Save The Wild Rogue, is working to extend Wild and Scenic protection to the Rogues tributaries, which would stymie the logging plan.
Kavita Heyn of American Rivers (where I once worked!) and Stephanie Tidwell of Klamath-Siskiyou Wild are helping to lead the charge for the Rogue.
I cherish the election maps offered by the design team at The New York Times.
It’s good to see the overlap of these bubbles because it shows that red and blue co-exist in the same places. It’s a finer distinction than the red state/blue state point of view.
Another striking map is the Voting Shift map which shows where each party received more votes in 2008 than they did in 2004. There’s a very identifiable red streak from Texas to West Virginia that’s interesting because it’s so well defined, localized and contained.
Bill Moyers appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air today. He is one of our best journalists and he served on LBJ’s staff in the 1960s, so he’s well qualified to speak on the historic events transpiring in America today. He says “he felt a great stone lifting from our neck” but he also recognizes the racism that continues to exist in many parts of the American South.
SEVEN DAYS: How was the Times-Picayune perceived before Hurricane Katrina?
CHRIS ROSE: We’ve always been a very vital and vigorous part of the community here . . . What did not happen before the storm that happens now is that, when you get introduced as being from the Times-Picayune at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon, people stand up and clap for you. We’re treated as heroes.
Katrina brought back that very poignant, meaningful mission of journalism — like it really, really mattered every day what came down on people’s doorsteps. Suddenly, high school students to folks 90 years old were reading the paper because we were the only ones people could trust.
The storm brought down a quintessential dichotomy in the community: There were those who cut and run, and there were those who stepped up, at great sacrifice. There’s no question, no question, the Times-Picayune stepped up. And in the vacuum of political and corporate leadership, we carried the fucking day in this town.
There’s also this bit:
The writers and the photographers were in the city and management was relocated to Baton Rouge by virtue of our building flooding. You take management and move them 70 miles away from staff, and we win two Pulitzer prizes. You think that’s a coincidence? That’s not only a paradigm shift to follow in journalism, but in any corporate structure.
Rose’s collection of columns, 1 Dead in Attic is now available from Simon & Schuster. Rose originally sold 65,000 copies of a self-published edition.
Film critic, Roger Ebert, discusses the vice presidential debate as theater in today’s Chicago Sun Times. His is one of the more relevant approaches, given that TV has totally altered how politicians get elected in this nation.
I get the feeling that the powers that be in the Republican Party saw what happened to Nixon in 1960, and collectively agreed to never let that happen again. And for the most part they’ve been wildly successful at selling their mythical version of a much slimier reality. But I digress.
Here’s some of what Ebert saw in Governor Palin last night:
When she was on familiar ground, she perked up, winked at the audience two of three times, and settled with relief into the folksiness that reminds me strangely of the characters in “Fargo.”
Palin is best in that persona. You want to smile with her and wink back. But who did she resemble more? Marge Gunderson, whose peppy pleasantries masked a remorseless policewoman’s logic? Or Jerry Lundegaard, who knew he didn’t have the car on his lot, but smiled when he said, “M’am, I been cooperatin’ with ya here.” Palin was persuasive. But I felt a brightness that was not always convincing.
I think Palin is clearly Marge, not Jerry. A comment on Ebert’s post by “Citizen Spain” says it best:
What annoys me most is that Palin’s disarming Marge Gunderson quaintness has transformed a significant portion of our population into drooling, blathering Mike Yanagitas. Such a super lady!
Portland is a city full of friendly, interesting people, so it’s natural that web sites would spring up from this fertile land to support that fact. One is Portland On Fire, a site that profiles a different Portlander each day. The site is currently inactive, but there may be work happening behind the scenes to bring us more profiles.
Another site I took note of is Strange Love Live, a podcast series featuring local tech persons of interest produced by Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal. I’m looking forward to the show’s next feature on local photographer, Mark Coleman. Mark and I met at Beer and Blog two Fridays ago.
Also at Beer and Blog, I bumped into Dawn Foster. Dawn is profiled on Portland on Fire, as well. Since meeting her, I noticed that another Portlander (one I have not yet met), Marshall Kirkpatrick, named her an up-and-coming social media consultant on ReadWriteWeb. Dawn gave me an invite to Shizzow, a Dopplr-like site that helps friends connect in real space and time.
I also met Amber Case and Bram Pitoyo at Beer and Blog. They’re working on organizing the first annual CyborgCamp, among other things.
This post is not conclusive, it’s just a run through of some of my preliminary findings in the tech and social media communities here. I’ve also had coffee with a couple of ad guys, and gotten to know someone working at Wieden + Kennedy. The someone at Wieden mentioned her frustration that the tech and ad communities are not better connected. It was an interesting observation, and by no means a situation exclusive to Portland.
