A picture named dd10.jpg

"Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?" Guy de Maupassant

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Building Communities through Digital Storytelling

A picture named bridgesscreenshot.JPGBridges is a photosite bringing together a community of youth across countries like India, Nepal, Peru and Kenya through digital storytelling. They have a neat project discussion board too, where the community is encouraged to interact with each other. 

From their About Me page :

"BRIDGES to understanding gives voice directly to children around the world.

Our interactive online program connects middle school students in the developed world with their contemporaries in indigenous communities. Central to the program is digital storytelling mentored by professionals and created by students. We provide the tools and training that enable them to tell stories from their own lives and communities.

These stories are shared through this website where our students can engage each other, ask questions about each others' lives and collaborate on creating multimedia stories exploring their cultures."

[link via Scobleizer



11:42:45 PM    comment []  trackback []

Blogs - Market Research of the Future

From Blog Influentials, a post that suggests:

  (good) bloggers = Influentials

 .".. Market Research of the Future

The interesting thing here is that the IPDI at George Washington U conducted 1,392 online surveys and 1,029 RDD sampled national telephone surveys to confirm their findings. This is expensive market research as is only a snapshot of the respondents views. Comparitively speaking, blog aggregation can be very inexpensive - especially if companies like BlogPule and IceRocket continue to improve their trending tools and/or provide access to low cost aggregated data sets. Perhaps more importantly, monitoring Blog Influentials can provide continuous data.

In the future market researchers may call Intelliseek, Technorati, IceRocket or BlogLines to buy six months worth of political Blog Influential posts, or Female 18-25 Blog Influential posts, or Blog Influentials who have mentioned iPods at least once in the last six months, etc. in much the same way they buy targeted sample lists today. Another product might be just the list of feed addresses (in OPML or some such) for a particular demographic. The researcher could then create their own aggregator, indexes, searchers and trend data. This would eliminate the bias introduced by indexing techniques selected by the blog data vendor - like the removal of English noise words."



2:16:02 PM    comment []  trackback []